Genesis 1-11 | Recap

Today's reading is from Genesis 3, 22 through 24.

Then the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become like one of us, in knowing good and evil.

Now lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever.

Therefore the Lord God sent him out from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.

He drove out the man, and at the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Today we're discussing what life is like east of Eden, a phrase that God borrowed from Steinbeck.

And it's especially appropriate after a week like this.

I was just talking briefly with some folks as they came in.

We are discussing how it feels like all of life has been politicized.

That we've been, we've put a political lens over almost every experience of our life right now.

And uh we uh I I hope that this morning can help rediscover an alternative story.

Not one that disregards politics or doesn't involve in it, but one that transcends it.

One that gives us a lens to look through, which helps us to make sense of weeks like this one.

I mean, do you remember when uh uh national news or like national emergencies were like a every three or four months thing?

They're like every it's like every week now that there's something that we're supposed to get riled up about.

So let's pray, and I'll describe this further.

Uh, and I'll describe further what we'll do this morning, but first let's pray.

Father in heaven, we praise you for the work that you are doing in our church immediately.

Lord, what a blessing to be able to announce Megan this morning.

Lord, we praise you for the work that you do in our hearts, that you continue to do.

We praise you that the good work that you have started in us, you will see through to completion.

We praise you that you give us a story that is bigger than uh what we can get through our news feeds.

And Lord, we ask that you would draw us and our hearts into that story and give us the wisdom to see your good news as the ultimate ground of our hope.

Lord, we lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Um, Edwin Friedman is this rabbi who uh wrote a couple of books that I just love.

He wrote one leadership book called A Failure of Nerve, which is really good, and another one that's about congregational leadership that I'm about three-quarters of the way through.

And every other page I think, what have I been thinking trying to lead a church without having read this book?

Um and it's about family dynamics and congregational leadership and how the family is ultimately the basis for society.

It's where we learn all our habits and all our bad habits.

And so, whether you're in a business or whether you're in a uh a church or whatever organization, they basically mirror the dysfunctions that you experience there, mirror family dysfunctions.

And so he it's a really helpful book to help sort of see those things.

And it's even had me reflect on my own life and see, oh, you know what?

There's uh things that I'm dealing with that are that are generational things that I'm dealing with.

And that's something that I think us uh Westerners don't typically think in terms of.

We typically don't think in terms of generations.

Even during John's prayer this morning, I hope that starts to bring us into that paradigm of thinking of the church as something that has a generational impact.

By investing in our children, we're we're seeing things change in a multiplicative way as it moves through history, and generations of Christians are raised up.

But he describes this one symptom that takes place in families, one dysfunction that happens often in families.

He says everyone's nervous system, he calls it, excuse me, he calls it a feeling plasma.

Families can take on the form of a feeling plasma, where nobody in it themselves is an individual.

Instead, he says, everyone's nervous system is constantly bombarded by the emissions of everyone else's.

I think that's a great description of where our nation is right now.

Everyone's nervous system is constantly bombarded by the emotions of everybody else's nervous system.

And so we're in this undifferentiated feeling plasma.

And you can see that an anxious culture breeds itself into this kind of lack of differentiation from one another.

Uh it we just absorb the anxiety of everyone around us.

I was uh I got I bought a suit for a wedding.

Cool, huh?

Yeah, yeah, it's cool.

Sometimes I have to wear suits for my job.

Uh and we uh it's like such a lame flex, I'm sorry.

The my dad bought it for me, just so we're clear.

The uh we uh anyway, I was talking with the lady who fit the suit, and she was like, I feel weird saying it, but I actually had a good 2020.

I feel so bad saying it.

And I I was like, I feel like you just put your finger on what's going on.

We're we're all so anxious because we're all so anxious.

We all had such a bad 2020 because we all had such a bad 2020.

That's not obviously some terrible things have happened, but that's not uh but the way that we've emotionally processed it um has we've adopted this stage of like a feeling plasma.

He uses this other phrase where he says, we are a panic in search of a trigger.

Yeah, I know.

We are a panic in search of a trigger.

I think that's really true.

And what's tempting is to spend our time trying to find our way out of the panic by analyzing the trigger.

The trigger isn't the problem, it's the state of panic that we're living in.

