Clough Genesis Lesson 2
Problems, Solutions and Applications of Genesis – 1:1-3
Today we’re going to try to do three things. Here’s what they are: we’re going to outline the problem that we have with Genesis 1:1-3. There’s an interpretation problem here in these verses, the problem has been discussed for many centuries. We want to be alert to it because some of you have translations that have shifted in the last ten years and this shift betrays the fact that the scholars who are doing the translating themselves are affected by this controversy. So we’ve got to outline the controversy of Genesis 1:1-3 first. Then we’re going to try to come up with some solution to Genesis 1:1-3 and we’ll show you why we come to the solution and how we come to the solution. That’s the second thing we’re going to do. Then the third thing we’re going to do is take the results of our solution and apply it to the Christian life. So we hope to accomplish these three things: problem, solution, and application.
Let’s look first at the problem. Follow as I read from the King James of Genesis 1:1-3. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. [2] And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was moving upon the face of the waters. [3] And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”
Now over the years there have been three major views on handling these verses. The first view and the oldest one is the classical creation position. In this classical creation position here’s how verses 1-3 are read. Verse 1 indicates a point and finished act, so that by the time you reach the period at the end of verse 1 the act is finished. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” finished, go on, next thing. Verse 2, in this first position of the classical creation view, is taken as what is called a circumstantial clause. A circumstantial clause doesn’t depict action; a circumstantial clause depicts circumstances or a state, not action, but a state, therefore in the classical creation view verse 2 represents the state of affairs at the end of the action of verse 1. In other words, verse 2 is tied to the main verb of verse 1 as a circumstantial dependent clause. Then verse 3 describes a second point act.
Let’s make sure we’ve got it now. In the first view, which is the church’s historic position, Genesis 1:1 is a point act of creating the heavens and the earth; their amorphous form of verse 2 when all that work is finished, so the net result of verse 1 has been creation of a watery chaos. Then verse 3 is the first act in improving the watery chaos. Men who have held this position go all the way back to the earliest years of the church. Martin Luther said, for example: The plain and simple meaning of what Moses here says is that all things that exist were created by God and that at the beginning of the first day God put into it the light, so that the light of the day was shining and the shapeless heaven and earth could be seen. So Luther very clearly interprets verse 2 as circumstantial to verse 1. John Calvin: There is no doubt that Moses gives the name of heaven and earth to the confused mass which He shortly after denominates water. There is no question that Calvin takes verse 2 as circumstantial to the action of verse 1. In our own generation the most vigorous proponent of the classical creation position has been Dr. Henry Morris, as leader of the modern creationist movement.
But there are some difficulties with this position that over the years have caused controversy. What are those difficulties? The first difficulty is this: the word pair, “heaven and earth,” everywhere else in the Bible never refer to a shapeless mass. The word pair, “heaven and earth,” always refers to a finished, organized, “heaven and earth.” So one of the things then, is that this classic interpretation seems to lead one to take an unusual view of “heavens and earth.” It’s not lethal but it’s an objection.
The second position, you have to turn to the book of Isaiah. We have the Isaiah 45:18 passage. “For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens, God Himself that formed the earth and made it; He established it; He created it not in vain, He formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD, and there is none else.” Now the word “vain” there is a recurrence of a word in Genesis 1:2 and in this classic creation position one wonders if God has created the heavens and the earth a watery chaos, yet here in Isaiah 45:18 it appears that God hasn’t created it a watery chaos, he says “I created it not chaotically,” then it seems that we’ve got some sort of a problem here that has to be addressed. That’s the second problem with the classic creationist position.
A third problem with the classic creationist position is the fact, if you turn back to Genesis 1:2 and you look at the condition therein described, it’s all dark and it’s all chaotic, and that has an evil connotation in the rest of the Bible; darkness is always pictured as a symbol of evil and in the new heavens and the new earth in Revelation 21 and 22, no darkness is said to exist, because the light of the glory of God filled it. And also Revelation 21:1 says, “and there was no more sea,” and this seems to denote there’s an ominous nature to all this chaos and darkness of verse 2.
