Who Made You?

This week we are starting a series through Genesis. And the intent of this series is to properly tell the first chapter of the gospel story. By that I mean the four chapters of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Consummation. And it’s important that we take the time to get the first chapter right, because, as we will see, it has too often been neglected, distorted, or outright forgotten. And this, in turn, does terrible things to the chapters that come after it. And one of, if not the biggest, reasons this happens is that we read Genesis in the wrong way. Specifically, by reading it as if it were something other than what it is. And we do that for innocent enough reasons, it’s not like we intentionally misread it. It’s just that we have never read anything else quite like Genesis. And so we don’t really have anything else to compare it to. And so we read it as if it were one of the other sorts of things that we read. A science or history textbook, a self-help book, a poem or a fairy tale, and so on. And by doing so we make all sorts of innocent but often incorrect assumptions about what it’s trying to tell us and what we should take away from the story.

One of the major misconceptions that many people have about how they should read Genesis is that, for whatever reason, they seem to believe that we should read it as if we have never read the rest of the bible at all, or have little to no access to it without “spoiling” the plot. And you hear this in a lot of preaching on Genesis as well. Pastors preach through Genesis 1 using nothing but the text in this chapter and their own assumptions about it. No reference to the rest of the Pentateuch, of which it is the introduction, or to the rest of the Bible, or even to the rest of Christian faith in general, of which it is the philosophical foundation. The best you’ll get is a rhetorical wink when you get to the promise of the gospel in chapter 3. The sort of look you give your kids when they watch Star Wars for the first time and find Anakin a little annoying in episode 2. But it’s reasonable enough because we tend to think that the best way to enjoy a story is for the first time, when you don’t know what’s going to happen. So there can be a bit of a reflex to try and empty your mind when you sit down to read Genesis and just try to start from scratch each time.

But I think that’s a really poor way to read Genesis. In part, because that’s not how the first people to ever read Genesis would have read it. The original audience would not have seen Genesis as a starting point, they would have read it as a theological explanation. A prequal, if you will. But one without Jar Jar binks. So Genesis was written by Moses. At least, according to the unanimous testimony of Jewish religious tradition, a great many literary scholars throughout church history, and, well, Jesus himself (John 7:22). So call me naive if you want to but that’s good enough for me. Well, what does that mean about the original audience of that book? It means they were, at most, a few decades older the Moses.

Moreover, if you read the Pentateuch as a whole, meaning the first five books of the bible, you begin to see some remarkably sophisticated literary structures that tie the books together into an extremely cohesive narrative. We’ll see more of that later on, but for now what I’m getting at is that the books appear to be written so cohesively that somebody would have had to have knowledge of the events in Exodus to be able to write Genesis the way they did. Now sure you can always say “the Holy Spirit could have prophetically inspired the literary structure in advance” but like why? Why feel the need to appeal to miraculous intervention to explain what appears to be the careful and intentional composition efforts of a skilled human author? Can’t the Spirit work through a good outline?  Again, you don’t have to just take my word here, we’ll get to some examples later on, but for now I just want to suggest that many many skilled biblical scholars are correct when they say that Genesis was likely written by Moses to the Israelites after the Exodus.

If this is indeed the case, then it means something very important for our sermon today and for our series this summer: Genesis was not meant to be the first thing you learn about God or the world. It was meant to explain what you have already seen. I hope to convince you that this is a better way to read Genesis. As we consider this, I don’t have a main point today, but rather a main question: Who made you? And I want to look at what that question would have meant to the original Israelite audience, and what it means for us today.

• What This Question Meant for Israel

Bruce Waltke, one of my favorite Old Testament scholars, said that Israel’s problem wasn’t understanding how long it took God to make the world, it was that they worshipped gods from every place they’d ever been and they were about to track all of that junk into the promised land with them. And I think it’s important for us to realize that because we have much more similar theological needs to them than I think we want to admit. But fortunately Moses, inspired by God, set out to write an account of their history up to the present day that would help them understand who God is and who they are in relation to him. Moreover, he structured his account in such a way that it would also help to make sense of what they had experienced in the Exodus. That’s part of what I mean when I say that Genesis wasn’t meant to be the first thing you learned about God and the world; it’s meant to explain what you’ve already seen. The Israelites didn’t know what had just happened to them. They had just left a land full of pagan religion where false miracles were performed (or staged) on the regular and every natural phenomenon was attributed to a different deity.

