The
First Book of Moses, called Genesis
What follows is
the revelation of God’s ministry of reconciling man to Himself. It contains
information about heaven but is not about heaven. It contains information about
the spiritual kingdom of God but it is not primarily about that subject as much
information is left out. It contains science, history, and other topics but it
is not specifically about those subjects. It is the revelation of what God has
done, is doing, and will do, not about what man has done, is doing, and will
do. This is one reason why the so-called great men of history get little or no
mention. Alexander the Great gets brief mention, one as, “the king of Grecia,”
in Daniel 8:21. The subject matter is about God’s plan for mankind and how He
responded to mankind’s response to His reaching out to them. Man is at war with
his Creator, a war he cannot win. But his Creator has offered peace with Him
and the Bible is essentially about that.
As we study the
text of the Bible there are two things we must be aware of. As educator and
author, E.D. Hirsch wrote, the meaning of any text is what it literally says.
Anything you add to it or take from it beyond that may be its significance to
you or mean something different to you but it says what it says. Another way of
looking at this is the old saw, “a text without a context is a pretext.”[1] Don’t use the Bible, the
foundation of your convictions, in a way that attacks that foundation to suit
an agenda you have; political, economic, social, or just personal.
Additionally, as
we study the text of the Bible there are two questions which pose themselves
that we, at some point, must consider. As a scholar of Ancient Greece, Stephen
Todd, said about what a historian must consider when approaching an ancient
text, we must ask ourselves why it was written and then, why it was preserved.[2]
These two sets of
considerations will be very important in our study of the Bible, which is the
story of God’s efforts at reconciling man, who has fallen away, to Himself.
Genesis, chapter 1
Genesis
1:1 ¶ In the beginning God created the
heaven and the earth.
We are first going
to discuss the answers to two questions that are very important for every
Christian to resolve in their heads. There will by necessity be some repetition
in my statements to reinforce what I am saying.
As an aside,
first, though, let’s talk for a second about the name, Jehovah, as found
in the King James Bible.
Why the name
Jehovah? Jehovah is a valid transliteration of the Hebrew name for God, the
Tetragrammaton. The J did not sound as it does today in the Early Modern
English of the King James Bible. In fact I was used for what would become the
letter J and the modern J sound which took root in the 17th century.
The letter J began as a variant of the letter I in 1524. It is dumb to argue
about this rendering of God’s name which is translated thousands of times as
LORD, all caps. Get over it. If you want to say Jehovah or Yehovah or if you
are a modernist who likes the sound of Yahweh I personally don’t care but I
will always refer to God as God, the LORD, all caps, the LORD God, or, yes,
Jehovah. It's funny how people who don’t even read their Bible will plant their
flag on ground such as how to pronounce the name presented in the Hebrew text
which, with the addition of vowel points and other grammatical items over the
millennia, scholars aren’t really sure of anyway. Hebrew had no vowels for centuries and the
name of God was not even to be pronounced from an old time. This is what I
understand from my studies. Tell me if you think I’m wrong and provide your
citations, please.
First, we must
ask, “Who is the God of the Bible?”
The testimony of
the Bible is abundantly clear that the universe did not come into being by
itself and there is no evidence that there are alternate universes. The
universe is also not eternally preexistent like scientists before the Big Bang theory
thought, as a time is given here, in the
beginning, and an action by God as in God
created.
It is impossible
to believe the Bible and, at the same time, believe in the Big Bang theory
where all matter and energy comes from the primordial explosion of the
singularity, the size of a period in a sentence. Nor is it possible to believe
in its antecedent belief, the Kabala’s mustard seed that explodes into the
universe, or the Hindu’s cosmic egg that explodes into the universe and believe
in the God of the Bible. The physical universe is a production of God as all
matter, energy, and time can be attributed directly to Him. He has no beginning
and no end and is beyond our ability to finitely reason.
Modern man, since
Isaac Newton, has come to believe in reductionism where, for instance, in
biology the whole is defined by its parts. It is a bottom-up belief. However,
the Bible teaches a top-down structure of the universe. The parts are
determined by the context. As an example, the words rite/right are defined by
their context in a sentence in phrases such as, “a religious rite or ritual,”
or, “turn right,” or, “your legal right.” So, genes and their expression are
determined by the organism they are in. I share the same genes with a fruit fly
but we are vastly different creatures because there is a design, a mold, an
idea that makes me different from them. Many different buildings are made
partly with bricks; the University of Pennsylvania’s Golkin Hall, my house, and
the local high school. However, they are all different buildings because of
their design plans.
So, biology and
all reality, to be understood properly, should be understood by the fact that
it is all based on a design formed in the mind of the Creator. Then, the
smaller parts and their place in the scheme of thing come more into focus.
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