Those are the three objections to the classic creationist position. Now we come to the second view that men have held. The second view is probably known to most of you as “the gap theory.” It’s otherwise known as the ruin/restoration view. This view was developed, we don’t know by whom, it was developed down through church history, primarily to solve the fall of Satan problem. Man didn’t want to put the fall of Satan just prior to Adam and Eve’s fall so they wanted to kick it backwards in time, and so it was an attempt to deal with that, but mostly the gap view has been used as a panacea to solve geological problems.
And here is the way this second view, the ruin/restoration or gap theory, reads Genesis 1:1-3. Verse 1 in this view is like the first view, it’s the first act and it’s complete by the period at the end of the sentence. But the major difference is that this view reads verse 2 not as a circumstantial clause but as an action clause, that is, “And the earth became without form and void; and darkness came upon the face of the deep.” That is, verse 2 doesn’t represent the state of action at the end of verse 1; it represents the fact that the heavens and the earth were created perfect but then, through Satan’s fall or something else, then God smashed it and the smashing of the judgment is verse 2. And they place, therefore, a long gap of time between verse 1 and verse 2, hence the name the gap theory. And then verse 3 would be the third action, “God said, Let there be light.”
As I said that view was developed somewhere during the Middle Ages, John Milton tends to follow this in Paradise Lost, but mostly in recent years, in the 19th and 20th centuries fundamentalists have held to this because they thought that this would solve their geological problems. Men today and movements who hold this is the Scofield Bible, both the first and second editions hold to the gap theory. Dr. Arthur Custance, Merrill Unger, former head of Old Testament department at Dallas Seminary, Bob Thieme, Arnold Fruchtenbaum, these are Bible teachers who would hold to the view.
But the gap view
has problems as well as the first view.
And to explain this we have to go back to what is known in Hebrew as a
connective or a waw, pronounced v-a-v
although it’s written w-a-w. And it’s a
letter in the Hebrew alphabet and it’s used to connect things. For example, when you put the phonetic
translation of verse 2 we get something like this: [Hebrew word] that’s one
Hebrew noun without form, and void is this [Hebrew word], and it’s written to
sound nice when you read it, because after all, people in the Old Testament
didn’t have a Bible like you have, they memorized this thing. If you go to
And therefore
the text is written so that it can be easily memorized and so the first verse
is Bereshit bara ha Elohim, and it
just has a rhythm to it, Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'arets. And this is
the way the Hebrew sounds. And when it
comes to verse 2 it says, tohu vavohu,
and it could have picked other adjectives but it picked ones that kind of
rhymed to make it easier to memorize.
But tohu, when you connect it
in the Hebrew, instead of putting an “and,” they didn’t have an “and,” they put
a waw and it would be like this, tohu vavohu, the sound, you hear it in
your ear, and it appears in the Hebrew alphabet as this waw. Well, Hebrew has two
kinds of these waws; one is a
conjunctive, the other is disjunctive.
The conjunctive waw does what
a conjunction does, it connects, easy.
If you want to see conjunctive waws
just look at your Bible, if you have a King James particularly, verse 3, verse
4, verse 5, verse 6, verse 7, verse 8, verse 9, verse 10, verse 11, etc. etc.
etc. See how they all start: and, and,
and, and, and, and, and, and, sounds like a broken record. That’s the way Hebrew narrative is written. It’s really written just like a little child
speaks, the kid comes home and starts, this happened to me today and this
happened to me and then this happened and then this happened and then this
happened and, and, and, and. It’s the typical child’s way of speaking, and
that’s the Semitic way of narrative form, using conjunctive waws.
But, occasionally when they wanted to stop and get
their breath, or they wanted to put a parenthesis in to amplify something,
they’d put a disjunctive waw in. Now you can’t tell when you look at the waw but you can tell by the grammar and
so on it’s disjunctive. If you want an
example of a disjunctive waw turn to
Genesis 3:1 and you’ll see one there, and the translators caught it and they,
at least in the King James, did not translate it by “and.” See what they translated it by? “Now.”
