Gooding, David: 1 - Genesis

Good evening, and first of all, allow me to thank you, please, most sincerely for the warmth of your welcome. Thank you too for your invitation to this part of the world, for the stimulus and encouragement it is to my own faith to see how vigorous and prosperous is the work that God is doing through you and in you in this part of his vineyard. I trust in the short days I shall be with you to get to know as many of you as possible. Thank you once more for all the encouragement your Christian testimony is to me. Now, you have heard in the first session of each evening, we shall be dealing with some kind of survey, not of the whole of the Old Testament, but of some of the major books of the Old Testament. From the Law, the first division of the Old Testament, we shall be dealing with Genesis and Leviticus. From the second section of the Old Testament, that is the former and the later prophets, we shall be dealing with First Kings, Second Kings, and Ezekiel. And from the third division of the Old Testament, the writings, we shall be dealing with Zechariah the Prophet. Uh, sorry, but from the, I should have mentioned Zechariah the Prophet among the prophets, of course. We shall be dealing with Zechariah the Prophet among the writings. Finally, from the third section of the Old Testament, the Writings, we shall be dealing with the First Book of Chronicles. Genesis, then Leviticus, First and Second Kings, Ezekiel and Zechariah, and finally the First Book of Chronicles. Again, I shall not be attempting to survey in detail the whole of any one of these books. What I shall do is to select one or possibly two of their major themes, and aim not at an, at an exhaustive exposition, but rather to stimulate and guide your further studies in these books of God's holy word. And so tonight we come to Genesis, for where else would a study of the Old Testament start? And let us prime our thinking by reading from the first book, the first chapter, and the first few verses. Genesis 1, verse 1. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness, and God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening, and there was morning, one day. Genesis is a very large book. It consists, in our English translations, of fifty chapters, and you will find that those fifty chapters divide themselves into two halves. The first half of the book tells us of the story of the creation of the world and of man in this world, and takes that story through the fall until the destruction of man under God's judgment at the flood. That is the first half of the book of Genesis. The second half of the bun- book of Genesis begins with man after the flood. God's great program of reconstruction and redevelopment. Now, when we look at the first half of the book of Genesis, we find it is devoted to three stories of creation. Please notice I say three stories. Many popular handbooks tell us that there are two stories of creation in the book of Genesis, and some handbooks dare to tell us that those two stories contradict each other. Neither statement is true. There are not two stories of creation in the book of Genesis, there are three, and those three stories do not contradict each other, but they complement each other. Just as we find in the New Testament, there are four gospels, not one life of Christ, but four lives of Christ that tell us of the person of our Lord Jesus and his work from four different and complementary angles. So in the first half of the book of Genesis, there are three stories of creation that tell us of creation from three distinctly different points of view, and therefore complement each other and give us a rounded picture of the creation of the world and man's part in that created world. Let us give ourselves then for some moments to isolating and studying the themes of these three creation stories that make up the first half of the book of Genesis. And the first creation story is found in chapter one, verse one, unto chapter two, verse 3. It tells us that creation was not made all at once, which we might have supposed had we not divinely inspired record in front of us. It tells us that creation was made in stages, stages that became ever more complex and complicated. Stages of creative acts that led at last to a climax and to a crowning point with the creation of man in God's image to have dominion over God's good handiwork. Therein, the first creation story preaches us a gospel message. Man is the climax and crown of God's creation, and man was designed of God not to be some slave of mindless, material, colossal, elemental forces, certainly not to be the prisoner of chance. Man was made in God's image to have dominion over the works of God's hand, to rule, to administer, to organize, to develop God's world for God. It puts its fist into those dark perversions of the truth that would tell us that man is a slave to elemental spirit forces in the universe, on the one hand, which, if I may call it, is the error of the East. It puts its fist likewise into the error of the Western world