Lecture

The aim of this course is to trace the history of God’s kingdom or the history of God’s rule or the history of God’s will upon the earth, and the aim of this particular lecture is to show how Genesis 1 relates to that history.

But perhaps before jumping into the particulars of our course, it might be well for me to back up and say a word of introduction concerning the work of theology. It is the work of the theologian to take particulars and to group them into universals. It is the work of the biblical theologian to take the particulars of God’s revelation and to synthesize them into larger universals of thought. It is the nature of the human mind as God created it to take particulars and to synthesize them into universals. Perhaps I can illustrate the nature of the mind and hence the nature of the work of theology from a homey illustration.

When my youngest son, Jonathan, turned three, I began to call on him at the breakfast table to pray. Now John prayed indeterminably long; he never seemed to conclude his prayers. And moreover, to compound the problem, I didn’t understand what he was saying half of the time. And so, one morning I told the family that we’re going to allow John to pray himself out. I felt badly that I was violating his dignity, and so John was going to pray until he said, on his own, “In Jesus’ name, amen.”

On this particular morning, I kept my eyes open to see what he was doing, and to my surprise, I discovered that he was praying with his eyes wide open. He was studying the entire table, and he would start off, “Thank you for my egg. Thank you for Steven’s egg. Thank you for Susan’s egg. Thank you for mother’s egg. Thank you for daddy’s egg.” And then having gotten all the eggs, he then said, “Thank you for my orange juice. Thank you for Steven’s orange juice. Thank you for Susan’s orange juice. Thank you for mother’s orange juice. Thank you for daddy’s orange juice.” And then came the toast and then came the forks and then came the knives, and finally when he could see nothing else on the table except the saltshaker and the pepper shaker he said, “Thank you for the saltshaker. Thank you for the pepper shaker.” And when he could see nothing else, he said, “In Jesus’ name, amen.”

A year later, like the rest of us, he had taken these particulars and grouped them into universals. Now that is the nature of the human mind and that is the nature of the work of the theologian. He takes the particulars of the revelation and he groups them together into universals.

Now one can see quite readily here that the grand question of theology is What is the ultimate universal that brings it all together? And as one might expect, theologians have differed on this ultimate universal. Of course, there are some that say that there is no ultimate universal, but if we believe that the Bible is given to us by one mind, it seems quite plausible, and I believe it will be demonstrable that there is an ultimate universal that brings all of revelation together.

If one wishes to study or to have a summary statement of the views of theologians concerning these ultimate universals, I would commend to your reading the book by Gerhard Hasel entitled Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate. And in this work, published by Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1972, he has a chapter entitled “The Center of the Old Testament and Old Testament Theology” (pages 49–64), and here he summarizes the views of varying theologians as they seek to determine the ultimate universal of Scripture.

For myself, I find myself in harmony with men like Van Selms who speaks of the rule of God or with men like Eichrodt who speaks of the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth. I believe that the center, the ultimate universal of the Old Testament can be seen in the model prayer of our Lord. When He taught His disciples to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That is, God’s name today is being tarnished because His rule and His will is not being affected. The world today is filled with blood and tears and calamity, and the unbelieving world calls into question the ability of God to rule if He exists. They say Where is God in the light of all of this calamity? God’s name will be sanctified and hallowed when His rule is affected upon earth.

The Bible is really a story of the establishment of God’s kingdom, rule, and will upon the earth. To me this is the center of the Old Testament. I like the way Eichrodt expressed it. He said it is “the story of the irruption of the kingdom of God.” Now we must be careful how we spell this word irruption. He did not say eruption. That is e-r-u-p-t-i-o-n, which would be the breaking out from within, as an eruption on the skin. But rather Eichrodt is speaking of the irruption—i-r-r-u-p-t-i-o-n—the breaking in from without. It is the breaking in the establishment from above of the heavenly rule.

Now a sub-universal, a sub-reality, a part of this ultimate universal of the establishment of God’s rule is that man is rebelling against God’s rule. In fact, God’s rational creatures, created with a will are rebelling against this rule and, as a result, God is judging them for their sin, for their revolting against His established, moral, ethical rule. But the reality is that in the midst of this judgment upon man for his revolt against His rule, is the reality that God is saving man and carrying His program along toward the ultimate consummation of His kingdom upon earth. Von Rad speaks of this stepping in of God and saving man in the midst of his sin and judgment as the “salvation history.” It is God affecting salvation in the midst of judgment as part of His program of establishing finally His perfect kingdom upon the earth.