Well that n-o-w is the same thing that’s translated a-n-d everywhere
else but it’s a disjunctive. So, “Now
the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had
made.” Now that is a parenthetic
expression and if you want to read it properly or visualize it in your mind, every
time you have one of these things you can put brackets around the
statement. It’s a parenthetical pause to
describe the state, or condition, or circumstance.
The problem with this second view, the
ruin/restoration, is that verse 2, by all means of Hebrew grammar, is a
circumstantial clause. It doesn’t
represent an advance in anything. This
is not exactly lethal because you can bend language to do anything you want to
do but it’s a pretty potent objection to this view, that the second verse must
be a circumstantial clause and therefore isn’t a sequential action. It shouldn’t be the verb “became without form
and void,” you just have to say “now the earth, it was without form and
void.” That’s the way you have to take
it as a circumstantial clause. So the
second view has a little problem with grammar.
The second problem with this view is that it doesn’t
do what it’s supposed to do, namely solve all our geological problems, sort of
a giant ashcan and we can take our bulldozer and scrape all our scientific
problems and drop them in the basket.
Here’s what happens if you do; if you say ah, I got an unlimited gap of
time between verse 1 and 2, no sweat, I can put all my millions and billions of
years in that convenient gap. Oh? If you do, then you’ve got the problem of the
fact of man existing before Adam, or a pre-Adamic race of which the Bible does
not speak.
You’ve got another problem far more fundamental and
that is that if all the geological strata were laid down before verse 2, what
then do you do with Genesis 6, 7 and 8 and the universal flood. It was this problem that led Morris and
Whitcomb, when they wrote their book to entitle the book, not The Genesis
Creation, but The Genesis Flood,
because they said surely we can control our interpretation of Genesis 6, 7 and
8, surely there we know that there was a universal flood. But if you have a universal flood, a
universal flood must leave effects. But
a universal flood can’t leave effects if all the effects, that is the rock
layers, were made before verse 2. So the
second problem of this ruin/restoration thing is it really doesn’t solve your
scientific problem that you thought it solved.
What is has done, unfortunately, is lull fundamentalists into a hundred
year sleep; Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years, fundies have slept a
hundred. And as a result we are now one
hundred years behind in our geology and biological research. Now the secular world is a century ahead of
us and very belatedly now we are trying to get our stuff together without any
NASA grants and National Foundation grants and so on, trying to get funds
together here and there to try to do our research. But we’re a hundred years behind because
people thought they had an answer to the scientific problem.
The third problem with this view is that it confuses a
symbol with the things symbolized. Yes,
darkness is a symbol of evil but it’s a symbol of evil, not evil; that’s the
point. In other words, something can be
evil and you’d symbolize it by darkness but because you’ve chosen darkness to
be your symbol doesn’t mean the darkness itself is evil. It has become a symbol and you’ve made a
linguistic mistake of confusing a symbol with the thing symbolized. Maybe another way to imagine this error would
be to imagine a little child playing with his tinker toys on the living room
rug; the kid empties the box out, splat, there it is, a thousand pieces all
over the place. All right, he’s got a tohu vavohu, a mess. But what does he do? He then puts together something with his
tinker toys, he builds some sort of a tower and so he’s putting order out of
chaos, picking up the little sticks, putting them together and so on, and he
gets this thing and then if he has a brother, like all good brothers, whack,
the kid comes in and knocks it apart and now he’s back to tohu vavohu. Now the second tohu vavohu is a result of judgment, but
the first one isn’t. So just seeing a
chaotic condition doesn’t itself prove it was caused by judgment. A chaotic position could be the start of a
process of creation, or it could be the end result of a process of
disintegration, it could be either one.
So just by itself chaos does not mean evil; it can just mean the
starting point of construction.
Those are the problems with the second view, the
second view being held for the last 200 years.
Now the third view, this is one that’s become very
popular in the last twenty years, popular among the intellectuals and the
Hebrew scholars. To show you how
powerful it is and how it’s affecting us already, all major translations now
except the real fundamentalist translations, have yielded to the third view of
Genesis 1:1-3 and Christians have been sleeping and haven’t even noticed
it. I’ll prove it to you in a moment but
first let’s see what the view says. This
view says verse 1 is a dependent clause to verse 3, so both verse 1 and verse 2
are lead ups to verse 3 so you’d read it this way: “In the beginning, when God created the
heavens and the earth, [2] The earth being without form, and void, [3] God
said, Let there be light.” In other
words, in this view there is a pre-creation chaos already existing prior to
creation. And the question it raises is
where did that come from? Creation,
where it doesn’t include the bringing into existence of this watery chaos, it
is a given, before the act of creation begins.
