What Creation Tells Us About God: Sovereignty, Wisdom, and Benevolence

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Hey everyone, I'm Dr James Spencer and welcome to this first episode of the Prepped Podcast. Today we're going to start at a logical place for the first podcast. We're going to start in the beginning with Genesis 1-1-2-3. Before we jump into the text a little bit, I wanted to talk just a bit about how I tend to approach Genesis 1-1-2-3. There's a lot of different ways to approach this text. Two, three.

There's a lot of different ways to approach this text. One of the ways that's become fairly popular, and is probably one that most of you are familiar with, is through the creation evolution debate and really looking at the age of the earth, whether the earth is young or old, and trying to make this text compatible with science. That's one way to approach it. I am not a scientist, I'm not an apologist, I'm a Bible guy, and so I tend not to approach it. I am not a scientist, I'm not an apologist, I'm a Bible guy, and so I tend not to approach it that way. It's not that I don't think that that's an important way to approach this text or that it isn't, or that there's not. It's not an appropriate way to think through the book of Genesis or specifically the creation narrative here in Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3 specifically. It's just not my area of expertise and I think it's important to recognize that because I won't be commenting at all on the creation evolution debate. Really, the way I tend to approach Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3, and really the rest of the book of Genesis, is not even so much as what's called a history, trying to demonstrate that the events that occurred actually happened, although I do believe they did actually happen.

I tend to approach it in terms of theology, in terms of God's revelation. The Bible is God's revealed word to us, and so what does that mean? It means that the Bible is telling us things that we wouldn't otherwise know about God. We might be able to, for instance, infer that the world was created. We might be able to infer that there is a creator, but without Genesis 1-1-2-3, we would be at a loss as to who that creator is, how this creation came about, and really we'd be at a loss, at a deficit in our knowledge of who God is. So God's revelation to us, the Bible, what it does is it provides us insight into who God is and why God made the world and what it all means, and so I tend to approach this answering just a few questions. Number one who is God? Number two, who are we in relation to God? And number three what are the implications for who we are in relation to God for the way that we should live? So there's a properly theological question who is God? There's an anthropological question about our own identity and who we are as human beings, and then there's a more of a practical or a life-oriented, if you will, patterning that I want to go through so that we understand what's really happening here and what this text tells us about how we should live proper.

One of the things that we should really consider first is what is the genre of Genesis 1.1 through 2.3, this creation narrative? Here in Genesis there's a temptation, I think, to just say well, it's narrative. This is the narration of God's initial creation, and this proceeds in a way similar to what we might find in any other Old Testament narrative, if we went to something like Genesis 14 or Genesis 22,. These are narrative texts. The trouble with that is that this text in Genesis 1 really isn't structured in the same way that other Old Testament narratives tend to be. It has different syntax and different arrangements. It uses different literary devices, and so what we have in Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3 isn't exactly what we might consider a narrative genre. It does have some resemblance to poetry, though it's not exactly poetry either, and so what we probably have is sort of a mixed genre here, where in Genesis 1-1-2-3, we're not exactly getting a play-by-play narrative account and we're not exactly getting a fully symbolic or poetic. What we're getting is an intermingling of the two.

Tendency is to take a look at Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3 and recognize that God is now in creation, doing something that is more significant than simply creating the various aspects of creation, and that the narrative in Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3 is structured and presented in such a way that it's trying to draw out some of that additional significance. So, obviously, the creation of material things is pretty significant. Creation of the world is sort of foundational for us to even be here, and so it's not as if we need to deny that this is important. However, just because God created it doesn't exhaust the sort of meaning, the significance of why he created it, what it was created for, how do these things and the way he created it. What does it gesture toward?

And in the context really of Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3, and even if we tack on Genesis 2,4 and following, what we really find is that the creation is probably gesturing toward the later temple, the tabernacle and the temple that Israel created. If you think about some of the apparatus in the tabernacle and the temple, just to give a couple of examples, they would have a vegetation sort of drawn and presented on the walls or the canvas in the tabernacle or the walls in the temple, and this gestures back to then the garden imagery, the vegetation that we see particularly in Genesis 2, 4 and following, but also obviously we see in Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3. We see in Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3. And so what we're really finding in this text Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3, and then again in 2, 4 and following we're seeing God create his sort of garden temple, and so I think that the creation narrative here in Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3 is very much constructed to help us emphasize and recognize that the pattern established in creation reverberates. We could say reverberates through various other structures and commands and practices in ancient Israel and, by extension, into the church age, and so one easy example of that is Genesis 2-3 ends with the Sabbath, and so we see that God creates the world in six days and on the seventh day he rests. And then we have the command in Exodus 20 in the list of 10 commandments, that Israel is to keep the Sabbath. Why there's to keep the Sabbath there? To work for six days and rest on the seventh? Because God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. And so the Sabbath is a way of imitating the cadence and pattern of God's actual creative activity within the life of ancient Israel, and so it's an ongoing sort of imitation and reminder, ultimately, that God is the creator and that this cadence is important in many ways, and so keeping the Sabbath holy gestured back toward creation.