So this morning we're gonna do two things at once.

We're going to recap the first 11 chapters of Genesis.

It's probably the bigger thing.

Now, the reason we're doing that is because we're entering Genesis again next week.

We covered the first 11 chapters of Genesis at the beginning of last year.

And we're gonna be moving through the the following 10 chapters about of Genesis uh uh beginning next week.

We're gonna pick up in chapter 12.

But in looking at the first 11 chapters of Genesis, which is referred to as primeval history, we are seeing an explanation for how we as humans and humanity and culture are prone to these states of panic.

Why is it that we are so susceptible to becoming a feeling plasma that's just drawing and encouraging one another's anxiety?

And what we're going to see is an alternative narrative that we're able to live in.

So we're going to see a recap of Genesis, which is helpful at a practical level.

We're going to see that in this recap, there is a diagnosis of our current situation that I think you'll find incredibly accurate.

And when you see the accuracy of the diagnosis, I hope you'll be able to see as well that there is a thread of hope that God has woven into this story from the very beginning.

And when we see the truth of the diagnosis, we are also able to see the truth of the thread of hope that God has woven in.

We can grab onto that.

This morning we are finding our place in the story of redemption.

We're going to look at how this bigger story can change our lives.

So, are you ready for this?

First 11 chapters of Genesis, we're going to blitz.

So hang on to your hats.

Creation, the image of God, dominion, marriage, and family, fall, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood, Babel, and then we're going to look at what we've learned.

Ready?

Do it as a song.

Do it as a song.

God is the creator of everyone and everything.

Creation.

Genesis 1:1.

Genesis 1:1

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

What do we need to know about the world?

The story starts with God.

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

It didn't come from anywhere else.

None of our existence comes from anywhere other than God.

God created the heavens and the earth.

God is the center of the story, and out of the overflow of his love, he brought us into existence by the word of his power.

And the creative of the creation event is recounted to us in six days that God created the earth and all that is in it in six days.

On day one, he created light and he called it good.

On day two, he created the sea and the sky and he calls it good.

On day three, he creates land and vegetation, and he calls it good.

On day four, he creates the sun, the moon, and the stars, and he calls them good.

On day five, he creates the birds and the fish, and he calls them good.

On day six, he creates land animals and humans, and he calls it all very good.

So there's an important takeaway here.

It's all from God.

God is before all things, and he created it, which means that he didn't create it bad.

If God created it bad, that would mean we are trapped in this creation and we need to be set free from it.

But God didn't make creation bad, he made it good.

And he didn't make it neutral, which means creation is something that God could either take or leave.

And because it's not neutral or bad, that means it's not disposable.

God made creation good.

Next, the image of God, Genesis 1.27.

So God created man in his own image.

In the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them.

At the end of the six days of creation, he fashions humanity and he makes us different from the rest of creation.

He makes humans in the very image of God, which means that we are placed over creation and are at the same time a part of creation.

We are made from the mud and we have the breath of the Spirit poured into us to animate us and give us life.

So we as humans, every human that you've ever met, bears the very image of God.

Why are humans different?

Because we bear the image of God.

God Himself.

That means that there is no person that you've ever met that does not have an inherent dignity and worth.

This is why injustice stings like it does.

Why seeing death in a pack of animals versus the death of humans is so strikingly different.

It's because in humanity we all bear the image of God.

Next, dominion.

Out of this identity that God has given to us, he provides for us a role.

In Genesis 1.28, and God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

See, out of our identity, which is the image of God, God gives us a God like position of dominion over creation.

And then he commands us to live out of that identity into our role in the world, which means that we are called to continue the creative action that God started on the first six days.

That is your purpose.

God says, see this creative activity and energy that I have put into the world.

You, humanity, continue it.

Continue to cause its flourishing.

Humans are placed here with the role of creating flourishing.

This means that the world is not to be thought of like a petri dish, with humanity as the bacteria eating up all of the nutrients inside of the dish.

That is the wrong metaphor for humanity.

Humanity is the agent of flourishing in creation, so that when humans are present, everything does better.

All things grow and increase and are more fruitful and multiply, and humanity brings life and flourishing into it, beginning with our very own families.

And from there we create towns and cities and music and businesses and countries and all of these products of culture that we create.