that tells us man is ultimately a slave to the blind, materialistic, mindless forces of matter. It preaches us the gospel of creation and man's part therein, man made to have dominion as viceroy of God, to control, to rule, to organize, and to make something of earth for God. The first creation story also tells us not merely of a series of creative acts that led to the climax of man and man's dominion. It tells us of a series of organizational arrangements. It sketches in for us the organization of our world by God, and gives us more than a hint at some of the principles of organization that lie behind the arrangements of our world. These organizational arrangements also preach their lesson. They tell us on what terms man is to be viceroy in God's universe, on what terms he holds his dominion. And those terms are simply this: man holds dominion so long as man himself is utterly dependent upon God. Let me therefore call your attention to some of these organizational details. In the story of day one, we read, first of all, a creative act. God said, let there be light, and there was light. Secondly, an organizational arrangement, the arrangement of the lighting system of our universe and our world. I don't know whether you have pondered recently the lighting system of our planet Earth. It is a thing we've grown so used to that I suspect we take it for granted, and sometimes maybe we fail to observe how deliberate and how meaningful is the organization of our lighting system? I am not merely talking now of the how of the organization, but of the why of the organization. Let me just step aside to try and illustrate to you the difference. I was walking along the road in my own university in Cambridge at one stage, and on my left I had a psychologist and on my right a mathematician. And they two were arguing about the difference between the question how and the question why. And the psychologist, I think, had it in his head that the mathematician hadn't quite understood the difference. So the psychologist said to the mathematician, you see those beautiful yellow electric lights that light up the road here, said the mathematician, I see them. Said he, pray tell us, why are those lights yellow? And the mathematician replied with very long words about sodium this and electrical that, and all sorts of chemical formulas and what have you, and learned it was. And when he had finished, the psychologist said, I'm sorry, you're wrong. That is how they are yellow. That's not why they are yellow. Why they are yellow is because the city fathers have decided that yellow lights are the best form of light to write this, light this particular stretch of road. Now I bid you inquire why God has arranged the lighting system of our world as he has. The Bible calls attention to it here, does it not, saying that God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. Hey, why do that? When you already had two jolly good words, light and darkness, why go and add another two, day and night? Why call the light day? And you will say to me, but sir, they're not the same thing anyway. Light is always there. It never goes out. Strictly speaking, light is not the day. Day is not the light. Day is our ration of light. The darkness, likewise, doesn't go out. It's always there. The darkness is not the same thing as night, is it? Night is our ration of darkness. So once in every twenty four hours, uh twenty four hours, God has arranged things so that we get a ration of light and a ration of darkness. And the learned among you will know how it is done. Our little planet is made to twizzle round, vis-a-vis the source of light in the sun. And for twelve hours a day, our planet twists into the light, and we enjoy its warmth, we enjoy its light. It makes possible our activities, it makes possible growth, it makes possible life itself. But then, whether we are ready or not, whether our work is done or not, we are mercilessly twizzled out of the light into the darkness. There is nothing we can do about it, and we are made to wait for another twelve hours, helplessly dependent on forces beyond our control for our next ration of light. Why do you think God did it that way? Please don't say there was no other way God could do it. Why, God has a thousand and one ways he could do it. He could have made us all phosphorescent or something, with little lights in our foreheads as the fish have. He could given us a, a, a rather large cosmic switch or something to switch it off when we wanted it and when we didn't want it. Why has he done it this way? To have the light always there, but to ration it out to us twelve hours light, which we call day, and twelve hours darkness that we call night. I'm asking you, therefore, to notice not merely that creation story number one deals with creative acts, it deals also, as do the other days, with organizational acts. And if we inquire the why of the organization, we may find the clue to this particular, uh, section in the words of Jesus Christ, our Lord, recorded for us in John's Gospel, chapter eleven. On