Straight to the Heart of Genesis

60 bite-sized insights

Phil Moore

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780857210012
• eBook ISBN: 9780857213785
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain a child always," claimed the Roman orator Cicero. Perhaps that's why Genesis is one of the most loved and hated books ever written.

Genesis - the name is simply the Greek word for "Origins" - is the God-inspired history of the world from its inception, and right from the outset it was always controversial.
God inspired the Bible for a reason. He wants you read it and let it change your life.

If you are willing to take this challenge seriously, then you will love Phil Moore's devotional commentaries. Their bite-sized chapters are punchy and relevant, yet crammed with fascinating scholarship.

Welcome to a new way of reading the Bible. Welcome to the Straight to the Heart series.

Part One:

Primeval History

(Creation to c.2100 BC)

Creator God (1:1–31)

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

(Genesis 1:2–3)

Every culture has its own creation story. The Hebrews had heard a lot of them. The Mesopotamians told them that their god Marduk killed the ocean-goddess Tiamat and created the universe from her severed remains.¹ The Egyptians told them that their god Atum created the world from a mixture of his own spit, snot and semen. These stories may sound strange and far-fetched to us, but ancient Middle Easterners believed them without question. No Egyptian ever dared to challenge his culture’s great creation story – except for the one who came down from Mount Sinai. Moses, the Hebrew baby who had been plucked from the River Nile and brought up as an Egyptian in Pharaoh’s royal family, begins the book of Genesis with a very different story.

The world was not created by Atum or Marduk, but by a different kind of God whose name is Elohim. This was not just another name for the sun-god of Egypt or the moon-god of Mesopotamia; that’s why Moses deliberately avoids using the words sun and moon altogether in this chapter.²

He is a self-sufficient, independent God, who hints that he is three-in-one and that he is creating the universe out of love, not out of loneliness.³ He uses a plural name, which can be translated gods as well as God, but takes singular verbs to make it clear which word translators should choose. He is One God, yet creates by his Word⁴ and through his Spirit, and he hints at the Trinity when he says “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.”⁵ The word “God” occurs over thirty times in this short chapter to make it clear that the creation stories of the ancient world were mistaken. The universe began with the only true and living God.

Our culture has its own creation story which is believed with the same committed dogma as the stories of the ancient world. In our classrooms and on our television screens, Charles Darwin’s tale of evolution and natural selection is not just taught as theory but as fact. The heroes of our story are not Marduk or Atum, but chance and time, yet Moses insists that it all began with God. In fact, Professor Stephen Hawking, one of my former neighbours at Cambridge, argues that science actually points in the same direction: “The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications… It would be very difficult to explain why the universe would have begun in just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”⁶ Good science is the friend and not the foe of good theology.

Moses does not attack science itself. He endorses the goals of science when he tells us in 15:5 that God encouraged Abraham to discover his character by examining his universe in more detail.⁷ What he would attack is science hijacked by secular humanism, which fixes and twists the evidence to pursue its own agenda. As the Harvard evolutionist Richard Lewontin admits:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs… in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.⁸

It is this blinkered fundamentalism which Moses says must die. The “Divine Foot” is well and truly in the door, because the universe began with God.

A wide spectrum of views is held by Christians today on how to interpret Moses’ words in this first chapter. My purpose is not to champion any party, but simply to make sure that you respond to Moses’ challenge as fully as you should. Our thinking can become as enslaved to our own culture as the Hebrews were to Egypt’s, so we need to take seriously what Moses wrote after eighty days with God on Mount Sinai.

He tells us that God needed no raw materials for his work of creation. God’s Word is so powerful that Moses simply repeats that “God said” and “it was so.” We even discover in verses 5 and 14 that he created time itself, and proceeded to create the whole world in just six days.⁹ He made the first human beings, not from animals, but from dust and the breath of his mouth, and Moses tells us this in Hebrew prose rather than poetry to encourage us to take his words literally. Jesus believed him when he taught on marriage from 1:27 and 2:24, that “at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’”.¹⁰ Paul also believed him when he quoted from 1:3, 2:7 and 2:24 as literal reasons for us to obey God’s Word today.¹¹ All this should make us feel very uneasy about our own culture’s cherished creation story. It sheds light into those places which Richard Lewontin would prefer to keep hidden.

