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Genesis 1 - Made in God's image
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Genesis 1 - Made in God's image
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Genesis is a foundational book in the Bible, written by Moses. It contains stories of faith and heritage passed down through oral tradition. Moses had outside resources when writing Genesis. The audience was the descendants of Abraham, the Israelites. Genesis starts with the creation of the heavens and the earth by God. The Hebrew word for "create" signifies creation out of nothing. The Trinity is emphasized in the word for God used in Genesis. The Messianic Jews believe the first word of Genesis signifies the creation of two worlds. The Spirit of God hovers over the waters in creation. The darkness over the deep represents resistance to God. The day in Hebrew culture starts in the evening. The word for day in Hebrew can mean a period of light, 24 hours, or a general time. The age of the earth is not a doctrinal issue. Creation is a mystery with more questions than answers. God separates the waters and creates an expanse. The earth before Noah had a vapor-like greenhouse effect Hey! Welcome to Biblically Wired. I'm your host, I'm Barb. Today we're going to see if Genesis 1 can rock our world and dig into this foundational piece. I do want to say just a bit about Genesis. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are called the Torah. So this is the five books, also called the Pentateuch, that are the foundational books of the Jewish religion, hence roots of our Christian faith that are extremely valuable to know. Genesis was written by Moses probably about 1450 BC, so quite a bit after creation, and it was written from mostly oral tradition. So back in this time, there was plenty of population. At the time that Moses would have written this, there was well over two million Jews, and they mostly learned their heritage through oral tradition, which meant that they learned and studied and practiced the stories of their faith, and they passed it on to the next generation. Now when Moses wrote the five books of the Pentateuch, he also had some sort of outside resources. We see him say here and there in his writing, he will use the word, this is the account of this and that, or this is the account of so and so. And in those cases, we assume it is most likely an outside resource written by maybe Adam, Abraham, Noah, or one of Noah's sons, maybe. These stories were commanded to be written down. Two times in Exodus, God commands Moses to write things down. Interesting too that God had prepared him so well. He was educated in the courts of Egypt as he grew up in the Pharaoh's house. His education is seen in his writings. His writings are absolutely, monumentally brilliant. And if you look at the framework of a lot of his writing and the way he emphasizes things by certain patterns and numbers, it is truly incredible. So his authorship of Genesis was verified by other writers and prophets, Joshua, Kings, Judges, and Malachi. All of them attribute the authorship of Genesis to Moses. Jesus affirms in Matthew 8 that Moses wrote the first five books. Genesis is quoted 165 times in the New Testament and over 200 if you count all the repeats. Basically, without Genesis, none of the Bible would make sense. So this is imperative that we have a good picture of what Genesis is. The audience of Moses was the Israelites that were the descendants of Abraham. So they have a foundation for creation, mankind, the fall, separation from God, and much more. Whenever we start reading a new book in this podcast, we're going to go over who the audience was. The more background we know on the audience, the better we can interpret the book. So we're going to start in Genesis here, verse one, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Most portions of the Bible we can get through quite quickly. But this verse, many books can be written about this verse. And that is because of the Hebrew in this verse. So the word for create is bara, B-A-R-A in English. It's a Hebrew word that means create, fashion, or shape. But it can only be used with God as the subject because it means something that is created out of nothing. God used no existing material to create the world. He created bara out of nothing. So God is separate from creation. If the universe perished, God would remain. For the word God here in this first sentence, Moses uses the word Elohim. Most the time in the Old Testament, God is called Yahweh. But right here, he is called Elohim. Elohim is a Hebrew word for God. It is a singular word with a plural meaning. So right here, when Moses uses the word God, he's emphasizing the Trinity. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now, it's the word beginning here that will blow your mind. And this is the word that they could write books on, as I have said. The Messianic Jews bring much to this first word in the Torah or Bible. Messianic Jews are Jews that are born again, just like us. There are brothers and sisters in faith, but they've been raised in the Jewish culture. The word for in the beginning is pronounced Barashit. So I'm not always going to pull us over for a long dialogue on a Hebrew word, but this is important. You can watch hours of videos on this if you want to. So in a nutshell, this first word, Barashit, starts with a bet. That is the second letter in the Hebrew alphabet, also called the number two. So to the Jewish people, it signifies that God was creating two worlds. The first one, which we are living in today, and the one to come when Jesus reigns in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem