Bible Study Genesis Part 7-Brooding

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God's Word is supreme at Chapel Ministries.

We consider it absolutely essential to a proper relationship with God.

We study it, we love it, we rely on it every minute of every day.

The following program is an edited recording of the regular Bible studies we hold.

And we decided to share these with you in the hope that you too will be able to find inspiration, encouragement, and ultimately salvation through discovering Christ in Scripture.

Our intention is to travel all the way through the Bible.

It will be a challenging journey, but one that will undoubtedly bring you to a decision.

Through this study, you will be faced with either believing or rejecting what God has said to us.

It is our intention to provide you with enough knowledge to make an informed decision about God and his word.

We strongly encourage you to listen intently and diligently, because though at the moment you may not realize it, these things are truly a matter of life and death.

In fact, these are matters of eternal life and eternal death.

Never treat what God has said lightly.

There's truly nothing more important to you.

Now join us as we seek God's will through his inspired word.

These first few verses are the ones that people are attacking.

They're trying to tell you that God doesn't know what he's talking about.

You know better, of course.

As I said, we are in Genesis chapter one.

We're still moving through these first few verses.

Hang on a second.

For some reason, my There it goes.

So we are still moving through these first few verses.

And I know it seems like we're just going round and round in circles, but I'm trying my best to establish in your mind two important foundational truths.

Number one, listen to me, this is what number one foundational truth.

God is responsible for creation and no one and nothing else.

Number two, there seems to be a purpose behind every detail that God has left us, including the fact that there are lots of details he has left out.

The fact that there is missing information is itself telling us something.

He has withheld so many specifics that it seems like that might actually be a part of the story.

There must be a reason he didn't give us the physical facts of his creative process.

Now you may be thinking, why is that so important to know?

Because so much energy has been expended trying to find things in the Bible that aren't there.

And that effort has only hurt God's processes, God's purposes.

If I can convince you that this story has a different aim than filling our heads with knowledge of the natural universe, then perhaps instead of looking for things that aren't there, you'll spend more time looking at the things that are there.

Now, before we move on to address the actual other included details of verse two, I have one more thing to say about verse one.

Though I've chosen to mention, just as a side note, though I've chosen to mention this so late in our discussion of these two verses, I don't want you to assume it's only a minor point or even less important than the ones already made.

In fact, the opposite.

This one detail found in verse one is so rich in meaning that we would be here quite a while discussing it.

That's why I'm just going to mention it here, because we don't have time to fully treat this topic.

We have an entire Bible to get through, but I am going to at least mention it.

Genesis 1:1.

Genesis 1:1

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

In the beginning, God.

Now I'll say again what I said some weeks back.

This is an immediate challenge to our faith.

God is wasting no time testing who'll stay with him and who will be scared off.

But I want to talk about God for a second.

The English word God, as you can imagine, is one of the most commonly found words in the English language Bible.

Someone has actually counted it and they say it appears 4,444 times.

At least that's the number of the King James numbers of times God is mentioned.

Now, what may surprise you is that the English word God actually translates many other original words.

That is especially true in the Hebrew.

God has several names in the language of the Jews, and those names are really quite special and meant to reveal different aspects of the character of God and his relationship to his people.

Now, in this ministry, in the past, we have taught on the names of God.

And as each one comes up in our current journey through the Bible, we will once again address those names.

Nonetheless, for the moment, let me just say that in Bible days, names were much more than just the label, they were a description.

Almost every name we encounter, especially in the Old Testament, tells us something about the person with whom that name is associated.

For example, Abraham wasn't born Abraham, he was born Abram.

His father and mother gave him the name Abram.

Well, God gave him the name Abraham.

God gave that man his name.

And he did so because he had intended to make Abraham's descendants as numerous as the stars of the heaven and as the sea, the same, and as the saying which is upon the seashore.

Abraham means, listen to me, father of many nations.

God himself gave Abraham that name because he was going to make Abraham father of many nations.

