Exploring My Strange Bible - The Surprising, Actual Story of Genesis 1-2

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

In modern Western culture, we have two very different narratives swirling around the first two pages of the Bible. In the first narrative, the creation story in Genesis 1-2 represents a literal seven days, and this all happened only a few thousand years ago. In the second narrative, earth and its inhabitants took billions of years to evolve into their present form—and therefore, Bible-believing Christians are fools. What if both these narratives miss the main point of what Genesis 1-2 is all about? In this lecture, Tim explores the Bible’s creation story alongside other ancient creation stories, revealing a very different narrative about the origin of life, our purpose and identity as humans, and what all of this tells us about the God of the Bible.Tim taught this lecture in January 2016 at Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon.REFERENCED RESOURCESNothing: A Very Short Introduction by Frank CloseThe Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate by John H. WaltonThe Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder by William P. BrownCheck out Tim’s extensive collection of recommended books.SHOW MUSIC“Nob Hill (Instrumental)” by DrexlerSHOW CREDITSProduction of today’s episode is by Lindsey Ponder, producer, and Cooper Peltz, managing producer. Aaron Olsen edited and remastered today’s episode. JB Witty writes our show notes. Powered and distributed by Simplecast. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey everybody, I'm Tim Mackie, and this is my podcast, exploring my strange Bible. I am a card-carrying Bible history and language nerd who thinks that Jesus of Nazareth is utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have. On this podcast, I'm putting together the last 20 years worth of lectures and sermons where I've been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites us into the mission of Jesus, and the journey of faith. And I hope this can all be helpful for you too.

I also help start this thing called The Bible Project. We make animated videos and podcasts and classes about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology. You can find all those resources at Bibleproject.com. With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this week. It's good to have you guys here. My name's Tim, and we're going to be exploring some light topics tonight, like how to read and interpret the first two pages of the Bible.

So nothing controversial there. But I'm really excited to be here with you guys. And, you know, why do I care about this? You know, I see some people from the home team, Door of Hope, my community over there. And I know many of you from Bridgetown. I have lots of friends who are part of Bridgetown. that are friends for many years.

So, you know, some of you know a bit about me, but when I write all that, I wrote all that out earlier today, and I was like, I get tired just thinking about it. I need to eliminate something for my life. I just have too many things going on, but I love them all, because everything that I get to do revolves around the scriptures.

And so why do I care about this? topic, why am I here? Why should you care what I have to say? And actually, my roots of interest in the first two pages of the Bible, I mean, they really go back to when I became a brand new follower of Jesus, which was coming up this summer 21 years ago. I was 19, about to turn 20. And I became a follower of Jesus through Skate Church ministry.

Anybody? Yeah? Yeah? Gerald, who's the pastor here? You guys know Gerald? There you go. So Gerald, I met Gerald when I was a brand new Christian. He was one of the staff guys at Skate Church and kind of took me under his wing,

and we became friends. And I've known Gerald for a long, long time. And so, you know, I didn't really grow up around the Bible much at all. And so, you know, I'm a young man, a child of Western culture, just like all of you. and I remember, you know, being very compelled by Jesus and who Jesus was. And when I began to read the teachings of Jesus, it's very clear Jesus has a thing for the Bible. Like he's just constantly talking about it and quotes from it all the time. And so, okay, if I want to follow Jesus, I need to have a relationship and engage with this book.

And so there you go. I'm a young man, and I'm reading the Bible for the first time. And I remember pages one and two reading them for the first time, anybody. And page three, how about the talking snake? Like, that's a whopper, you know? Like, there's just the Bible. There's a lot of odd, strange, surprising things going on in it. And what I noticed, even as a new Christian, was as I met other Christians, they would get especially worked up and passionate about pages one and two.

and get in like defensive argumentative mode. You guys know what I'm talking about? There's something about the first couple pages of the Bible that gets Christians angry for some reason, especially when they're in dialogue with people who have different views of what they do. But that was kind of my intro to Genesis 1 and 2 was like, oh, wow, this is a strange new world of the Bible.

Some people get really angry because they really believe that these first two pages give us crucial evidence about the physical origins of the universe. And there you go. That was my introduction. I thought, well, okay, I'll just start to learn as much as I can. Then I had other friends, people who weren't Christians, and I remember meeting friends. These were from high school and later on just living here in Portland. And I had other friends for whom one of the main reasons why Christianity seemed all so stupid and silly to them was because they admit those same argumentative angry Christians too

about pages one and two of the Bible. And they just thought, you know, this, whatever these Christians thought about where the world came from based on their reading of pages one and two from the Bible, they were just ridiculous and had their heads in the sand and why would I want to sign up for that club? You guys know what I'm talking about? Do you guys know anybody here?

Yeah. So that was me getting introduced to this whole set of topics. And so I went on to wonderfully become absolutely obsessed and in love with the scriptures. And so the career arc was a natural one. You know, it went from no aspirations except skateboarding and living in my parents' basement, smoking way too much pot to becoming a follower of Jesus to sign up for ancient Greek and learn ancient Hebrew. And I just couldn't get enough. And 14 years and four educational institutions later, I still can't.

get enough. So now I try and make, I make Bible cartoons for the internet. Like that's a big thing. I clearly can't get enough. I'm really, really into the Bible and whatever. I'm happy to confess that. So one of my biggest concerns and interest now is about pages one and two of the Bible is not, it's actually not about the debates and not about what Christians get angry about and not what people who aren't Christians think angry Christians are stupid about. That's a very important conversation. That's a conversation about do we live in a world that has some kind of intended origins and purpose? Is there a personal being who stands at the origin point of all that exists?

Or are we just a lucky accident, you know, random molecules that happen to bump into each other in the right and here we are. That's a really, really important conversation, creation, evolution, whatever you want to call it. That's not what I want to talk about tonight. And you actually don't want to hear me talk about that because I'm not qualified to talk about that. I went up through Biology 2 in college,

and it was a push for me. I was fascinated with it. Again, I was a new Christian, so all of a sudden, science had a whole new, just fascinating meaning for it. me. So I'm not a scientist. I'm not the son of a scientist. I just, that's not my world, but I'm a Bible nerd. And something that began to dawn on me as the years went on and I began to read and learn and study and original languages and all that geeky stuff was, and I began to

read other Hebrew Bible scholars, Jewish, Christian, neither. And they, the way they were talking about pages one and two of the Bible, all of a sudden made the debate seem like a whole adventure in missing the point. And here's where these two sides are going, and here's the path that I kind of want to help us explore tonight. So there are two stories out there about, there's at least two. There's actually way more than two, but there are two for our purposes tonight, about where the world came from and how the Bible fits into it. So you have a little. So you have a little bit of have a scientific narrative that's been growing with worldwide research about the age of the universe and the origins and so on. So it's the 14.5 billion-year-old universe, you know, Big Bang theory,

expanding universe, all that kind of thing, the planet Earth, somewhere in the realm of 4.5 to 5 billion years. And then, you know, we're a lucky accident, random molecules bashing together and here's us. So that's a that's a very dominant narrative in our culture. And so people, whatever, have different relationships to that narrative. Most people think that if you believe that basic outline of the history of the universe's origins, then you can't possibly with intellectual integrity be a Christian or believe that God exists because of the way that the other side of the camp presents the argument. And that's that very simple, basic reading of the Bible tells us that the universe is just a few thousand years old.

If you do the biblical chronology, according to a very certain interpretation, and you read the pages one and two of the Bible. And you've got a seven-day process and boom, a universe that's working and wonderful. And so either there's an apparent tension here, and I use the word apparent intentionally, right? There's an apparent tension that either what we need to do is mind. modify this story, the scientific narrative, to fit this story, pages one and two, of the Bible. And so there's lots of positions and people who do that. They'll say, well, this narrative, it's a conspiracy theory against Christians or something like that. Or, you know, more reasonably that it's just a wrong interpretation. And so we can rework the evidence to fit the time scheme

in pages one and two. Or there are some people who are Christians and they are not, willing to ignore this body of evidence here and so they will say well actually the you know the pages one and two maybe aren't saying what we really thought they were or some of the words actually pages one and two are referring to this whole process right here but we just couldn't have ever seen that before but now we can and then the bible gets accommodated to this narrative are you guys with me here so in both camps somebody's accommodating to the other side of the debate and making it work both camps assume that they've correctly understood what this text is trying to say in Genesis chapters one and two and for me that's the real question I'm not a scientist I am a Bible nerd

and as I watch this debate and as I listen to people who I trust and they've given way smarter than me and they've given their whole careers to trying to understand what pages one and two of the Bible are saying in Hebrew as a part of ancient Israelite culture using ideas and language and culture at the time, the whole thing just becomes like, wait, what just happened here? The debate has set the agenda. And so what is my analogy for what's happened to Genesis 1 and 2, it's a lot like, any Harry Potter fans? Yeah. So it's kind of like going into Harry Potter for the purpose of saying, you know, you have your nephew's birthday party

coming up this weekend, and you know your brother or your sister asked you to do magic tricks or something. You're like, I don't know any magic tricks. Where do I go? Harry Potter. So you start reading Harry Potter in order to try and learn how to do magic tricks.