Then one day some old dude shows up talking about a new God they may or may not have heard much about before, and his new God starts doing battle with all the gods of Egypt. And the wildest part is that he completely demolishes them on their home turf. So these Israelites, right, their story began in captivity. They were born as slaves. Their parents were born as slaves. Their grandparents were born and died as slaves. And in particular, they were slaves to a man named Pharaoh who claimed to be the son of Ra, who was the sun god in the Egyptian pantheon. Pharaoh ruled his kingdom by what’s called a divine right, meaning he directly credited the fact that he was a descendant of God with his divine right to rule.

In Egypt, the state received it’s power to rule from it’s religious teaching. Back then when you became Pharaoh and you wanted more power and influence, you simply selected or published a new creation myth that explained how you either a god or descended from the gods, or how your city was the original location of creation. There are numerous recorded Egyptian creation myths that all follow more or less the same pattern, but place power in the hands of different cities or Pharaohs. Ramses II, the Pharaoh who most likely ruled during the Exodus, has inscribed on his tomb that he was the son of Ra. And of course the other people in the world were somehow created by the gods specifically to serve you.

Then the individual people would worship whatever god corresponded to their particular needs at the time, or the regional gods of their cities, or even just household gods represented by statues or amulets made of valuable materials. And so religion was a means of delineating the power and the value of the individual person. The more powerful and/or valuable your god was, the more powerful and valuable you were. Did your god have power over a household? Or over a city? Or a nation? Or the sun itself? If so, and you worshipped them faithfully, it was possible they would use some of their authority over this area in your favor.

Well, as I mentioned, Moses shows up, or more significantly, Yahweh shows up, and starts systematically dismantling the most powerful gods in the Egyptian pantheon. The gods of the Nile, either Hapi or Osiris, depending on the myth, are defeated when the water turns to blood. The frog-headed goddess of childbirth and fertility, Heqet, is defeated and turned against her own people when frogs invade the land, die, and start to stink. The cow headed goddess Hathor, mother of Ra, is defeated when all the cattle in the land die. So on and so forth until finally darkness covers the whole land. The sun god Ra is dead. And Pharoah is shown to be powerless to stop the death of his own first born son. The message is clear. The God of Moses is on a completely different level. They have never seen or heard of anything like this - a God without domain. A God without limits.

Now you’re probably wondering when we will actually get to Genesis 1. And that’s fair. But you have to understand, for the people of Israel, the events of Exodus 3-7 were their Genesis 1. That display of total sovereignty was the prologue of Genesis for them. But clearly, they didn’t get the meaning of that display. Because on the way out of Egypt they were still scared. And still Egyptian enough to want to go back. They weren’t Israelite enough yet. Some of them probably still had Egyptian gods in their sattle bags. And so sometime after they got to Mt. Sinai, God gave them a book that explained it all. It explained why he had power over every part of creation. Because there was no god in the beginning but him. And no god made anything except Him. And it explains why he cared for this people. Why a God like this had chosen to go to war with an allegedly divinely appointed Pharoah over a bunch of slaves. Because they were children of Abraham. Who was a son of Noah. Who was a son of Seth. Who was a son of Adam. Who was the son of God. Meaning they were descendents of God, made in his image, a part of the chosen lineage of people he had set apart for himself.

You have to know how weirdly this story would sit with an Israelite at that time. It was systematically unmaking everything they knew up to that point. They would have read Genesis and been confused - you mean God made everything? But, with what tools? Out of what stuff? With whose help? Because that’s how all the other creation stories work, nobody was dumb enough to believe in a God who literally made everything.

And the Holy Spirit, through Moses, does something brilliant with the narrative. He sets up a comparison that will help the Israelites see what’s going on, and help them tie the text of the creation account to what they had just seen in the Exodus. Remember, they’ve already seen the plagues. They saw God strike creation 10 times with destruction, and they heard Moses tell them 7 times throughout the course of it, “God says this is happening that you may know I am Yahweh.” They saw Yahweh demonstrate his power over the land, and the water, and the beasts of the field, and the things that swarm in the oceans and in the sky, and they even saw him turn out the lights. All of them. Now imagine you have seen all that. And now hear you are, standing in the middle of the desert. And Moses has come down from the mountain covered in black clouds and lightning, the one that killed you if you touched it. And maybe you’ve tried to pray to your household gods a few times but it feels like they didn’t answer even more than they usually don’t answer. And then you hear Moses begin to read…

“In the abeginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”... And God said, c“Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

And you think to yourself, “Well I guess that would explain how he was able to turn the sun off.. “

9 And God said, g“Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so.

That makes sense in light of what he did to the Red Sea…

20 And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds7 fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.”

So that’s why the frogs and the bugs listened to him…

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so.