is the capital of the world. This is going to happen in the millennial reign. So Barashit in its fullness is like a seed with all the future knit in it, similar to our DNA, which has all our future, all our body processes already knit into it. So this means that when God was creating our world, his focus ultimately was on the second world, where Jesus will reign, and we will be serving him. For a thousand years in the millennial reign, Jesus will be on his throne, and we will be on earth, literally close to Jesus. It's mind-blowing. This letter, Beh, also in the beginning, also signifies blessing, and the root of the word is head. So the first verse to the Hebrews would read, at the head of all things, before anything else was, God, who already existed, created the heaven and the earth out of nothing. I'm going to say that one more time. So the first verse to the Hebrews would read, at the head of all things, before anything else was, God, who already existed, created the heaven and the earth out of nothing. That is incredible. Okay, moving on to verse two. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. So we have a few things going on here in just the beginning of creation. Things will clip along a bit faster after this second verse, but I want to point out that this darkness that was over the surface of the deep is to be believed as the enemy. So we know Satan was cast out of heaven as he longed to be God. He wanted to be worshiped, and here this darkness that's over the surface of the deep is expressing resistance to the Spirit of God that was moving over the surface of the waters. So the hovering that the Spirit of God was doing is its act of creation. The Holy Spirit, one of its main roles in the Trinity, is to create and recreate. Right here, this verb signifies a vibrant moving, a protective hovering. So there was something coming against the work of creation that the Spirit of God was protecting. It's interesting to me because in Christian tradition, we say that a third of the angels followed Satan out of heaven when he was cast out. This is from the way they had read Revelations chapter 12, verse 4. And about this red dragon that is Satan, it says, And his tail swept away a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she gave birth, he might devour her child. I personally think that's a stretch in my mind. I have to do more research. But there are many Christian traditions that just kind of tumult through the ages. An example is the wise men. There's nowhere in the Bible that says there was three wise men. And the most likely thing is that the wise men came in a caravan because they were bringing so many valuable gifts. And almost nobody would travel without protection in the desert at that time. We see in verse 5, God called the light day and the darkness he called night. And there was evening and there was morning one day. Notice that the day in the Hebrew culture starts in the evening. There was evening and there was morning one day. So right here, the word day is yom, y-o-m in English. The Hebrew word here for day gives scholars or novices or new readers or whoever, the impression each day was definitely a period of time. But that period of time can be explained three ways. It can be the period of light as opposed to the darkness. It can mean the period of 24 hours. Or it can be a general vague time, almost a process more than anything. So that word yom gives credence to anybody's guess on how old the earth is. I know there's a lot of people that are very staunch about different ideas regarding how old the earth is. But it really isn't a doctrinal issue. And there's not really any reason for us to fight about it as it is not determined. There is a theologian named Morris, and you can study his stuff. And he studied Genesis for probably most of his life. And I love what he says about Genesis 1 and creation. He says that there are more questions than answers in the story of creation. The best way to read it is to appreciate what it says and enjoy the fact we get what we get. There doesn't need to be a lot of interpretation. And I think that's pretty valuable insight. So verse six, God says, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters. And he separated the waters from the waters. The reason I wanted to highlight this portion is because God made the earth before Noah to be protected with this vapor-like wet greenhouse type effect. And that meant the plants would be watered from below the earth. And it meant the air was very moist. People could live a long time because the sun was not bearing down on them so terribly. And reptiles could grow very big. So the earth before Noah was different than the earth we're experiencing now. Until the flood, it had never rained. So Noah had a much bigger job than we ever gave him credit for when God asked him to build the ark. So this vapor blanket that God had above the earth, it provided that necessary reservoir of water for a worldwide flood. I've heard many theories about how that flood came down. It had to have been quite a torrential rain. So on this day three, we see we get the land, the seas, the trees, the fruit. Day four, verse 14, the sun and the moon and the stars. Of note, the sun, moon, and stars became a source of worship. And they still are through all of the years that humans roamed the earth. Day five, God makes the fish and the birds and he tells them to multiply. So day six is the animals and mankind. So we're made on the same day. So of note, when these land animals are created, this would have been the time period the dinosaurs roamed the earth. If the word day is truly a 24 hours period or a short period, then the