Now, can you learn a thing or two about magic from reading the Harry Potter novels? Yeah. Are you likely to learn any coin tricks? Probably not. You know, you might learn something. But you're convinced this whole book's about, you know, magic and wonder and mystery, and surely I'll find out. And you find a way, you know, and then you bomb miserably, you know, at the kid's birthday party and they throw their candy at you or something like that.

But so you guys get my point here. The whole point is you picked up Harry Potter looking for the wrong thing. You came into it with an agenda that isn't what the author's agenda is. And that's my basic point. And it's actually not my point. It's the point of a lot, a lot, a very, very smart. Hebrew Bible scholars. And it's a growing voice within this conversation that perhaps we've all just missed the point. And we've been making pages one and two of the Bible try to do something that if we had Moses or the author of Genesis 1 and 2, he would be like, you did what? You made my pages one and two say what? Like how did you do that? So here's what I'd like to do. I actually just have two simple, simple points that I want to communicate. And then we're going to take those two simple points and walk through some of the basic

things on pages one and two. It'll take just a couple of minutes to make my two points, and then it'll take me way, way more minutes to do the rest of the thing right now. So, you know, fire hose. You guys ready for a fire hose right now? Okay. I make no apologies, right? I'm just going to go for it. And then when we, we conclude, I'm going to stop talking, take a drink water, and then I'll be happy to field questions, and we'll do Q&A here in the room. So we're going through, if a question occurs to you, do write it down if you think it would benefit everybody else too. So, you guys ready? Okay, here's my first main idea. It's a very simple one, but here we go. Let's just go for it.

the Bible is an ancient text. Is that news to anybody? No, no. Is it only an ancient text? Well, sure, I should say, if I'm a follower of Jesus, do I believe that it's more than an ancient text? Yeah, yeah, I believe that it's a living reality.

It's a word of communication that does things to people, namely it wakes things up inside of them and points them to Jesus. So if I'm a Christian, I think the Bible is more than an ancient text, but not less than an ancient text. It is still an ancient text. It's an ancient text that is a living word and that does those things and points me to Jesus, but it's an ancient text that's doing those things. You guys with me here? Now, I just, we shouldn't have any debate about that. So I find it's actually the second part of this main point that's the one that we actually are guilty of not really getting right

is that we don't treat it like one. We don't treat it like an ancient text. Because of the right conviction that it's a living word that messes with you and points you to Jesus, what we tend to do is treat it as a text that's fallen from heaven in our language. and it you know it it motivates all this bizarre behavior of what we do with the thing you know as like the spiritual grab bag you know or the the spiritual poterie it's kind of like i'll take a

sentence from here and a sentence from there i mean i hope if i wrote a letter to you what you would never do with it is just say well it's too much time to read the whole thing beginning to end but i'll kind of read a sentence today and i'll skip down and i don't really like those sentence i'll read the and tomorrow, you know, and then, oh, that's a good line. I'll memorize that one out. What did he say in the paragraph before it? I don't know, but I'll memorize this sentence right here. Like, you know, I hope you would never do that.

But that's precisely what we do with the Bible. That's like the main approach that readers have to the Bible. And so we do. We treat it as if it's a book that fell out of heaven that we don't read like any other book and that it's not ancient. Now, why do I say that I don't think it's ancient? because we read it in ways that violate the basic principles of human communication all of the time. So how?

This is my second. That's my first main point. You guys with me? Okay. So here's my other main idea. And this one's a really boring, nerdy sentence. But work with me here. All right?

So acts of communication, any act of communication. There's verbal communication, like what I'm doing right now. There's sign communication where it can be images or something like that, but verbal, textual communication. That's what we're talking about here tonight, written texts. So acts of communication, including written text, through language, generate meaning within a particular language and historical and cultural context. Anybody learning anything right now? It's a good thing you didn't pay to get in here tonight, right? He's throwing something right now.

I'd be like, really? This is what I'm here for? So once again, it's a little more wordy concept, but it's simple. It's that how is it that words, whether I speak them or write them out, generate meaning? Well, we share a culture, and we share. a language and we share a historical setting where through language I can you know how many have you ever done a thing where you just say the same word over and over and over again begins to sound like gibberish you know that one it's a good one um so it's like that it's like what are these sounds coming up but we all

it's a it's a language is a signifying system or linguistic system we all have these unspoken rules that we've learned as we were brought into this language and culture we all just know know what words mean. So, you know, think if you're like an alien, you know, 3,000 years from now and you're unearthing, you know, whatever, the ruins of planet Earth, and, you know, you find, well, we don't write anymore on paper. Does anybody write on paper anymore? Good for you. Well done. You know? What's going to be left of us? It's going to all be on microchips, you know? So 3,000 years from now, they have microchip scanners or something like that. And they notice, like, all of these strange little, you know, you know, right? And it's like, what's, what's that? I mean, look,

look at us. And actually, I had one to stunt me today with John Mark and I were texting about the timing of being here tonight. And he said, he said, how'd this sentence go? Want me just look it up? Is it weird to read a friend's text alone? No, I want to really recap. create the moment here. The event starts at 6.30, but with people get off work, will pry start 10 minutes late. And I was like, pry, pry start 10 minutes late, pry start 10 minutes late. And it really threw me. I was like, I mean, it's a misspell that didn't get picked up or whatever.

And then it struck me out five minutes later, probably, probably. was that is that just yours does everybody else know this one too welcome to John Mark's brain everybody there you go but there you go

there you go pry no it's very efficient probably is a very long word to spell so so look at this I mean this is hardly intelligible even to look at it right there on the screen but do you all know

what this well now you know what this one means but you guys know what I'm saying here. So there's all kinds of unspoken cues, subtle nuances, but it's a code. It's a secret code that we all have just been ushered into. And at some moments, it doesn't seem secret because it's just us, but to an alien 3,000 years from now, the word Google will be a secret, you know, unless Google takes over the universe or whatever. But so that's my basic point. Here, I'm just, it's a silly illustration. of my basic point.

Any act of communication only has meaning within a cultural context by that spoken language and the historical circumstances that shape the use of language in that moment. Are you guys with me here?

Is the Bible an act of communication? It is. I'm pretty sure that it is. Is it an act of ancient communication? Yes. It was written in an ancient language. It's written in an ancient language from an ancient historical cultural context, that of the ancient Israelites, and it's written in ancient Hebrew. And so, you know, this, you think this looks like, oh, oh, that's interesting right there.

Okay, all right. So, sorry, now I'm getting crazy. So you think that looks like gibberish. Let's just go for a famous line from page one. Breshi Bara alohem and Hashemayim We pry we'll start around 645

right but see now you know the code don't you? You know it means probably Breshi Borehahalahim et ha shamane vatarets so OQI so that's a more complex code

but it's still a code it's a code from another culture so how do I go about discerning what that means. Well, welcome to the wonderful, exciting world of biblical studies that has consumed my imagination and joy for the last 20 years. It's just such a wonderful, this is so, as a follower of Jesus, I believe, I believe about Jesus that he is the originator of all things embodied, become a human being. And what I believe about the scriptures, because I adopt what Jesus believes about these writings,

they themselves are a divine and a human word. And so they didn't drop out of heaven, just like Jesus didn't drop out of heaven. They came into existence out of the story of what God was doing with the ancient Israelites people all the way leading up to Jesus and what language did the ancient Israelites speak. They spoke this one.

And all of a sudden, we're forced to this reality that it's somewhat uncomfortable, but I think we have to face it. Otherwise, we're going to go wrong in this whole exploration of pages one and two. Is that reading the Bible is an act of cross, it's a cross-cultural experience. And in Western culture,

and celebrating tolerance and diversity and so on, we say we love cross-cultural realities, right? We celebrate it even, and that we be accommodating to people of different languages, and culturalism, socioeconomic situations, right? And that makes the wonderful Western pluralistic world, right? That's at least the culture that we're in.

