How to approach Genesis 1

If you missed Ariana Grande’s most popular song last year, tell me what she means:

I didn’t think you’d understand me
How could you ever even try? …
We can’t be friends …
— Ariana Grande

Was she breaking up with a guy because he didn’t understand her? If you keep listening, it’s the other way around. The refrain is, “I’ll wait for your love.”

Even best friends misunderstand each other. We make assumptions about what the person is saying. We hear part of the message and miss the main thing. We don’t connect the words with yesterday’s conversation.

The chance of misunderstanding is greater when we don’t know someone well. If the person is from another culture, or another language, or another time, we’ve got work to do to understand who they are, what they’re saying, and what they mean.

All those issues are present when we come to the Bible. All sixty-six books come to us from another culture, another language, and another time. We misunderstand them when we read them through Western eyes, though the dynamics of our culture and the assumptions of our time.

That’s why people divide over how to read Genesis. We misunderstand it when we expect it to answer our questions about science and history, instead of hearing what it is talking about. Gordon Wenham expressed it well:

Though historical and scientific questions may be uppermost in our minds as we approach the text, it is doubtful whether they were in the writer’s mind, and we should therefore be cautious about looking for answers to questions he was not concerned with. Genesis is primarily about God’s character and his purposes for sinful mankind. Let us beware of allowing our interests to divert us from the central thrust of the book, so that we miss what the Lord, our creator and redeemer, is saying to us.
— Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, WBC (Dallas: Word, 1987), liii

Scripture is not a revelation about science. It’s a revelation of God. When we focus on the wrong questions, we miss the one who is revealed in Scripture, and then we end up fighting with each other.

That’s especially true of Genesis 1. People argue over how the Genesis account of creation and the scientific account of origins fit together. Some views:

1. The Bible is true, and science is wrong where it doesn’t agree. Young earth creationists such as Ken Ham (answersingenesis.org) believe the universe was created in six literal days, just a few thousand years ago.
2. The Bible and science both say the same thing. Hugh Ross (reasons.org) believes the Bible gives us scientific information about a universe that’s ancient. For example, Isaiah 42:5 says “the Creator of the heavens … stretched them out,” and Hugh Ross identifies this statement with the inflation of the universe that followed the Big Bang.
3. The Bible and science give us information about different things. Francis Collins (biologos.org) is a Nobel-prize winning biologist who helped unravel how DNA works. He wrote The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. In 2020 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for “harnessing the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.”

I personally grew up in a tradition supporting the young-earth creationists (#1 above). Over time, I realized that the Bible didn’t fit my view of it. To honour the text, I had to change my view.

Let’s take a New Testament example. According to Mark 4:31, Jesus called a mustard seed “the smallest of all the seeds on earth.” If you think Jesus was making a statement about biology, then he was wrong and the Bible contains errors.

Jesus went on to describe the mustard seed growing into “the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree” (Matthew 13:32). That’s also wrong. Mustard seeds grow into garden shrubs, but not trees. Jesus made two biological errors in one story, and your Bible has multiple errors. If you think the Bible teaches science, that’s the conclusion you’re forced to accept.

Once you realize the Bible is not teaching science, you can listen to what Jesus was saying. If you were buying mustard seeds at the market and one little seed fell off the scales, you wouldn’t worry about it. What’s one seed? But that one little seed can grow to fill your garden, and Jesus said the kingdom of God is like that. If Jesus is God’s Anointed (Messiah), the kingdom was arriving in him (the king)! His audience knew that Israel was meant to be God’s garden, though it had been overrun by foreign powers (Psalm 80; Isaiah 5). God was restoring his reign in his anointed.

And then comes the unexpected twist in Jesus’ story. The little kingdom that was coming to life in Christ would grow into something no one expected: a tree far bigger than God’s garden — a tree so large that the birds come and perch in its branches (Matthew 13:32). This was language that the big kingdoms used to describe their power (compare Daniel 4:12, 14, 21). The little mustard seed becomes the kingdom of God: far bigger than a garden, it fills the whole world! Wow!

Jesus’ story is not bad biology; it’s messianic hope. Any attempt to make it fit science misses the point. When we try to make Scripture say something it never set out to say, we distort it into something it is not, and we miss what it is saying.

So, what is Genesis 1 about? If it’s not a science text, what is it saying?

Israel’s story

All Scripture reveals God. The Old Testament is God’s interaction with his people Israel. Israel had a unique relationship with God, established through the Sinai covenant. The Lord freed them from human rule (Pharaoh), and formed them into the first kingdom of God on earth. This foundational story is in Exodus.

Genesis is the prequel. Why did God sent Moses to rescue them? God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob (Exodus 2:24). Genesis is the backstory: God calling Israel’s ancestors:

• Abraham (Genesis 12–25)
• Isaac (Genesis 25–36)
• Jacob, with his twelve sons who became the twelve tribes (Genesis 37–50).

But Genesis doesn’t start with Abraham. It starts with God’s relationship to the world. Genesis 1–11 makes the astounding claim that the God of Israel is the God of all people.

In the beginning, God established … not just Israel! The heavens and earth are his. It was formless and empty until God gave it shape and significance. God’s decrees gave it form and function. The heavenly sovereign declared how things were to be, empowering creation to be fruitful.

So, who is this God? And what can we know of God if God is in heaven and we are on earth? How does he govern the world? How does he care for and protect his earthly creatures? What’s our place in his world? And what if we resist his authority?

Genesis 1–11 addresses the foundational issues of God’s authority. It’s a prelude to Israel’s history. It’s the account of heaven and earth in God’s care, how the earthly realm turned from God, and how God responded. It explains why there are nations with their own rulers, and why God called Abraham to establish a different kind of nation.

Next time we’ll apply that approach to the text of Genesis 1.

What others are saying

Tremper Longman III, Genesis, Story of God Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016), 38:

The proclamation of Genesis 1 is that God, and no other, created the cosmos. This remarkable revelation is muted by those who insist that the main purpose of the book is to provide an alternative depiction of the process of creation as that offered by modern science. However, Genesis 1 (and we will see Genesis 2 as well) is not about how God created creation. It is not to be mined for hints about how long creation took or the specific way in which God brought the world and humanity into being. That said, the creation accounts provide profound perspective on the nature of God, ourselves, and the world. Genesis 1 (and 2) imparts to its readers a worldview which affects the way they believe, think, and act. We will here concentrate on the contribution of the cosmic creation of Genesis 1, and in the next on the human-centered account in chapter 2.

John H. Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 198–199:

The most important result of this study for the interpretation of Genesis is the realization that the Genesis account pertains to functional origins rather than material origins and that temple ideology underlies the Genesis cosmology. These conclusions have significant ramifications for the public discussions and controversies of our time, including those concerning the age of the earth, the relationship between Genesis and science, the interpretation of the biblical text in relation to evolution and Intelligent Design, and the shape of public science education.

John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 1–17, ed. Thomas P. Halton, trans. Robert C. Hill, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 74:35:

Notice how the divine nature shines out of the very manner of creation, how he executes his creation in a way contrary to human procedures, first stretching out the heavens and then laying out the earth beneath, first the roof and then the foundation. Who has ever seen the like? Who has ever heard of it? No matter what human beings produce, this could never have happened—whereas when God decides, everything yields to his will and becomes possible. So don’t pry too closely with human reasoning into the works of God; instead, let the works lead you to marvel at their maker. Scripture says, remember, “What the eye cannot see in him has come into view from the creation of the world and are understood through the things he has made.”