That's part of us living out this identity.

I was listening to the Joe Rogan experience because I'm a white guy in my 20s and it's the law.

And we uh he had this guy on discussing the Amazon rainforest.

Here's a cool quick quick fact about the Amazon rainforest.

They they the soil that naturally occurs in the Amazon rainforest uh is very nutrient poor.

But there were huge swaths of human civilization that used to exist in the Amazon rainforest that cultivated their own soil.

And it's because of that human cultivation that the rainforest thrives.

Isn't that amazing?

And we think of like humans are the enemy of the natural occurrence of the rainforest.

No, humans are where rainforests come from.

I wasn't making a joke, but I'm glad it landed.

But that's just a picture of what human dominion means, right?

The main function or the the fundamental ingredient that we use, I I I keep getting text messages, I'm sorry.

Oh, it's the elders are texting.

I'm just getting real-time feedback on the sermon.

I'll try and do better.

Uh the no, it's just problems are getting solved, which is good.

Uh, they're taking dominion.

The fundamental uh the the necessary ingredient, the the foundational principle that uh that our dominion is based upon is the family.

We all come from somewhere.

None of us just appear in the world.

We're all born of parents and people.

And that takes place in a family union.

And so that becomes the one of the first things that God initiates after creation between Adam and Eve.

In Genesis 2, 24 through 25.

It says, Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh, and the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

God pulls together these two who are made in his image, Adam and Eve, and he says, You will become one, and out of this oneness, more life will be able to be generated.

And he places it in a pattern where he creates the man first, and out of the man he creates the woman.

And there's an organization of the marriage relationship where the man is to be the head, like the woman is to be the body.

And they are to support and encourage one another by Adam's leadership and protection.

Now, God is to be God over all of that, who supports Adam, who supports Eve, from them creating life.

This becomes the fundamental dynamic of existence.

From this, all other organizations and institutions come, from cities to countries, and the family dynamics go with them.

Now, what do we have?

We have a man and woman who are created and a glorious creation that provides them with all that they need.

It is all made good, and they have a role and a purpose.

Continue the glorious exploration and co-creation with God in this good place.

Make more flourishing.

Out of the same overflow that led God to create the world out of the abundance of his love, he calls humans to participate in that same abundance of love and then have the same response that he has, which is to continue creating and promoting fruitfulness.

Next, humanity falls.

In Genesis 3.24, we see the results of this fall.

It says, He drove out the man, and at the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

So Adam and Eve are deceived by the serpent in the garden.

And the serpent deceives them by saying, implying, perhaps God is not actually for your good.

Perhaps God enjoys more withholding from you than he does providing to you.

And perhaps God is not being honest with you and truthful to you, that you are made in his image.

Perhaps he is withholding from you.

Perhaps God is not telling the truth when he says that when you eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will die.

Perhaps surely you will not die, but maybe you will actually finally live.

Maybe you'll finally be like God.

The serpent deceives Eve, who then convinces Adam, and they both fall together.

In the dynamic of the fall, we see a perfect inversion of the created order.

Whereas man was to be the head of the home, protector of his wife Eve, and they were to take dominion over the creation.

Now the creation and the serpent commands Eve.

Adam stands by, unprotecting, allowing his wife to be deceived.

His wife, by the way, was not the one who received the commandment from the Lord.

It was Adam.

And Adam then has the opportunity to choose between his wife and the Lord, and he chooses his wife over the Lord.

The relational structure that was built into creation is perfectly inverted and chaos ensues.

There is a breakdown of relationship at every level.

We become alienated from God, we become alienated from creation, we become alienated among the sexes, and we become alienated even in ourselves.

We discover that we're naked and we are full of shame.

God, in that condition, does not kill Adam and Eve immediately, although death does enter the world.

Instead, he curses them at the point of their blessing, so that Eve is cursed in her reproductivity, so that there is pain in childbearing.

Adam is cursed in his labor, so that he will toil against the ground.

But in the midst of his curse to Eve, he provides this promise of a seed that will come through her and destroy the serpent.

And then he casts them out of the garden, but not without clothing them first, covering their nakedness and shame with the clothing of an animal, a sacrifice, that their shame might be covered.

Now, this breakdown in those relationships that we see with the fall also enters into the family.