That’s why it’s called a pre-creation chaos view. All major liberal positions today hold this third
position. All major Bible translators
hold this third position, outside of the fundamentalist evangelical
school. And it’s held in modified form
by some fundamentalists, such as Dr. Waltke, formerly head of the Old Testament
department at Dallas Seminary.
To show you the all pervasive view of how this view
has crept up on the Christian community without being noticed, here’s a list of
three major translations, one Jewish, one Roman Catholic and one Protestant,
all within the last twenty years and every one of them are going with the third
position. JPS, the Jewish Publication
Society, Jewish version, 1962, says:
“When God began to create, the earth being without form and void, God
said, Let there be light.” So verse 1 no
longer describes a point act; it’s describing only a condition. In AB, the Roman Catholic modern translation
to replace the famous Catholic Douay Version, 1970: “In the beginning, when God
created, the earth being without form and void, God said, Let there be
light.” And finally, in the Protestant
area, NED, the New English Bible, translated in 1970, “In the beginning of
creation, when God made,” so you can see, all the modern translations are
shifting to the third position. The reason for this shift is partly linguistic
and partly based on comparative studies.
But it seems to me this third position has a lethal
objection. What it does is eliminate ex nihilo creation or creation out of
nothing. Now we no longer have our
sacred fundamental foundation stone of God creating everything; now all
creation is is a rehash of materials.
Now, taking the tinker toy illustration, God doesn’t make the tinker toy
set, He just puts it together. And so
the grandeur of God’s creation is simply assembling from prior chaos the
existing universe. But creation does not
include the act of making the tinker toy set itself, a very radically reduced
view of creation.
Those are the three views and those are the problems
of each. Now how do we solve the problem? Let’s go to our second topic for this
morning. We’ve got the problem outlined;
now how do we solve the problem. The
first thing you want to remember is that we’ve got to solve Genesis before we
can solve any parallel passage in the Bible.
There are other parallels of creation, Proverbs 8, a little bit in
Proverbs 3, Jeremiah 5, there’s Psalm 104, a little bit in Psalm 33. There are passages in the Bible depicting it,
there’s only one problem, all those passages are poetry and poetry is a lot
harder to interpret than prose. So here
at least we’ve got prose. Now I know
some of you have heard somebody mouth off some place that wants to kind of get
slippery and slimy with Genesis, that this text is just poetry, Genesis is just
a poetic view. Really? The serious men in the field don’t accept
that Genesis is poetry. Gerhard Von Rad, who hardly can be called a fighting
fundamentalist, he is a liberal German Old Testament scholar, said: (quote)
“Nowhere at all is the text figuratively poetic.” “Nowhere at all,” so the big men in the
field, whether they buy the content or not, are not saying Genesis is poetic;
that little thing comes from high school religious teachers or something.
The tools that we’ve got to use to solve our
interpretation problem go back to how the book is built together. Who wrote Genesis? Well, Genesis never tells us. Jesus, when He’s on the
Let’s look at the divisions of the book of
Genesis. There are divisions in this
book and they are called toledots,
and this is a word, feminine plural, which means generations. It comes from the Hebrew word yalad, which means to beget. You can see the “l” in the noun, you can see
the “d” in the noun, this is an ending, and the “y” is turned into an “o”
here. Now the toledots, translated generations, means that which is
begotten.
Now observe what you see in Genesis 2:4. “These are the toledot of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the
day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.”
Genesis 5:1, “This is the book of the generations” or
the toledot, “of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the
likeness of God made He him.”
Genesis 6:9, “These are the toledot” or “the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and
perfect in his generations.”
Genesis 10:1, “These are the toledots,” or “the generations of the sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and
Japheth.
