David Pawson
Unlocking The Old Testament : Genesis 2(Creator and Creation)
I would like to give you a little bit of a philosophy lesson. Everybody has a philosophy, it's your way of thinking about things. The word means simply, "to love wisdom," or "to seek the answers to big questions," and all of us have a philosophy, but the trouble is in our modern world. There are so many different philosophers that are being thrown at us through the mass media and in so many different ways. So we get into confusion. If you accept Genesis 1, then, there are a whole lot of modern philosophies that are ruled out by the very first page of the Bible. I've just made a list of some of them. I cringe when I hear a word ending in "-ism," "i-s-m."
There are only two "-ism" that I'm happy with, "baptism" and "evangelism." But apart from that, all the other "-isms" usually are philosophies of a false kind. For example, if you believe in Genesis 1, atheism is out. Atheism believes there is no God. "I'm an atheist, thank God." Said someone. And agnosticism, agnosticism is ruled out. Agnosticism says, "I don't know whether there is a God or not." But Genesis 1 says there is. So you can't believe Genesis 1 and be an agnostic. Animism, which is the belief in many spirits controlling our worlds, spirits of rivers, spirits of mountains. There's still a lot of animism in the world. That's ruled out.
Polytheism, that's the belief that there are many gods, Genesis 1 rules that out. Dualism, believes that there are two gods, one good and one bad. And the good god is responsible for the good things that had happened, and the bad god for the bad things. Well, that's not the Biblical philosophy either. Monotheism believes that there is only one god, one person. Judaism believes that, Islam believes that, but Genesis rules that out by using the plural word Elohim.
Deism believes that god is the creator, but he cannot now control what he had created. He's made something like a watch, wounded up and now, it runs on its own laws. So miracle becomes impossible. Deism is very common even in church. Do you believe God can change the weather? If you don't believe that, you're a deist. You may believe that He created the universe, but He can't control it.
Theism believes that God, not only created the world, but is also in control of everything and everyone He's made, and Theism is one step towards the Biblical philosophy. Existentialism believes experience is god, our choices are affirmation of ourselves, that is religion. Humanism believes that man is god. Rationalism believes reason is god. Materialism believes only matter is real. Mysticism believes that only spirit is real.
Monism is rather a funny one, but is very common today, and that is that matter and spirit are essentially one and the same thing. Pantheism believes everything is god. A modern version of it is called, Panentheism, god is in everything. When those are all ruled out by Genesis 1. If you want an "-ism" that sums up the Bible philosophy, it is Triuntheism, three-in-one, creator and controller of the universe. That's the Biblical way of thinking. It comes right out in Genesis 1 and it stays right through to the last chapter of Revelation.
▲Well now, let's move on from these rather intellectual subjects to look at Genesis 1 itself, and the first thing that strikes us is the style of Genesis 1. It is not written in scientific language. Hallelujah for that. Otherwise, even in our scientific age, very few could understand it. I picked this up somewhere, you won't be able to see it at the back, but look it up at the video. And God said, "Let-." Oh, what an equation, mathematical equations comes, and God said all that, "And there was light," Because that's the scientific formula for light.
Aren't you glad that Genesis 1 wasn't written in scientific language? Or none of us would understand it, or very few of us anyway. It is written in simplistic language. For example, there are only three kinds of vegetation in Genesis 1, grass, plants, and trees. So very simple categorization of vegetation isn't it? Everybody knows grass, plants, and trees. There are only three kinds of animals mentioned in Genesis 1, domesticated animals, animals that we hunt for food, and wild animals.
Now, these simple classifications are understood by everybody everywhere; three different sized plants, three different kinds of animals depending on their relationship to us. This is what we mean by simplistic. There are only 76 separate root-words in the whole of Genesis 1. That's remarkably few. Furthermore, every one of those words is to be found on every language on Earth, so that Genesis 1 is the easiest chapter to translate of the whole Bible.