But somehow, when it comes to the Bible, we're not willing to check our cultural baggage at the door and step into a foreign new world. We demand that it speak our language. We demand that these authors talk about our world the way that we want them to. And when they don't, you know, we either think they're stupid and primitive,

You know what I'm saying? It's reading the Bible is a cross-cultural experience. My analogy is that when we go into pages one and two of the Bible, most at least American Christians, I think, are like... I've never actually gotten to explore Europe very much. But what I imagine, I did in the Mediterranean and Israel quite a bit, and I would remember, like, being in Jerusalem or something, I went to school there for a year,

and you would see, like, the tour buses, you know, line up, and off come the tourists, and they're all wearing shes. shorts. Nobody wore shorts there. Are my shorts and like tube socks pulled up and they're wondering where the McDonald's is? You know? And you're just like, aye, aye, aye. I'm from America. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Right. So, but I think that's, that's in essence what we do with pages one and two and with a lot of the Bible is we come into the Bible and we're just like, where is the McDonald's? Where's some ideas I can identify with? Where's the things that warm my heart and make me feel good? And you know,

you're just like, stop it. I'm going into a new wonderful land and usually a respectable person will get a phrase book or find some tools that will help me navigate things here and adapt. So here we are. We're going into ancient Israel here with this first sentence of the Bible and into the ancient world. Pages one and two are one of the most fascinating doorways into the ancient world and context of the Israelites and how they thought about it. So let's do a couple of test examples here. We did with LOL. and OMG and pry so let's try this this is the standard English translation of that first sentence in the Bible so let's just do some samples here and this is the easiest one to do look at what's the last

word in the sentence in English and it's also the true in Hebrew too earth okay earth is earth is a normal understandable English word yes what is the normal range of meaning of the word earth in English. If I say earth, I hear planet, yeah? And dirt, yes. Yeah, exactly. Any others? Planet and dirt. Or world, isn't that the planet?

It's just another word for planet. So, ooh, a dwelling. I'm not sure about that one. Let's talk afterwards about that one. Really? So we've got world and planet, which I kind of think go together, and dirt. So how do you know the difference between those two? Well, context. If I say, you know, I went out into the backyard, I was planting these flowers, man, I got my fingers into the earth, and it made me feel great.

That's not true for me. It is for my wife, though, and God bless her for that. She's amazing. So the sentence itself tells you, oh, he's talking about it. It's not like he's a, you know, a giant the size of a galaxy, putting his fingers into a planet, Earth. You know, that's ridiculous. So, no, the word Earth there means dirt. So, but it's normal meaning in English is planet. You guys with me here? So, you know, if you were to try and close your eyes and read page 1 of the Bible in

English, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And what visual image pops into your mind's eye? a planet where what's the planet doing it's floating yeah because that's what planets do right

they're out there floating and we got heaven so you know anybody have some stars or galaxies around there that kind of thing right and there you go yeah now once you read the next sentence

that's all going to get weirded out you know because it's formless and void and we'll talk about that so but nonetheless so that's what occurs to English reader. Now, stop and just ask yourself a question. How long have human beings had accessible to their imagination that image of planet Earth floating in the middle of the starry space and so on? How long has that image even been imaginable to human beings? The first television

pictures from space broadcast to the masses, April 1, 1960. How long ago is that from right now? There you go. Fifty-five years, 56 years ago. Yeah, I'm bad at math, too. That's why I'm not a scientist. So, okay, so a little over 50 years. And there's some other pictures from earlier satellites, but they're barely getting the curve of the Earth before something went wrong and the thing burned up or whatever. So, but this is the first one that was put on television for everybody to see black and white TVs. So for 50-some-odd years, this image of planet Earth floating in the middle space has been available. to the human imagination, how old is page one of the Bible? So it's at least 3,000 years old, or up to 3,500 years old,

and there's lots of nerdy debates about why that range or what that difference is, but somewhere between 3,000 to 3,500 years old. Now, here's where a lot of Christians go, especially in the debate of the last few hundred years. Is it's the conviction? Well, it's the Bible. It can break the normal rules of language, and because it's a divine word,

that it can be revealing all kinds of new information or ideas about the natural world that these people would have never known about otherwise. And so, yeah, we are legitimate to begin to think of the Bible predicting what people would know about the world in the future. I have a problem with that. And my problem is that the Bible is an ancient text, and I don't think that's treating it like one.

And the Bible is an act of communication. And that, if you go around using that principle to understand everybody's acts of communication, you have just made mishmash of what humans are and how we talk with each other. Are you with me here? Like if someone took your words to mean the opposite or something different than what you intended them to mean, has this ever happened to you? And how do you feel? You feel violated. You feel misunderstood.

And I think that's precisely what we're doing to the biblical author, is we're making the divine origins of the Bible trump over the human origins of the Bible. And so as a basic conviction, I think that's just a viability. violation, and I don't think it's necessary. I think we're actually making the Bible do something that it's not designed to do. So if you go through the Hebrew language, biblical Hebrew, and you study all the times that the Hebrew word, not earth, but the Hebrew word that gets translated as Earth, Orates, and the Hebrew word for heavens, Shemayan, you can get a very basic picture of what these words mean. And it's a picture of the observable world of somebody living 3,000 years ago.

What are the heavens to someone living 3,000 years ago? It's what's up there? And what is earth for someone living 3,000 years ago? It's what's under, this is very, very simple observation. The meanings of words, just like LOL and OMG, are shaped by language, history, context. Another experiment. This is from day two of the seven-day sequence, which we'll talk about on page one of the Bible. From day two, Genesis 1, verse 6. Then God said, let there be a rakia between the waters,

and let it separate the waters from the waters. So God made the rakia, and he separated the water under the rakia from the water above the rakia. and the million dollar question is what on earth is the rakia well let's turn to our English translations

to find help oh wait darn it they're having a big centuries long debate about what the rakia is I turn to the new American standard of the NIV and it's an expanse between the waters so God's making an expanse

that separates waters above from waters below If I'm reading in the new living translations, it's a space that God makes. If I'm reading the King James, God makes affirmament. You know, I mean, that may. So that's interesting. Language is change over time.

What was, I imagine, an understandable English word at one time, is no longer, right? I don't even know what that means, affirmament. And then I read the new Revised Standard version, a dome a dome so what what is the rakia okay so back up and just go here you don't get it from this picture but just think you know go to montana big sky country or something like that get on the highest hill you can and what's what's the basic shape of things when you look up if you let your eye follow here to here and let your eye follow here to here when what let it let's say it's a clear

sky, no clouds. What's the color? It's blue. And what's the shape of the blue thing? It's in the shape, right? So convex or concave depends on the angle of what you're looking at, right? So it's the rakia. That's the rakia. What is it? What's rakia? Hebrew is a beautiful, wonderful language. The nouns in the language very often are connected to verbs in the language with the same root letters. And so there's a verb, Raqa, and it refers to what a blacksmith does when he's smoothing and beating out a large piece of metal, like a shield. So what does this blue thing happen to look like? It's like a large, smoothed out shield, right? So dumb is what the new revised standard version is getting at. Now, why is it blue? Well, right? Remember there's waters,

God's separating waters above and from waters below. So waters below, presumably are the waters like we would have down here and so on, and then out of those waters on the next day three, dry land is going to emerge from the waters below. But then there's waters above. So there's waters up there above the rakia. It's likely why it's blue. How else do I know there's water up there above the rakia?

Because it comes down sometimes. or in our case quite a lot, right? Here in Portland, it comes down very often. So how does it come down? How does it come through the rakia? Well, I mean, again, I think 3,000 years ago, these clouds and so on, but then sometimes it's just solid gray, right?

And then it's raining in these clouds and so on. And you can go through in about two dozen places in the Hebrew Bible at least. You can learn even the mechanism by which the water comes through the rakia. This is the introduction to the flood story in Genesis 7, and it says that there's windows up there. There's windows up in the rakia.

And who controls the windows? If you read the book of Job, who has storehouses of hail and rain and snow up above the rakia, and who works the windows to let it down? There you go. There you go. So what's happening here? So now I'll drop a bomb in the room and make us all uncomfortable for a minute, right?

So is there a blue solid dome above us right now? I mean, there's the atmosphere, right? But that is kind of a modern concept and discovery that it's like, you know, it's this air, like super condensed and it's permeable, but it keeps all of the oxygen in underneath here and you go through it and oxygen runs out. So, oh, he's talking about the atmosphere. stop it. Stop it.