We find in Deuteronomy 5, of course, that it also gestures toward the Exodus, and so there's a lot of parallels and uniquenesses, and there have been a lot of complex arguments made that, for instance, creation and Exodus have a lot to do with one another. I think that's probably the case. What we see in creation is God sort of looking out at this world that is formless and void. This is Genesis 1.1. In the beginning, god created the heavens and the earth, and now the earth was formless and void, and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. There's a lot there that we can unpack, but basically what we need to do is we need to recognize that the world as created.

God is looking down at this world and he's seeing it, that it's formless and void, or tohu v'bohu in Hebrew, and what this really means is that it's probably something more like it's not fit for life. And what this really means is that it's probably something more like it's not fit for life. Nothing can be sustained here, because there is no particular order. Everything is all sort of mixed up and congealed together, and so it's not mass chaos, it's not necessarily a complete and total mess, it's just it's disordered disordered in a way that would preclude actual life from happening.

And so what God does in creation now is he's going to start making distinctions. He makes distinctions between land and water, he makes distinctions between light and darkness, he makes distinctions between day and night, and along the way, he's also going to make different structures to sort of go along with and govern these areas. So we see, you know, the fish go in the water there to be fruitful and multiply. We also see the sun and the moon put up to sort of govern the day and the night. And so we see God organizing things. He's creating an order to the world, and part of his creation, his creative work, is this ordering. It's making these distinctions, it's defining the functions of those elements that he creates, and then it's placing inhabitants in those areas where that's appropriate. So we find again, like the fish go in the sea, the land animals and the humans go on land and the birds are up in the air, and so all of these different distinctions that God makes, all of these different structures that God creates within creation, are actually really crucial to life on earth.

It isn't just that God zapped everything into existence. What God does is he says he goes at this in an orderly fashion. Now, I think that's really important, because oftentimes we think about creation and we think about it in terms of just God's sovereignty, god's control over all things, and that's an appropriate way for us to think about it. I'll get to that in just a moment, because I think one of the things that the creation narrative does teach us is that God is sovereign. We'll talk a little bit about that, but I think one of the things that often gets lost is that God is also wise. God's wisdom comes out in creation very, very well, and so what I would argue is that what we see in the creation narrative is God's wisdom in ordering. In other words, god is going to create an order, a way of organizing things that ultimately results in Sabbath, and so there is a harmony.

In Hebrew we might say it's a shalom, a peace, a wholeness to creation after God is done creating and that's something that's very important for us to recognize. The ancients did seem to recognize this we absolutely see that creation is associated with wisdom. So in the Targums, which are ancient Aramaic translations of the Old Testament, one of the things we see is the addition of the chokmah in some of the Targums, and chokmah is wisdom in Hebrew, and so in the beginning, god created the heavens and the earth with wisdom. They're associating wisdom with creation. We see a similar association in Proverbs, and so what we find in this Genesis creation narrative is that God's wisdom is really on display, and so, in addition to sovereignty, we also see wisdom. Now let's turn to sovereignty, because sovereignty is really crucial and important, and I think that, just aside from hey, god created everything and then, you know, nothing was created that was not created by God. That obviously points to a sovereignty, but I think there are other layers here.

In ancient Near Eastern myths about creation, what we often found was that the gods were fighting one another. They're in battles and creation comes about through those battles. So the gods have to fight one another, and then out of those wars come the foundations of the earth. This is the raw material stuff that the world is made out of. We see something very different, though, in Genesis. In Genesis, god isn't fighting anyone. God is just speaking the words out into this formless and void stuff that has been created, and so there's no resistance, there's no other side that God is sort of fighting or pushing out of the way in order to create what he creates. That's just not the case, and so what we see the difference between God's creation and ancient Near Eastern creation accounts is that God's sovereignty is sort of boundless. He's not fighting anything. He speaks and the world obeys. He speaks and his creation just follows his word.

I think there is a lesson there for us, especially as we move into Genesis 2-4 and following Genesis 3-7, these various other texts, the commands of God given, the law being spoken, and how our obedience then leads to blessing. Now, there's a lot of ways that that could kind of go wrong. I'll just mention in particular I don't think that our obedience is a quid pro quo relationship with God. I don't think it's transactional, as if we're trading our obedience for God's blessing. What my tendency is to look at this and I'll link a couple articles in the description where I go into this in greater depth but my understanding of this is that what we see in this text and what we see in this dynamic is that God's blessing is the result of obedience, because obedience allows us to live along the grain of the universe, with the grain of the universe.

