Scripture: Genesis 1:1-5; John 1:1-5; Genesis 12; Psalm 90:4 Series: Creation
Opening a multi-week series reading Genesis 1 and John 1 together, this sermon argues that creatio ex nihilo—God making everything from nothing—is central to Christian faith, distinct from mere creation-care. It traces the Trinity within the act of creation (the Father speaks, the Son is the spoken Word/logos, the Spirit/ruach is the breath that becomes reality), addresses the Hebrew nuance of bereshit and stylistic differences between Genesis 1 and 2, and reconciles the biblical account with science, noting the Big Bang reinforces rather than contradicts creation and that the ‘days’ need not be 24-hour periods. It closes on light as singular and grounded in Christ: all light exists through Jesus the Word, who did not abandon creation as a watchmaker but humbled himself to incarnation, cross, and resurrection, offering hearers a place in the new creation.
Illustrations: genesis-style-shakespeare-tiktok, mark-too-many-ands, hubble-lemaitre-expanding-universe, carlsbad-caverns-total-darkness, spotlight-on-stage, divine-watchmaker, church-in-the-50s
September 10, 2023
Genesis 1:1-5
John 1:1-5
When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. - Genesis 1:1-5
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it. John 1:1-5
Introduction
Why is there something rather than nothing? What does it mean that God created everything from nothing? In the Jewish faith, creation has an importance, but the more important section of Genesis is found in chapter 12, when Abraham is called to go from Ur of the Chaldees to the Holy Land and the people of God are established. But for Christians, for 2000 years, the very beginning has been an essential aspect of the faith. Genesis 1-2 is the part of the bible with the most biblical commentaries. Creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing, is the central Christian understanding of creation. It points to the power of God to create as well as the power of God to save God’s creation.
Today, in a lot of churches, creation can be used to mean the lived environment. Creation-care is another way to talk about protecting the earth, but creation goes deeper than that.
How should we understand creation? How should we understand Jesus’s part in creation? and how does it really affect our lives today? Over the next few weeks, I’m gonna be going slowly through the Genesis chapter one and the gospel of John chapter one together to look at the importance of creation for any theology or doctrine of God, any understanding of right and wrong, as well as any understanding of salvation and our future with God.
Hebrew
Hebrew is a complicated language. I’m not very good at Hebrew. I’ve tried. It is not my strength. I’m much more comfortable in Greek. The language of Genesis !, though is simpler than a lot of the other sections of the Old Testament. I can tell the difference in style between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 because I can read Genesis 1 and I can’t read Genesis 2. When we translate the uniqueness of language is often flattened out. The best example of this is not found in Genesis but in the Gospel of Mark. A literal translation of Mark would have three times as many “ands” in it. Mark loves to say, and they did this, and they did this. and immediately they left and did this. English translators attempt to reduce redundancy, which takes away from the character of the text.
The same things are going on in Genesis 1 and 2
The stylistic differences between Genesis one and two are almost impossible to portray. It is as if Genesis 1 is written in the language of Shakespeare and Genesis 2 is a set of tik tok reels.
Genesis 1 begins with two words in Hebrew bə-rê-šîṯ ba-ra. What is unique about them in Hebrew is that there is not a definite article. It doesn’t say in Hebrew, in the beginning, a more accurate direct transaction would be in a beginning. Early Jewish rabbis made a big deal about this and some postulated that it’s a sign that there were multiple creations and that this was the creation that stuck. There’s something beautiful and complex going on here, something old. For much of Christian history, what was of central importance in the Genesis narrative was that God creating everything from nothing. There’s emptiness and void. That’s all there is. There was an absence. There was no material reality. There was an absence of reality. God existed separate from this material reality. We believe that God is eternal but God is not material. God is not an object in the created universe like you or I or the Sun and the moon. Before creation, there was this absence of material reality. And then God said, let there be light. And there was light. And then God said, this is important. It is also one of the reasons why we, we are reading Genesis 1 with John 1. John 1 begins in poetic fashion. In the beginning was the word And the word was with God. And the word was God.
How did creation happen? How did the first act of creation take place? God spoke! The speech of God. The logos of God is the Son of God. This is super deep. I want to just say it again. The way in which creation came into being was the speaking of God, the Father. That act of speaking was the medium of God, the Son. And what was spoken into material reality was the Spirit, the ruach of God and Hebrew, the breath of God. We have the full Trinity here. God the Father speaks. God the Son is the medium and message of what is spoken. God the Holy Spirit is the voice which comes from the Father and the Son into the reality that now exists.
Creation
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1 is a title as much as a declaration. The heavens aren’t created in Genesis 1:1. It describes what is about to happen. Because then we’re back to darkness. We’re back to the void. In the beginning, God created the heavens of the earth. In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God and all things came into being through him. And without him, not one thing came into being. This into-being-ness is a very Greek concept. You don’t find it as much in Hebrew. Later, Christians connected John’s language of being with pagan philosophers like Plato and Socrates and Aristotle. The focus here is not on the philosophy, but this binary transformation that takes place in creation. There’s nothing. And then there’s something. How did we get something from nothing? The answer to that question is God. Why is there something rather than nothing? The answer to that question is God.
