The Thursday After

On Sunday January 7, we at WMB spent time in Genesis 1.

I love Genesis 1. It is such a wonderfully crafted story that you can spend hours thinking about it. If I had to credit my love of Genesis 1 to only one thing, it would be this video. There’s lots of podcasts, ponderings and readings that also contributed (like stuff from John Lennox). A long time ago, the truth seeker in me struggled to reconcile what we were discovering about the world (science, observation) with what I was told Genesis was saying. Part of this struggle was just living during a time when everyone else was also trying to figure it out, which is always messy. I have landed at a place where the truth-seeker in me is more than satisfied, and I love Genesis 1. I never expected to land here. I don’t have all the answers, but I have a few, and there are enough questions for a rich, long life of meditating.

So here’s two things about Genesis 1 that might be surprising to you.

Point 1: Genesis 1 does not describe the world being made out of nothing. We have this notion that before creation “there was nothing”. That’s a later idea, and frankly I haven’t heard anyone give me an understanding of what “nothing” is. In the ancient near east, the “before creation” was chaos and disorder. Look at the second line of Genesis 1: “The earth was formless and empty and darkness covered the deep waters”. Then God begins his work of creating.

The Genesis 1 narrative shows that there is land, and light and plants and creatures which are spoken into existence. This is all the big movement from chaos and disorder, to beauty and order. Then God speaks humans into existence, that we are some sort of copy or image of God, so the humans can continue to make beauty and order.

I think its really interesting that the holy name is “I am”, which is “existence” in it pure form. So if we want to get caught up in existence vs. non-existence, God introduces himself to Moses as “existence” itself.

Point 2: The biblical story shows how humans are always facing choices between trusting God or their own ideas about good and evil. Genesis 1 sets the context for this story and sets out the intended state. But Genesis 1 does not ask you to choose between its narrative and some science-informed observations of creation.

Genesis 1 is much more interested in why creation exists and why humans exist than in the newspaper account of how those things occurred. John Lennox uses the analogy: Science can tell you how aunt Betty made the cake, but it cannot tell you why she made the cake. 

I sometimes hear Christians say “you have to make a choice between science and Genesis”. This is what is known as a false dilemma – “erroneously limiting the options available”. Beyond untrue, this false dilemma is dangerous: it puts a barrier in front of truth seekers who then might never get to see who Jesus really is.

We are still figuring out the relationship between what we are discovering in our universe and the biblical narrative. Most recently, its been the new field of genetics because of the sequencing of the genome. If this is of interest to you, give The Genealogical Adam and Eve: The Surprising Science of Universal Ancestry by S. Joshua Swamidass a read. Its a bit of a challenge (you’ll need the printed version). The main takeaway for me: we have a ways to go before we understand this all on both the Biblical and science front and wow, we really imported a lot of our own ideas into the biblical narrative.