Do you remember that old piece of doggerel:
“The things that you’re
liable
to read in the Bible,
they ain’t necessarily so!”?
Nowhere, I guess, is scepticism about the Bible focussed more clearly than on this first chapter of Genesis, these seven days of creation. Some claim that the findings of modern science have completely undermined what we have just had read to us. Some point out that there are other cultures which have creation myths and epics with certain similarities to Genesis, chapter 1, and therefore they try to place it on the same shelf with them, a shelf labelled something like, ‘Quaint, primitive and faintly ludicrous myths’. Other people point to the two, distinct creation accounts that there are in chapters 1 and 2, as you are probably aware, and suggest that two contradictory stories have been botched together rather badly by an incompetent editor.
I don’t think we should be surprised that there is this concentration of controversy around Genesis chapter 1 because the early chapters of the Bible are very important in establishing the foundations of the Christian faith. These brief chapters are quoted over forty times in the New Testament and some of the foundational doctrines that we derive from them are as follows:
The
sovereignty of God;
The nobility
of man;
The dignity of
work;
The value of
the material world;
The sanctity
of marriage;
The entry of
sin into the world;
The entry of
death, through sin;
The reality
and severity of judgement;
The glory of
grace in the promise of a saviour.
These are the foundations of our faith and no wonder they are disputed, no wonder the authority of these early chapters has been attacked.
As this chapter is controversial, so in, approaching it, we need to ask the right questions of it. Asking the wrong question in life is never helpful. For example, if you ask me, ‘What colour is the equator?’it is not a helpful question. It doesn’t get you anywhere. All it does is reveal your ignorance of the object in question. So it will not help us to ask, for example, ‘In what literary category is the beginning of Genesis?’ because, in answering it, we will be pre-judging our interpretation of what it says. Clearly it isn’t history, because all human history is based, directly or indirectly, on eye-witness accounts and there were no eyes to witness, certainly for the first five days. It has been pointed out that the more you know about myth and fairy tale the less you are likely to try to put it into that category, and the last few words of verse 16 reveal how little interest the author had in the scientists’ question, ‘How?’
No, let’s not try to assign Genesis, chapter 1, to one of our preconceived literary categories. We need to examine this passage in its own terms. So I want to begin with its first four words, ‘In the beginning, God…’. This passage, and indeed the whole book, is going to be about God. He is mentioned thirty-five times in these seven days at the beginning of creation, and the interest is more in the Creator than in the creation, in the Maker, rather than in the matter. I hope you’re aware of that whenever you open the Bible: it is a book about God. We usually read it to find out about ourselves, about me and about the human race, but it is primarily a book about God, telling us what we do not know, not just telling us again and again the things we do know, like the fact that we ought to try to be good. If you read the Bible and it keeps telling you you ought to try to be good, you soon stop reading it. You know that, you don’t need to be told it every day. But you and I don’t know about God and that is what the Bible is speaking to us of. And these first verses are certainly doing that.
His existence, you will notice, is certainly taken for granted. God was already there. ‘In the beginning, God…’. For Him the beginning and the end have no significance, because He is beyond both. He is outside time. He is the Creator of time. “If God made everything, who made God?” our children ask us. God was never made. He could not be made. He is the First Cause. Nothing stands behind Him.
You cannot prove the existence of God because God’s existence does not follow from anything else. There is nothing from which we can deduce God. We cannot appeal to something else by which to prove Him to ourselves or to other people. He is self-existent. People intuitively know that He exists. And the Bible claims that the person who doesn't is a fool.
‘In the beginning, God…’. We cannot get behind Him.
There is a story of a surgeon and an architect and a politician discussing at a cocktail party which of their professions was the oldest; and the surgeon said, "Well, you remember at the creation when God made Eve, He made her from a rib of Adam? That was the work of a surgeon. You can't get more ancient than that!" Then the architect said, "Ah, but before that God brought order out of chaos. That was the work of an architect and that makes the architect's profession oldest. "Ah," said the politician, "But who made the chaos?"
Well, we don't get behind God. ‘In the beginning, God…’. Notice there is not the least hint of polytheism here, no question of gods - plural - at work. There will be a plural, and it's a very significant plural, later in the chapter. But no question at the outset of gods at work. No hint of dualism: there is no struggle to overcome chaos, no conflict with an opposing dark force. There is no question of pantheism. God is quite separate and distinct from what He creates. Matter is not an emanation from the Divine Being, it's not just an extension of God. But nor is there a sort of Olympian detachment here. It is rather the involvement of a living Person. The verbs of this opening chapter express an energy of mind and will and judgement which exclude all question of our conceiving God as an "it" instead of a "You". Right from the outset God is active. He is the outgoing, self-giving, initiative-taking God.