that occasion, we read that his friend Lazarus was ill, in fact dead, and our Lord announced to his twelve disciples that he was about to depart into Judea. The disciples say, Master, surely you're not going into Judea again, for of late the Jews sought to stone thee. Goest thou there again? In answer to their problem, our Lord gave them an object lesson drawn from creation, drawn, in fact, from this very topic that we are now discussing, the organization of planet Earth's light supply. Said our Lord, are there not twelve hours in the day? There are, roughly speaking. Well now, said our Lord, if a man walk in the daytime, he doesn't stumble because he sees the light of the world, that's the old sun up in the sky. But if a man walk at night, he stumbles because, and I bid you take notice of the proper and literal translation, because the light is not in him. Simple observation, isn't it? But remarkably true and exceedingly significant. If a man walks at night, he stumbles because the light is not in him. Indeed, it is not. It is not in him. It is not in his little world. It is ninety million miles and more outside of his world. The light is not in us, not in our world. And every time our little planet Earth twizzles round and puts us into the dark, and every time it twizzles back and brings us into the light once more, we are reminded of the fact that this planet Earth of ours is not a self-contained flat with its own lighting supply within its. We are helplessly dependent for number one essential on a source of light and power uh nineteen million miles outside ourselves, outside our planet. Why, God himself could not have made it more abundantly clear that whereas man was made to have dominion in his planet, the condition of his dominion is this, that man should learn he is not a self-contained autocrat. He is dependent on powers outside himself, outside his world, and ultimately on the creator himself. The lesson that our Lord drew from the physical lighting system of our planet is, of course, immediately to be paralleled at the deeper level of human experience. When it comes to moral and spiritual problems, then once more there is a light, but it is not in us, nor in our world. We are dependent on the source of moral goodness and spiritual light that lies outside ourselves, outside our world, and resides in the Creator himself. I content myself, therefore, to make that comment on the first creation story. You may perceive that similar lessons are taught us on other of the days of the increasing climax that lead to the creation of man. There follows a second creation story. It runs from chapter two verse four through chapter three and right up to the end of chapter four. This creation story turns to another topic. It turns to describe human life. What is human life? It describes life at its various levels, man's physical life, his aesthetic life, his moral life, his community life, and among others, and highest of all, his spiritual life in fellowship with God. If you will ask, what is human life, you must put together all the descriptions that you will find in the second creation story. Running alongside of that, of course, is the description of what is life's opposite, namely death. For just as there is life at each of these levels, physical and aesthetic and moral and social and spiritual, so there is death for humanity that has fallen into sin at each one of these levels. In particular, the second creation story tells us for what reason man originally was made and gives us his raison d'etre. He was made, says the second creation story, to till the ground from which he was taken. To till that ground for God's pleasure and for his own enjoyment. To make something of the world, to till the ground. God set him the example in planting a garden in Eden and encouraged him to do likewise with the rest of the world. He was to till the ground, the ground that lay around him, and now also that little parcel of ground that was walking about on two legs, for man too was made out of the dust of the ground, to till it for God, for God's pleasure and man's enjoyment, and in fellowship with God. That was life. Caring for the earth and the ground and the planet in fellowship with God. It was as a father will give a son a toy. Maybe it's a clockwork train set, or nowadays is it an imitation American rocket or something. And father and the boy sit up on the floor playing together happily with the toy. Father enjoying it as much as the boy, perhaps, a trifle more sometimes. Ah, but while together they play with this toy, a something else is happening, and a friendship is being formed between father and son that's going to mature into a lifelong friendship long after the toy is finished with them in the dustbin. So did God create a temporary planet Earth and put man on it and invite man to live and to experience life at all his levels, developing this vastly complicated and glorious toy, the planet Earth, in fellowship with God. When planet Earth was done, there might have come not only a friendship, but