_{Handout 16}

The Bible’s View of Creation & the Cosmos – Conclusions & Non-negotiables

A. How We Read the 1st Account and the 2nd Account of Creation in Genesis:

There are plausible reasons for reading them somewhat differently, as different genre.

To summarize what we have argued in previous handouts:

1. There are two accounts of creation in Genesis 1 & 2. The 1st account includes all seven of the ‘numbered’ days, and thus includes and concludes with Gen 2:3, the establishment of the Sabbath.

   The 2nd account begins with Gen 2:4, and runs until the end of chapter 4.

2. The rest of the Bible, including the New Testament, takes everything in the 2nd account of creation (Gen 2:4–4:26) in a very straight-forward manner. The rest of the Bible bases theological arguments on that straight-forward reading. In the professor’s judgment, there is no compelling reason for Christians to do otherwise. I take Adam & Eve to be the literal parents of the human race.

3. But on the other hand, there are reasons for reading Genesis 1 as something other than a scientifically precise or chronologically strict account of creation. In recent years, conservative scholars have pointed out the following:

   • Genesis 1 is highly structured with considerable repetition and cadence. Nothing else in the Old Testament is like it.

   • Genesis 1 (including Gen 2:1–3) should be read, not through the lens of 21st century science, but through the lens of the ancient Near East in the time in which it was written (around 2,000 – 1,500 BC).

   • There is a perceptible difference in genre between the 1st and the 2nd accounts of creation in Genesis. Readers in the time of Moses would have recognized that difference.

4. However, Genesis 1 is not(!) poetic. It cannot be dismissed as merely figurative, symbolic, or legendary.

   In Sum: The rest of the Bible takes the 2nd account of creation in Genesis in a very straight-forward manner. But there are viable reasons to conclude that the 1st account of creation might not be intended to give us a scientific or chronologically precise account of creation. Rather, its intention was to tell us some very fundamental things—true things(!)—about God and the cosmos / the created order.

B. Regarding God & the Cosmos / the Created Order – the Fundamentals:

1. The Bible begins with, “In the beginning, God . . .”. The existence of God is everywhere assumed in the Bible, and is the fundamental fact of the universe.

2. There is no hint of any other ‘god’, spirit, or power involved. There is no talk of ‘gods’; it is always & only “God,” one God.

3. Everything in the cosmos goes back to that one & only God (note esp. Gen 2:1). There is nothing that has independent existence apart from God. [Satan does not exist independently; he is a created being. Evil is not a self-existent force.] In Genesis there is no description of any self-existent primordial soup (“chaos”) from which ‘God’ somehow arose.

4. The creation of an orderly universe, sustained by God’s will & power, provides a basis for science.

   In a previous handout (H/O #13), we quoted several passages that support this idea. Among them were: Genesis 1; Genesis 8 (God’s pledge to Noah); Prov 25:2; Jer 33:23–26; Col 1:15–17; and Hebrews 1:1–3.

C. Regarding the Nature & Character of God

• Don’t miss: Direct creation of the cosmos by an act of God’s will ⇒
• The orderliness, complexity and diversity in the universe reflects . . .
• How is God’s creation repeatedly described in Genesis 1?

• Similarly, after God created the animals and the humans, He . . . [See also(!): Jer 32:41. ]

  Q: Why??

  Ans.:

D. Regarding the Age of the Universe . . . the professor leans toward . . .

• There are viable reasons for reading Genesis 1 as something other than a scientifically precise or chronologically strict account of creation. If that is the case, then we are not bound to maintain that the cosmos was created in six literal 24-hour days.

• The professor leans toward old earth / old universe.

• But not macro-evolution, i.e., not the formation of new species from old.

E. Regarding Human Nature, and How We Relate to God:

• The creation of human beings is special and is discrete from the rest of nature. Therefore, thorough-going macro-evolution–in which humans are simply the current stage of a randomized process of natural selection governed by natural forces, to the exclusion of any divine intervention–is utterly incompatible with the biblical account of creation.

• Adam was “created” (Gen 1:27), yet he is also described as having been “formed” from the earth (Gen 2:7), by a direct act of God. Eve was taken bodily from Adam (Gen 2; 1 Cor 11:8; 1 Tim 2:13).

• God made a monumental decision . . .

• Humans were created well; we were “good.” Not __, but __.

• The ‘fall’ was a real event in human history (Gen 3). It is not just a story that was told to explain some aspects of human life. There was a substantial change in our nature, and a radical change in our relationship with God, as a result of the first sin.

• Again, the doctrines of our creation in God’s image + the fall & its effects are major(!) elements in our view of human nature, and of our understanding of salvation.

• Yet significantly, after the first sin . . .