And so we see here in Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3, that as God commands, creation obeys, and in this is his sovereignty. And that obedience, this lack of resistance, this responsiveness to God's Word we could call it obedience is ultimately the stuff that allows the creation to find its Sabbath. In other words, if creation hasn't done what God wants it to do, we don't get Sabbath. At the end we're sort of thrown into turmoil, as we see after the fall in Genesis 3, 1 through 7. And so it isn't that our obedience is rewarded with blessing. Certainly not that. But what I think we see is that our obedience allows us to live into the order that God has already established and, to the extent that that matters in a fallen world, we do experience God's blessing, we do experience his presence and we are more in line with the intended order of the universe. So fall does some weird things to that, but I think in this first section of Genesis, what we're really seeing is a reminder that when God's word is followed, good things result. So that's God's sovereignty. So we've seen that God is sovereign and God is wise.

Now I think there's a third attribute that we can find here in Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3, and that is that God is also benevolent. In other words, it's possible for God to be sovereign, to have total control of the way that he designs creation, for him to be wise in the sense that he orders creation in the way that he wants and intends it to be ordered. And if God is not benevolent, he could create a world. He could create a world, a creation in which human suffering is perfected, but he doesn't do that. What he does is he creates a creation in which it's possible for humans to thrive, it's possible for humans to habitate this creation and to live in harmony with all of the other aspects of creation. That is what God creates. And so what we see is that God is not only sovereign and wise, but he's also benevolent. He has a goodness that he wants to convey to all of his creation, particularly to humans, and he wants those elements of creation to be governed and ordered and, in that order, to experience his presence. He wants us to have relationship with him, he wants us to live in dependence on him and he wants our good. He has designed this world for human flourishing. That's what we see in Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3. And so, as we're looking at this, then, what can we say?

Well, we can say a few things. Number one if God is sovereign, wise and benevolent, and he has created this world for human flourishing, what then does that entail for us? Well, obviously, it means that we're creatures. We were created beings. We are not the creator. There's a fundamental distinction between the creature and the creator. And so, as we think about that, what does that mean for us?

Well, it means that we are determined by God. In other words, because God has created this space, created this world for us, and he's put us within it to live and serve, and to be his image within it. What it means to be his image is not simply a matter of dignity. It's also a matter of obligation, of responsibility. In other words, being made in God's image is fantastic. It's a wonderful thing, but it's also something that we need to live up to. There are certain ways for us to be God's image, not just to have God's image inherently, which I do believe that every human being has. There's an inherent dignity and imageness that every human being carries. At the same time, though, being made in the image of God comes with these obligations and responsibilities. It means something, practically, for us to be made in that image.

I think part of that, and when I say that God determines what it means to be human, we are dependent on him. We don't set our own course, we don't pursue our own way. We are, then, dependent on God, dependent on God and so humanity. What it means to be truly human is, in part, being dependent on God, taking our cues from him, listening to his voice, being dependent on him and fulfilling the tasks that he gives us. We don't get to set our own course in every instance, we don't decide that. No, that's not what it means to be human. We're going to be human this way.

That's what ends up happening at the fall, and so we need to recognize that we are limited as creatures. There's only so much that we can actually do. We have some amazing gifts that God has given us that will allow us to do a great deal, but ultimately, what we find is that we are dependent on the creator and our relationship, our primary relationship, is really to that creator, and to the extent that we maintain that strong and good and right relationship with creator, all the rest of creation will fall in line. It'll all work together. And so when we think about what's usually phrased as a theological anthropology, in other words, an understanding of humanity from a theological perspective, we need to be thinking through the idea that we are actually dependent on the Lord, that this dependence is crucial for what it means to be human, and oftentimes we think about our limitations as if they are a bad thing. Sometimes they are. Sometimes our limits can hinder us from serving the Lord, but at the end of the day, really, our limitations are designed in part to remind us that we are to be dependent on God. So God is sovereign, wise and benevolent. We are dependent on him as his creatures, who have been given a particular station and responsibility as God's image.

What does all that mean for us? Well, I think it's embedded again within the creation narrative. What it means is that we are to pursue God's order, that we are to live into the pattern of creation, and by that I don't mean some sort of naturalistic idea. This is a pattern of creation. Is God speaks, creation responds obediently, faithfully responds to the voice of the Lord and organizes itself in the way that God tells it to, and in so doing, results in peace and Sabbath, and even within a broken world. I think that's very similar to the pattern that we're supposed to be instituting. We are to listen to the voice of the Lord, whether that be through the reading of scripture, whether that be through our interactions with one another and the teaching that we get through the church.