And notice the majesty of His creative acts: ‘And God said…’ repeatedly through the chapter – ‘And God said, “Let there be…” and it was so.’ (vv 3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 26). Eight times. You have to be pretty powerful, don't you, just to speak and for something to happen. Take, for example, the Ashton breakfast table, where, when we get to the time for Bible reading and prayer, I ask for silence - and it doesn't happen! Now, I imagine if you're someone like the Master of Trinity, you could be walking across Great Court and you could see a blocked drain and you could say, "Let that drain be cleared." And, if there were sufficient porters or fellows around to hear it, it might happen. Perhaps the queen can say things like that as she walks around Buckingham Palace, but most of us are not powerful enough to have the same influence, not even at our own breakfast tables, let alone in the wider world.
Notice too that, for God, no intermediary is involved with tools and materials and plans to execute the command. He spoke. And His word willed the end and shaped the means to that end, every least cell and atom of it. God did not just speak an idea, whereupon other agencies came rushing along, like sub-contractors, to execute it. His word did it all. It went out and achieved all that was contained in His will for that act of creation, in the smallest detail: all the planning, all the execution, contained in the word. There is awesome majesty in that. ‘And God said, “Let there be…” and it was so.’
Moreover, God's creative activity was purposeful. We see this from the ordered pattern of creation. Now, I doubt that we are meant to attach much significance to the chronology of this passage, in view of the fact that the chronology is stood on its head a few verses later in chapter 2. But there is a patterned order which receives extra emphasis from another of the repeated refrains of the verses: ‘And God saw that it was good.’ It is "good" in verses 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, and it has become "very good" by verse 31. The purpose of God's creative activity is clear. It is that creation should be good in His opinion. And it fulfilled that purpose perfectly. Verse 31: ‘And God saw all that He had made. And it was very good.’
Now these are magnificent truths about our world, and they are very precious for us. They are not science, but they make the whole enterprise of science possible. There are three assumptions upon which science is based.
The first is that this is an ordered world. There could be no science without an ordered world. Science exists because of patterns. The whole enterprise of science rests precisely on the assumption that it is an ordered world in which pattern can be discovered and categories established. This world is not a chaotic, nightmarish place where chance rules. It is the ordered creation of the Creator God.
Now the second assumption of science is that of contingence, which means that things do not have to be the way that they are. If the order of the world were a necessary order that could be uncovered by logical reasoning from a philosopher's chair, there would be no need for science. But the world's order is contingent. God could have made it otherwise, and to find out how it is, we have to investigate it. We need to explore. We can't just reason it out. There is an inescapable need for experiment and discovery, which drives the scientist out of his armchair and into the laboratory. If you want to pursue this fascinating idea of contingence, you will be able to follow it up in David Atkinson's very good Bible Speaks Today commentary on Genesis 1 to 11.
The third assumption of science is that there is a correspondence between the rational minds of human beings and the rational order of the physical world, between our ability to understand the world and the way the world is. There must be that correlation between our understanding of order in our minds and the order that can be perceived in the world around us for science to work at all. And why does it work? Because it is the same mind behind the world order as the one from which our thinking processes derive. The fact that science works supports the view that there is a God.
‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’
Let's just look for a moment now at the structure of these days of creation: ‘…formless and empty’. In verse 2, the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. The earth had no shape and it had no inhabitants. So in the next verses, God goes about giving it shape and inhabitants. I don't know that this is particularly significant, but there is a sort of structure around those two ideas, which is the basis for the structure of the six days of creation. In the first three days, He gives shape, and in the second three days, He provides inhabitants. There is a match between day one and day four, day two and day five, day three and day six. It goes like this:
- On day one, He creates light and dark, in verses 3 to 5, and on day four, He creates lights for the day and the night, in verses 14 to 19.
- On day two, He creates the sea and the sky, and on day five, He creates the creatures for the water and the air.
- On day three, He creates a fertile earth and on day six, he creates creatures for the land.
The key idea in those first three days, is the idea of separation, and the key idea in the second three days is the idea of fruitfulness. It isn't a tight schema. There's fruitfulness there in verses 11 and 12 on day three, and there is separation in verses 14 and 18 on day four.