a new relationship, and man have risen to become not merely a creature of God, but a son of God, and to enjoy eternal fellowship with God. That was the program for man's life. Alas, man was tempted, so the story goes on to tell us. Man was tempted to redefine what life is. For the serpent came with his proposal. He bade Eve look at the tree of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. He spelled it out thus to Eve. She saw that the tree was good for food, life at the physical level. She saw that the tree was desirable to look on, a thing of beauty, life at the aesthetic level, the arts, the beauty of life. She saw that the tree was desired to make one wise. Life at the intellectual level. Look at it, said Satan. That's life. Get your physical full, be filled with your arts and aesthetics, enjoy your intellectual life, put them all together, and that's life. There is nothing besides. The word of God, oh, nonsense, he said. That's just old legendary stuff aimed at keeping you in subservience. Cut out the word of God. This fellowship with God that dampens your spirits and would keep you down from true evolution. Banish God, banish his word, and learn to live, my dear, said he. Life is simply this, physical, aesthetic, intellectual enjoyment without fellowship with God. And man was deceived into reconceiving and redefining life. What a bitter thing it was, as he found this new definition a recipe not for life, but for a kind of living death. For the physical and the aesthetic and the intellectual divorced from fellowship with God through his word. This is already death begun. In that day, man died, and spiritual death was eventually followed by physical death. But the story tells us that God had his plan for man's redemption that he began to sketch in even at that early stage. There was the news that one day a greater would come, the seed of the woman that should bruise the serpent's head. Until he came, man was put under the discipline of hard labor and work that should have been a playtime and a pastime and a gentleman's occupation became the hard labor of a convict and a prison in his labor camp. To remind man that man without God is a fallen creature, that life without God is not life but a living death, and to urge men back to seek that fount of life that is eternal life with God, without which all else in the end must come to frustration, vanity, and corruption. A way back to God then was initiated through sacrifice and the promise of a coming redeemer. But the second creation story has not ceased yet, for it wants to tell you that man went even further away from God. Was he made to till the ground for God? Was that his raison d'etre? See what a wretched failure he has been. Now to introduce into God's world the element of rebellion, the element of sin, to fill God's world with a race of rebels, all descended from the arch rebel Adam himself, to fill God's world with the thorns and thistles of immoralities and rebellions. See what a wretched gardener the man had been. And for his sake, then, the world, the earth was cursed. But that wasn't the full end of the story. For in chapter four we read that man went on to further rebellion, in that he now rejected the way back to God. For whereas Abel brought him the divinely appointed sacrifice as the way back to God, Cain tried to come to God as though sin had never been, or as if sin didn't really matter. He thought he could walk into God's presence and find acceptance merely as a good gardener, without first acknowledging that he was a sinner in need of redemption. Just as there are many people today who imagine they can find acceptance with God simply by being a good mother or a good father or a good businessman or a good school teacher and fail to acknowledge that these things are useless unless first a man acknowledge his need of redemption through the sacrifice of Christ. Cain went further. When God admonished him to repent of his stiff-necked obstinacy and to come the way of redemption, Cain burst forth into a deeper rebellion. Said he, in effect, to God, God, if you won't have my way, neither will you have Abel's way. And And Cain Cain. slew Abel. What do you imagine God did with the man? Well, what would you do? You perhaps have a gardener, as I see many of you have, perhaps even you have two. And, uh, you, uh, appoint these gardeners and you say, now look here, not I want you to grow are not orchids, please. I don't want orchids, I want tomatoes. And presently you come back and you find the garden full of orchids and not a tomato in sight. You say, my man, come here. I appointed you, and I told you straight I wanted tomatoes, not orchids. Why have you grown orchids and not tomatoes? And the man turns around to you and says, my good sir, I like orchids, and I don't like tomatoes. I should grow orchids and not tomatoes. And if you should appoint any other gardener to grow tomatoes, I will shoot the man. What would you say to a gardener like that? I fancy you would say, um, well, goodbye. You needn't be gardener anymore. You