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Gen 1: 1 – 2:7

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 22 Aug, 2004
(Discovering God series, Part 3)

HAVE YOU ever heard the term, “The ANZAC Myth”? Does that mean that the Galipoli landing never occurred, that it is only a fairy story? Of course not!.

   We all know about World War I and the Australian effort there. When Australians first began fighting, the British military leaders were disgusted. They thought that our men were poorly disciplined and badly managed. By the end of the war, they were saying that the ANZACs were the best soldiers they had.
  You’ve heard stories about the first major conflicts we were in. You’ve heard how Australians were landed at the foot of cliffs, in a campaign planned off tourist maps which didn’t show the difficulty or the danger of landing at that site. You’ve heard about the bravery of the Australians as they tried to attack machine gun emplacements on the cliff tops. You know the story of Simpson and his donkey, tirelessly picking up the wounded — Australian, New Zealand or Turkish — and getting them assistance.

  Why do we tell these stories?

  This is the ANZAC myth. We know ourselves better from this account. We see ourselves as brave, as people who take on a task and do it to the best of our ability, even if the odds are against us. We see ourselves as tough, but compassionate, as people who will fight to the end, but who are humane to our enemies. We are not mere mercenaries. We are not savages. We do our job, but we are fair and decent people.
  We are also not swayed by mere rank. A Private can lead when the Captain is wounded. It’s all about the best man for the job. It’s about the equality in mateship.

  Our myths tell us about ourselves and about our world and about our place in it.

  Think, though! We could have told this story very differently. We could have told about soldiers who were scared and ran away, or others who trampled on the dead and dying as they pressed forward in the battle. We could find Australians who executed unarmed Turkish captives. We could say that the ANZACs were dupes of their leaders who should have refused to fight when the situation was so hopeless.
  But that is not how we want to understand ourselves. The story we tell ourselves about ourselves is our myth.

  In one sense, Genesis is also a "true myth". It tells us about ourselves and about our world and about our place in it. But it is not our myth. We didn’t devise it to tell us about ourselves. It goes back about three thousand years, and it tells us how God wants us to understand himself and how he wants us to understand ourselves.

  It’s true, but it’s certainly not science. It’s an answer to the people who said that there were many gods who fought or had sex and created the world out of corpses and baby gods. This might seem incredible to us today, but those were the dominant myths in the world of Moses and David and even later, at the time of the Babylonian captivity.
  And it is an answer to the people who believe that God or the gods started everything going and then left the entire universe to run itself.
  There are still people who think that way. Even some Christians think that way, but they are wrong.

  Genesis is about God and about us and about that vital relationship I spoke about last week.

  Many years ago, I was part of a Beach Mission team down at Eden near the Victorian Border.
  There was a family down there which was very supportive of the Mission. They were active Presbyterians, and the parents and their girls were into everything.
  But they also had a son, Stephen, who was into nothing. He came along to some of the functions, but hung back and didn’t mix much.
  One night he got talking to one of the girls on team and she came to see me. “Stephen believes in evolution,” she told me, “And that is keeping him from believing in Jesus!”
  So I went and talked to him. I explained that there are many theories about Genesis and evolution. Some deny evolution altogether. Some come closer to denying Genesis altogether. Some try to put the two together.
  I said, “I believe Genesis, and I have my theories about how Genesis and science fit together. But they are only theories, and I may need to change them.”

  Then I said, “The theories you have about Genesis are your own business. The real issue is knowing the God who gave us Genesis. If you put your faith in Jesus, you will begin to know God, and you will have all eternity with him to ask him how he created everything. But, if you don’t put your faith in Jesus, it won’t matter how well you understand the creation. You will have missed the chance of eternal life.”

  He took away a copy of Four Spiritual Laws, and, early the next morning, he asked Jesus into his heart to be Lord of his life.
  That is the right decision to make!

  I ran into his sisters many years later, and asked how he was going. He had moved interstate and I’d lost track of him.
  He was still going on fine. And I also discovered that he had his own theory about Genesis, something different from mine, but that was OK. The main thing was that he believes in Jesus and has a relationship with God through him.

  I’ve mentioned both Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 this morning, because they are different stories, different accounts of the creation.
  Genesis 1: 1 starts out very plainly.

In the beginning, God...

  That’s what it’s all about.
  The Hebrew is even starker. That “In the beginning...” is more of a heading than part of a sentence. It takes the focus off The Beginning and puts it onto God.

God created the heavens and the earth.

  It’s God from beginning to end.
  It’s interesting. All the way through this first chapter, you find the generic word for God — elohim.
  This is God as God, God the creator, God without any reference to relationship, just the majestic, all–powerful creator of the Universe.
  You’ll notice that he doesn’t even have to get his hands dirty to create all these things. He speaks, and it happens.

God said, Let there be light, and there was light.

  Someone put it like this: I could stand at the top of Mount Victoria, and say, “Let there be a tunnel right under here, connecting Springwood with Lithgow.”
  Nothing much would happen.
  If Bob Carr said the same thing, it would happen.
  This doesn’t say anything about how he does it; it only talks about the authority he exercises, the power he has to get things done.

  The Bible doesn’t tell us about the how of the creation, but it tells us that God did it.

