"How the World Began"
By Dr. Mickey Anders
First Christian Church
May 30, 1999
If you want to know the essence of a table, you wait until it is built. If you want to know the essence of a rose, you wait until it is in full bloom. To discover the essence of most things, we go to the end of the process.
However, if we want to discover the essence of humanity, we must go in the opposite direction. We must go back to the very beginning, to the original casting to find out the essence of humankind. We must go back to our roots to find who we really are. We must look back beyond that great catastrophe, which changed us and disfigured the image of who we were meant to be.
In Genesis, we reach back to the bedrock of life. There we make life's fundamental assertions. We find that God made the world. God made us. We can trust God.
"In the beginning God..." What a difference these four words make. The Bible does not begin with proofs for the existence of God, but with the assumption that God was before anything else. God is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. All that exists owes its existence to God.
Here in the early pages of the Bible we find the answers to these crucial
questions:
Who are we?
Where did we come from?
What did God intend when he gave life to us?
In the first 25 verses, we find the dramatic story of the creation of the earth. God moved without hesitation from one act of creation to another, and then concluded, "That's good."
In verse 26, there is a dramatic change of pace in the creation story. For here, God stops to talk to himself. As God contemplates, He says, "Let us make man." It's as if God says to himself, "Maybe I'd better stop and think about this act of creation. Shall I do this? Shall I give humans dominion over all that I have made? Shall I risk it? Shall I make this being that is so different from all the other animals and plants? This one will be radically different. Humans have the potential of being the coronation of creation or its crucifixion."
God loved all of his creation - the animals, the flowers, the clouds, the blue sky, the green grass. God must have felt a deep satisfaction in all of his created order. He knew it was beautiful and good. But then he stopped and asked, "Shall I make humans and give them the power to destroy all of this?"
Humans have demonstrated their power to annihilate species. We humans can disturb the eco-system so that some parts of creation will not survive. God knew that we would eventually discover nuclear energy and the power to destroy the entire earth.
No wonder God paused. He recognized the potential for goodness, but he also recognized the depths to which humans could go.
Now God addresses man as a Thou, a you. The others are third person.
2:17 But the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, YOU shall not
eat
1:28 God blessed them and said, (You) be fruitful and multiply.
There is something radically different about man.
Any time we read these early passages, we must stop and deal with the theories of creation of man. What about evolution? It is a word that strikes fear in the hearts of many of God's people. I have known many people for whom evolution was the epitome of everything evil in our world. It might destroy their faith and they do terrific battle with the theories of evolution.
Many Christians don't want evolution taught in our schools. They go to great lengths to find evidence against it. But for me, I am hesitant to fight a war against science. Christians did that hundreds of years ago when we said that the earth had to be the center of the universe. Christians condemned the scientists who suggested otherwise.
I believe that all truth comes from God. If science discovers a new truth, then we don't have to fight it because it comes from God. We don't have to argue with gravity, because gravity comes from God. We don't have to fight chemistry, because chemistry comes from God. If scientists prove that evolution is true, then we don't have to fight it because all truth comes from God.
The Bible is not a science book. It is a book of faith. Sometimes I think only those who appreciate poetry can really understand the Bible. Those who insist on approaching it from a scientific background seem to twist its meaning.
Personally, I have never had a problem with evolution. I grew up in a fundamentalist church in Arkansas and attended public schools. I remember vividly in the 10th grade when they taught us the theory of evolution. There, as a Christian young man, it never shattered my faith. I remember thinking, "Oh, so that's how God did it."
I always thought of evolution as merely one explanation of what God had done. Perhaps I made the mistake of picking and choosing from evolution. I never agreed with everything evolution said because I always added God to the equation. Then it made perfect sense to me.
Now I admit that there is such a thing as "godless, atheistic evolution," but it doesn't make sense to me. The odds are against it. I don't believe that all of creation happened by chance. But I do believe that God could have used this process, that God could have directed evolution.
Science can only go so far in its explanations. It can answer How, When and What, but not Why the world was created or Who created it. Science can't tell us by whom and for whom the world was created.
Science cannot explain the meaning of humankind. We cannot accept that the essence of a man can be derived from science, which says that man is only a higher mammal.
The Bible makes the simple affirmation that God made us.
I have no problem with what scientist may say about how the world was
created. Their ideas can never challenge my faith that God did it.
God may have used whatever biological process that he wanted to.
He's big enough to do that. Personally, I find nothing in theistic
evolution that is contrary to the bible.
Take the example of young parents who have just had a baby. They often send out a card that says, "God has given us our first child." An evolutionist, a biologist or a physician might say, "You naïve little couple. Let me explain to you how that child got here." Then the scientist would explain that there was a sperm which fertilized the egg and by biological processes, the baby grew and was born. The young couple would immediately reply, "Sure I know about that, but God gave us our child by way of biological processes."
For the person of faith that is not a problem. I believe we should approach the creation stories exactly the same way. The Bible says God created the world and humankind. Say what you want to about how it came to be biologically. Such explanations may say something important about the body, but they don't explain the essence of a man.
The essence of a man depends upon God creating mankind. Michelangelo depicted the creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. There you will find Adam, full formed, looking like a man lying in a half-reclining posture with his hand outstretched toward God. There is the picture of God whose finger is about to touch Adam. Is Adam a man yet? I say, "No." This body is not human until the miracle occurs when God touches Adam and gives to him the gift of life. The Bible says after God formed the man, then he breathed into him the breath of life. The KJV says, man became a living soul.
I remember studying about Cro-Magnon man and Peking man. Were they Adam? Not until God breathed into one of them a living soul. It was a form like a man. It looked like a man, but it was not a man until the miracle occurs.
Thomas Carlisle was addressing a group of evolutionist once. He said, "Gentleman, make man a little higher than a tadpole. I hold with the ancient Psalmist who said, Thou has made him a little less than God."
The Bible says God made man a little less than God. I have no objection for scientist saying what they want to about this body. They can say that my grandfather was a monkey and my great-grandfather was a tadpole. I don't care. Scientists can explain how the body came here, but only God can explain the essence of humankind.
Our meaning comes in relationship to God, the God who gave us life, who calls us by name, who sacrifices his son for us, and spends his time trying to draw us to himself again. The essence of being human comes from outside of us, not from inside of us.
When Christopher Reeve fell from a horse and broke his neck, he was very anxious about what his wife would say when she saw that he no longer had the "Superman" type of physical body. When she came to his bedside, her first words were, "You are still you. I love you and am here for the long haul." It's a reminder that we are more than our bodies.
Sometimes we hear discussions about what the image of God means. Some say it is the opposable thumb. Some say it's our brain. Some say it is the ability to communicate. But I believe we cannot explain the image of God scientifically.
The image of God is given in our relation to him. That is what makes us special. It is not because we are the highest of the mammals, but because God chose to speak to us, God addresses us as a Thou. That's why we are different.
Whatever you make of evolution, we still must be confronted with the question. Why did God risk it? God knew that humans could be the coronation or the crucifixion of the world? I suppose the jury is still out on humans. It remains to be seen if we will rise to the original purpose for which God created us. We might still blow it and destroy all of God's beautiful creation.
And the jury is still out on you and me as well. God has called us to live not like an animal, but to live in relationship to God as seen in Jesus Christ. The jury is still out on our lives. I wonder what God's conclusion will be about our lives. Will God say it was good or will he say it was not worth it?