It takes a genius to be that simple. You see, God, like every writer, has to ask, "Who's going to read what I write?" You've got to angle your writing towards your potential reader, and there's such a thing as a fog index for writers which, I test my writing on, and you take so many sentences, you count the number of multi-syllable words, and how many sentences you put them in a mathematical formula, and then it comes out, and you know exactly who'll be able to read what you write. Whether it's Reader Digest's readers, or scientific thesis readers, and it's a good way of checking.
Now, God wanted the story of creation to reach everybody in every time and in every place. So He made it utterly, utterly simple, and the result is, a child can read Genesis 1 and get the message, and it can be translated into any language. It takes a genius to be that simple. Einstein was asked to explain his theory of the Relativity of time, and he said, "One minute sitting on a hot stove seems much longer than one hour talking to a pretty girl." Now it takes a genius to be that simple and everybody now understands the theory of the Relativity of time. God wanted to be that simple, so He didn't write a scientific account of creation.
He wrote a simplistic one. God is the subject, along with the Word and the Spirit, there's a trinity coming in already, especially when later it say, "Let us make man." The verbs are very simple. Now, I want to point out the difference between created and made. The Hebrew word created, "barra," means to make something out of nothing, and it only occurs three times in the whole of Genesis 1, for matter, life and man. only those three points was God creating something absolutely new.
In between, He uses the word, made, which means to make something out of something else. Now, we can make things, we can manufacture things, but we can't create, and that's a very important point in Genesis 1. There are three points of which God does something totally new out of nothing, matter, life, and man. We might say today matter, DNA, and man. The objects, the days 1-7, again, utterly simple. Each sentence is so simple that it has a subject, a verb and an object.
The grammar is so simple and straight-forward that, again, anybody can understand it. It's a remarkable production. The structure of Genesis 1 is beautifully put together, it is so orderly spread over 6 days, but the 6 days are divided into 3, and 3, you may have never noticed this, but cleary, there are 2 lots of 3 days.
▲At the beginning of it all, it says the Earth was uninhabitable and uninhabited. It was without form and void or empty, and God takes 3 days to form it and 3 days to inhabit it. In the first 3 days, He creates an environment, but in the second 3 days, He's creating individual things or creatures that inhabit that environment. So, He does it in order, He prepares the environment first and then He puts creatures into the environment and an amazing correspondence between the first 3 days and the last 3 days. The first 3 days, He creates a varied environment by contrast, contrast between the light and darkness, sky from ocean, and land from sea.
He's creating distinctions which makes a variety. Having created that, on the third day, He puts plants in. But now, He creates the inhabitants. Now, the sun and moon in that sense, are the inhabitants of light. I'll come back to that later, there's a very important point here. But light and darkness was general, now we have the specifics, the sun, moon, and stars, inhabiting that light and that darkness. The sky from the ocean, fills them with birds and fish, and on the 6th day, on the dry land the animals and the human beings appear.
How many of you have ever noticed that parallel between the first 3 days and the second 3 days, could I see? Just a few of you. Isn't it a remarkable order? It's beautifully done, God is doing things in such an orderly and precise manner. He's actually bringing order out of chaos which He loves to do.
▲Now, I told you in the last talk that Genesis 1 is mathematical. The 3 figures that keep coming through the account, even in the English, are 3, 7, and 10. 3 is what God is, 7 is the perfect number right through scripture, and 10 is always the completeness. Now, when you look at the 3, 7 and 10, it's remarkable. At only three points does God actually creates something, three times, He calls something by name, three times, He makes something, three times, He blesses something, all the way through, even in English, you'll find everything is in three's.
The verbs are in three's. Next 7's, seven times it says, "God say that it was good," seven times. there are seven days, that's obvious. The first sentence is seven words in the Hebrew, the last 3 sentences, in this account of creation, all sentences are in seven words, not in English I'm afraid, but you'll have to take my word for it about the Hebrew. Now, in all these, it's in marked contrast to, for example, the Babylonian epic of creation, which is so complicated and so weird, that when you compare it with the simplicity of God's word, you will have no doubt which rings true.