  I want you to notice how alone God seems in this passage. This is God, majestically other, different from all his creation. For a Muslim, this is very much the picture of God — so different and isolated that he has no real personal interaction with people. There is no partnership in their view of God.
  And yet... right at the beginning of the story, we find the Spirit of God moving on the face of the deep.

  It’s not entirely clear, not entirely unambiguous, yet it seems, from this, that the Sprit of God has some kind of separate existence, is there with God right from the beginning.

  Then we turn back to the almighty, all–powerful God, decreeing the shaping and the filling of the entire creation, shaping the realm of light and darkness, shaping the realm of sea and dry land and so on, then filling each realm with lights, with geological features, with creatures of all kinds. God alone.
  Yet even the word, God, is not entirely unambiguous, either.
  In Hebrew, it is elohim, which is a plural form. God, singular, is elohim, plural!
  Right at the heart of God’s existence is a plurality, some kind of community.

  The point is, that, although God is majestic, although God is One, although God is the supreme creator of everything, he is also the God of relationship and community. Any religion which does not recognise that has no justification for community — it is an inexplicable interloper into their world. A God without community in the essence of his being is a God who cannot create community. You end up needing two gods, one who creates community, and one who creates everything else.
  The more you try to protect God’s absolute oneness, the more you become a polytheist, a believer in many gods.

  But there is only one God. There is great mystery here!

  So let’s move across to Genesis 2, because here we find part of the previous story told from a different perspective.
  It’s a bit like our ANZAC myth. Much of the story comes from official war histories, from the daily records kept by each unit.
  But there is also the story of Simpson and his donkey. That comes from a newspaper story sent back from the front by a reporter. The official war history would have records from the medical corps, and you’d find mention of Simpson, J, Private — on duty 0600 hrs to 2015 hrs.
  But the war correspondent wanted to deliver a picture to his readers. He saw Simpson trudging back and forth with his donkey, carrying the wounded back to the beach for treatment. He described the scene and immortalised a soldier doing his duty.

  And the story of God forming the first man and the first woman also became part of the total picture.

  It’s in absolute contrast to the first chapter.
  For a start, elohim, the generic creator-God of chapter 1, gives way to Yahweh elohim, God with a name.

  We translate this "The Lord God.” There are historic reasons for this translation; but it misses the point, that here we see God in relationship, revealing himself personally. He doesn’t speak and it is so, that was chapter 1. Here God takes natural elements, he takes the dust of the earth, and makes a man. Here is God, getting his hands dirty! Here is God, putting himself into making humans, breathing his own breath into our nostrils. Here is God, desiring the creation of people. He wants us to be in community with him and in communication with him!

  It’s not science, it’s a story, in the same way as a parent might answer a child’s question, “Where did I come from?”
  You don’t always need to give a blow–by–blow account of what its parents were up to nine months before the child’s birth. Sometimes it’s good for a child to know, for example, about the parents’ love for one another, about the story more than about the details. I am a firm believer in accurate and timely sex education, but children also need to understand their origins in terms of the love their parents shared, and in terms of the family story and family relationships they come from.

  And science puzzles out the mechanics of the creation, but Genesis tells us that the God who created the heavens and the earth and all thtat is in them is the same Yahweh–God who lovingly made us, and whose love reaches out to us and always has.
  I am fascinated by all that archaeology and biology has revealed. I am fascinated by the latest discoveries about genetics.

  But I need another story to live by, the story of  a God who loves me and who wants me to know him.

  Right now I know that someone will be asking, “If God is so keen to be known, why does he seem so far away?”

  George Harrison wrote the song, My Sweet Lord, which has the words,

I really want to know you,
I really want to show you, Lord,
But it takes so long my Lord...

  One reason it was popular is that it is not only Hare Krishnas who feel that way. God does seem remote and difficult to know.

  The wonder of the Gospel is that is shows us a God who can be known, who is not far from any of us, for

...in him we live and move and have our being

  Next week we will look at why we have that sense of alienation from God, why we do find it hard to experience that personal relationship that Genesis talks about.
  But today we will end with the reassurance that the creator God of the Universe is the God who has told us his story, and it is a story of loving intimacy with his creatures.

  Centuries ago, the Christian leaders of England got together to produce a new catechism. This was a collection of questions and answers about the Christian faith. Every child was taught the catchism from the earliest age, because if provided simple and dependable guidelines for understanding what they should believe.

  The first question was,
What is the chief end of Man? In other words, what is the main reason that humans were created?
  The answer every child had to learn was,
Man’s chief end is to know God and to enjoy him forever.

  That has never been rescinded. It is a  Biblically–based truth, and will never pass away. God loves and enjoys us, and we are created to love and enjoy him.

  I want to leave you with a suggestion today: if you are serious about knowing God, why not begin reading the Bible?
  Here’s a simple way to begin.
Every morning, read part of Mark’s Gospel in a recent translation. Generally aim to read a chapter a day, but, if a chapter is clearly divided into sections, and you’d rather concentrate on a single section, that’s fine: just do that.
  Before you read, ask God to reveal himself to you; when you finish, ask yourself,
  “What does this teach me about God — the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit?”
  Then ask,
  “Is there an example to follow or a sin to avoid?”

  As you begin doing God’s will, you will also begin to know him.
  May you find that to be so.

AMEN