Dublin, Texas. All right, well we are glad to have you with us
as we kick off our study here again today.
And I mislabeled where we ended last time.
So we’re not kicking off in verse eight.
We’ve already done verse eight.
We kick off here today with verse 14 Right, so yesterday we did go through
those first three days,
which are sometimes called the forming days.
That’s the day in which the structures of creation are made.
Though we have plants,
but they really in kind of keeping with,
in kind of keeping with the biology of the time,
plants are probably not considered living things
the way that we would categorize them scientifically.
So because they don’t move,
that they’re not alive in the classic sense
that you would understand them in the ancient world.
Plants and trees are part of the structure of creation.
Then we move on to these next three days,
which are the filling days.
We’re filling up what has been created.
And so we begin on day four here.
And God said,
“Let there be lights in the dome of the sky
to separate day from night
and let them be for signs and seasons
and for days and years
and let them be lights in the dome of the sky
to give light upon the earth.”
And it was so,
God made two great lights,
the greater to rule the day
and the lesser to rule the night
and the stars.
God set them in the dome of the sky
to give light upon the earth
to rule over the day and over the night
and to separate the light from the darkness.
And God saw that it was good
and there was evening and there was morning,
the fourth day.
So one interesting thing right away here is that
rather than using the titles, Sun and Moon,
which were known to the Hebrews,
this passage uses greater and lesser.
And the leading theory on why that is
is because in the Hebrew and in the world of that time,
the proper names for Sun and Moon
were also the proper names
for local non-Israelite deities.
So there were gods and goddesses called Sun and Moon,
Ra,
the Sun God, et cetera.
So rather than risk any confusion
with the idea that there are other gods,
the Hebrew narrative, which is deeply committed to the idea of one God,
simplifies and says there’s a great light
and a lesser light.
Now, it’s clearly Sun and Moon,
but for that reason,
they don’t use those labels. Yeah, and so God makes these lights
and it’s for a specific purpose
so that there’s light on the earth.
I wanna point out this language
that we have here right in verse 18.
We have,
it’s for the purpose of governing
the day and the night to separate light from darkness.
And once again,
we come back to that core theme here
where God makes the creation so that it is ordered.
In fact, this word of governing it,
it’s a very hierarchical understanding of how things work.
And this is actually a little less so,
push back on me if you disagree with this,
Clint.
I think one could read the history of theology
of the church as mirroring
this kind of hierarchical theology.
If you read ancient theology like Aquinas, for example,
his work is very,
very structured and hierarchical.
There’s this idea of the thing that governs the thing
that governs the thing.
And there’s a very clean sort of structured order
that goes the whole way through.
This idea that creation was made such that each piece
fits into the order so that there is structure
and that there’s separation between one thing and the other
is very clearly knit and built into this
because that’s the distinguishing feature
of the Judaism of its day from the surrounding religions
is that ultimately creation doesn’t happen by chaos.
It doesn’t happen by disorder.
It doesn’t happen by two deities fighting it out
or humans needing to convince the deities
to bring order from their natural disorder.
No,
from the beginning,
these things were intended
to serve a particular function
and that function serves in a hierarchical purpose
all the way down the line.
It is a very specific understanding of the way
that God interfaces with the world and it was unique.
It was different in the context in which it was written.
And so we might miss that for our own time and place
but this is truly saying something about God
that might’ve been missed otherwise. Right, and so again here we have on this fourth day,
this first day of filling that the space,
the void is now filled.
There are lights.
We,
yes, we know that the moon is not actually a light
but in the practical sense,
that’s what it does,
right?
If you’ve looked at the moon recently,
you’ve seen there’s not much of it.
If you look in the near future
or if you looked nearly a month ago,
there are nights that you could almost drive
without your headlights on.
The moon provides light.
It’s not,
whether you wanna talk about it scientifically being a light,
it looks,
it lights up the sky.
And so that’s
the role that the people gave it.
That’s what they cast it as,
as that lesser light
and it is the one that rules over the night.
And what does it do?
It separates, it provides light in the darkness.
What does God do in the human spirit?
We would say the same thing.
And so there’s an evening and a morning, the fourth day,
and God saw that it was good.
Then we move to the fifth day.
God said, let the waters bring forth
swarms of living creatures.
Let the birds fly above the earth
across the dome of the sky.
So God created the great sea monsters
and every living creature that moves of every kind
with which the water swarm
and every winged bird of every kind.
And God saw that it was good.
God blessed them saying,
be fruitful and multiply
and fill the waters in the sea
and let the birds multiply upon the earth.
And there was evening and there was morning,
the fifth day.
Now here we have,
I mean, the obvious piece of creation here
that were the water animals,
the air animals, right?
We’re not yet to land.
Notice that each of these days parallels days one through three,
day one separated light and dark.
Day four, we get the lights in the sky.
Day two, we have water and sky.
Day five,
we have birds and fish.
Now this is though the first time that God says something
in addition to let there be,
God blessed them.
Notice that this is not,
we sometimes read this as a command
but it is a blessing.
Multiply,
be fruitful and fill the space,
fill the sea,
fill the sky,
fill the earth,
multiply.
That there is inherent in creation the promise of growth,
the promise of proliferation,
that they are here
and they are blessed with the opportunity to multiply.
And this is new because this is the first real encounter
we have with living things. I wanted to tease that out as well,
Clint, because I think it actually has implications
for our understanding as Judeo-Christian people
that the creation from its beginning had good in mind,
that it was on its way to prospering,
of fulfilling and filling the earth.
There’s a kind of inherent optimism in this creative story.
This idea that God not only says that it will happen
but it is, as you say, it’s a command, it’s a mandate.