That's like going into Jerusalem and saying, oh, there's the McDonald's. That's exactly. You know, it's like, no, stop it. This is a different culture. And they envision the way that the universe is organized in a very, very different way than we. It's a cross-cultural experience. And so here, it's a wonderful, fascinating. Read through the Psalms, if you're doing the read scripture thing, is you're reading through the Psalms.

Some of you, this is a geeky little experiment, but just keep a little notebook any time. the structure of the world is described in the Psalms. And you'll learn all kinds of fascinating things. You'll learn that the earth is a big circle here. You'll learn that the earth, or the land, again, not planet Earth, right? What's under my feet here is actually supported by pillars. And it's supported by pillars to keep it from sinking into what? Because if you dig down long enough into the audits,

what do you eventually find down there? water yeah and what so there's and there's waters way down below there and what do you call those you call those the abyss the the home the great abysmal deep that's below the earth and you pray that you don't ever sink down there because it's terrifying down there um so you add up all the descriptions of the natural world in the stories of in the lines of the Hebrew Bible and you end up with something like this this isn't particularly controversial This is from a standard Old Testament introduction written by a former Moody Bible professor, John Walton.

He's this Orthodox, a Christian as they come. And he's saying if you stack up all the references to how the Israelites envisioned the physical world around them, it's a flat earth, arranged in a big circle. Isaiah 40, he looks down on the circle of the earth, God does. You have the rakia. and at the very edges, like for Israelites, way up in Mount Hermone and so on,

you can see it's like these big, tallest hills, they touch the sky, they're supporting the rakia. You've got the waters above the rakia. There's your windows, you know, dropping down some water right there. Oh, sorry, the resolution's not great. Here, but you can see this window, can't you? This one here. You've got the pillars supporting the audits from singing down.

Who's that? Yeah, we'll talk about that. we'll talk about that in a little bit here so so here you go the bible's in ancient text ancient texts communicate by using the cultural language historical settings for the words and this i mean on page one of the bible this is the vision of the physical universe that's coming coming into existence how you guys doing okay now that might bother you i don't know if it bothers you, but it should get you thinking. We'll let William Brown kind of take us on our next step here. Oxford, Oxford Professor of Hebrew Bible. He says, the framers of creation in the Bible

inherited a treasure trove of venerable traditions from their cultural neighbors. Instead of creating their accounts ex-Nihilo, and that's a scholarly nerd joke right there, It means from nothing, out of nowhere. So in other words, you know, Moses, where the biblical authors aren't just sitting there one day and they get a Holy Spirit trance. Genesis 1, page 1 of the Bible. No, no. Like these are people who grew up with Egyptian, Babylonian neighbors.

They've been introduced to the great stories of ancient Egypt and ancient Babylon. They have a shared cultural conception about the structure of the world and how things got the way that they are. And so the biblical authors are developing their own traditions, Genesis 1 and 2, in dialogue with some of the great religious traditions of the surrounding cultures, particularly those originating from Mesopotamian Egypt, as well as those of their more immediate Canaanite neighbors. So what he's saying is this, is that essentially Genesis 1, what we want Genesis 1 to do is to march out of the ancient past and come sit in a university debate classroom and talk with the great minds of physics and whatever biology today and get into a debate with them about how exactly the universe came into existence. And when we do that, we're violating the basic principles of human communication. Because not only are we going to end up making this page one say something that it was not

designed to do, we're actually missing the very thing that it wasn't. trying to do and still is trying to do through the language. Are you guys with me here? It's like reading Harry Potter trying to learn how to do magic tricks. It's like reading Genesis 1 and trying to find out how old the universe is. It's just like, hold on, hold on, whoa, whoa, we've missed, something's gone wrong. So, I'm going to do one more nerdy thing, and then we're just going to rock the first, go back into Genesis 1, and then we're going to go into Genesis 2 and just learn and discover together, and you'll just see all this applied and fleshed out. You guys with me? Okay. So, and again, this is all on the handout. Don't even try and write this next one down,

because your hand will cramp. Trust me. Okay. This is a thesis. This is not just my thesis. Again, you know, people way smarter than me, Hebrew Bible scholars, so many different amazing scholars. I'm just synthesizing their work here and trying to let people know about it. So I'm adapting number of really smart people's language here. The early chapters of Genesis accurately present two accounts of the cosmic and human origins in the language and ideas of the ancient Hebrews. These texts should not be removed from their ancient context and read as if they speak literally about the universe or humans in 21st century scientific terms. Don't take it out of the ancient setting and make it try and do something it wasn't.

designed to do. They speak in terms of an ancient, near-eastern perception of the world. The rakia is a perfect example of that. They should be interpreted within that setting. When we discern the meaning of the text in their ancient context, what we find is they constitute a worldview statement about God, about his relationship to the world, about humans and their relation to God and the world. this basic worldview statement transcends its ancient cultural setting and commands the attention of God's people in all places and all times. You guys with me? Okay, I'm just trying to be as crystal clear as I possibly can.

So instead of reading Harry Potter to find magic tricks, right, you go into Harry Potter ready to be invited into a fictional universe that bends your mind. It's wonderful storytelling. and you walk away or better and richer human, right? And probably a whole bunch of other things, right, that I'm not thinking of at the moment. So when I go into Genesis 1 and pages 1 and 2 of the Bible,

what I'm immediately confronted when I read Genesis 1 in a way that respects language and communication is I am powerfully confronted with a depiction of a creator God who's not going to create in the language and ways that we would talk about Now, in these days, who's going to create, according to that context, but the character and the purposes and the heartbeat of this God speaks loud and clear. The kind of world that I'm living in, maybe not its physical arrangement, right, but the kind of world that it is and why it's here, and why we are all here,

and who we are, and who God is to us and who we are to each other, this all leaps off the page of Genesis chapters 1 and 2. And if those statements about who God is and who we are and where we are and where we're all going and what we're here for, right? Those, that's money right there. Like, we're all asking those questions. And these chapters are, we're on the target when we're asking those questions about what Genesis 1 and 2 are doing. You guys with me here?

Okay, let's keep, let's keep rocking. Let's just go for it. Okay, this is not just mine, but it's kind of a Mackey translation, but it's borrowing from a lot of other really smart Hebrew Bible scholars too. Close your eyes, do whatever you want. I'm just going to read the first five verses of page one of the Bible. In the beginning, God created sky and the land, and the land was wild and waste and darkness was over the surface of the deep waters,

and the breath of God was hovering over the waters, and God said, let there be light, and there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and he separated 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. Epic.

Epic. What's missing? Any proof readers? people who love punctuation and grammar, what's missing? It's just one period right there at the end. Hebrew doesn't have punctuation at all the way that we think about it.

Their basic way of ending and then connecting another sentence to it is with the basic word and. So there is one complete long run-on statement there together. What's happening here? Well, if we're going to, let's do kind of the same thing we did with Earth. So beginning, beginning. You see that word beginning there.

And I think in English, we come to the word beginning. And, you know, you tell me if you think I'm off base, I think most of us tend to think the point in time. I'll do in time. And you have a point in time. And what you're tracing is that beginning point and then whatever sequence of things comes after that. You guys with me here for the English word beginning.

In Hebrew, this is very interesting. In Hebrew, in any language, when you're doing a study of words, you want to just not study what this one word is, you want to ask, are there any other words that have overlapping meanings with it? So like here in Portland, you know, there's this water that comes out of the sky. What do we call this?

Well, we call it rain, most basically, but we have a lot of other vocabulary for it. we call it drizzle spit does anyone say it's spitting you know guys drizzle did anyone a couple weeks ago

after the snow right and then the night that it was all freezing did you look at your phones and what did it tell you was falling from the sky wintry mix that's what I said it right here winter mix

is falling from the sky so in any language you have you want to look at what i want to know about how this idea works in this culture or language but i want to know every word that overlaps but if there's a lot of words for an idea it means each word is trying to do a little bit of a different nuance with it rain drizzle spit wintry mix right so uh beginning here's interesting there there are two words in hebrew for beginning and one of them very clearly means point in time. And it's not the word that begins Genesis 1.

It's very interesting. Point in time in Hebrew, it's the word techila. It's the clearing your throat letter. Techila, I'll just say it. Techila. If you want to check out a good example of Tehila, go look up, Josea 1-3. from the beginning of when God was speaking his word through Josea.