Genesis 11:10, “These are the generations” or the toledot “of Shem: Shem was a hundred years
old and begat Arpachshad two years after the flood.”
Genesis
Genesis 25:12, “Now these are the toledot Ishmael, Abraham’s son, whom Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah’s
handmaid, bore unto Abraham.”
Genesis 25:19, “These are the generations of the toledot, of Yitzhak, Abraham’s son:
Abraham begot Yitzhak,” and so on.
Genesis 36:1, “Now these are the toledot” or “generations of Esau, who is
Genesis 36:9, “These are the generations of the toledot of Esau, the father of the
Edomites in
Genesis 37:2, “These are the generations” or the toledot “of Yakob,” or Jacob.
You see that there are sections, obviously, in the
book; sections so obvious that at least one New Testament author started his
book with the same title. Turn to
Matthew 1, now you can see where Matthew got his first verse from, where he got
his linguistic style from. Matthew 1:1, “This
is the book of the toledot,” or the
“generation of Jesus Christ….”
So you see, it’s a style, it’s a certain style that
introduces a section of material and it’s that style that we use to interpret
Genesis 1:1-3. Each toledot section introduces the following material and acts as a
title. The toledot tells what proceeded there from. The Gospel of Matthew, what preceded from
Jesus Christ? The whole movement called
Christianity and that’s why the Gospel of Matthew ends with what? [Matthew 28:18, “All power in heaven and earth
is given unto Me, [19] Go ye,” into all nations of the world, [20] “Teaching
them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded,” baptizing them in the
name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
The commission is that which proceeds from the Lord Jesus Christ. So the toledot
marker, then, is a marker of style.
Turn back to Genesis 1:1-3, read it once more and then
we’ll look at some slides looking at structures. We want to observe certain features in the
text. This is the structure of one of
the beginning of the toledot, the
first one in the Bible, Genesis 2:4-7.
You’ll see the elements, three elements in the structure. The first element is verse 4; verse 4 is an
introductory summary statement, “These are the stories about man,” this is a
loose translation of it, “in connection with the cosmos when it was
created.” Then in verses 5-6 we have a
circumstantial clause and then in verse 7 we have the main action, “And God
formed man.” We’ll read that in a moment
but for now there are three things you want to look for. There’s the introductory summary of the toledot; there is the circumstantial
clause anticipating the main action.
Three things, title, circumstance, action.
Genesis 3:1-3 shows this quality a little bit; it
presumes a summary statement in verse 4 and like the serpent, Genesis 3:1
“was,” there’s your circumstantial clause with the waw conjunctive, and then the main action, “and he said to Eve,”
and so on. And this is true of other
ancient near eastern writings at this time in history. For example, Enuma Elish, that thing I read
to you last week from
So what we’re going to suggest is that we’ve got
Genesis 1:1-3 the same thing. We’ve got
an introductory summary statement, verse 1. We’ve got a circumstantial clause,
verse 2, and we’ve got the main action in verse 3. However, we want to be sure we’re not saying
what that third position says, so let’s see what we can do with the text. Let’s look first at verse 2. In this view verse 2 is circumstantial, so we
don’t have to sweat the grammar of that second ruin/restoration view or the gap
theory, trying to ram a “became” into verse 2.
We just simply relax, back off, and label verse 2 as circumstantial, and
this conforms better with grammar, it conforms better with the rest of the
book. Verse 1 is followed by a
circumstantial clause.
Turn to Genesis 3:1 and watch how it turns there. This is just a case in the text but let me
show you another one besides this. “Now
the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field,” that introduces the
narrative with a circumstantial clause; then the action begins, “and he said
unto the woman.
Turn to Genesis 5:1, here is an actual toledot, here’s a section that Moses
used, and we read: “This is the book of the generation of Adam.” Okay, there’s your first element, the
title. Now your circumstantial clause,
strictly speaking it isn’t in the grammar but it’s serves function of the same
thing, “In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made He him;
[2] Male and female created He them; and blessed them, and called their name
Adam, in the day when they were created.”