▲Well now, I must plunge, I'm afraid, at this point into the problem, but before I do so, let's just underline this point that Genesis 1 is simplistic. I think, I can do it most easily by imagining a children's book, describing how a house is built, and if you want to write a children's book, you would have to give a simplified summary. You would say, "First, came the brick layer, who laid the bricks. Then the carpenter came to put the window frames and the door frames and roof joints on. Then the plumber came to put the pipes in, the water and the wastes. The electrician came then, to put the wires in, then the plasterer did the walls, the decorator painted them and finally, they all went on a holiday." So that explaining it simply to children, you would probably explain 7 stages, you follow me? But that is simplistic and the sermoner involved and designing churches and getting them built, I know that life is not that simple.
You have to have what's called a 'critical path analysis' and you work out when the brick layer has to come and when the carpenter has to come, he may have to come twice, when the plumber. It's a very complicated business getting a building up, but the only people who needs to know that are the builders. This is good enough and this is what you would do if you were telling a story to anybody at any time and place. Do you follow me?
There's no doubt that Genesis is the simplification and that science can fill out a lot more details for us, but God wanted everybody to understand that He did it, that He did it in an orderly way that He knew what He was doing. But as soon as you talk like that, then this bogey of science versus scripture comes up, and the tension is there. There is a tension in many scientists over anything supernatural, that is because, science can only study the natural world, can't study the supernatural, so that the supernatural is something science doesn't really have any contact with and finds difficult to think about.
But there are specific questions of science that come up in relations to the Genesis 1 account of creation and I feel that I must just mention them. Some of course, of the difficult is that people have been flipping. "Did Adam have a navel?" I've been asked, profound isn't it? Or, "Can snakes talk?" Or, "Where did Cain get his wife?" Lord Sopha was asked that at a high powered corner and he said to his question just once, "Why are you so interested in other people's wives?" There are in fact three possible answers, but I'm not going to give them to you. One of the latest I read in the National Press was, "Did Noah take woodworm into the ark, or technically two woodworms?" Or one common one I get asked today is, "Why are dinosaurs never mentioned?" Since we've become so fond of them. But these frankly are flipping, there are much more serious issues that we have to face. The speed of creation, geologists tell us it was formed a quarter billion years, Genesis seems to say it was 6 days.
There's a little bit of a gap there to be closed. Similarly the age of the Earth, the order of creation. Actually the remarkable thing is, science agrees with the order of Genesis 1 with one exception, and I think that can be explained. The exception is that sun, moon, and stars don't appear till the forth day after the plants are on Earth, but in fact, we now know that the original Earth was covered with a thick cloud, a mist. In fact, Genesis 2 says a mist covered the whole Earth, science knows that's true now. So, when the first light appeared, then it would just be generally seen lighter cloud. Whereas when the plants came and started turning carbon dioxide to oxygen that cleared the mist and for the first time sun, moon, and stars appeared in the heavens.
Now given that, that actually the appearance of the sun, moon, and stars after the plants was due to clearing, that's thick cloud surrounding the Earth, then science agrees exactly with the order of Genesis 1, that creatures appeared in the sea before the land, that man appeared last. There's an astonishing correspondence on that one. So, order is not now a major problem, but the origin of animals and humans is. This whole question of evolution versus creation, and there are other things like the age of the people who lived before the flood, diffusely 969, that's the oldest man, and then the extent of the flood itself.
▲The tragedy is that to the modern mind, these problems come first in relation to Genesis. That's why I didn't take them earlier than now, because I believe we have got to get the message of Genesis first of all, then tackle the problems later. If you just discuss the problems in Genesis, you will miss the very important messages that it has to give us. but nevertheless we mustn't overlook the disagreements. I want to begin by saying there are three ways of handling this problem of science versus scripture. It's very important which way you're going to do it. The three ways are:
1. Repudiate
2. Segregate
3. Integrate
I'll tell you straight away, I believe the third is the right one.