So it's the beginning point, and then it traces through the book, it collects his sermon stone, Josea 1 3. The word that begins Genesis 1 is different. It's a different word. It's the word reshite. Now, for junior high purposes, I usually, that's the proper transliteration right there,

but I kind of do that usually. like that. Okay. So, Reschit. Rechit. Don't you say it with me? Reishit. So you study all the uses of Reishit, and it's really interesting. It's not a precise term. It can refer to a day. You can refer in Jeremiah 27, one, at the beginning of King Zedekiah's reign. And it's actually referring to this huge gap of a decade at the beginning of his reign. Then the story picks up. So it can refer to a small period of time, it can refer to a large period of time. It can be used in something like in Isaiah, the prophet will say the one who knows the end from the beginning, from the farthest reaches into the future and the farthest reaches into the past.

So, Reshite is a way of marking an unspecified period of time in the distant past. and the point is not how long it was the point is this was when the action took place now here now that the Rashid has been accounted for let's get the story moving with what I actually want to talk about Rashid's a way so my

so that's a nerdy way of saying it my normal way saying it and it was like way back when way back when okay now let's get the story moving with what I want to talk about So way back when did God create what's up there and what's down here? Sky and land.

Way back when? So it's not even of interest to the author, how long, or when exactly that? It's just like, but I'm a light, the sky and the land. Now, let's start talking about the land. So it's very interesting. Most people approach Genesis 1 and 2 thinking, oh, this is a story about how the universe was manufactured into physical existence. And the first sentence of the Bible says the universe was manufactured into physical existence.

Hey, it's in the reshshade. Now, now that it's here, let's start, let's get the story. You guys with me here, the very thing that most people turn to page one is the very thing the author is totally not interested in talking about. Isn't that ironic? So, adventure isn't missing the point, right? There you go. Okay.

So what else is interesting here? Now, so in the beginning, God created what's up there and what's down here. Now, what's going on down here in the land? What's happening down here? With wild and waste. This is another wonderful, wonderful Hebrew phrase to learn about. Wild and waste. Most of your English translations, maybe you have one open in front of you,

are going to say formless and void. And so again, I remember. reading pages one and two of the Bible for the very first time. And so I, in the beginning, God created planet Earth, hanging out there in space, but then, oh, wait, no, it's formless and void. So it's like a clay blob undulating in space or something. That was what was in my mind. Anybody? You guys know what I'm talking about? Yes, it's a formless and void. But then you're like, oh, there's water, right? Remember there's formless in void, and darkness was over the service of the deep waters, and so it's a clay blob or whatever. Okay, so let's start.

stop real quick here. So formless, formless and void. Our Hebrew phrase here is a rhyme in Hebrew. Some of you might know it. Tohu va voho. It's a rhyme. Tohuva voho. Tohuva voho. Tohu va voho. And you can go look up other instances of Tohu. Vohu is pretty rare. It only occurs about two other times. Tohu occurs quite a few times elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. go check out one in Deuteronomy 3210. It's a poem about how God found Israel in Egypt in the wild, desolate wilderness. God found Israel in the wilderness. He discovered him in the midst of Tohu.

So Tohu doesn't mean nothing. It doesn't mean undulating clay blob, right? It means a wasteland. It's a place where life cannot flourish. And so the way that the world's depicted here is, in the beginning, God finds the world in a state of Tohu-Vavohu. And what is Genesis 1 about? Genesis 1 is about how God is going to speak and architect a world of beauty and order

and meaning and purpose out of Tohu-Vah-Vohu. So Genesis 1 doesn't present itself as a story of God, bringing something into physical existence, whereas before there was nothing. That's not, that's a modern conception of when we think about the creation of the universe, we have this very sophisticated concept of nothing. Nothing. That's a very, very complex topic. Do you guys know about the Oxford very short? Oh yeah, I don't have internet quite right.

Well, maybe I do, but I don't want to mess with it. Oxford Very Short Introduction. Do you guys know about this series of books? It's like it's modern encyclopedia Britannica, but it's better than Wikipedia because they're little paperbacks, and they're beautiful. And they're just, they get a world expert on hundreds of topics, and they force them to write a short little paperback

that's less than 100 pages that everybody can understand. And then once you get a bunch of them, they start to line up, and they've coordinated all the covers to make this cool pattern on your bookshelf. Anyway, okay. So they have a volume. There's a volume on nothing, one of the world-renowned physicists leading researchers on nothing. And it's a very sophisticated modern concept.

Ancient people had no concept of nothing. And this is true in Egypt. This is true in ancient Babylon. This is true in the Bible. When a biblical author wants to think of nothing, they don't think of something physical existence. They think of disorder and Tohu-Vavohu. For something to exist, for us,

it means to have physical existence. For something to exist for a biblical author, it means to be functioning and ordering. The same way that you, we would use the English word create for this too. You could say, let's say you had a room that used to be, if you had a family, and they had little kids, and, you know, this was maybe the baby's room, and then, you know, the little toddler's room and their toy room and so on. And then you could say, oh, well, actually, you know, they moved into a different room. And I created a den. I created a study den. I took the tohu va-o-vo-hoo, right? Of like the toys and the spaghetti sauce on the walls and the crayons and the scribbling, right?

And I created a den. Would anybody say that in English? You would say, I made a den. Oh, even better. Even better. Would you say, oh, yeah, we made it into a den? You would say that, wouldn't you? You made it?

That's very impressive. Right? You made a den. You know? like, wow, so it was an addition, you built it onto the house or something. It's like, yeah, we made, you made the wood? Now it's getting ridiculous, right? So what does it mean that you made a den? What you did is you took something that was, for one purpose in the disorder, right? And you brought order and you brought new purpose. That's Genesis 1. It envisions God,

what does it mean for God to create to an ancient Hebrew author, to bring order out of chaos? That's the story that Genesis 1 is telling. And that's what's going on with Toho. Vahu-Vaw-Vohu. Now, how? How is God going to create by bringing order and beauty out of chaos? Well, there's darkness. So Tohu-Vaw-Vaw-Vohu, and then there's darkness. And who is there in the midst of the Tohu-Vavohu in darkness, poised and ready to bring order in life? So breath, breath of God, breath of God. And my hunch is knowing John Mark is that the door of hope people, you know this one.

This is like a quiz, and you'll fail miserably. I'll be very disappointed in you. So, but Bridge Town, folks, Hebrew word for breath or spirit? Come on, you've got to feel proud. Put that one there. So there you go, spirit or breath. It's the Hebrew word. Rewak, it's another clearing your throat word.

So Rewok, it's the, it's the, invisible, personal presence of God. Just like your Ruach, when you put your hand up here. I'm sorry, we're in Portland, and I'm telling you what to do right now. So you can resist authority if you want to, but that's fine. I'm just inviting you to put your hand up to your mouth. I grew up here. I know what happened inside of you when I said, put your hand up to your mouth.

Anyway, so put your head up to your mouth and say hello. I'm helping you check your breath right now, and you want to do that. So, all right. Do you feel that? You feel that in your head? What is that? That's your ruach. That's your ruach.

So we're talking about an invisible energy, but it's your, it's, you're a person. You're not a force, right? So you have a ruach. It's the animating life energy that is a sign of your own personal presence. And God has an animating life presence. And can you see your ruach? Did you see anything? It's invisible, animating life presence.

They're hovering, hovering in the midst of the ruach. And then what is the first thing that God does to bring order out of Tohu-Vawahou? What's the first thing God does? And God said, he speaks. He speaks. What did it take to get ruach on your hand, to feel the ruach on your hand? I asked you to speak. Speak.

So you have God, and then you have God's ruach, and then you have God speaking a word, and the ruach carries what's in God's mind and makes it into this tangible reality out in the world. So you have God breathing his spirit out through a word. And what does God do with his word? Let there be what? Light. And there was light, and God saw the light, and it's good. Okay.

So, God said, let there be light. On Hebrew, this is the word, or. It's not very exciting. I'm sorry. Or light. What is light? What is light? so we're experiencing it right now in the room

but saying 21st century concept what is light what is it so there's an energy I'm hearing energy wave and sun let's work with those concepts right so yeah in our solar system light is primarily generated by the sun and what's going on there

it's this gigantic huge immense immense ball of exploding gas. It's a huge reaction going on there. And it's giving off immense amounts of energy that in the form of waves or particles, and there's a great debate there that I don't really understand because I'm not a scientist.

In waves or particles, it goes at great speed towards us. And what do we call that wave or those particles that go at light speed across the universe to give you a sunburn on a sunny day. What do we call those? We call us the rays of the sun, but when we want to get precise about the little teeny tiny things

that are penetrating your skin and burning you and killing you slowly, right? What are those things? We call them photons. Light is a thing, right? In our imaginations, light is a thing. For 21st century, modern person,

and it's an actual thing. It's a little packet of energy, right? and it behaves like a wave, it behaves like a particle, there's something happening there that somebody understands, I trust, but I should don't. So it's a thing.