That’s a circumstance introducing verse 3, “And Adam lived an hundred
and thirty years, and begot a son in his own likeness,” the main action is in verse
3 and verse 2 forms a sort of bridge to get you ready for what’s going to
happen in verse 3; verse 1, the first part of verse 1, being a title to the
whole thing.
Turn to Genesis 6:9; you see the same pattern
there. You have, verse 9, “These are the
generations of Noah,” there’s your title.
What’s the next thing, circumstantial, “Noah was a just man, perfect in
his generations, and he walked with God.”
Now the action, he “begot three sons,” so you’ve got the title, you’ve
got the circumstance, you’ve got the action.
Let’s go back to Genesis 1 and see how we put it
together. In Genesis 1:1 we take this to
be a title of everything, including the making of the chaos, plus the six days
work. So we take 1:1 as a title. We answer the difficulty of the classic
creation position; remember one of the difficulties was that the word pair,
“heaven and earth,” isn’t usually used for disorder, it’s used for order. We’ve solved the problem here, because if we
make “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” we make that to
include everything, then we aren’t faced with the problem, because “the heavens
and the earth” when they’re finished at the end of this, this, this, this, this
and this, so acting as a title we avoid the classic criticism of the classic
creation position. Then we take verse 2
to be circumstantial to verse 3, that is, verse 2 sets us up in the way that
the other toledot do for the first
action which occurs in verse 3.
Now we don’t suffer from the problem of the third
position, which was the watery chaos uncreated that existed prior to creation
because we’ve said that verse 1 includes creatio
ex nihilo of verse 2, that is, that using the tinker toy thing, verse 1
includes the making of the tinker toy parts as well as putting the tinker toy
parts together in a model. So it’s all
encompassing. Our justification for
doing that is found in several places.
Again, flip back to Genesis 5:1; in 5:1, after the title, “This is the
book of the generations of Adam,” we find snuggled very close to verse 1 and
the generations of Adam what? The
creation of Adam. So the title, when it
says these are “the toledot of Adam,”
include not just what Adam gave as progeny, verse 3, but it includes the
generation of Adam who gave the progeny.
So what we’re saying is that Genesis 1:1 is an all
encompassing title; that is, it includes the creation out of nothing of the
watery chaos and subsequent use of that chaos in construction. What we have done here this morning is
basically this. We have taken the
theology of that first position and married it to the language and the
linguistic work that’s been done in the third position. The third position is on sounder linguistic
grounds than the first or the second position.
So we use the linguistic structure but we preserve the theology of the
first position. So this is how we handle
Genesis 1:1-3. That’s our solution then:
“God created the heavens and the earth.”
First, they were in a watery state, right after He created them, then He
spoke into that mess, “Let there be light.”
We’ve done two things, so far this morning; we’ve
covered the problem, the three views of Genesis 1:1-3, we’ve threaded our way
between these and picked up a position of solution and now we come to the third
part, so what? What does this teach as
far as being a Christian is concerned?
What difference does it make? We’ll see it makes quite a bit of
difference.
Turn to Jeremiah 4:23.
In Jeremiah 4:23 we’ve got one of the references in the Bible to tohu vavohu, that is to “without form
and void,” and this is the passage, if you have a Scofield Bible you ought to
see a note somewhere along here because they use this passage to prove that
every place in the Bible where you have a smashed tinker toy it means somebody
smashed it, whereas we said the disordered state doesn’t have to be a smashing
of the tinker toy, it could be a tinker toy before anybody puts it
together. The classic passage to use to
show the water chaos and the tohu vavohu
always is evil is this one. Jeremiah 4:23-26. Let’s look at it.
As we read this you follow in your text as I read
mine, and I want you to do something as you read it. I want you to remember the elements you know
happened in Genesis 1, you know “God said, Let there be light,” there was water,
there was mountains, there was man, now look for those elements as we read
these verses; just mentally look for them.
“I beheld the earth and, lo, it was without form and void; and the
heavens, they had no light. [24] I
beheld the mountains and, lo, they trembled, and all the hills moved
lightly. [25] I beheld and, lo, there
was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled. [26] I beheld and, lo, the fruitful place was
a wilderness, and all its cities were broken down at the presence of the LORD,
and by His fierce anger.”