dinosaurs would have been cohorts with humans. But if yam here means any amount of time, they may have not been on earth with humans. One of the theories people have though, is that God created dinosaurs to reveal his majesty to humanity. Either way, it's revealed here that at this point, all the animals and humans were vegetarians. So these animals were created. And next comes humans. Chapter one, verse 26, then God said, let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle and all the earth, and every creeping thing. God creates man in his image. In the image of God, he created them. Okay, so humans made in the image of God is not so much something that man has, as it is something that man is. Humankind was created to be a graphic image of the creator, a formal, visible, and understandable representation of who God is, and what he's really like. We'll see that we are to be ambassadors of God, we are to represent him in a way that people around us will be attracted to who God is. Being made in his image gives us our self worth. We are made in the image of the creator of the universe. This also means there's an unbridgeable gap between human life and animal life. Animals were not made in the image of God. We're biologically similar to certain animals, of course we are. But we are distinct in our moral, our intellectual, and our spiritual capabilities. So we could not have been born from animals, or been some sort of evolution that came from animals. It also means there's a huge unbridgeable gap between us and angels. Nowhere in the Bible are we told that angels are made in the image of God. Angels are a completely different creation. They are eternal. We are eternal, but we are different. But this is the huge, huge point. So this means because we're made in God's image, this means the incarnation of Jesus Christ was possible. So God in the second person of the Trinity, Jesus, could really become man because although deity and humanity are not the same, they are compatible. So this means human life is a compatible place for Jesus to come. For Jesus to be fully human, we are made in his image, and we are compatible for God to become human. God was looking way in the distance when he created us. He was truly looking at that second world. So human life also has intrinsic value, quite apart from the quality of life experienced by any individual. It is just valuable because human life is made in the image of God. As believers in Christ, we have a new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of our creator. And as we grow in faith as Christians, we are being transformed more and more like Jesus. All of this makes sense and is possible because we are made in his image. Also, guys, and this is huge, every single human being, no matter how much they have destroyed their image of God by sin, they still have the status of being in God's image. And therefore, they need to be treated with the dignity and respect that is due to God's image bearer. So this has profound implications for our conduct toward others. It means that people of every race deserve equal dignity and rights. It means that elderly people, children, orphans deserve full protection and honor as human beings. Being made in the image of God is an incredible, incredible thing. So definitely, God was not making a mistake when he made us. Knowing we are made in his image sets a foundation for our self-worth. The creator of the universe designed us to reflect him. So it means we possess personality, we have knowledge, we have feelings, we have a will, we have morals, we're able to choose right or wrong. And we are spiritual beings and we are made for communion with God because it's on the level of spirit that we communicate with God. So God so greatly wants a relationship with us because we are his children made in his image. He is set out right now at this point in creation. He is going after Adam to be in a relationship with him out of love, deep longing for communion. God wants us to know him and wants to know us. And that's what the word is about. It is the basis and foundation for everything we believe as a Christian. Being made in God's image, being a child of God makes sense. God wants to be near us and because we've been sinners, he cannot be near us because he's holy. So we see this tussle, this tug of war throughout the Old Testament and this need for a savior to come and purchase us from our sins to pay the price so we can be close and connected to God. Ultimately, God was not planning on a heaven where we're going to be as innocent people like Adam. God has been interested in a heaven where we are redeemed people, redeemed people that have made the choice to love God and to worship his son. Now, when we take this one step further, which we always have to do because we're made in God's image, spirit to spirit, we can house the Holy Spirit. So because Jesus paid the price for our sins, we can be a holy vessel for the Holy Spirit. It was the pouring out of the Holy Spirit that started the tangible, miraculous body of Christ. We are born again and we have the Holy Spirit within us. This Holy Spirit is part of God and it couldn't be in us unless we were made compatible. So doesn't it all make sense? Without Genesis 1, it wouldn't make sense. We would wonder if animals could house the Holy Spirit. They can't. There's so much in this first chapter. So yes, I thank you for bearing with me through this teaching. I pray that you will soak in it a bit and ask Holy Spirit what portion of this he wants you to focus on and that you will grow firmer in your foundation day by day. I pray God's blessing on your day and I ask that you keep your chin up in Jesus' name.
