Lessons from the Beginning

Lessons from the Beginning

Genesis 1:1-2:4

            Recently I had occasion to preach on Chapter 1 of Genesis, a word that means beginning—so I was preaching on the beginning of the beginning.  I think it’s a good idea to occasionally return to the beginning to make sure we haven’t missed something, some clue as to where we should be and where we should be going.  In the song, “Do Re Mi” from The Sound of Music Julie Andrews (Maria Von Trapp) sings, “Let’s start at the very beginning; a very good place to start.”  Let’s do it! 

            Every time I return to Genesis 1, I find something I missed before.  My good friend Mike Brower says the same thing.  He presented our Scripture lesson that Sunday, and he found things he hadn’t noticed before.  Let’s examine some of my discoveries.

            Genesis 1:3—“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”  What was that light?  It separated day from night—but God doesn’t create the sun, moon and stars for another eleven verses, so it couldn’t be their light that appeared on the first day.  Mike Brower suggested it could have been the Light of the World—and that’s a tempting thought.  But classic Christian doctrine says that Jesus Christ is uncreated.  Like God the Father, he has existed from the beginning—in fact, from before the beginning. 

            Perhaps that light was what scientists refer to as the Big Bang.  It certainly fits the description, since that explosion released so much energy that the universe is still expanding.  It’s a tempting thought, one that both conservative Christians and liberal scientists will have trouble with.  Perhaps that’s why I find it so tempting.

            Genesis 1:29-30—God has already created the animals (v.24) and humankind (v. 26-28), and now God tells them what they are to eat.  All animals and all people are to be vegetarians.  No killing of animals, even by other animals, and certainly not by humans.  We are to eat “every plant yielding seed…and every tree with seed in it.”  The animals have been given “every green plant for food.”  If this sounds strange (and it certainly does to me!), remember God’s promise in Isaiah 65:25, the prophecy regarding the new earth that God will create in the age to come:  “The wolf and the lamb will graze together [my emphasis]; the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”  Apparently, this is how God intended things to be.  It’s an interesting thought.

            Genesis 2:2-3—“And on the seventh day God finished his work…and he rested on the seventh day…So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy…”  The seventh day wasn’t something added on, separate from creation, it was the culmination of creation, it’s crowning touch.  It was the day God sat back and examine all that had been created, all that God had made and blessed with the words, “And God saw that it was good.”

            And so we are to finish our work week with a Sabbath—a day of rest, so we can enjoy and appreciate God’s good works.  “It is finished,” God said.  “Let us enjoy the fruits of our labor.”  We are to keep the Sabbath Day holy because God sanctified it.  Unfortunately, most of us fail miserably at this.

            Genesis 1:1-2—Perhaps what intrigued me the most was that God began before the beginning.  The Jewish Study Bible translates the passage this way:  “In the beginning, when God began to create the heavens and the earth—the earth being unformed and void…”  Before the beginning, the earth was here, but it was wasteland, and whatever existed was chaos.  

God’s singular accomplishment over the period of creation, however long it lasted, was to bring order out of chaos—for which God deserves the highest praise.  We can be grateful for this, and for God continuing to bring order to order the chaos of our world—and of our lives.