can go and grow your orchids for all I care, but grow them on your own allotment. Hear your cards get going. When Adam sinned, yes, there was discipline, but a way of redemption. When Cain sinned, I say it respectfully and reverentially, God gave the man his cards. Look, he said, Cain, I tell you now, you were made originally to till the world for God. That is the raison d'être of your existence. Now, Cain, you may go. Go, man, go. I shan't kill you. Just go, please go. You might as well, for now, when you till the ground, she shall not yield her strength to you at all. You might as well go. Do I hear somebody saying, I wish my boss would tell me that, I got tired of working. What a wonderful holiday it would be to do be dismissed and set free. Ah, but you haven't thought. For God to dismiss you, that is hell. We didn't make ourselves. We are creatures of God. He made us to do his will. Find me a man that has ultimately rebelled against doing his creator's will, to the point where the creator himself has dismissed the man, and you have a man now whose existence is utterly meaningless. Though he exists for all eternity, you will not find any meaning, purpose, point, reason in his existence. Nothing but a meaningless, pointless, frustrating existence. He has rebelled against the very purpose and person for whom he was created. It is true that Cain's posterity were foremost in the invention of many of the arts and some of the technologies and some of the sciences. And arts and technology and science are delightful occupations done in fellowship with God. But all the arts and sciences and technologies done out of fellowship with God will in the end lead to eternal frustration. For man was made to live and serve God, and if he be dismissed from his only fundamental raison d'être, then that is hell begun, the beginnings of an eternal frustration. Many a man or woman in our modern society is precisely there, rebelled against God, refused the way back to God, and is living, living, living, but a living death that is ultimately pointless because purposeless, and doomed at length to end in the frustration of an eternity apart from God. There is a third creation story. That runs, as you see, from chapter five, verse one, to the end of chapter nine. And what shall that tell us? This tells us of something different from the other two. It begins where they begin, in chapter five verse one. This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man in the likeness of God, made he him male and female, created he them, and he blessed them and called their name. That is, it starts at the beginning again, at the creation of man, but it goes off on a different angle to discuss with you not the purpose for which man was made, nor the place man holds in God's universe, rather the constitution of man. What is man? We've seen so many thousands that we no longer feel any item of surprise when we see a man. There was a day when the world was new, and man was a very exciting thing. The likes of him had never been seen before. There have been angels before. They were spirits. There had been animals before, but they were but animals. Now there came this new thing. Hey ho, what was this new thing? It was part animal, you could see that, for it had its stomach and legs and lungs and all other such things that animals have. And yet it wasn't just animal. It was spirit and able to have fellowship with the Father of spirits. What would you call this new thing? God called it Adam, that is man. And man, as you see, was able to reproduce, for he was male and female. Unlike the angels, he was part animal and could reproduce. Could man? Interesting, wasn't it? Part animal, able to reproduce, and yet spirit evidently, and made with a tremendous potential. For subsequently, chapter five tells us, there was born a man into this world called Enoch, and having lived here for some many years, presently he was translated that he should not see death. And without dying, he was taken by God into that other realm, that is the presence of God. You say, was man made with that potential? He was indeed. And what happened to Enoch, we are assured, shall one day happen to thousands of mankind. When the Lord Jesus comes, you will see a potential in man that perhaps you hadn't noticed before. For not only shall the dead be raised, but living men and women shall be changed. And though human still, they shall be caught up and taken into the presence of God to live now in that spiritual realm. Human still, but transformed with a different kind of human body. It is a thrilling story, the story of man and his constitution. But again, you must hear the developing tale of man's sin and the fall. And this time, what sin did to man's constitution. Says chapter six and verse three, announcing God's judgment on fallen humanity. My spirit shall not always abide in man, for that he is flesh. That is to say, God is commenting upon man's constitution. Fallen man, now spiritually dead and cut off from the Father of spirits. Man has constitutionally become