▲1. Repudiate
The first is taken by naive Christians who say, "You've got to choose." You either choose that the scripture's right or that science is right, but you must repudiate one or the other. You can't accept both, and that makes it a very simple choice. The result is that unbelievers choose science and believers choose scripture and both bury their heads in the sand. That is not the answer to this problem. Partly, because science has been right in so much. We owe these video cameras to science and these spotlights. We came in a car here, we've been in a red hot telephone line, Jim and I all this week. All these things came from science. So, just to say, science is wrong, he's probably the most foolish, lying to take in modern world, but equally silly to say they are always right. But this way of repudiation is not the answer, to say one is right and the other is wrong, fails people with a choice. It leads to dishonesty, it leads people to feel that they must commit intellectual suicide in order to believe the Bible and that is a mistake.
▲Segregate
The second way is to keep science and scripture far apart as possible, and to say that science is concerned with one kind of truth and scripture with another. That science is concerned with physical truth, material truth, natural truth. Whereas scripture is concerned with moral truth and supernatural truth, and therefore they deal with entirely separate issues. That science tells us how, and when the world came to be? Whereas scripture simply tells us who and why? And they are to be kept entirely separate, segregate them as far away as possible, then they can live together.
It's rather a strange approach to try and put it in its modern dress, science talks about facts, whereas scripture's suppose to talk about values, and therefore, we don't look into the Bible for facts, we look into the Bible for values. That's a very, very common way of talking today, even by preachers and churches, but it's the wrong solution. It fits our Greek thinking, and most of us think like Greeks unfortunately, and we keep the physical and spiritual in two water-type compartments. The sacred and the secular, the temporal and the eternal.
That kind of thinking is totally alien to the Hebrew mind, which saw God as creator and redeemer. So that the physical and spiritual belong together, so, I don't think this is the answer either. It involves treating Genesis as myth, Genesis 3 becomes a fable, entitled, "How the snake lost its legs," and Adam becomes every man instead of one man, I'm sure you've heard this kind of things. So that these are fictional stories teaching us values about God and about ourselves, teaching us how to think about God and about ourselves, but we mustn't press them into historical fact.
Now, if you start on that track and treat Adam and Eve as myth, as a story with a moral truth in it, but not historical truth, then where do you stop as you read through the Bible? At first people said, "Adam and Eve were myths," then they moved on a bit and said "Noah was a myth, the flood story has truth in it but moral truth, not historical." Then they moved on said, "Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were myths." Then they moved on and said "Moses was a myth," and if you saw a recent TV series on Exodus by man called Roma, you know that he was treating it as a myth, a nice story with a good moral in it, but not historically true, and then they moved on. Until now there are theologians who treat the resurrection and the virgin birth of Jesus as myth, stories with a truth in them.
That's my problem with this approach, where do you stop? Ultimately, there's no history left in the Bible, there are only values, no facts. Of course, it makes it possible then to put the Bible along side the Koran, and along side the holy Vedus and other scriptures which are values, but I believe it has destroyed the Bible. God is the God of history, history is His story and we are reading facts. Furthermore, as I said earlier, Jesus accepted Genesis as factual, therefore, this is not the answer to the problem, but it's probably the most common way that Christians have tried to get over the problem.
overlap overwrap
Both scripture and science are in fact overlapping circles and they are dealing with some things that are the same and they are apparent contradictions between them which we must look at. How then are we going to resolve? How can we bring them together? Well, we need to remember two basic things, very important, and the first thing is that transitional investigations of science and I mean by that. That science changes, it's always in transition and things that were regarded as scientific facts years ago, are now no longer regarded as scientific fact.