Adam and Eve have children, and they have two brothers, Cain and Abel.

Now, Cain they take on these very different dispositions, but the point of what happens ultimately in the story is that murder enters into this first familial relationship.

Relationship between Cain and Abel, Abel is murdered by Cain because Cain was jealous that Abel's offering was accepted by the Lord.

The fundamental relational institution of the family is immediately broken.

And so this place of our thriving all of a sudden becomes the place of our deterioration, and that continues throughout the generations.

Now, ultimately, this continuation to it snowballs, and we see a cycle of vengeance take place on the earth, and there is a spiritual deterioration of humanity so that we only consider wickedness all the time, and violence reigns in our hearts.

And God looked down upon his creation and he thought, what do I do?

What do I do with this terrible, wicked, broken thing that causes nothing but pain?

And he says that he had regretted creating it, and so he intended to decreate it.

The waters that he had separated from the land, he would now bring back together in a flood, so that we would see a perfect inverse picture of his creational act as he deconstructs the world that he had made in an effort to wash away the sin which we had brought into it and become so completely corrupted by.

And God said to Noah in Genesis 6, 13 to 14, I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them.

Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

Make yourself an ark of gopher wood.

Now God, in his plan to destroy all things, doesn't destroy all things.

Instead, he creates a small path.

Through Noah and his family, he commands them to build an ark and to gather his family together, and they would be preserved through the judgment, so that on the other side of the flood they might find new life.

And God, instead of bringing total destruction, makes a way through the judgment that they might be saved.

Now, Noah, at the end of this, at the other side of the flood, when the flood waters receive and Noah and his family come out, God makes a covenant with Noah.

And he says, He will never flood the earth again.

He won't undo his creation ever again.

And the way that you can be certain of this, he says, is he places a rainbow in the sky right at the edge of a storm.

And then he recommends them: go forth again, be fruitful and multiply.

I will provide you with consistency.

You won't have to worry about an uncreated world anymore or a decreated world anymore.

There will be seasons where sometimes it will snow.

There will be days and cycles.

Be fruitful, multiply.

God creates a covenant, makes the symbol the rainbow, and God closes the door on Himself ever destroying the world again.

Next.

The families multiply on the earth.

And at this time they all speak the same language.

And at Genesis 11, verse 4, it says, Then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.

Genesis 11:4

Now God had always commanded them, be fruitful, multiply, take dominion of the whole earth.

Here they are saying, we will use our unity to accomplish precisely the opposite.

We instead will gather together, and instead of spreading over the whole earth, we will be gathered in one place.

And in our being gathered in one place with our one language and our one way of seeing and understanding things, we will be able to build something that reaches us up into the heavens.

You see, the human heart knows that it was designed to dwell in the heavens, to dwell where God dwells.

And so this motivation is built into the human heart.

If we could just get everybody together, if we could just get us all speaking the language, if everybody just thought the way I did, if you just understood this ideology that really colors the whole world, then we would finally be able to reach up into the heavens and we could get there ourselves, and we wouldn't need God to save us.

But God once again closes the door on the Tower of Babel.

And it gets the name Tower of Babel, which is a name that God borrowed from Mumford and Sons, where he says that he will confuse their language so that they would not be able to understand one another.

And so that this desire for a total worldwide unity that allows humanity to get to the heavens on their own, that door has been closed.

Do you hear me?

That door has been closed.

The event becomes a type for the rest of Scripture, where we see over and over again humans building kingdoms that rise up against God, saying we can do this without God.

And over and over again, those kingdoms topple.

There is no way to do this without God.

So what have we learned?

Look at how this picture maps perfectly onto our understanding of the world.

You look out and you see this good creation, especially here, like in Colorado, we have so much good creation just at our fingertips.

And you see it in your children's faces sometimes.

And you see it in your close friendships and in the enjoyment that we get out of our music and singing together.

There's this goodness that we see that's intrinsic in creation, and yet we experience a constant brokenness because we are fundamentally broken at our core.

Two opposite extremes that are true at once.

Humans in the image of God capable of such incredible things.

Humans so easily stirred up into a frenzy that we only cause destruction.

Those same creatures.

Don't you see how the Bible explains that?

How the Bible diagnoses us and explains us to ourselves.