So we read Genesis 1 in English, you know, with that concept, and what do we think? God's creating what? He's creating photons, apparently, right? He's creating light.

Now, this will really, this one will spin your brain because in our sense of the universe, what generates the photons? The sun. When does the sun come into play on page one of the Bible? Yeah, so day four, day four. We're on day one.

So the sun comes in on day four. So how do you do that one? That's a wow, wow. Okay, so let's turn to our children's Bibles. Surely, you know, our well-intended parents had got it right. And what you'll see is the planet Earth hovering there in the midst of empty space in a universe just permeated with little dots of photons, right? light so so just stop one second so how old's how old's page one of the bible okay do we have to do

that again no we don't so it's 300 300 300 years old so light so not light's not a photon stop it right so light is is well actually sorry i'm making you dizzy by going back and forth but that's just how i operate so um what god calls light something here he actually gives a name to the light what does he call it he calls it day what is day is day a thing that you make we made a den

I made a day what does that even mean right so day is not a thing it's certainly not a photon day it's a yes it's a period of time it's the period of time in which humans can get stuff done

you know and although in the city humans get stuff done around the clock or whatever but normal humans who respect their bodily patterns and so on, know that it's best to sleep during that time and you work during the day. So day is a period of time the humans can flourish in. It's a period of time. So what is God making here? God's not making anything.

You would only think that God's making photons if your vision of Genesis 1 is, oh, this is a story about how the material components of the universe are being brought into existence here. But that's not what's happening here. So what is happening? God's establishing an order here. Out of Tovavahou and darkness comes, if you're a farmer and your existence of you,

your family, and your community depends on you getting food to grow out of this ground. What is extremely, extremely important to you in terms of daily cycles here? And you'll know your whole life, you'll go. and everything can happen under the sun earthquakes and famines and so on but what is for sure going to happen

at the same exact time around tomorrow morning this day it's just like a law of the universe it's like one thing you can count on the stability there's a lot of crazy unpredictable things that get a lot of chaos in this world but there's one thing that is stable

and certain day God's bringing order out of chaos here. Are you with me here? It's a very simple idea, actually. So God's not making the spacetime continuum. He's establishing order. And here's what you can do. You can go on and read your way right through.

The rest of Genesis 1 and 2, we'll look at a couple other examples, and you can just see it plays right through. On day 2, God makes the rakia. And we learned earlier that the rakia is not a thing. from their perspective, it's a thing that comes into existence, but it's just different.

And what you end up with is that drawing that I showed you earlier. How are you doing? You can just run it right through it. Okay, what we're doing is we're respecting normal communication, respecting the author, context, all that kind of thing. Now, here's one other thing that ought to strike us when we read the first sentences of the Bible here. And it's not something that is there.

it's something that's not there. Because remember what William Brown said. William Brown said, you know, the biblical authors didn't come up with these accounts just dropped out of heaven. They're developing it using their language and cultural understanding in dialogue with their neighbors.

And so if you go read the ancient world origin accounts of the Babylonians or of the Egyptians, you'll find a very common motif in those stories. and that motif is referred to with a geeky technical scholarly word called Theomaki. Theomaki. Theo means God. Maki, it's not my last name, that's Mackey. Maki is the Greek word for battle or for fistfight.

It's the battle of the gods. You can go to Babylon and you can say, who brought order and beauty out of this world? and they will tell you, oh, well, of course, the patron god of our city, Marduk. And then they'll show you the great epic stories out of their library about how Marduk is the one who subdued the forces of evil and chaos and made the world so wonderful that we can live here in the land of Babylon. And they'll tell you a story about Marduk.

There he is on the right there with power, not the statue. There, we'll talk about him in a second. This picture on the lower left here. And on the right is an ancient depiction of the god Marduk, He's fighting, he's fighting a monster. And that monster's name is Tiamat. Tiamat. And Tiamat is the goddess who represents the chaotic waters,

the waters that the spirit of God is hovering over, right? In Genesis chapter 1, verse 2. And here's how the battle gets really quite dramatic, is that Marduk, he summons the wind gods to come blow a great wind. How many have ever stood in front of a really powerful fan and it blows your mouth open? You guys know that one? So it's like that.

But he summons the wind gods to blow this great wind and then, you know, Tiamat's got a big mouth, a little sharp teeth and so on it. So it forces Tiamat's mouth open and then he shoots his bows all down Tiamat's throat and it pierces her heart and so on. And then he grabs her mouth and rips Tiamat in half. And then the lower half of Tiamat becomes the waters below.

And the upper half of Teumat becomes the waters above the Rakeha. So how did the world come into existence? The world that we live in is the world where chaos and evil can only be subdued through violence and through battle. We live in a world that came into existence through violence and danger. Are you with me here? And this was such a common motif. You can turn to Israel's Canaanite neighbors. And what you've got here is a picture of a god mentioned in the Bible,

the god called Ba'all or Baal, is how we butcher it in English, Ba'all. But they said Ba'all. And then here's a picture of Ba'al fighting his own chaos dragon. He has multiple heads here in Canaanite creation stories. And there you go. This is how Israel's neighbors talked about where the world came from. What do you notice is absent from Genesis page one? you're like whoa this god like where's the battle

you know the only thing that you could say maybe pose as a threat you think is the tohu va voooo but then you realize no that's just the raw materials i mean this this god has no rivals and there's not multiple gods how many gods is there in the first line there's just one i mean just that concept right there is this one of the most history-shaping ideas in the world that there is one true all powerful God who's the originator of all. And that God has no rivals whatsoever. So right there, you're watching your Israelite neighbor go into a bar, right, with their Egyptians and Canaanite and Babylonian neighbors. And they're all talking about what kind of world we're living in and who the

gods are and where we all came from. And the Israelites speaks up and it's just like, you know, I just, I hear what you're saying about Marduk and he does seem pretty bad. And I wouldn't want to run into him in a dark alley. But my God, Yahweh, the God of Israel, I believe is the one true God and that we live in a universe that is safe, that we live in a universe that was made for beauty and goodness and order and that doesn't find its origins and violence and death and destruction. Are you with me here? That's a worldview statement. And it's a statement about who God is, and it's extremely powerful. Now, when a biblical poet sees the world collapsing around him, he might want to be reminded that his one true God is actually the most all-powerful God.

So, biblical authors are not afraid to use this motif in their language about creation. Psalm 74. You read the first part of Psalm 74. It's about the destruction of Jerusalem, how foreign armies have come in and invaded Jerusalem and destroyed it. And so this is what the poet says. He reminds himself of who God is. He says, my God is king from of old, working salvation. in the earth. You divided the sea by your might. You broke the heads of the dragons in the waters.

Oh, when did that happen? Whoa, you crushed the heads of Leviathan. You gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness. You cut openings for springs and torrents. You dried up ever-flowing streams. Yours is the day. Yours also is the night. You established the luminaries in the sun. You fixed all the boundaries of the earth. You made summer and winter. Now, just stop right there. What's this point? I'm about. This is a poem, the poet expressing how he believes the world. And look, what is God making? I made a den. What does God make? Summer, right? Winter. So you fixed the ordered boundaries of the earth. You fix the ordered boundaries of time. Right? In our concept, you make something by bringing it into physical existence.

This is the same idea here. In the Bible, you make something by creating order. And how did God create order? Well, he beat the bad guys. I mean, look, he's just pulling all the language and imagery of these Canaanite and Babylonian stories. And this poet is asserting that even though Babylon's come to town and destroyed our temple,

that doesn't mean that Marduk is the one true God. Yahweh is the one true God because he made the heavens and the earth when he defeated the forces of chaos. Are you with me here? So this is actually interesting. This is just, you know, this one's for free. Well, it's all for free, but this one for free too.

I mean, there's more than one creation story in the Old Testament. You're looking at one right here. Here's another one. Proverbs 8, you can go read another one. Psalm 104, you can go read another one. And they all describe the origins of the world in the same basic view of how it's structured.

And they use all this language and imagery that doesn't fit in our setting, but that's because it's an ancient text. And this is how they talked about it. Are you guys with me here? I think this is really interesting. Okay. Let's see.