There are a number of ways for us to hear God's voice, but the point of the pattern of creation, what this all means for us, is that, if we are going to be really fulfilling the image of God that is within us, what we need to be doing is we need to be making sure that we are responding appropriate to the lead to the Lord, that we are dependent on him, that we are constantly gesturing back toward our dependence on him, and that we go out and we make appropriate choices that will keep us in relationship to the God that we serve. And so we have this idea that God is sovereign, wise, benevolent. We have us in the middle as dependent beings created by God to be his image on earth, and the implication of that is that this pattern of creation that we've seen, where God speaks and the creation responds obediently so that it results in Sabbath, this is ultimately the pattern we're to institute. So, as we kind of close this down, and we're thinking about the book of Genesis, and really Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3 overall, I think what we see here is a sort of prototypical narrative that reinforces what Israel is supposed to do when they get the law going to get this law of God. After the Exodus, god pulls them out of their slavery in Egypt, he brings them out into the wilderness, he gives them the law, he tries to teach them to obey him and depend on him. We have these fantastic verses, like we find in Deuteronomy 8, that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. He's trying to teach them to depend on him, that obedience is their strategy for making their way in the world. The law is that body of rules and revelation that help Israel to understand what it means to obey God, what it means to live before a holy God. And so you have this pattern, I think, instituted even in the old testament.

As we move toward the new testament, that pattern really doesn't go away and there are some discontinuities between the old and new testament. I wouldn't deny that. I don't think you know that the church replaces israel or anything like that. But what we do see is in something like ezekiel, uh 36. We see, you know, god is going to act on the human heart. It's a heart of stone and it needs to be a heart of flesh. And as he changes us, as he puts his spirit within us, then he's going to cause us to obey his laws. So obedience doesn't really go away. This idea of dependence on God doesn't ever go away and that sort of reverberates.

This pattern that we see in the initial creation reverberates across the Old Testament and into the New Testament, and I would even argue that, as we look at something like the Great Commission which we'll probably come back to an awful lot in prep I see the Great Commission as a crucial aspect of what it means to be Christian and how it is that we live our Christian lives. But even if we look at that, what we see is we live under Christ's authority, we learn to live under Christ's authority and we teach others to live under Christ's authority, and so this draws us back into this idea of obedience. How do we live according to the order that God has instituted? What does that really look like? Well, it looks like conforming to the image of Christ, because Christ lived a perfect life, he lived a sinless life, he lived a holy, faithful life, and that's the pattern that we aspire to. So, as we think about this creation pattern, that's really where I see all of this going.

It's this, again, when I say a prototypical narrative, it is a foreshadowing of all things to come that is ultimately going to be broken in Genesis 3, 1 through 7. That's a text that we'll address in the next episode, but it's important just to recognize that Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3 offers this sort of pristine picture, this unique glimpse of what the world was like when there was no sin and everything had responded faithfully to God and followed and was arranged according to his word. After the fall, things are not arranged according to his word and so you have a lot of different wrinkles and challenges and problems that you end up facing. But in Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3, what we see is that God is sovereign, wise and benevolent, that we are his dependent creatures who should seek to follow the pattern of creation so that we can experience the peace and wholeness that God can provide, which is, I think, symbolized in the Sabbath in Genesis 2-3. So hopefully that helps. It gives you a very basic picture of Genesis 1-1 through 2-3.

I know there's a ton of things that we could cover in getting into the minutia of these texts, but what I wanted to provide in this episode was really a broad overview of what it means, what it looks like the creation narrative, who God is within this creation narrative, who we are in this creation narrative and what sort of patterns we need to follow, given our relationship with God. And I think that understanding the creation narrative from this perspective is crucial for us. It's a foundational narrative for all of our faith. But also I think that this viewpoint, this perspective, this way of approaching the text can easily get lost when we get stuck into the creation and evolution debate. To provide a different sort of way into this text that didn't address that creation evolution problem, didn't even address the day age theory or anything like that. Those are really important things and maybe I'll provide some additional resources on those later, but for right now, I think that as we start out and we're thinking about this as a podcast this is really what I want to do in this podcast.

I want people to understand the text itself, who God is, who we are and what that means for our life. And so, as I study the Bible, those are the three questions that I often seek to answer, and obviously I take rabbit trails down various scholarly ventures, but really those are the three key and crucial questions that we need to keep them. So hopefully you enjoyed this and we will catch you on the next episode of Prepped. Take care everybody.