Science changes its views, for example, it used to believe that the atom was the smallest thing in the universe, now we know that each atom is a whole universe in itself. It was said until very recently that X and Y chromosomes decided whether if we just became a male or a female human being. I gather now, that's been thrown out of the window and it's something else entirely different. You really have to keep changing your mind to catch up. The whole discovery of DNA has revolutionized our thinking about life because we now know that the earliest form of life had the most complicated DNA in it and that mathematically DNA is a language.
It is not a trans-combination, it is a language passing on a message from one generation to another, therefore, DNA must have a person behind it. That's changing a lot of people's thinking. So, science changes, it is in a state of transition. Geology is changing. I read an article by the science correspondent of a Times, he said that there are now seven different ways of finding out the age of the Earth, carbon 14, radiogenic helium, magnetic field decay, oceanic nickel, etc., etc., and he gave a list of the dates that these new methods have been revealed, and interestingly enough, the shortest is 9000 years, and the longest is 100,075 years not far from a quarter to billion.
Well, who's right? I don't know, I think we wait until the scientist make up their mind on many real issues. Anthropology is now in a state of disorder, what we thought were prehistoric men, our ancestors, are no longer regarded as out ancestors, but creatures that came and went, and disappeared. Biology, again, has changed. Very few believe in Darwin's evolution today. So, that's the first point I want to make today, science does change its opinion and to tie the Bible to any particular age of science would mean that, in the next generation the bible would be thrown away as well.
▲3. Integrate
The second thing I want to say is equally important. Traditional interpretations of scripture can also change. The Bible is inspired but our interpretation of it may not be. I think we need to draw a very clear distinction between the Bible text and how we interpret it. For example, when the Bible talks about the four corners of the Earth, who interprets that to mean that the Earth is a cube or a square? See, the Bible uses what we call, the language of appearance. It talks about the sun rising in the east and setting in the west and running around the sky. Who takes that to mean the sun is moving around the Earth?
Well, they used to, but it was a wrong interpretation using simply the language of appearance. So that we need to think again about our interpretation of the Bible so that we become a little more flexible. I believe in this way science is realized to be transitional and our interpretation of scripture seem to be traditional, then we'll begin to be willing to rethink.
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I thought I'd illustrate this by looking at the days in Genesis 1 and I found that there are at least 5 different ways of interpreting the word "day" in scripture and I'm going to go through all five and leave you to take your pick, how about that?
There are, as I've said, slight discrepancies between six days and four and a quarter billion years and we need to close the gap in some way. So, how are we going to take the word "day" in Genesis 1? It's a Hebrew word "Yom," which sometimes mean a day of 24 hours, it also means an era, as in the day of wholesome cart is over. I don't mean a 24 hour day, I mean a day of wholesome cart is over.
But there are 5 different ways of interpretation.
▲1. The first is to take the word "day" literally as an Earth-day of 24 hours. Your problem then, is to find more time somewhere, and you'll find various commentaries "find more time," in one of three ways:
a. The first is by finding a gap between verse 1 and verse 2, or rather verse 2 and verse 3. In other words, the Earth, it said, "Became without a form in void over a very long period and the six days are God putting it right again." That's a very common theory you'll find it in the Scofield Bible, you'll find it in a number of Bible notes. That in fact, the six days whether reconstruction of a will that had gone into chaos over a long period, very common theory.
b. The second way of finding more time, is to find it all in the flood. There had been various books notably connected with the names Wickham and Norris that have said that the geological data that we have all come out of the flood, not very easy to maintain that.
c. Most intriguing way of finding time is this, that God genuinely created antiques begins with a theory, how old was Adam when he was made by God? Wasn't a baby, so was he 30 years old when he was made by God? In which case, anybody meeting him would have said, "You're 30 years old." That would have been wrong, he'd only be a half an hour old, you follow the theory? That God can create genuine antiques and that He could make a tree that looks like 200 years old, has all the rings in it. It's a possible theory, God could do that, but all these are ways trying to take the day literally and find more time somewhere, follow me?