But notice how astronomy is put in its place by this scheme, this pattern to these days. The human race has always been fascinated by the heavenly bodies. Do you remember the excitement when the comet, Hale Bop, appeared? Indeed, the worship of heavenly bodies has been a widespread feature of human history - through horoscopes today and more serious forms of worship in the past. But Genesis 1 gives the sun an entirely different place, in verses 14 and 15: a sign to mark the seasons and days and years, and to give light on the earth. The suns and stars of our universe speak for God and not for fate. They are our servants. They are not our masters. They govern the day and the night, but only as light-bearers, not as controlling powers. So much for your star sign and your horoscope.
And surely verse 16 ends with the greatest of all understatements: ‘He also made the stars.’ The current consensus tells us that we are in a galaxy that measures 100,000 light years across, 2 million light years from our nearest neighbour, Andromeda, one of 100 billion other galaxies, all apparently moving apart in a way one might expect if they'd all come from one mighty explosion about 10,000 million years ago, the 'Big Bang'. Now we know God through His works and the size and the complexity of those works amaze us, because He is an amazing God, and we could be crushed by such awesome immensity. But it cost God but a few words to create them – ‘He also made the stars.’
There is a deliberate polemic going on in Genesis chapter 1. It's a deliberate debunking of astrology. It's a clear denial of many other world-views - polytheism, dualism, pantheism, the eternity of matter, the evil of matter, astrology, deism and, especially for us today at the end of the twentieth century, every attempt to empty this world in which we live of meaning and purpose, the modern world-view that we have complete insignificance and meaninglessness in the face of the vast timescale and the vast size of the universe in which we live.
But Genesis 1 presents the tremendous acts of creation as a mere curtain-raiser to the drama that fills the rest of the pages of the Bible. Recently I visted the Natural History Museum and saw the dinosaurs, those phenomenal creatures that were around on the earth for 137 million years. We look at them and think how incompetent the dinosaur was and how it deserved to become extinct. Well we've lasted four million. Are we likely to last another 133 million years? Dinosaurs were adapted far better in many ways than we are. And, in the face of facts like that, how can we think the human race is significant? How can we think there is any purpose or meaning to human life? But Genesis 1 tackles that head on. It says these acts of creation are mere curtain-raisers to the drama that's going to follow in the rest of the Bible.
The prologue is over in a page. There are a thousand more pages to come in scripture. Why did God recount this in this way, as if it just took a week? Because that's all it mattered to God. He had bigger fish to fry than creation. He had bigger things to do. The story is going to lead on until He sends his Son to die for human sin and reveals Himself into the created order in that way. And that, in God's way of seeing things, has far more significance than the vastness and complexity of the created order in which you and I find ourselves.
If there is a Creator and if this is a creation and not an accident, then it has huge implications for you and me. We matter because of what this chapter is telling us. So let us move now to the creation of human beings.
It is now over 500 years since Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, and in those early years of European exploration of North America, there arose the question of whether the native inhabitants of that continent, the Indians, were in fact human beings. The Europeans, as they encountered Red Indian culture, were puzzled. Were these human beings? Were they some superior form of animal? The matter was settled by a bull of Pope Paul III in 1537, which declared that the Indians were really human because they were capable of holding the catholic faith and of receiving the sacraments. Not all papal bulls, alas, have expressed such sound theology!
It is an enormously important question: what is a human being? What makes a person a person? It's a question for the politicians who ask us to vote for them. It's a question for the schoolteachers who teach us. There exists a whole range of views of what it is to be human: what is a man?
Desmond Morris, the anthropologist: "Vertical, hunting, weapon-toting, territorial, meotonous, brainy, naked ape, a primate by ancestry and a carnivore by adoption." Well, that's one view of the human race.
Bertrand Russell: "A chance collocation of atoms on a minor speck of interstellar dust." Again that sense of how small we are against this universe and all its complexity.
Francis Bacon: "Man now realises that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason."
"To man, as man, we say, good riddance!" - the behaviourist, B. F. Skinner.
"Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world." - Marshall McLuhan
It's not just the moderns who take that view. This is Jonathan Swift (admittedly it's a bit of polemic from Guilliver's Travels): "The most pernicious race of little, odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."
And against that, you can put a range of other things.
There's the Greek philosopher, Protagoras: "Man is the measure of all things."
John Donne, from a strongly Christian perspective: "It is not enough to call man a little world. Save God, man is a diminutive to nothing."