How the world came about made all the difference to the group of Hebrew refugees who huddled together at Mount Sinai. If the world had truly begun with their God, then their lives had a purpose and they needed to follow him. They believed what Moses told them because they had just seen this God take on and defeat the so-called mighty gods of Egypt, but we have even more reason than them to believe that what Moses writes here is true. If this world merely evolved through chance and time, our lives are random and have no eternal purpose, but the fact that Jesus endorsed the words of this chapter and proved that he was right through his resurrection changes everything.¹²

The New Testament reminds us of this when it tells us that “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command.”¹³ It accepts that every culture has its own creation story, but insists that God revealed the real one to Moses. It urges us to grasp where the universe is heading by believing this account of how the universe was started. It began with God, it is sustained by God and ultimately it will end with God too. Our culture’s creation story must submit with all the others to the overarching fact that it all begins with God.

Cat’s Eyes (1:26–31)

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

(Genesis 1:27)

Percy Shaw knew the Bradford-to-Halifax road, but he needed some help one night in 1933. The Yorkshire fog had descended thick and fast, and the winding road had ravines on either side. He strained his eyes to see through the fog, and suddenly two bright lights made him slam on his brakes in alarm. He had been about to drive unwittingly off a cliff-edge and had only been saved because his headlights reflected in the eyes of a cat that was sitting on the barrier. The following year he filed a patent for his new invention: tiny cat’s eye reflectors which would be placed on roads all around the world to mark out the right path any motorist should take. Percy Shaw’s idea was simple and it made him a fortune, but God had already had the same idea at the dawn of time.

The whole universe proclaims the glory of God in general, but he wanted to mark out the path to his door more specifically. In order to demonstrate what his character is like, he therefore made the human race as the pinnacle of his creation. Adam and Eve were his first pair of reflectors, and he urged them to go ahead and multiply to fill the earth. God referred later to the human race as those whom “I created for my glory”,¹ because they were to be a set of divine cat’s eyes who reflected his identity for the whole world to see.

He made them to reflect him as the three-in-one God, who hints at the Trinity throughout this chapter. The universe was “very good” and yet at the same time “not good” in 2:18 until the man was complemented by the woman. “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness,” God said to himself as he “created man in his own image… male and female he created them”. Then he gave Adam and Eve the gift of marriage and sex so that they could “become one flesh” and reflect the Trinity more perfectly.

Unless you are very bad at maths, you will have noticed a slight problem there. God is Three-in-One, but he created humankind to be two-joined-into-one. That’s why God continues his instruction and tells them in verse 28 to “Be fruitful and increase in number.” God’s human cat’s eyes would reflect his glory in even deeper ways than a husband and wife echoing the love within the Trinity or the sacred union between Christ and the Church.² They would also reflect God the Father through their parenting, and God the Son through their obedience. These cat’s eyes would be laid out in ordered family units as God’s definitive flesh-and-blood answer to the question “What is the Creator God truly like?”

God also made them to reflect his role as Ruler of the earth. Right from the outset, he gave them delegated authority in verse 28 to “Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” He designed his cat’s eyes in 2:5 and 2:15 to “work the ground” and take care of the Garden of Eden. When they made and built and named and organized, they acted as little reflectors of the Creator God whose image they bore.

If you walk down any stretch of highway, soo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Straight to the Heart Series
• Introduction: It All Begins with God
• PART ONE: PRIMEVAL HISTORY
• PART TWO: PATRIARCHAL HISTORY
• Conclusion: It All Begins with God
• Other Books in the Straight to the Heart Series