Where are we going? So here is, let me, I'm just going to start hitting on a few things here. We're going to, I'm going to kind of begin landing the plane. We're going to look at the days of Genesis, then we're going to look at Adam and Eve. You with me? So the days of Genesis 1, there's the sequence of God creating,

not bringing things into physical existence, but God bringing order, takes place in a sequence of seven days in Genesis 1. And then the camps trot themselves out, right? And so, you know, Genesis 1 refers to seven, 24-hour literal days. Well, actually, perhaps those are referring to long epochs of time or age, you know, and they refer to hundreds of thousands or millions of years or whatever. And you guys with me here, this is usually how the debate, no, it was 24-7, you know,

and the debate ends, then they just agree to disagree. And so I'm asking, let's back up and just say, what does it even mean to have this kind of creation story framed in the sequence of seven days? Well, first of all, let's just notice something about the symmetry, the literary art. of the symmetry of these days. This is super fascinating. So you remember, what does God do? When he says, let there be light,

what principle of order is coming into existence? Time, right? Day, the sequence of day and night and so on. So then we have the rakia. That's day two. And what was the purpose of the rakia? You remember? It's to separate waters from waters below.

And the whole thing is that the rakia will keep, you know, the whole world from being submerged water. waters, and waters can come down just periodically, as God graciously gives it, and that's going to be really, really important. For what? For who? For farmers, right? For you. Light, day is going to be really important, and rain is going to be really, really important. So you have the sky and the seas. Day three, let the dry land emerge from the waters that are below the rakea. It doesn't say he zaps them into existence. It just says let them emerge. It's very interesting. And

then as God said, let vegetation sprout up from the ground. And of all the vegetation on planet earth that you could name, the vegetation that is specified emerging out of the ground is what kind of vegetation? Fruit trees. Fruit trees with seeds in them. I mean, just go read the story. It's like, well, wait, what about, you know, I don't, what about mangrove trees or something, like rather bushes, you know, like, so fruit trees come up out of the ground. For whom are fruit trees going to be very important in the story that goes, humans. You have the first three days right here, and everything's getting teed up to create an ordered space where humans can flourish. Then what happens in the next sequence of three is each of those

domains gets filled with their inhabitants. So day four, we say it's about the creation of the sun, moon, and the stars. It actually doesn't ever use the word create. It says, let the lights of the sky, sun, moon, and stars, be for the keepings of the sacred festivals. Oh, this is a good one. Sorry, I'm going to just show one thing that I haven't done yet. That was some friends night hiking.

Sorry about that. This is later on. This is my geeky Bible software. Let there be lights in the vaults. of the sky, this is a rakia, to separate day from night, to let them serve as signs to mark sacred times. Now some of your translations have seasons right there, and we think summer, winter, fall, that kind of thing, but that's not what the word means. It's the word, Moedim. It's for the sacred days of, for an Israelite, what are the sacred days of the year?

Passover, tabernacles, weekly, tabas, and so on. Why, if you're an Israelite, you're reading Genesis 1, why does the sun come into existence? So that you know when to celebrate Passover. You don't start a day too early. Don't start a day. The sun's there for humans, specifically Israelites, to mark the sacred times and days of the years.

That's what's going on on day four. wait for it wait for it there we go okay so that's exactly those are the the inhabitants of the domain that indicate time then what goes on on day five

it's precisely the creatures that are going to live in the rikia or in the waters below the rakea so the birds they go up and they get to go touch the rikia up there and then you get the fish now this is really cool

at the heart of the symmetry right here, right? Look at day two. What is made first? The sky, and then the seas below them. But then on day five, what is made first? The fish, which go in the sea, and the birds which go in the... Do you see that at the center?

They're right there? Do you see it? All right, give me affirmation. See it. This is called literary art. Art. Isn't that beautiful? At the whole chapter, and dude, oh, William Brown, who I quoted earlier, it's amazing. Like, there are so many words in chapter one that come in multiples of seven, words that occur seven, 14, 21 times. God speaks 10 times in the chapter. There's all of this

literary artistry coming into the sequence of these seven days. It's so amazing. And then on the sixth day, you have land, animals who are going to fill the dry land, and then you have the humans. Who are or that's what the fruit trees are for. And then, once it's all ordered and purposed, God rests from his work. So to try and ring out of this a sequence by which the physical universe came into existence, do I even need to say it, at least from my point of view, right?

Because I think it's just, I just think we're not reading according to how this author is trying to communicate, or what this author is trying to say. So what are these seven days about? And this is very interesting, and I can only allude to it, and I'll show you a quote from a great book that you should read about Genesis 1. But when the Israelites made the tabernacle,

and inside of the tabernacle, it was the meeting place of heaven and earth, where God's space and human space come together. And the decorations inside of the tabernacle were all of these images of flowers, and fruit trees and pomegranates and the cherubim, these angelic protectors of God's presence

and gold and jewels and so on. And it's like you're walking into the Garden of Eden. All of it is the symbolism of you're walking into this place where God and humans dwell together, the Garden of Eden. And when the Israelites inaugurated the tabernacle,

there in the wilderness, they did it with a feast. And that feast lasted how many days? seven days go read Leviticus 9 when Solomon made an even bigger better version of it and not a tent

in a big fixed place this is in 2nd Kings chapter 6 and you walk inside and it's even more amazing pomegranates and angels and leaves and so on

you're like walking into the Garden of Eden and how long was his inauguration ceremony of his temple it was actually two sets of seven he has a seven day feast and they're like

let's have another one and so they have another seven-day inaugural feast. And what, I mean, everybody who's way smarter than me in Hebrew Bible scholarship is saying is, dude, Genesis 1, God's making his cosmic temple. And he's inaugurating it on the seventh day, just like you do, with your temple.

And the king is coming in, and when he's resting, just like the Israelites, when they come into the land and rest, after Joshua brings them into the land, it's not so they can all take a vacation, right? It's so that they can get to the business of human, flourishing. And so God is creating his cosmic temple in a sequence of seven, a Sabbath cycle, and then he rests means he begins the operation of this wonderfully ordered world that he just set up. How you guys doing? I'll let a really smart guy say it better, a smart guy who's going to be here and

speak here to you all in some not very long. And again, this is all up on the handout online, so don't scribble. But get the book. The seven days are not given as the peer of time over which the material cosmos came into existence. But the period of time God devotes to the inauguration of his cosmic temple. The seven-day cycle understood in its intended context has nothing to contribute to the discussion of the age of the earth. This is not a conclusion designed to accommodate science. Do you hear that right there? I'm not making Genesis 1.

Well, but this really seems compelling. So I just kind of, oh, look, look, you know, the old earth or something. so no no stop that right so we're not trying to accommodate anything we're drawing from an analysis and interpretation of genesis in its ancient environment meaning we're looking at the ancient Hebrew words the way they use the words and we're looking at the the thought world of the ancient hebrews and their neighbors that shaped how they would write a story like this the point is not that the biblical text therefore supports the view of an old earth simply that there is no biblical position on the age of the earth. Viewing Genesis 1 in this way doesn't suggest or imply that God was

uninvolved in the material origins of the universe. It only contends that Genesis 1 isn't that story. Are you with me? Okay. Let's, um, one more, can you do one more movement with me, Adam and Eve? Okay, it's very interesting. So, uh, humans, how do humans? Because, so that's the origins of the universe. when it comes to the origins of humans, it's the same positions, the same debates, all of the same issues at play here. And why I just want to look at three, again, three sentences about the creation of humans,

and we'll kind of, we'll look at what these words mean, and we'll just wait, wait for the magic, right? So here's a statement about humanity in Genesis 1. It's on the sixth day, and it's the pinnacle moment of the story. It's right here, right? It's the pinnacle. God created humanity, or in Hebrew, Adam, Adam.

In his own image, in the image of God, he created Him. Who's Him? Adam. So not Him male singular, Him as a singular reference generic to the whole of the human species. Male and female, he created them. So how many humanities are there on planet Earth? How many species, humanity?

It says one Adam on planet Earth. And what does that one Adam consist of? Male and female, right? The binary gendered pairs. He created them. God blessed them. God said to them, be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth.

