Created for relationship

Genesis 1: 1 – 2: 6

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 17 Feb, 2008

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!

You know about the Australian effort in World War I. At first, the British military leaders were disgusted with our men. The leaders thought they were undisciplined and ill–managed. By the end of the war, some said that the ANZACs were the best soldiers they had.

The generals planned the campaign off tourist maps. They gave no indication of the difficulty or danger of landing at ANZAC Cove. Our men landed at the foot of the cliffs and had to climb up to attack machine gun emplacements on the cliff tops. You have heard 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 who we are: brave people, people who take on a task and do it to the best of our ability, even against all the odds. We see ourselves as tough, but compassionate, 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.

Nor are we 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, it’s about mateship.

Myths tell us about ourselves and about our world and about our place in it.

What would have happened if we told this story very differently? We could have told about soldiers who ran away in fear, or others who trampled 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 tackle a hopeless situation.

But that is not how we want to understand ourselves. The story we tell ourselves about ourselves is our myth.

And, in a sense, Genesis is also a 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.

Genesis is true, but it’s certainly not science. We have to be clear on both those facts. Genesis is an answer to the people who said that there were many gods who fought, who had sex, who created the world out of corpses who turned baby gods into stars and planets.

This might seem incredible to us today, but those were the dominant myths in the world of Moses and David. Even later, even at the time of the Babylonian captivity, most people still thought that way.

Other people believes that God or the gods started everything going and then left the entire universe to run itself — and even today some people still think that way. Even some Christians think that way, but they are wrong.

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

Years ago, I was part of a Beach Mission team at Eden near the Victorian Border.

One family there was very supportive of the Mission. They were active Presbyterians: the parents and their girls were into everything.

But their son, Stephen, was into nothing Christian. He came 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.

What do you think? Would you worry if someone said they believed in evolution?

I want to make it very clear to you that you are not saved by your views of Genesis or of the Second Coming or of Britain’s place in prophecy. You are saved by Christ alone, and faith in him. Sola Christi — I explained that a few weeks ago. Once you are saved through faith in him, you will have all eternity to sort out the other questions.

So I told Steve 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. But they are only theories, and I can change them if new evidence appears.”

“Your theories about Genesis are your own business. The real issue is knowing the God who gave us Genesis. If you trust 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 out on eternal life.”

He took 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!

He moved interstate and I lost track of him, but I met his sisters again more recently.

He is still going on fine. I hear he had his own theory about Genesis, something different from mine, but that’s OK. The main thing is 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.

Interestingly, all through this first chapter, you find the generic word for God — elohim.

This is God as God. This is God the creator, God without any reference to relationship, just the majestic, all–powerful Creator.

He doesn’t even 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 Morris Iemma said the same thing, it would happen. Well, maybe not, but you get my drift.

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.

Notice how alone God seems in this passage. This is God, majestically other, different from all his creation. A Muslim would say this is how Allah is — different, isolated, without 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. Or is it the breath of God? But does God breathe?

It’s not entirely clear, not entirely unambiguous, yet it seems 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. The one and only, singular God is elohim — plural!

Right at the heart of God’s existence is a plurality, some kind of community.

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 unexplained interloper in their world. A God without community in his essential 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 — no matter how you deny it!

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

But 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 report sent back from the front. 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.

While we translate this "The Lord God,” this translation misses the point. Here we see God in relationship, here we see God revealing himself personally. He doesn’t speak and it is so. That was chapter 1. Here God takes natural elements, 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. They need to know themselves in terms of the family story and family relationships they come from.

Science puzzles out the mechanics of the creation. But Genesis tells us that the God who created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them is the same Yahweh–God who lovingly made us. And he is the God whose love reaches out to us and always has.

Archaeology and biology reveal such facinating things. Who can keep up with the latest discoveries about genetics, or fail to be amazed by it all?

But I need another story to live by. I need 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?”

You remember George Harrison’s song, My Sweet Lord? It 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. Many people say that 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. Next week we will reflect on 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. As we have seen today, it is a Biblically–based truth, which 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? The principle is the same whether you have never even thought of knowiung God until this point, or whether you know him but your relationship with him has grown stale and cold.

Here’s a simple way to begin.

Every morning, read part of Mark’s Gospel in a recent translation. 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

© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)