Phil Moore\u2019s introduction to Genesis<\/a>. Today we continue to hear from him on this vital book of the Bible:<\/p>\nCREATOR GOD (1:1-31)<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cNow the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, \u2018Let there be light,\u2019 and there was light.\u201d (Genesis 1:2-3)<\/em><\/p>\nEvery culture has its own creation story. The Hebrews had heard a lot of them. The Mesopotamians told them that their god Marduk killed the ocean-goddess Tiamat and created the universe from her severed remains.1 The Egyptians told them that their god Atum created the world from a mixture of his own spit, snot and semen. These stories may sound strange and far-fetched to us, but ancient Middle Easterners believed them without question. No Egyptian ever dared to challenge his culture\u2019s great creation story \u2013 except for the one who came down from Mount Sinai. Moses, the Hebrew baby who had been plucked from the River Nile and brought up as an Egyptian in Pharaoh\u2019s royal family, begins the book of Genesis with a very different story.<\/p>\n
The world was not created by Atum or Marduk, but by a different kind of God whose name is El\u00f4h\u00eem. This was not just another name for the sun-god of Egypt or the moon-god of Mesopotamia \u2013 that\u2019s why Moses deliberately avoids using the words sun and moon altogether in this chapter.2 He is a self-sufficient, independent God, who hints that he is three-in-one and that he is creating the universe out of love, not out of loneliness.3 He uses a plural name, which can be translated gods as well as God, but takes singular verbs to make it clear which word translators should choose. He is One God, yet creates by his Word4 and through his Spirit, and he hints at the Trinity when he says \u201cLet us make man in our image, in our likeness.\u201d5 The word God occurs over thirty times in this short chapter to make it clear that the creation stories of the ancient world were mistaken. The universe began with the only true and living God.<\/p>\n
Our culture has its own creation story which is believed with the same committed dogma as the stories of the ancient world. In our classrooms and on our television-screens, Charles Darwin\u2019s tale of evolution and natural selection is not just taught as theory but as fact. The heroes of our story are not Marduk or Amun, but Chance and Time, yet Moses insists that it all began with God. In fact, Professor Stephen Hawking, one of my former neighbours at Cambridge, argues that science actually points in the same direction: \u201cThe odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications \u2026 It would be very difficult to explain why the universe would have begun in just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us\u201d (\u2018A Brief History of Time\u2019, published 1988). Good science is the friend and not the foe of good theology.<\/p>\n
Moses does not attack science itself, deliberately avoiding using scientific terminology. He endorses the goals of science when he tells us in 15:5 that God encouraged Abraham to discover his character by examining his universe in more detail.6 What he attacks is science hijacked by secular humanism, which fixes and twists the evidence to pursue its own agenda. As the Harvard evolutionist Richard Lewontin admits: \u201cWe take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs \u2026 in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door\u201d (The New York Review, Jan 1997). It is this blinkered fundamentalism which Moses says must die. The \u2018Divine Foot\u2019 is well and truly in the door, because the universe began with God.<\/p>\n
There is a wide spectrum of views held by Christians today on how to interpret Moses\u2019 words in this first chapter. My purpose is not to champion any party, but simply to make sure that you respond to Moses\u2019 challenge as fully as you should. Our thinking can become as enslaved to our own culture as the Hebrews were to Egypt\u2019s, so we need to take seriously what Moses wrote after eighty days with God on Mount Sinai.<\/p>\n
He tells us that God needed no raw materials for his work of creation. God\u2019s Word is so powerful that Moses simply repeats that \u201cGod said\u201d and \u201cit was so.\u201d We even discover in verses 5 and 14 that he created time itself, and proceeded to create the whole world in just six days.7 He made the first human beings, not from animals, but from dust and the breath of his mouth, and Moses tells us this in Hebrew prose rather than poetry to encourage us to take his words literally. Jesus believed him when he taught on marriage from 1:27 and 2:24, that \u201cat the beginning the Creator \u2018made them male and female\u2019\u201d.8 Paul also believed him when he quoted from 1:3, 2:7 and 2:24 as literal reasons for us obey God\u2019s Word today.9 All this should make us feel very uneasy about our own culture\u2019s cherished creation story. It sheds light into those places which Richard Lewontin would prefer to keep hidden.<\/p>\n
How the world came about made all the difference to the group of Hebrew refugees who huddled together at Mount Sinai. If the world had truly begun with their God, then their lives had a purpose and they needed to follow him. They believed what Moses told them because they had just seen this God take on and defeat the so-called mighty gods of Egypt, but we have even more reason than them to believe that what Moses writes here is true. If this world merely evolved through Chance and Time, then our lives are random and have no eternal purpose, but since Jesus endorsed the words of this chapter and proved that he was right through his resurrection, that changes everything.10<\/p>\n
The New Testament reminds us of this when it tells us that \u201cBy faith we understand that the universe was formed at God\u2019s command.\u201d11 It accepts that every culture has its own creation story, but insists that God revealed the real one to Moses. It urges us to grasp where the universe is heading by believing this account of how the universe was started. It began with God, it is sustained by God, and ultimately it will end with God too. Our culture\u2019s creation story must submit with all the others to the overarching fact that it all begins with God.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday I shared an extract from Phil Moore\u2019s introduction to Genesis. Today we continue to hear from him on this vital book of the Bible: CREATOR GOD (1:1-31) \u201cNow the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1268,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,105],"tags":[541],"class_list":["post-9848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-pentateuch","tag-books"],"yoast_head":"\n
BOOK EXTRACT - Straight to the heart of Genesis<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Yesterday I shared an extract from Phil Moore's introduction to Genesis. Today we continue to hear from him on this vital book of the Bible: CREATOR GOD\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/adrianwarnock\/2010\/10\/book-extract-straight-to-the-heart-of-genesis\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"BOOK EXTRACT - Straight to the heart of Genesis\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Yesterday I shared an extract from Phil Moore's introduction to Genesis. 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Just not all at once. Healing takes time. Compassion and patience sustain us over a lifetime of change. These are the themes I explore in my books and in the articles I have written for Patheos since 2003. My writing draws on my scientific training as a doctor and psychiatrist, my work in the UK's National Health Service and the pharmaceutical industry, alongside more than twenty-five years as a member of a growing church where I served on the leadership team offering pastoral care. My perspective has also been shaped by chronic illness since 2017, when I developed life-threatening pneumonia that caused lasting damage to my body, triggered several further conditions, and uncovered a diagnosis of blood cancer. This was successfully treated, although doctors expect it to return in the future. Out of these experiences I founded Blood Cancer Uncensored, an online patient-led support community. 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My qualifications and training reflect this integrated background: \u2192 British MB BS medical degree (equivalent to an MD in the USA) \u2192 Postgraduate qualifications in Psychiatry (MRCPsych) and Pharmaceutical Medicine (MFFM, DipPharmMed) \u2192 Theological training courses run by Newfrontiers","sameAs":["http:\/\/patheos.com\/blogs\/adrianwarnock","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/adrianwarnockpage\/","https:\/\/twitter.com\/adrianwarnock"],"url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/adrianwarnock\/author\/awarnock\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/adrianwarnock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/adrianwarnock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/adrianwarnock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/adrianwarnock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1268"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/adrianwarnock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/adrianwarnock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9848\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/adrianwarnock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/adrianwarnock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/adrianwarnock\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}