What you’ve got in verses 23-26 is a reverse of
creation back to the primordial chaos.
What we have, if we diagramed it, would be this. We start out with our elements of chaos and
we build a finished creation on top of that.
The act of creation takes us from the beginning of chaos to the finished
product. But now, what does verse 27 say
in this passage? This is the old story,
if you just look at the context it often solves your problem. “For thus saith the LORD, The whole land
shall be desolate, yet will I not make a full end,” full… full…full end. In other words, we’ve got a dismantling
through evil back to chaos, but evil can’t obliterate the existence of the
chaos.
Let’s look at this again. Here’s creation; creation includes making the
chaos, that is, making the pieces of the tinker toy set, and putting the pieces
together. But evil can only destroy the putting the pieces together but it
can’t destroy the pieces. So evil is not
as powerful as creation; creation is more powerful, it includes bringing chaos
into existence and further developing it, whereas evil only acts to dismantle
what is ordered, but it can’t deny existence. Evil never destroyed existence;
it only destroyed the order of existence.
So here, “I shall not make a full end,” it’s not a complete destruction,
it’s simply the little kid walking into his brother’s tinker toy and reducing
it back to a place where it was when he started building something. But the brother that went in and wrecked the
tinker toy set didn’t destroy the tinker toy pieces, he just dismantled
them.
So what we have in Genesis 1:1-3, one of the things
that we’re getting to here is it limits the power of evil; evil is not its
equal and opposite to creation. Philosophically this is extremely important
because in the Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas and others built a system of
philosophy on the idea that creation and evil are equal and opposite and that’s
not true. Evil is opposite but it’s not equal in its power and its persuasiveness
to the act of creation.
What does this say? What does this say about why
watery chaos is in Genesis? Fortuity
watery chaos does connote in the Bible evil. We get a hint, if we look at some passages
where watery chaos occurs. The primary
idea of watery chaos is that water assumes the shape of the object in which it
is carried. We see this in Genesis 49:4
where Levi is said to be as unstable as water.
Water is shapeless, and large bodies of water can be acted upon by wind
forces and out of the wind forces come waves.
Water is shaped by forces. Now
watch how that sea of passivity shows up in the way the Bible writers use water
every where else.
We’ll start by turning to Isaiah 17:12-13, we’re just
simply studying how watery chaos is used, and we learn from its usage what
writers mean by it. “Woe to the
multitude of many people, who make noise like the noise of the seas; and to the
rushing of nations, that make a rushing like the rushing of mighty waters! [13] The nations shall rush like the rushing
of many waters; but God shall rebuke them….”
Turn to Isaiah 57:20, “But the wicked are like the
troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up constantly mire and
dirt. [21] There is no peace, saith my
God, to the wicked,” the turbulence, the unending, uneasy, unstable, turbulence
of water.
Turn to Daniel 7:2, again the figure of a watery
chaos. “Daniel spoke and said, I saw in
my vision by night, and, behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the
great watery chaos,” or “the great sea.
[3] And four great beasts came up from the sea,” now there he’s
obviously, like Isaiah, talking about people, it’s the sea of humanity. Isaiah uses that. Jacob, in Genesis 49 uses it.
Turn to the New Testament and watch how it keeps on
going. Ephesians 4:14, same imagery,
same feature of general revelation used time and time and time again for the
same thing, so you ought to be able to learn something from the way this
imagery is employed. “That we henceforth
be… this is why the Word of God has to be taught to Christians, “That we
henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every
wind of doctrine,” now what’s that a picture of but a boat tossed on the watery
chaos of the sea, “tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine….” Look!
Read that! What’s causing
this? Spiritual forces acting on
people. Ah!
Turn to Jude, verses 12-13, this is a description of
people, in particular, apostate people.
“These are spots in your feasts,” says Jude, “when they feast with you,
feeding themselves without fear; clouds they are without water, carried about
by winds; trees whose fruit withered, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by
the roots. [13] Raging waves of the sea,
foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness
of darkness forever.”