Today we will be looking at Genesis 1, the creation account, and even here we shall see that it is a story of God affecting salvation as part of His program toward His kingdom in the midst of judgment. However, before looking at Genesis 1 explicitly, it might do us well to see this account of the creation as part of the larger framework of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, for throughout these early chapters of Genesis, we are being taught this basic truth or reality that in the midst of judgment because of man’s sin, God is affecting salvation and carrying His program along.

For example, in Genesis 2, upon the creation of man, God immediately imposes His will, His rule upon him. We read in Genesis 2 that Yahweh, God, took the Adam, took the man whom He had created and put him into the garden in the area of Eden, which He had prepared, and the King James says, “to till it and to keep it” (v. 15). From my own part, I’m in agreement with Cassuto’s commentary here, Umberto Cassuto, who reads here that “He put man in the garden for serving and for keeping.” That is, He put man in the garden to carefully serve Him, to scrupulously observe His rule. For in the next verse, immediately God puts man under His rule, and we read in verse 16, “And the LORD GOD commanded the man . . .”1 Immediately here we have the expression of God’s rule, of God’s will. It’s a primitive Torah. It’s a primitive law.

There is a positive command and there is a negative command. The positive commandment is “of every tree of the garden you shall eat.” It is a commandment to man to enjoy the banquet table of life. But there is also a negative commandment, and the negative commandment is “but of the tree that gives one the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat, for in the day you eat thereof, you shall surely die.”

The temptation of man here is to refuse his creatureliness, refuse in childlike faith to live his life under the propositional, verbal expression of the will of God. Instead of accepting his creatureliness in childlike simplicity, obeying the will of God, he is tempted to step outside the will of God and to eat of the knowledge of the tree of good and evil. Now when the Bible speaks of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it is using a merism; that is, a statement of opposites to indicate totality. That is good and evil are opposites to indicate moral decisions. Man will be tempted to decide on his own what is good and what is bad. He will make up his own law. He will make up his own rules. Very similar to the humanistic manifesto which says, “Away with special revelation. Away with the heavenly law. We will decide on our own what is right and what is wrong.” Adam revolts against the rule of God and he partakes of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. He steps outside of the will of God, and he will decide on his own what is right and what is wrong. As a result, man dies. He is consigned to wearisome toil and inevitable death, for man can never find out absolute moral law without the special revelation from God. And as a result, he’s consigned to this wearisome toil and inevitable death.

But in the midst of this judgment, God affects salvation. He sacrifices an animal and He provides man with a covering—covering his shame and his guilt, which has alienated him from God and alienated him from one another. That is, in the midst of the judgment, God affects salvation as part of His process of continuing His program upon the earth rather than totally destroying the man.

In chapter 4, sin has progressed to the point of fratricide. It is the account of Cain’s attempt to murder his brother Abel. He is well aware that he is doing wrong. Sin is crouching at the door. Sin, dismissing God’s standards for him, is crouching at his door, but he revolts, he rebels, and as a result he is judged, and this judgment takes the form that he is banished from the arable, fertile land and he is consigned to a life of urbanity or city living. He’s a picture of the great mass of humanity today who, revolting against God, are consigned to urbanity and to civilization—a horizontal life, but with no vertical dimension relating them to God.

But even in that judgment, separated from God, there is still a token of salvation, a token of grace, and God puts a mark upon his forehead and takes even the rebel into a mysterious relationship allowing him to live out his life. But once again, in the midst of judgment, there is salvation.

We now move on to the famous flood story in chapters 6–9 of Genesis and now sin has leavened the lump to the point that every imagination of man’s heart is evil continually. As a result of his sin, God now destroys the human race in the form of a flood. But even in the judgment of the flood, there is still the work of salvation, for on top of the flood, there is an ark and in that ark are eight lives. In that ark rides the hope of God and the hope of man as God is continuing His program of salvation to affect His rule in the sparing of their lives.

But now we come to the famous Tower of Babel story in chapter 11. Once again, man reproduces and multiplies, but now we find man in a titanic, self-assertion against the rule of God. Instead of obeying God’s command of spreading out over the face of the earth and finding peace by submitting to His law written upon their hearts, man says We will have peace. We will have utopia apart from God. The symbol of their rebellious unity is the Tower of Babel, and the strength of their unity is their common language. The UN building today, it seems to me, is a long shadow of the Tower of Babel. It is a renewed expression of man’s design to have peace without the rule of the Prince of Peace. We will have peace without God.