The name Abram, by the way, just means high father.

Abraham means father of many nations, because it wasn't just his name, it was his identity.

And then there's Jacob.

That name means supplanter, trickster, usurper.

But it's literally translated, listen to me, heel catcher or heel grabber, because at birth, from the womb, Jacob tried to stop his twin from being born first by, you guessed it, grabbing his heel.

He did not want his brother Esau to be born first.

He wanted to be born first.

Why?

Because the firstborn gets all the blessings, or at least the mightiest blessings in the Jewish homes.

Now we'll talk more about that when we get there.

The story of Jacob is in this book, is in Genesis, and it is vital to the whole story of the Bible.

And then there's Noah.

His name means rest, comfort, or comforting.

Then we have Moses.

Moses actually, believe it or not, the name Moses means water saved.

And everybody knows that Moses was pulled out of the river by Pharaoh's daughter.

That's why his name means water saved.

Therefore, it tracks that God's names would have this same descriptive function.

He isn't just named God in the Bible.

I mean, why would he be?

The word God is so impersonal, it's so cold, so common.

Since shortly after the garden, the word God has been thrown around so much it almost lost its meaning.

No, the name God is not a name he would chose, he would have chosen for himself, nor did he.

Where we see the word God in English, there are descriptive Hebrew words underneath.

Here in verse one, the word God, yes, we're still making this last point about verse one.

Here in verse one, the word God is translating the Hebrew Elohim.

The name Elohim, by the way, is one of the reasons many preachers don't want to teach from the Old Testament.

It's one of those words that's almost too hard to believe, too hard to teach.

In fact, the word Elohim itself is a faith test.

Once again, God is challenging us by calling himself Elohim.

He's trying to see how sincere we are when we say, Lord, I believe you.

Oh, yeah, well, what if I told you my name was Elohim?

Yeah, that makes it tough.

Believe me, as I said, we could teach on this one word for at least an hour, but I have only one thing to say about it.

You ready?

I only have one thing to say, but it's a doozy.

The word Elohim is actually in the plural.

Elohim is in the plural.

Arguably, the literal translation, the direct translation of this part of the verse could read in the beginning, God's created the heavens and the earth.

There are some that know that that's plural that thinks that God actually meant that angels created the earth.

That's not what he said.

He said, Elohim.

Because it's in the plural, people were confused.

They thought it said God's created the heaven and the earth.

Now, that's not a very accurate translation because it ignores the complexities of translating it into the English from the Hebrew language.

I'm just putting it that way to demonstrate for you what it means, to demonstrate that it is in the plural.

I'm doing so to highlight to you that Elohim is a plural proper noun.

God is challenging us with this statement.

He is referring to himself in the plural, despite also telling us things like Isaiah 44, 6.

Thus saith the Lord, the King of Israel, and his redeemer, the Lord of hosts, I am the first and I am the last, and beside me there is no God.

Or Deuteronomy 4 35, unto thee it was showed that thou mightest know that the Lord He is God.

There is none else beside him.

Or first Timothy 2.5, for there is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.

And then he even put it into his law, Exodus 22.

I am the Lord thy God, which hath brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Now again, we could go into a very long theological discussion about the significance of the word Elohim.

We could look at the grammar of the sentence that contains the word.

We could discuss the origin of the word.

We could look at similar words in similar languages.

But this is not a theology class.

This isn't seminary training.

We're simply attempting to figure out what God has to say.

Therefore, let me just come straight out and say that this word is in the plural because God wanted it to be.

But why?

Doesn't the plural form of this word discredit monotheism?

Monotheism being the belief that there's only one God.

Doesn't the plural make that difficult to square in our brains?

Well, it doesn't appear to me that God is interested in any theism, but I can tell you that he uses the plural form of this word in order to establish immediately that he was going to run this creation of his as the Trinity.

He wanted those who were reading or listening to his word read that he exists as a triune God and he will govern us as a triune God.