Biblical Account of Creation
I believe it is important at this point to say a few words about the biblical account of creation versus secular scientific accounts of the universe and the cosmos. For a long time, the presumed understanding of the universe was that it was a steady state. It had always been and it would always be. This goes back to the Greeks. For a long time, there was no way to disprove this. The universe was there. There was no reason to think it hadn’t always been there. We could look at the time on earth and the timing of different things and the way matter decays, the way the energy is transferred.
Christians, for many centuries, were heavily influenced by Aristotle. This was true even into the last century. In the midst of that, in the 1930s, two different astronomers came to a realization about the universe. Edwin Hubble was an American working out of the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, and Georges LeMaitre, was a Belgian priest and astronomer. Both came to a realization and found observational data to back up this realization that the universe was expanding. For the universe to be expanding, there had to be a point from which it had expanded. Thus was born the theory of the Big Bang. The Big Bang is not a theory about creation, but about history, about the hard edge of history before which nothing can be observed. All observational data is limited by the Big Bang. Even the most secular of scientists would claim that speculation about what happened before the Big Bang is purely just speculation. The Big Bang does not contradict the Christian Bible. In fact, it in many ways reinforces a Christian understanding of creation. The parts of Genesis that people get hung up on the most have to do with the days of creation. For a long time, the church was very focused on the timeframe of creation. There are a lot of reasons for this. Some had to do with different theologies of ages or epochs or dispensations under which we lived. Now, a day is a single rotation of the Earth, right? We, we can be agreed with that. It’s pretty universal around the world. How we measure the day is different, but that a day is one time around is not disputed. Whether or not you’re measuring from sunset to sunset, sunrise to sunrise, midnight to midnight, it’s still all the way around about 24 hours. When we look at the Genesis account, you have the first day: there was light and there was dark, but there wasn’t a planet rotating. Waters weren’t separated from land: how can you measure a day without the sun?
On top of that, in the Book of Psalms, the psalmist says, a thousand years are like a day to God. A thousand years. Why not a million years? Why not a billion years?
All that to say that the biblical account we are reading in Genesis is not contradicted by scientific study. They are two methods of looking at same thing.
We’ll talk about different aspects of creation over the next few weeks, from the creation of the sun and the moon to the animals, the fish, the birds, and people. But we start with the out-of-nothingness. And ultimately what it matters to us today is how it shows us the power of God, the love of God, the unity of God and the purpose of God. The power of God in creating something from nothing. We see the love of God in that we see God creating something that is not God. God has no need for creation, yet decides to create it. This gift, this super abundant gift, is only made out of love.
We then get light, which will be one of the guiding principles throughout creation and all of existence. God speaks light into existence, but there is no sun at this time.
There are very few times in our lives when we are in total darkness. There’s usually a little bit of light. The only time I can remember was in Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico, on a tour. The guides told us to prepare for a moment, and then they turned off all the lights in the cave. This was before cell phones, so nobody was cheating. There were no sources of light. It was dark. I could not see my hand in front of my face. I think it’s interesting how so often we translate dark for darkness. If something is dark, it’s more about pigment. Darkness is the absence of light. The Bible isn’t interested in colors like white and black, but the presence of light and the absence of light.
Light plays an important part in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the gospel of John, we have, Jesus is the light of the world. Now, there’s a few ways to read this. One is that he’s a light among other lights, but that’s not what John is going for. Light is singular. There’s only one light. There’s only one source of light. All light exists because of Jesus. This is the radical Christian claim of creation. It’s not that, you know, the world came about a long time ago, and there’s a God who does some good things for us, does some bad things for us, here and there, but in that act of creating light, it was Jesus the Word, and in all subsequent light, it is Jesus.
As we participate in the light, we participate in Jesus. As we avoid the light, we avoid Jesus.
Light will stay central to how we understand creation. We all respond to the light differently. If you are up on stage somewhere, some of you love the spotlight, others are afraid of it.
God gives us the grace to be in the light because the source of all creation didn’t leave creation alone as a divine watchmaker. Our source saw the brokenness of the world, humbled himself to being born a baby. He grew up as one of us, teaching and healing and calling us to the kingdom of God. Then he continued to humble himself to the point of death, even death on a cross. And then three days later rise again, to defeat death and show us the first fruits of a new creation without death and darkness will look like.
God offers you a chance this day to be a part of this new creation. It doesn’t look like the old one. It doesn’t look like church in the 50s. It looks like a life boldly offered to others through grace. Not on our own strength, but because we let the strength of the God of all creation give us light.
Receive that light. Receive that boldness. Let us pray, Heavenly Father, thank you for the amazing gift of creation which guides this day. Help us to receive your true light and may we shine your light in the darkness through our love. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.