As a response to this titanic, self-assertion of society now against God, God takes the gift of language—a gift given to man to reduce the earth to order—God takes that gift and confounds it so that man is alienated from one another. We now have, as man is alienated from one another, the beginning of nations, races, and ethnic groups. Man now is alienated from God and alienated from one another and the grimmest product of civilization will now emerge in warfare of nation against nation and kingdom against kingdom.

But the question arises, Where now is God’s new act of salvation to carry on His program? That would take us to Genesis 12. Out of the community of nations, God chooses one man—Abraham—and He designs purposes from this one man to create a new nation—the nation of Israel, which will be His new instrument to affect salvation in the community of nations. And He says to Abraham, “I will make you into a great nation” (v. 2 NASB), and then He gives that nation the commandment to “be a blessing” in the midst of the nations.

So one can see that throughout these early chapters of Genesis we have this basic theme, this basic universal that God, in the midst of judgment, is affecting salvation as part of His program of bearing His rule along to its final destiny. Now we will contend that even in the creation account, this theme is present, that the story of the creation is a story of God affecting salvation.

Now in order to see this clearly, we must rightly exegete the first two verses of Genesis where we read, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Now in order to rightly understand the theology of the passage and the point of the passage, we must rightly decide the relationship between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.

The relationship of these verses depends on our understanding of the conjunction and. I suppose the most popular way of exegeting or understanding this and is to take it as a simple conjunctive and. That is, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and this is the way the earth was when He created it at that time. It was chaotic. I think immediately we see a problem with this exegesis; that is, how could one say that God created chaos? “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and in the very first stage it was chaos. This would do violence to the Hebrew word translated “create,” bara, for everywhere else the word indicates a final, finished, perfect product from the hand of the Creator. Nowhere else is the word used for an unfinished product. Can you imagine saying to an artist as you looked at his painting, You’ve created chaos? And this deeply troubled the Jewish exegetes even in the intertestamental period, for they asked the question, How could one say God created chaos? Now I believe there is a better explanation.

A second way of understanding our passage is to understand the and as a sequential and. That is, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” and then the earth became waste and void. This interpretation is traditionally known as the Gap Theory; that is, there is a long period of time between verse 1 and verse 2. He created it perfect (verse 1) and then after some time, the earth became chaos.

Now the Hebrew possibly could be so interpreted. However, in my judgment, this would be a most strange use of the conjunction and in Hebrew. In the Hebrew language, there are two forms of and—one is and, which is more conjunctive; the other is a sequential and. If the writer intended sequence here, I would certainly have expected him to use the sequential and known more technically as the vav-consecutive. But he does not use the vav-consecutive here, and hence, I think it’s best that we give up this exegesis of the passage.

A third way of understanding it is to take it as an apodosis vav; that is, one would read the verses in this fashion. When God began to create the heavens and the earth, this is the way the earth was. This is the viewpoint of Speiser in the Anchor Bible Series of Genesis. That is, verse one is the protasis, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth,” and verse 2 is the resolution, the apodosis, “Then this is the way the earth was.” This is possible; again, however, it would violate the Masoretic, the traditional punctuation of our text. I would not expect to have a strong disjunctive accent at the end of verse 1, which is now found in the received text. So therefore, I don’t think we ought to go with an interpretation that violates the traditional punctuation of the passage.

There’s a fourth way of interpretation, which I prefer, and that is to take verse 2 and the and as a disjunctive and. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now this was the way the earth was.” This interpretation finds support if we take seriously the expression, “the heavens and the earth.” The expression, “the heavens and the earth” is a merism, a statement of opposites to indicate totality in the same way as I explained the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” is a statement of opposites to indicate total moral rule. “The heavens and the earth” is a Hebrew way of saying, In the beginning God created the organized universe. The heavens means the firmament and this moon, the sun, and the stars—everything associated with them. The earth pertains to the geology, the vegetation on it, the creeping things, the beasts, and man.

Verse 1 then I think is best understood as a summary statement to be exegeted to be developed in the remainder of the chapter. That is, we read In the beginning God created the cosmos. God created the organized universe as we know it. There is then in our text a summary statement at the beginning and a summary statement at the end of the creation account, for in chapter 2 in verse 1, we find the exact same expression. “Thus,” that is after God had worked these six days, “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended His work.” When did God create the heavens and the earth? In the beginning or over the first six created days? So I take it that verse 1 of chapter 1 is a title, a summary statement to be explained.