That explains how he can kill all the cattle, he made them alive to begin with…

And so it goes, “And God said, and it was so. And God said, and it was so.” Ten. Times. In seven days.

And with the last few times he said that, he made people… Not just a Pharoah. A man and a woman. In his image. To fill the whole earth with their descendants, all of whom have a divine right to rule over creation, none of whom are slaves… And he called all of it good. Wow… no wonder he was mad at Egypt. Then over the next few weeks and months, you hear the rest of the story, and makes more and more sense. And eventually the story catches up to where you are, and all of a sudden the whole created order has been reshaped for you. Now you know what it means that you’re an Israelite. And you find yourself standing before the mountain of the Lord again, only now you realize that the created order wasn’t just broken in Egypt, it’s broken in you. And the God at the top of that mountain is too holy for you.  And you realize you don’t know how to live in this new world because all of the rules you learned as a child about how to make the gods happy in Egypt no longer apply.

And one day Moses comes down the mountain with some big stone tablets, and he finds you and your friends with a golden calf, trying to use some of those Egyptian rules to worship this new God. But that didn’t work. And you lost a number of friends and family members that day. And after some time Moses comes back with a new set of tablets and he begins to read. It starts with,

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.3 c“You shall have no other gods before1 me.

And he goes on. And as he keeps speaking you’re trying very hard to make a mental list of what you’re hearing, these are very important, you’ve seen people die for not listening many times at this point. And when he finishes you count out… 10 rules. And the longest one in the middle was about the seventh day, you remember that because it’s longer than the others and because in the middle of it Moses reminded you of how God created the earth in seven days - by speaking 10 times. And you think back and remember the 10 times God spoke to unmake the land of Egypt, saying seven times, “that you may know that I am the Lord.”

10 words of creation in 7 days. 10 words of decreation in Egypt with seven reminders of the Lord’s Name. And 10 commandments, with a reference to the seventh day and the seven days of creation in the middle. That would leave an impression, wouldn’t it? And as you start to see all these connections between the plagues you saw in Egypt and the creation narrative, you realize Yahweh wasn’t just winning against the gods of Egypt, he was the only player on the field. And you realize now that the God who saved you out of slavery is also the God who made you, and he has expectations for how you will live as his son or daughter.

• What This Question Means for Us

Now. You and I are not standing at the foot of a smoking mountain. But we sure have grown up in Egypt. That’s what the author of Hebrews points out in chapter 12, he says “you have not come to a terrifying mountain, but to a better mountain.” But notice he doesn’t say, “you have not come from Egypt.” In fact, the whole book of Hebrews is written as if those in Christ are making the same sort of journey out of the same sort of captivity, and the only thing that has changed is that we actually have a sure means of making it to the promised rest. But make no mistake, we are coming from the same kind of place. Whether you realize it or not, we grew up in Egypt.

By which I mean to say, we have grown up in bondage to ungodly powers, daily confronted with alternative explanations for why the world is the way that it is and where it all came from, and how that shapes what is expected of us. That happens in a myriad of ways, I’m going to only pick one but it’s not the only one, just hang with me for a minute and don’t get either too excited to too angry with me. Hear me out a second with one example of this. Scientists are now the priests of modernity. And to be clear I have nothing against scientists and do in fact respect and appreciate them a great deal, I am pro science. This is not one of those anti-science Genesis sermons. but did you see how I had to do that just now? Even pastors can’t just go around disrespecting priests. When I say scientists are priests of modernity I don’t at all mean that they are made up or doing made up things, or their work doesn’t matter, or anything like that. Quite the contrary. I’m just saying that their work has taken on religious significance in our culture. It’s gone from lowercase t truth to uppercase T Truth - not just true but an ultimate truth. And that happened because sometime in the 1900s the philosophers convinced the scientists that only the material world exists.

And the scientists, like literally everybody else, were largely cool with that because materialism - that is the belief that the material world is all that exists or at least all that matters, lets you have a genesis 1 without an Exodus 20. It lets you have words of creation without words of ethical restoration. Creation without law, put simply. But really that’s fine enough because if creation created itself, just like the Egyptian myth of Ra creating himself, then we don’t have to worry about a fall or sin or whatever because creation only gives us trees, it doesn’t care which ones we eat from. Here’s the problem though. If you take away God you don’t just lose Exodus 20 with the 10 commandments. You lose Exodus 3 - 7.