Alexander Pope: "Sole judge of truth in endless error heard: the glory, jest and riddle of the world." I guess, in many ways, it's that sort of thing that captures for us best the strange anomaly of what it is to be human - "Sole judge of truth, in endless error heard: the glory, jest and riddle of the world."
Or, as Mark Twain put it, "Man is the only animal that blushes. And the only animal that needs to."
Now I suspect those quotations tell us more about the speakers than they provide help in answering the question. Another of those little stories that I love is the one about two friends who were discussing the night sky together. The first turns to his friend and says, "You know, astronomically speaking, man is totally insignificant." There was a thoughtful pause from his friend, and then he replied, "Yes, but man is the astronomer."
Where do we place humanity? Centre Stage, or right at the edge? The crown of creation or its shame? Well, as we've begun to see, this chapter in Genesis is a highly patterned account, and it's been spread before us in its vast array, over five days in verses 1-23. Day six starts like any other day in verses 24 and 25. We are familiar with that pattern by now: ‘And God said, “Let there be…”’ and things start to happen. But then, the symmetry of the chapter is broken at verses 26 and 27.
I said there would be a significant plural: not “Let there be…”, but “Let us make…”. In a highly patterned and, indeed, repetitive piece of writing like this is, such a break is emphatic. The note of self-communing and the impressive plural make this a momentous step forward in the chapter. It marks a climax in the process of creation. There is going to be another such break in the pattern when we get to the seventh day at the beginning of chapter 2, which, unlike the previous six, is going to have no evening and no morning.
But firstly, let us look as this different creature in verses 26 - 30. We notice here that humanity shares the sixth day of creation with other land animals (vv 24, 25). Like them, we are made of dust, we're going to discover in chapter 2. Like them, we feed. Like them, we reproduce. They are half of our context. Humanity is in nature, but also over nature. Our relationship with nature is both continuous and discontinuous. We are set apart by our office, by our nature and by our relationship with God.
“Let us make man in our image”, in our likeness, but in what exactly does that image or likeness consist? There could be many answers, and, if we look at how God treats man differently in the first two chapters of Genesis, and how the rest of the Bible differentiates humans from animals, we come up with a cluster of unique qualities:
We are rational. We are able to think. God thinks. We overhear Him thinking aloud in verse 26. God wills, and speaks, and man reflects God's intelligence. So in Isaiah, chapter 1, v. 18, we find, ‘“Come now, let us reason together”, says the Lord’. We are warned in Psalm 32, v. 9, not be like ‘the horse or the mule which has no understanding’. We are rational.
Secondly, we are moral. We are able to choose. Adam and Eve could not only discern the difference between obedience and disobedience, they could also choose, as we shall see in chapters 2 and 3.
Thirdly, we are social, we are able to love. The plurality of the human race reflects the plurality of the Godhead displayed in the “Let us make…” of verse 26. Notice how fundamental to being human sexuality is. The first things the Bible says about humanity are in verse 27: ‘In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them.’ Sexuality is not a veneer, it is fundamental to personhood. A child before it is born has to be called 'it', but there is a very deep sense in which an 'it' is not a person and the first thing they tell you when a child is born is what its sex is, so that it becomes someone. Sex is right there at the start. For God to be adequately imaged in humanity, there had to be male and female. The 'him' of verse 27b, has to be a 'them' in verse 27c. The image of God requires relationship, the possibility of love for another person.
Fourthly, we are creative. We are able to make. Where was Beethoven's Seventh Symphony before he wrote it? In a sense, he created it out of nothing, one of the characteristics of the God of Genesis 1.
Fifthly, we are spiritual, able to pray. Our greatest privilege as human beings is the ability to know God.
So to be in the image of God must include all these qualities: rationality, morality, sociability, creativity, spirituality.
Those unique human qualities derive from Genesis and the rest of the Bible. But, if we just had these verses in chapter one of Genesis in front of us, we would see a different aspect to the image of God in humanity. Look again at verse 26. It could read as, “Let us make man as our image, according to our likeness.” Man is not just in the image of God, he is the image of God on earth. The verse is not telling us what man is like, so much as what man is to be and to do. He is to be the image of God on earth. That is one of the reasons why there was such a strict prohibition on making idols and images in the Old Testament, which you may be familiar with. It was not just that the one living and true God could not possibly be represented by a dead piece of wood or stone, it was also that God already has an image on earth, you and me, and there's no place for any other sort of image. No just a representation, but a representative.