a freak. My spirit shall not always abide in him, for that he is, notice the verb, it's commenting upon what man is, what his constitution is, for that he is flesh. Yes, you see, man as originally made is not merely flesh but spirit, and not merely spirit but flesh. When man sinned, he died. That left him with flesh. And what happens to flesh in man when he dies spiritually? Well, now God set about a very vivid and rather gruesome object lesson. For when man became a freak constitutionally, God was not prepared to maintain him forever. Therefore, God determined to destroy the whole race. He did not burn him up as subsequently he burned Sodom and Gomorrah, but he drowned the human race. Now, all of you will have observed, I suspect, what happens physically if you drown a man. You get hold of a man, don't you do it yourselves, but if you, you know, just for the sake of illustrating the point, if you get hold of a physical body and you submerge it in water for five minutes and you bring it out, why, the body is still there, isn't it? You've still got the man, have you? Well, you've got the flesh bit, but something has gone out of him. You know what chapter seven twenty two calls the s- breath of the spirit of life. Yes, you know, the breath that comes out of his mouth. And when the breath that comes out of his mouth departs, you're left with a lump of flesh that's, sad to say, presently goes rotten and corrupt. See in that physical judgment a parable of the deeper level of what sin did to humanity. Man was made of flesh and spirit now in the deeper sense, not just breath, but God-given spirit. When man spiritually rebelled against God and spiritually died, you were left with a freak, what the Bible calls a carnal man, a fleshly man that waxes corrupt, morally corrupt, spiritually corrupt, and ends by being a freak of a thing that God never intended. From that sad state, God devised an early example of salvation, an ark in which might man might hide, and in that ark go through the judgment, be buried in the waters, disappear from the sight of God, and then come out the other side to walk in newness of life in the new world that God was going to reconstruct. Asnor got into his ark, went through God's judgment, and came out to be the beginning of a new life and a new race in a newly constructed earth. And they who know anything of Christian doctrine cannot resist the temptation to see therein a parable. Man fallen is man a freak, a carnal man, fit only to be destroyed from the presence of God. But in Jesus Christ, our Lord God has provided a means of salvation. Not an escape from judgment, but a way through the judgment. So that in Christ, my substitute, the believer can say, I have been through God's judgment, accepted death, accepted burial, and I rise the other side to walk in newness of life. Finally, when Noah stepped out of his ark into that fair new world, he was not left to his own devices, but was guided, so the ancient record says, by birds, and in particular by a dove. Similarly, when our Lord rose from the waters of baptism in Jordan's river, so the record tells us, there descended upon him a bodily form like a dove. This, we know, was the gracious person of the Holy Spirit, who was pleased at that time to take the form of a dove. He proceeded to lead our blessed Lord first into the wilderness to be tempted, and then throughout the rest of his holy ministry, which thus was performed in the power of the Holy Spirit. This gives us too an example of what Christ is prepared to do for us, having accepted identification with him in his death, burial, and resurrection, we are not left to our own devices and power, but we too receive the Holy Spirit who anoints us as it anointed him, and that gracious spirit leads us to walk in newness of life to the pleasing of God and to our own endless spiritual profit. Thus does God in both Old and New Testament describe his plan for the reconstruction of man's constitution, once ruined by the fall, but restored through Jesus Christ our Lord and the work of his Holy Spirit. So there are three creation stories in the first half of Genesis. Wouldn't it be good if we could cover the three stories of God's redevelopment program that fill the second half of Genesis. But time forbids us, and we must leave our study there. Let's just ask God's help to remember and profit from his word. O God, we thank thee for this part of thy holy word, for its grand and great concepts. Whereas we are saddened to read of the fall of our forefather, we thank thee for thine enthusiasm that early devised these foreshadowings of salvation to guide men towards the coming of him in whom thy full salvation should be found. Implant thy word on our minds. Give us understanding thereof, we beseech thee. And grant us too to find refuge in Christ and the leading of thy spirit that shall fit and train us for that fair new world that thou art devising and one day will implement when thy plans in Christ have reached their fulfillment. In his name we ask these things, giving thanks. Amen.