And you are welcome to take any of those interpretations.
▲2. Then there are those who take a day as meaning a geological era, but it's a long time. It's a age-day, well that's quite a common theory, and therefore we are not talking about six days, but about six geological ages.
▲3. The third is the mythological, which I've already mentioned. The treats of six days as pure myth. It's only the poetic framework of a story and the main thing is to get the moral out of the story and forget the framework. That's part of the myth, that means it's a fable-day.
▲4. One of the most intriguing was by professor Wisemen from London university. He believed the days were educational, meaning, that God revealed His creations in stages to Moses and on the first day out of a week in Moses' life, God said, "This is what I did," and then the next day He told him a bit more, and then the next day, a bit more, and a bit more. So, these were school days of Moses, hope you're still with me, and there are two forms of that theory:
a. One is that God revealed creation verbally, in words.
b. But, another intriguing is that, He revealed it visually as He did in the book of Revelation to John, by giving Moses a kind of picture show and Moses saw light separate from the darkness, then the screen went black, and then Moses saw another picture of the moisture being separated from the seas. Next picture, he saw plants, animals, birds and so on, that it was kind of a picture show he wrote down.
But both of those theories whether in words or picture assume that the days belong to Moses' school time table.
▲5. And the final interpretation is that, these were God-days. Time is relative, to God as well as it is to us, that a thousand days are like a day to God, and a day like a thousand years. Therefore, God was saying to me the whole of creation was all in a week's work. That's what is was to me, and the point of saying that would be, that if you take geological time, human life loses all its significance, for example, go back to Cleopatra's needle.
If you let Cleopatra's needle represent the age of our planet and put a ten p peas flat on top of the needle, that's the age of the human race, and then if you put a posted stamp on top of that, its thickness represents civilized men. Do you realize we lose all significance in that? Who are we? And God, I believe, wanted us to think of creation as a week's work because He wanted to get down to the important bit, that's us on planet Earth. Well, that's the theory.
The seventh day, note the length of the seventh day because that had lasted centuries. It lasted all the way through the Old Testament, God's seventh day rest lasted until Easter Sunday when He raised His Son form the dead. All the way through the Old Testament there is nothing new created, God had finished creation.
The word, "new" hardly occurs in the Old Testament once, yes, I can think of once. There's a verse in Ecclesiastes, "Behold there is nothing new under the sun." So, God rested all throughout the Old Testament, that is a pretty long day? Well, there are five different ways. I think you've probably guessed which I'm going for, but I'm not going to press that. These are interpretations, God clearly wanted us to think of His work as a week's work. That's the message. I'm content with that message.
I personally believe we are talking about God-day. He's giving us angle on it, that was just a week's work to Him. To Him it has only been a couple of days since Jesus died. Time is real to God, but it's relative to God as well and we need to remember that. Well, I've taken just one example there, I'm leaving the big question of evolution till the next talk because that's a big, expecially if man is included in it.
What I've tried to do here is to show you that, we interpreters of the Bible, need to be a little more flexible sometimes and say, we may not have understood it right, and I believe scientists need to be a bit more humble. But many of them are becoming more humble as they discover the random principle in nature, that everything isn't neatly tied up in laws of cause and effect, and science is becoming much more flexible. So that, recently there was an article in by the morning newspaper, entitled, "Is science about to prove the existence of God?" Amazing title to read, a hundred years ago you would have read "Disprove," but now, there has been a swing round to a universe that is more open to personal intervention and control by God than it was before.
So, science and scripture in our day are beginning to move together again. That's all to the good. I believe the third way that I've showed you of reconciling science and scripture to integrate them is necessary because both scientist and scripture are concerned with truth. We are all committed to the truth and we want to find it out and I believe that science has found out a lot of truth about our universe for us, but it has not been able to tell us the most important truths either about God or about ourselves. For that we have scripture and thank God we have.
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