Remember, earlier I said that Exodus 3 - 7 were Israel’s Genesis 1. It was where the story started for the original audience. In slavery in Egypt. Sure it was slavery with leeks and onions, but also with idolatry and abuse. And what you need to know about Egyptian slavery is that God didn’t make it like he made creation. Slavery is what happens when sinful people are cut off from God and left to their own devices. It’s what happens when people try to be creative without following the example of the Good Creator. The strong abuse the weak. The weak become victims of false religion and superstition, living their lives for no other purpose than to eat their next meal. Natural selection is the way of the world according to the materialist faith. And be honest with me and with yourself, is that not how most of the world lives life today? Is that so different from how some of you grew up?

Israel’s first introduction to God wasn’t Genesis 1. And it wasn’t Exodus 20 either. It was when he showed up and rescued them. The first religious ceremony the Israelites ever did was take some lamb’s blood and paint it over their door posts and hope against hope that they would be spared, only to wake up, hug their oldest children, and walk out of Egypt with all the gold they could carry. Only then, once they were safe on the other side of the Red Sea, did they ever read Genesis 1. And then they find out that the slavery they grew up in was not how God had made the world at all - and that’s why he went to all that trouble to save them, because the love with which he created the world still remained for them, even in their sin, and so he had purposed to redeem them. Then and only then did he give them commands, and when he did he opened them up by reminding them that he is the God who saved, so that his 10 words of ethical restoration might be framed in the context of his 10 words of salvation and his 10 words of creation.

Listen, the plagues were a message from God that he is prepared to unmake the world if that’s what it takes to save his people. So let me ask you, who made you? Is it a God who can and will save you? Think about all the silly cultural creation myths that we make up to give ourselves power and value. We are no better than the ancient Pharaohs in this respect. People on the internet spew foolishness at all hours of the day. Talking about how you were made from stardust that got lucky and became sentient. Stars are pretty, and we think of them as valuable and powerful, so doesn’t that bestow a little dignity on you? Doesn’t it mean something that the elements that compose your body were formed in the heart of a star? Not just the center, the “heart” of a star. That almost sounds like the stars give a rip about you. Pharaoh claimed to be the son of a star and it didn’t do him a lick of good. You know what else is made of elements found in the heart of a star? Cow pies. If your dignity comes from the material stuff you’re made of, then you’re just a really complicated cow pie. With more steps. You know who is not going to come down and save you from the suffering, sin, and abuse you experience in this life? Stars. People have been wishing on them for centuries to no avail. You can’t just baptize that junk with science and make it not a pitiful thing for a grown adult person to believe.

Look, if you want to tell me that you are a complete nihilist, you see no meaning in life, and you see no value in anything, then I will respect you for your consistency. Because it is that, or it is the biblical narrative. Anything in between is magical thinking. But listen, if you’re sitting here this morning and Genesis 1 feels impossible for you to believe, that’s ok, let’s start with Exodus 7. Let’s start with letting God systematically wage war against the idols of your life. Against the sinfulness, and pain, and brokenness that you’ve had to endure in yourself and in others around you. And on the other side of that, I want you to remember Genesis 1. And I want you to remember that God’s Words of deliverance, and of restoration, are perfectly consistent with the words he used to make you.

You need to know that the Word he spoke to make you is the same one that he sent to become flesh for you, to keep the Word of law for you, to wage war against your idols by dying for you. There is nothing that has been made without him, all things are made through Him, to Him and for Him. He is the wisdom of God by which the world was made good, good, very good. He made you in His image, and now he offers to deliver you from slavery to sin and death and restore you to the purpose you were made for. His Name is Jesus, and he did all of this that you may know that He is the Lord. Now, you might reasonably say, “that’s all well and good. Sounds very nice. I’d believe it if I could, but I can’t.” But remember, the true God isn’t like the weak gods people dream up. He doesn’t need any raw materials to work with, and he doesn’t need any help anyone - not even you. Not when it comes to making the world, and not when it comes to breathing life into an unbelieving heart. That’s why Paul quotes Genesis 1 when he explains to the Corinthians how salvation works.

“For God, who said, m“Let light shine out of darkness,” nhas shone in our hearts to give othe light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

When Pharaoh found his gods overpowered he sat in the dark, hardened his heart, and cursed the light. If you find yourself in that spot today, make a different choice. Pray to the God who creates light.

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