Triune, by the way, is a word that means, as you can probably tell, triune means three, tri in one, un, triune.

Now, this isn't three gods, this is a three-in-one God.

Now, please don't ask me to explain it any further than that because I can't.

All I can safely say is that God is letting us know with this Elohim name, which he uses a lot, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that is the Trinity, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit created the universe, and that we acknowledge and worship him as such.

Though I really want to talk more about that because I'm a little bit afraid some people may not be on board with this or may not even understand what we're talking about, but we'll have to leave that for another day.

We have addressed that in this ministry.

If you want to check some of our website recordings, maybe it's there.

But we're going to leave it for there for now.

All I was hoping for was that you see that God from the very beginning is introducing himself as a trinity.

In fact, he brings up one of the members of the Trinity in the very next verse.

Genesis 1, 2, and the earth was, the earth became without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And the Spirit of God, that's a member of the Trinity, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

We're moving on now.

Something happened to the earth, a calamity of some sort struck the earth, it became without form and void.

It was a shapeless, lifeless heap by the time verse 2 comes along.

What happened?

We don't know.

We aren't told directly, but we are told there was darkness.

Now, this, by the way, is another clue that something happened between God's creation of the earth and this moment.

We are told that there was darkness.

This means there was chaos, there was disorder.

That's the imagery the original word purposely invokes in the mind of the reader.

And the feeling we get here in verse 2 is that this darkness, this chaos, this confusion dominated.

It was everywhere.

Everywhere the spirit went, there was the darkness.

This is not how God, this is not how Elohim would create something.

God would never make anything whose dominant characteristic would be described as darkness, as chaos.

Those things have, those words have nothing to do with God.

God has nothing to do with darkness.

He has nothing to do with chaos.

Something had to have happened.

We're just not told what.

To brood means to incubate.

Now we all know what incubating is, right?

Listen to me.

Incubating is bringing out the life that is contained within.

Listen to what Jay Vernon McGee says about this.

He said when commenting on Genesis 1, 2, quote, The Holy Spirit began a ministry here, which we will find him doing again and again.

It is recreation.

He comes into this scene and he recreates.

This is precisely what he does for us, unquote.

I emphasized it, but I hope you caught the word recreate.

Now, not to insult you, but recreate means to create again.

Now that's important for you to know.

Verse two is not a part of the creation, it is the beginning of the recreation.

The brooding that the Holy Spirit was doing, the moving of the Spirit of God had a purpose behind it.

It was bringing the life that is within out.

It was preparing to revive, make alive again the creation of God.

It's all these subtle hints in the narrative that tell the full story.

And I'm hoping that I can show you that the answer to that unusual dichotomy, as we called it some time back, this disparity between the flawless creation found in verse one and the without form and void of verse two, the answer to that jarring mystery is recreation.

Listen to me.

From verse two on through the rest of this chapter and the next, God is describing a recreative process.

To get the full message of the Bible, you must understand that.

From verse two on, this isn't a creation story.

It's a recreation story.

And it begins right here.

God wastes no time.

The Holy Spirit's purposeful brooding is about to incubate.

Listen to me, bring to life, bear fruit.

The brooding is about to lead somewhere.

This brooding, you can just tell by reading verse two, has an active meaning.

The brooding, the moving, as the King James puts it, is there to trigger the life within.

The life that's down deep for some reason.

The word incubate is perfectly suited for what is about to happen.

The feeling here is that the recreation is about to pick up steam.

There is something going on that is now about to emerge.

It's exciting, it's obviously purposeful.

God, the triune God, is on a very focused mission.

And as we get to these next few verses, that feeling only intensifies.

I want you to think about that for a week, and we'll pick it up at verse 3 next time.

We hope this study has blessed you.

God's word is a great treasure, and it's our belief that a thorough, purposeful study of it will bring all of God's children to an understanding of his eternal plan of redemption.

It is our prayer that this will be so for all of our listeners.

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