Have a blast, right? Look at this place. It used to be Toho-Vovoo, but now look at it, you know? And the food falls off. the trees for going to sakes just go you know um and really go you know make more of yourselves rabbits like rabbits you know just go for it subdue rule over the fish of the sea over the birds of the sky over every living thing that moves on the earth so so humans have this unique capacity this happens on the sixth day just tuck that away and it's not about two individual humans being made on the six day

it's about humanity. One humanity that consists of the binary gendered pairs, male and female, humanity is being made here as an entity as a whole. Are you with me here? And what is their, what's their calling and identity? Well, they are made in the image of God. And there's a lot going on here that we don't have time to go into. but just read again read through it in context he says he makes them in the image and then he blesses

his image-bearing creatures and what does he tell them to do make more of yourselves go go oversee this place so whatever the image is it's about the humans in their very existence in this one humanity but this binary pair they they generate life out of their own existence. And we're going to learn in chapter two what that pairing is. It's about this covenant of marriage. So when humans covenant to love each other,

they choose not to multiply like rabbits with everybody else, right? They just with each other. And then when they do that, out of that covenant of love, new life comes into existence. And it's an image of God. I mean, you tell me that's not an extremely profound statement

about God's character. What is God's essence? and nature, love that generates life. That's what Genesis 1 is trying to tell us. And it's wrapped up with the second part of their vocation is to rule, to oversee. So now there's all this world with food falling off the trees, and there's these creatures, harness all of these resources, bring them together, and steward them and manage them in a way that creates even more life in flourishing,

and neighborhoods and swimming pools and art galleries, you know, playgrounds and schools and all of this. It's the human calling and vocation is the image of God. You guys with me? That's humanity on page one. Here's humanity on page two. The Lord God formed the Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life

and the Adam became a living being. What's interesting is that this happens on the same day. In Genesis 1, it begins, you know, a sequence and humans are made on the, humanity is made on the sixth day. You turn the page to Genesis 2, starting in chapter 2 verse 4, and it just says, you know, way back when there was no farming, should we just read it together? Sorry, let's just, just to make the point.

You know, way back when no shrubs had appeared on the earth and no plants had sprung up, Tohu Vavohu. And the Lord God hadn't set rain on the earth because, well, there's no humans there. We can't have any farming on the earth because who's not there?

Humans. Do you see how Tohu Vavohu is different at the beginning of this story? It's not wild in waste. It's like, look at this land and there's all this potential for growth, but man, who's going to produce food here? You know, humans.

Why are humans even brought into the story in Genesis 2? It's so that they can be the ones who begin to cultivate order and flourishing out of the world. So, streams come up from the earth, watered the whole surface of the ground, raw materials are there, then, here we go, the Lord God formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Okay, let's go back to our slides here.

Then you're going to have the Adam, and then he's lonely, and so God makes animals and brings them to the Adam. Now, first off, what was the sequence of things in Genesis 1? Which came first? Animals or the humans in Genesis 1? Animals, then humans, in a sequence of days. Here, it's human than animals on the same day. Oh, a contradiction in the Bible.

Stop it, stop it, right? What you're assuming is that these accounts are trying to present to you in sequential order. Do I need to say it again? I don't need to say it again. So there's something different happening here. This is a totally different depiction. Genesis 1 was a statement about God's cosmic temple. Now we're focusing in on the identity and calling of these image-bearing humans.

and it's like we're restarting the story again from Tohuvavahu and now focusing on these humans. And what's the nature of Adam? Where does Adam come from? Dust. Now how do you know that? I don't know. I mean, maybe if you could find some dust on yourself,

you're just like, really, I'm made of dust? What does that mean? And think forward in the story here. How do you know that you're made of dust? Because you turn, but you know, Grandpa dies, and we all, as a family watched, it happen. And then we all took him out to the tomb, and we put him in the tomb until his body decomposed. And then we gathered together the stuff, and we said, dust.

Humans return to dust. What are humans? We're dirt and divine breath. Right? So this Genesis 2, this is Genesis 2's way of talking about the image of God. there's something we're earthlings our origins and nature

is bound to planet earth right to the earth but at the same time we're aware of a calling and an identity of who we are that separates us from the earth are you with me here this is just human beings right

it's the existential crisis right that we're all in trying to figure out why we're here and there it is we're dirt and we're divine breath and the dust here is not trying to tell us about like the physical composition of what we're made out of. This is a statement about our nature. Do a word study on dust in the whole of the Hebrew Bible. And anytime dust and people are mentioned in the same context,

it's a statement about our mortality and how we're weak and our frail and our origins and in how we die. So I don't think we're watching a little security camera screen of what happened. Eden. Here, are you with me here? This is a narrative depiction within the world as they imagined it, a statement about not the material origins, but about the identity and function of who humans are. The same thing happens. This is the last thing we'll look at, then we'll land the plane. Similar thing that happens with the woman later on in the story. So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. While he was sleeping, God, he, he, took one of his sides and covered it with flesh.

Then the Lord God built a woman from the side. He had taken from the man, and he brought her to the man. Now, I'm messing with you, because if you know the story from most English translations, God takes one of the man's ribs. Now, I actually, I don't like doing this, but I feel like I have an obligation to. Just go read any. actually go read almost all of the informed commentators on the book of Genesis, Orthodox Christians, Jewish, neither.

And they'll all tell you that the word side right there, it's the word Selah in Hebrew, it never, ever means rib, anywhere in all of the history of the Hebrew language that that word occurs. It refers to the side of a building. It refers to the side of a hill. You can refer to the side of a stone. It's the word side. We have a normal word for it in English. It's the word. side. Right? And I don't know why. None of our English translations will translate it the way that they translated in all of the other occurrences in the Bible. But I think because they're scared, that people won't buy their translation. I really think that's what's happening here. We've been taken hostage to the debates, unfortunately. So what's the idea here? You have the human and God takes from the side and makes another one. The one that we learned about from page one, about the paired, right?

The one humanity that consists of male and female. It's the same exact image here. And notice the architectural imagery. He takes from the side and then architects and builds the woman. And then he closes up flesh. I'm not sure how we're supposed to imagine this, right, visually, but I don't think that's the point. Again, this isn't about material composition.

This is about who and what humans are in our identity and our nature. And so then you have the one humanity that's made of man and woman. There you go. So same issue, and I think the same conclusion then, does the Bible offer us a precise sequence and description of the material composition of humans in the sequence by which they came onto planet Earth. And I don't think you can honestly say from the passages we just looked at that the Bible is trying to give us that information. If I walk away from these stories, who do I believe is responsible

for the origin of humans? Who? Yeah, that's very clear. And who are humans? Humans are glorious. They're incredible image-bearing creatures with this amazing. vocation and calling. We are dirt and we're divine breath. And that's such an amazing and powerful statement in their day for reasons that we're out of time now to talk about. But do you guys see the point that I'm making here? So just like I read to you from John Walton, who says, oh, not there, but here, the seven days aren't telling us about, you know, what he's saying is essentially is the Bible saying God made the world. The Bible's not trying to tell us how exactly or how long God made the world. And I think we can make the same conclusion here, that the Bible is telling

us God made humans. How did God make humans? I don't think the Bible is trying to give us that information. And what that does to the debates is it allows the Bible to make its very, very powerful claims about who God is and who we are and what kind of world we're in. But then it also allows the scientific story to be weighed and critiqued and evaluated on its own merits. Are you with me here? And we're respecting both modes of communication and we're not trying to make them crash into each other on the level of what they're saying. So let me conclude with the illustration. On the top is one of these famous photographs from a telescope. Anybody? The Hubble. Hubble telescope. And they aimed it at a pretty dense section of

of the sky, and they pointed it at this thing called Alpha Centauri. And they found within it one of the most densest packed systems of stars and galaxies. Somewhere on the realm of 100,000 galaxies. And what are galaxies? They're not stars. Galaxies are whole systems full of planets and stars, with a hundred thousand galaxies that are themselves full of hundreds of thousands. stars and planets and so on. And so we look out there and you fall on your knees, man,

out of humility. And if you're a follower of Jesus, out of worship, and you're just like, oh my gosh, like we are dirt and divine breath. Humans are glorious, but we're just such a small piece of who God is and what God is doing. And then below, you see one of what I think is one of the greatest important modern masterpieces of the night sky the artist van go yeah starry night and i'm not an art historian or an art critic um but the people that i've read who are have all kinds of incredible profound observations about what van go is doing in this painting aesthetically what he's doing with texture and light and framing of composition uh what what he's doing to you without even knowing anything about art history, but recreating the moment that you realize that there's

something bigger, you know, and more grand, and that the night sky has this unifying, swirling reality to it that's like swallowing you up. And you also, I think, after long enough of looking at starry night, will also fall on your knees in worship and in humility. Are both of them true depictions of the world? are they both true depictions of the night sky do they describe the night sky and depict it in the same way no of course not that's their beauty and we actually would diminish starry night

if we tried to like Photoshop some of Omega Centauri you know like do you get what I'm saying here and so there you go I think that's essentially what our debates have done and that's I hope we can set ourselves on a better course for doing with these pages. I hope this has been helpful. I know I raised a ton of questions that I'd be glad to dialogue with about for a little bit,

but I'm done talking. I told you I was going to talk for a long time. Is that okay that I did that? All right.