That means then that verse 2 is our chronological starting point. Now this is the way the earth was when God began His program of saving the earth. We are told the earth was chaotic (verse 2): “Now the earth was without form and void.” The Genesis account then is a relative beginning of the earth’s history. It doesn’t tell us about the creation of the angelic beings. It doesn’t tell us anything about the fall of Satan. When we begin the account, evil is already present and chaos is already present. It is an account of God stepping into this chaotic ruin and affecting salvation by establishing the cosmos, an organized beautiful world in which He will continue to carry out His program of salvation.

Now we’re told that when He started out, there were three conditions present in the earth. Now the earth was first without form and void. The Hebrew reads here “it was tohu wa-bohu.” That is, I take it to be sort of an itacism that is something like our hotsy-totsy, hunky dory, hanky panky. It was tohu wa-bohu; it was utter chaos. More strictly speaking, tohu means it was without form and bohu means it was without life. It was chaos.

Secondly, we are told that it was dark. “There was darkness upon the face of the deep.” Now it seems to me that something is wrong with planet earth when we begin the account. Where anyplace else that we pick up this tohubohu, as in Jeremiah 4:34 and Isaiah 34:11, it indicates that a world has come into a state of judgment. It has been ruined. It is difficult for me to believe that at the very beginning God created chaos. It seems to me rather that something dramatic and catastrophic had happened in the universe’s history. Moreover, not only is it chaotic, but we are told that there was darkness upon the face of the tehom or the deep or the sea.

It is interesting to note in this connection that in the new heaven and new earth, the new universe at the end time, John tells us that there will be no sea there. If you wish to see this, you may turn with me to Revelation 21:1 where John and the seventh and last thing that he sees says, “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth . . .” That is, a new cosmos. “. . . for the first heaven and the first earth [in which we are living were] passed away,” and the note, “and there was no more sea.” In the idealized, perfect universe to come, there is no sea. But here when I pick up the creation account, it is all watery, abysmal sea where man cannot live. Moreover, I’m told that in that new universe to come, there will be no night. For we’re told of the New Jerusalem that will come, and we read in Revelation 21:25, “And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day, for there shall be no night there.” In the perfect universe, there will be no sea and there will be no night, but when I pick up the creation account it is all sea and all darkness. It seems to me, therefore, that there is something wrong with planet earth at this time.

Not only are we told that it is chaotic and there was darkness upon the face of the deep, but thirdly we’re told that the created, saving Spirit of God was working there already, preparing this chaos for His salvation which will come, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. The question then immediately arises How did the earth get this way? Why is it dark and chaotic? Is it conceivable that it was eternally this way? No, because the Bible makes it clear that God created all things and brought it into existence. He also, we’re told in Isaiah 45, created the darkness.

We would raise the question theologically When did evil enter this universe? And the answer to that question, I believe, is found in Ezekiel 28:11–19. I’d like you to turn with me for a moment to Ezekiel 28 where, I believe, we have an account of the origination of evil in our universe, which I presume took place before Genesis 1. We read in 28:11 in this oracle against the king of Tyre, “Moreover, the word of the LORD came unto me saying, ‘Son of man, take up a lamentation over the king of Tyre.’”

Now who is the king of Tyre upon whom this lament is pronounced? I believe for three reasons that the king of Tyre is the one whom in later theology will be called Satan or the devil. The first reason I believe that this oracle refers to Satan is because of the argument of the passage. We’re told in chapter 28, verse 2, that he would first take up an oracle against the prince of Tyre (28:2) and now in 28:12, he’s to take up an oracle against the king of Tyre. Now if it was merely the change of terminology from the prince of Tyre (v. 2) to the king of Tyre (v. 12), it would not warrant the assumption that we are dealing with two different personages. But as one studies the context, one discovers, as McKay put it in the Christian Quarterly Review (1934) that the gulf between the prince of Tyre and the king of Tyre is as wide as the gulf between earth and heaven, for the prince of Tyre is a human aspiring to deity, but the king of Tyre is a cherub who will be dethroned and rejected from his heavenly position. For example, in 28:2, to see that he is truly human, we read, “Son of man, say unto the prince of Tyre, ‘Thus saith the LORD GOD: “‘Because thine heart is lifted up and thou hast said, “I am a god, I sit in the seat of God in the midst of the seas,” yet thou art a man, and not God, though thou set thine heart as the heart of God.”’”’” And at the end of the oracle, we read in verse 9, “Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth thee, ‘I am God?’ But shalt be a man, and no god in the hand of him that slayeth thee. Thou shalt die the deaths of the uncircumcised by the hand of strangers; for I have spoken it, saith the LORD GOD.’”