It’s a reality that God intended this from the start.
And we live in a world in which there’s a lot of skepticism,
a lot of skepticism of the disorder
that sort of lays on the side,
the feeling that things aren’t getting better
but they’re getting worse.
That’s not to say that the creation account
doesn’t sort of keep in mind
that there are these things that need governed.
But there’s a sense that God by God’s providential hand
has made things so that they naturally will fill the space
in which God made for them to fill,
that God’s providential care,
his sovereign overseeing of creation is such
that it’s possible for growth and for nurturing,
for fulfilling to happen.
And that’s a really good thing.
That’s a thing that should give us a positive frame
as we look ahead because ultimately God is faithful
to God’s created purpose.
He’s been faithful to it the whole time.
And we see that embedded right here in the creation text. Yeah, absolutely.
And again,
I think it’s important that we read this carefully.
God blessed them.
This is not a burden.
At this point, really not even,
it is instructional,
but it’s not a command.
It’s not legal language.
It’s not compulsion.
It’s invitation.
God blessed them saying,
be fruitful and multiply.
The growth of creation is a blessing that God confers.
And just as God speaks physical things into existence,
God speaks the promise of this growth into existence
as he calls the created order to do that.
And then we move to the final day.
And God said, let the earth bring forth living creatures
of every kind, cattle, creeping things, wild animals on the earth of every kind.
And it was so.
God made the wild animals of earth of every kind
and the cattle of every kind and everything that creeps
on the ground of every kind.
And God saw that it was good.
So let’s stop there for a minute.
Here we have the taxonomy or the differences
and the classifications that the Hebrews use
would be very different than ours.
They have essentially the walking animals
and the crawling animals.
And that’s really as complicated as they feel
the need to be.
And God calls them.
Essentially, cattle here is probably a word
that includes all domestic or domesticated animals.
So you’ve got basically wild animals,
domestic animals, and then the animals of the earth, the snakes, bugs,
et cetera.
And it was so that now God has filled the land.
God filled the sea and the sky.
Now God fills the land.
And here we see that it is good.
This is a sort of split.
There are two actions on this day.
The first time we’ve seen this and God saw that it was good.
And that’s before we move then to the next act. Sorry, it’s my turn to talk. Yeah, so we do.
And this is,
I wanted to pause here, Clint,
because we’ve had these hints before
and I don’t remember how much we’ve emphasized this
in our previous conversations this week.
So I wanna make sure that this comes out.
You notice how every one of these days before this day
has had this rhythm at the end of it was evening
and it was morning, right?
The exact language,
there was,
this is verse 23.
“There was evening and there was morning,
the fifth day.” That’s the fifth day.
So the frame of this is carefully chosen,
intentionally connecting to the lived experience of the people.
Creation not only happens in seven days,
but it has implications for the kind of life
that we are supposed to live.
That lesson’s embedded in the end of this.
The point that I’m making right now,
as it relates to this division between the general creation,
these animals that are either crawling on the ground
or the animals that slither,
all of these things,
and then this distinction of humankind,
which is made in God’s likeness,
these two things have a built-in separation because ultimately,
as we go through the days,
we get closer and closer and closer
to God making the beings closest in the image of God,
who now are supposed to live in the very rhythm of creation
that God has set out from the very beginning.
So the fact that this day is divided
is already supposed to tip the hat to us.
We’re supposed to sort of read between the lines already and understand, no,
there’s a kind of hierarchy
in how this creation is being portrayed
because ultimately, this is going to have implication
for how those people are called to live.
This is in some ways liturgical,
if you know what I mean by that.
It’s intended to have an impact in the life of the people
and we’re seeing it lived out from this telling
of the way that things were from the very beginning. Yeah, and so I don’t want to anticipate,
tomorrow we’ll cover the rest of this chapter
and we’ll unpack the best we can,
the final act of creation.
But I do want to say that as you read verse 25,
it is worth noting that the world
that human beings come into is pronounced by God to be good.
The creation is finished with the exception of the last act
and God has proclaimed all of it good.
And therefore being good,
it is ready to receive
God’s crowning creation as the story tells it,
the man and the woman.
And so it is important that we understand that in the story
that God is going to place people within the context
of a world that God has judged good
and has judged ready for them to occupy. Yeah, and the good there isn’t just qualitatively good.
It’s good in God’s intention that God made the world
so that it’s possible for the world to do as God desires.
There’s a kind of,
all of this talk of ordering
and patterning and then this idea of governing,
all of this sort of leads into this idea.
It’s not just good for the sake of the way that God made it and it was,
it’s that God made the system and order of it
in such a way that it will lend itself towards good.
Of course, that is the great pivot that happens
in a couple chapters when the order that God makes
is by this chief creation disordered,
that’s what makes it so scandalous
is that God from the very start architects it in such a way
that it was intended to lead forward in a positive way
and it’s only until that’s disrupted that that’s changed. Yeah, and some of you have seen this before,
but this is these two pages.
This is the world as God intended it
and this is the world as it ends up.
But it is important that we start
with the placing of people in the world that God designed,
in the world that God intended,
in the world as God wanted it.
And though it doesn’t last long,
it is essential that we understand it begins there. Well, friends, we’re glad that you would join us here today
for this section of the Bible study.
I think there’s actually gonna be some really interesting
conversation that comes tomorrow.
There’s some key words and actually there’s quite a bit
of scholarly conversation that happens in the section
that we’re gonna cover tomorrow.
So hopefully you get a chance to either join us live
or in the followup,
but until then, we hope you’re doing well
and we will talk to you tomorrow. Thanks, all.