Now, why does the watery chaos, why is this used
forever? What does this model tell us
about ourselves? It’s a picture of us,
mankind. The watery chaos becomes a
picture of mankind. Mankind starts in a
chaotic state, meaning that he has no shape, just like the water in the
glass. Man in innocence really has no
shape, it depends whether he’s going to harden himself in the direction of
righteousness, or he hardens himself in the direction of evil. But he’s got to make a choice, and it depends
which wind blows, the Holy Spirit or the evil spirit. Men are born in one of two directions. Now the reason that in the eternal state this
is not so is because the watery chaos of Genesis 1:2 serves as a self-destruct system.
When God wanted to ruin the antediluvian world, what did He release? What forces did God release to cause the
Noahic flood? The forces of the watery
chaos. In other words, the watery chaos
is a built-in self-destruct system; it is built into what we call mortal
history, or corruptible history, or sometimes theologians call it probationary
history. We don’t live in the eternal
state.
Genesis 1 isn’t describing the final creation, where
everything is fixed and there’s no chance of another fall again. Genesis 1 describes the first creation or the
former creation and that creation is built with a built-in choice to go either
way. And so God leaves the chaos there
as a threat—people, you come to Me for stability in My Word, or you’ll be
tossed to and fro or I’ll release the forces of chaos against you like I did in
Jeremiah’s day and I’ll dismantle the … I’ll smash the tinker toy set, you can
play with the pieces if you want to. Using
again the tinker toy illustration the eternal state would be a tinker toy model
that never comes apart, no matter how hard you hit it, and therefore there is
no chaotic element in it. It doesn’t
self-destruct forever. The resurrection
body is forever; the human body is not.
This is why at funerals you will often hear the minister read these
words from 1 Corinthians 15, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the
You see, the physical creation around us mirrors us
spiritually. This is something I hope to
cultivate in the Genesis series through the use of various techniques. I want you to grow eyes, as believers, to
look around you and appreciate the structure in the general revelation of
creation about you so you can look at the book of nature and see, hey, that
fits the book of the Scripture. Out
there are elements that correspond to my spiritual state today. Some boys in our congregation that have
spent a lot of time taking slides and studying the parallels between watery
chaos and masses of humanity and they’re going to put together a slide show
paralleling people and water, and you’ll see how very remarkable they are.
This is why Daniel, when he starts to preach about the
future he uses symbols. The symbols are
not arbitrarily chosen. This is what the
trouble is, people go into the Bible and say oh, it’s symbols. Sure there’s symbols there but they are not
arbitrary symbols, they are chosen because God, who made the symbols, made the
creation. And He made the creation
knowing that He’d have to pick a lamb to stand for Christ, and so the real
literal lamb has a certain image; lambs also stand for believers so God made
them stupid and so God made these things in the general creation to correspond
to the teaching purposes. Learn to read
the book of nature and you will worship your God in a lot more majestic and
magnificent way.
The watery chaos features then, of the universe in
Genesis 1:2, not in evil in themselves, they represent the potential of
self-destruction. It’s there, the sea
and the waves crash. Some of you have
never watched a storm on the edge of a coast and watched the waves, after about
48 hours of winds of over gale force, throw waves of a hundred feet or so up
against the shore; you’ve never had your feet on rocks that have been hit by
tons of water and you can feel it just shake like this, solid rock, sometimes
three and four thousand feet thick, can be shaken by impinging waves and water
under foaming seas. You have no idea of
power until you’ve had your feet moved while they’ve been standing on solid
earth by a wave smashing against that piece of ground. You have that experience and you’ll have no
problem whatsoever understanding what the Word of God is communicating when it
says, the creation threatens you, the creation can only be ruled by the Word of
God.
If our choice is not the Holy Spirit to blow upon us
with His Word and give His Word inside of us, we’ll be like this, and finally
then God takes His evil forces and turns us into self-destruction
mechanisms. Mankind can obliterate the
creation. In Adam the fall of man
resulted in the fall of the whole nature with him. Man is given a choice and there’s a threat
that hangs over us, the watery chaos, the sea; it’s a natural picture of
self-destruction systems. Where is our
stability? Our stability comes from the
Word of God. So we’re going to conclude
by turning to hymn number…..