Contrast those predicates with this statement about the king of Tyre, describing him. We’re told, for example, in verse 14, “Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth . . .” That is, you are the one that overshadows the throne of God and I have made you so. We’re told that was upon the mountain of God. In Semitic mythology, it was thought that the divine beings dwelt on a mountain in a far north. And Ezekiel was saying that this one was in the very company of God, for he was dwelling upon that, using metaphorical language, upon that mythological mountain in the very presence of God. “Thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire,” and you know elsewhere in Ezekiel God is associated with fire and when God came down there was a sapphire stone under His feet.

So this is an account of the fall of the Satan. I believe that the king of Tyre in Ezekiel 28 is Satan not only because of the argument of the passage, but because in Semitic theology, the king of the city ultimately was the god. The name of the Tyrian God is Melqart. Two Semitic words: mel meaning “king”; qart meaning “city.” One knows the name “city” from the Punic colony, Carth-age–new city.

The name of the Tyrian god is Melqart, king of the city, so that when Ezekiel says take up this lament about the king of Tyre, his contemporary hearers would have immediately thought of the god of the city. We know from Deuteronomy 32 and from 1 Corinthians 10:20 that these gods were demons. Deuteronomy 32:17, “They sacrificed unto devils, not to God . . .” Paul says, “the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils.” So the god of the city is a devil, is a diabolical person, and as one reads this passage, it seems as though the one portrayed here is the devil par excellence, Satan.

I believe the king of Tyre is Satan not only because of the argument of the passage and because the Tyrian god was known as the king of the city, but thirdly, because Paul in 1 Timothy 3:6, interprets the king of Tyre to refer to Satan. He says in 1 Timothy 3:6 one is not to appoint a novice to the office of an elder, lest his heart be lifted up with pride and “he fall into the condemnation of the devil.” The only passage I know that speaks of the fall of Satan as due to his pride is found in this passage. This one was rejected because his heart was lifted up with pride. For example, we read in [Ezekiel 28] verse 17 of this king of Tyre, “thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty; thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness.” So I take it therefore that Paul interprets the king of Tyre to refer to Satan. I may add here parenthetically from myself, I do not believe Isaiah 14 refers to Satan. The only passage then that speaks of Satan’s fall in the Old Testament is Ezekiel 28 and Paul interprets this passage to refer to Satan.

The sin of Satan then was his pride. When this occurred in history, I do not know, but I believe it occurred before Genesis 1. Sometime in the eons past, Satan, though created blameless, morally perfect, developed a way of thinking in which he thought of himself better than the rest of the creation. He left the mind of God. It was the mind of God to put others first. It was the mind of Christ not to grasp for Himself, but to give and to save. But somewhere in the ages past, a new mind originated, a mind that looked down on others, sought the position to be grasped after, and exploited it. I suppose, though I do not think I can validate it conclusively by an exegetical method, it seems to me plausible that when this new mind came into the universe, sin and death entered the universe, and we find this chaos.

The story then of Genesis is God’s taking this chaos and saving it into a cosmos. On the first three days, He overcomes the tohu, the chaos; on the next three days, He overcomes the bohu, the lifelessness. That is, on the first day, He separates the light from the darkness, and we have temporal separation—light from darkness. On the second day, He begins His spatial separation. He separates the firmament from the waters. But God doesn’t say it’s good because the spatial separation is not complete because man cannot live in just air and water. On the third day, He consummates the spatial separation by separating the dry land from the water, and now that we have the three life-supportive systems present—the air, the water, the land, God says, “It is good.” And then He creates the vegetation. On the next three days, and yet parallel to the first three, He overcomes the lifelessness. On the fourth day, parallel to the creation of the light, he creates the luminaries, and now the sun and the moon and the stars move across the sky and man has a calendar by which to reckon history, for the Bible is the historical process of the establishment of God’s rule. On the fifth day, parallel to the creation of the water and the air on the second day, God fills the waters with fish and He fills the air with birds, and He overcomes the lifelessness. On the sixth day, parallel to the dry land, He creates beasts and finally as the climax of all, He creates man.

So then, it is an account of God’s saving history. God steps into the chaos and He saves it, and with the creation of man, we begin the grand story of the establishment of God’s rule through man, which will be consummated in the Son of Man who will establish God’s rule finally and perfectly on earth.