God was the Creator, the Lord, the Ruler, so what is humanity to be and to do? He is to rule. “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness … and let them rule.” This explains what it means for humanity to be the image of God. As God rules over all He has created, so humans are to rule over that creation. What an awesome responsibility! The astonishing human domination of this planet is not mere chance. Naked and defenceless as we are, without teeth or claws or body hair to speak of, we can yet survive where no animal could last a second, on the surface of the moon. And this extraordinary supremacy over our environment did not come about by chance. No, God set us here to be as He is, to rule and to subdue. When these words were written, they couldn't know that man would get to the moon. It never occurred to them that we would conquer our environment by human knowledge, as we have. But, nevertheless, here it is clear from the book of Genesis that the dominance, the supremacy over our environment that the human race has achieved was set by God from the outset. He set us here to rule and to subdue. It's not just an accident. We haven't just been exploiting and raping the planet to our own advantage (although sometimes we have).
So what are we to do about it? We are to be like God who delights in His creation (v 31), who sustains it (vv 29-30) and who cares for it, as we shall see man doing as he tends the garden in chapter 2. It is a Servant King whom we are set to represent. Here is the job description for humanity, as it were: to be God's image, to rule and to subdue.
But we have lost the qualifications for the job, as we shall see when we get on to Genesis chapter 3. We were made to be as God, but we've disqualified ourselves by our selfishness and sin that fracture our relationship with Him.
I have a recurrent nightmare which you may well identify with. Without any warning or preparation, I suddenly find myself playing for England in a football international. I'm there at Wembley, in the England strip. Gascoigne lays on the ball beautifully for me on the edge of the area. The ball is at my feet. There are 120,000 people watching. I'm in the right place, I'm wearing the right clothes, I look right, but I do not have the qualifications. I have small chance of scoring a goal, I'm not Shearer or Sheringham. I'm me. Sometimes, there's a variation, which is even worse because there's more pain involved: I'm in a Test Match with Glen McGrath heading for me - I'm an even worse cricketer than I am footballer.
The point of the illustration is that humanity has a job description. We're in the right place at the right time, but we've lost the qualifications. We can't do the job as we should any longer. Instead of ruling the planet by caring for it and nourishing it and loving it, we've raped, plundered and despoiled it for our own selfish ends. Or we now go to the opposite extreme today, in reaction to the despoiling of the earth, we start to deify it again, so that the welfare of animals supersedes the welfare of human beings and the preservation of the rain forest becomes in itself an idolatry.
Left to ourselves, we'll never get it right. It is God who gave us the role, made us in His image, to be His image, as His image on earth, to rule and to subdue as He would do. He wants to do it through us, and it is only He can equip us for it, and our only hope lies in Him. For image is not just rule, it is relationship, to be right with Him. To be His representative, we've also got to love Him and to be loved by Him. And, of course, in time He sent the One who did have all the qualifications for the job, the One who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. All things were created by Him and for Him. He is before all things and in Him all things hold together. He is the head. He is the beginning, so that in everything He might have the pre-eminence, the rule that was meant to be given to man in the first place.
We shall never understand the first Adam until we take into account the last Adam. For what was begun at the creation of the world will only be finished when we see everything in subjection to Jesus Christ.
So there is that astonishing balance in the Bible's view of man. Other world-views fluctuate between renaissance man as 'the measure of all things' and nihilist man as 'the naked ape', emptied of all meaning, significance and purpose.
The ancient world view of a man-centred universe was, as we know, overthrown by Copernicus, who discovered that the cosmos did not actually go round the earth. But now scientists are beginning to talk to us about the ‘anthropic principle’. The immense improbability of the emergence of human life means that the development of the universe has followed a highly specific path to reach where we are today. Freeman Dyson has written this: “As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.” That is what is known as the anthropic principle.
What are we to make of such strange ideas? Where do we place man? I don’t think we can do better than to place him where God puts him. Pope Paul II was quite right back in 1537. What makes a human being a human being is the capacity to put God back where He ought to be, as ruler of the universe and to find our place under Him (not to mention finding our own peace and joy and fulfillment there as well) – the integration of the material world – ‘for we shall be in league with the stones of the field and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with us.
Let's end by looking at how the Bible expresses this in Psalm 8 (vv3-9):
‘When
I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the
moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what
is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?
You
made him a little lower than the heavenly
beings
and crowned him with glory and honour.
You
made him ruler over the works of your hands;
you put everything under his feet:
all
flocks and herds,
and the beasts of the field,
the
birds of the air,
and the fish of the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.
O
Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!’