The family as an institution and all of the structures that are built upon that institution are prone towards this disintegration.

So that we ourselves, we become pitted against each other like rival brothers, seeking to tear apart and kill one another.

All of it is broken and undone.

But through this story it runs a thread of hope.

This is what it looks like.

At the fall, when Eve is cursed, God says that there will be one that comes from her, who will destroy the serpent.

So we will no longer be under the kingdom of darkness, but instead we will be set free by the one that comes from her.

What does that mean for the reign of wickedness in the world?

It means that for a season it will be born by us.

It will be born and tolerated by God.

The wickedness will remain.

Why?

Because God closed the door on himself from just destroying it and washing it away again.

And remember, where does the wickedness exist?

In our hearts.

So in God closing that door, he preserves us.

Now, if the wickedness will not be destroyed, how can a just God continue moving and operating through the world?

And in fact, if we humans consider it for ourselves, how could we ever get to heaven?

Maybe we could get there on our own if we just unified enough and we organized the world precisely enough.

Maybe we could policy our way into the heavens.

We tried it at Babel.

We try it all the time.

But God closed that door as well.

Now look at how we're trapped.

God closed the door on justice being wiped away.

Excuse me, God closed the door on evil, on evil being wiped away by his justice.

So what hope do we have of seeing justice really take place in the world?

Which is the destruction of all sin.

And then God closed the door on our ability to save ourselves by just getting ourselves worked out and getting our institutions to reflect that.

God closed the door of that as an opportunity for salvation.

Do you see what he's done?

We're checkmated.

He has bound us all up in sin so that there is only one way by which we can be saved.

And it's him.

Both other doors are closed.

It's him.

And it's in this very thread that he is weaving through this story that we can pick up and follow.

From Noah comes Abraham.

Abraham is given a promise that through him all the families of the world will be blessed.

Through that line comes further patriarchs, the nation of Israel from the nation of Israel comes David from the line of David, enters Jesus Christ into the world.

Jesus Christ, God Himself, come down so that by him we might be saved.

This is the thread of hope that still runs through the story.

If you look out into the world and you feel that it is completely bound in an impenetrable gridlock that simply can't be thought out of or reasoned out of your right.

Jesus comes.

Father, directly by God, the good creation, just like Adam.

But instead of being deceived in the garden, Jesus remains faithful to the Lord when he is tempted by that very same serpent.

He's a better Adam.

Instead of abandoning his wife to the serpent, he protects his bride, the church, from that from the deceit of that very same serpent.

When Cain kills Abel, Abel's blood cries out from the ground for vengeance against Cain.

When Jesus, the true righteous brother, is killed, his blood cries out from the ground for our salvation, so that by him we might be saved.

When evil reached a climax and God washed it away, it is the ark that carried his people through the judgment so that they might be preserved.

Jesus is our ark that carries us through the judgment of God so that our hearts might be preserved.

When Adam dies in the garden, Jesus takes on that death that is entered into the world, so that by faith in him we will never have to die.

Unlike the Tower of Babel, Jesus doesn't ask us to build our way up into the heavens.

Instead, he comes down from the heavens so that he might bring heaven into the earth.

So that the earth will not be thrown away, but it will be redeemed.

Remember, creation was made what?

Which means God isn't getting rid of it.

Sin will not have the last laugh.

The destruction that we see in our culture and in our world will not be final.

The decisive battle has been fought on the cross.

The judgment, whose only analogy is the washing away of all sin, like the flood, has taken place, and by Christ we might be preserved through it, brought through to the other side to have new life.

Creation was made good.

Sin will not have the last laugh.

Look at how the Bible describes the world we're in.

Look at the thread of hope that's woven into it.

Look at how it connects to Christ.

Grab hold of that thread of hope and follow it through this dark world.

You'll see that the light will begin to show.

Because he is seeking to accomplish his redemption in it.

It is not.

Let our church grab hold of the thread of hope that you have woven into this story.

Let us see the decisive battle on the cross.

Let us rest our faith in Jesus.

And through that, let us take peace and hope for the world that we're in.

Let us not understand it naively.

Let us see the depth of despair that is real.

Oh Lord, but your grace is enough.

Your grace is more.

Let us take hope in that and worship you.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.