The Artistry of Genesis 1.

Genesis 1 is, in my opinion, the most beautiful and profound text ever written.

It is not just memorable, but catchy. Its like a song that you cant get out of your head

“Let there be light” “And he saw that it was good” “and there was morning and there was evening”

The Evangelical Convenience of Genesis 1

As an Evangelical christian I get a sentence in to the first creation account and I’ve already had my wildest dreams fulfilled… if I (anachronistically) read through the lens of new testament theology - God is revealed as trinity:

God created the world + The Spirit of God hovered over the waters + God said let there be light - wait, God the creator, the spirit and the word?!? TRINITY ALERT!!! 🤯🤯🤯🤯 If like me, you’re reading as an evangelical, the comfort this gives to our craving to confirm our theology in simple arguments is like water in the desert.

This and many other individual details that we find as we read the story reveal wonderful truths about the loving God who created the world and saw that it was good. But this satisfies our apetite for discovery and we miss the wood for the trees.

What did i miss?

If we zoom out and draw the structure of the passage out, there is a design so undeniable you don’t need any context, education, or knowledge of any other scripture to see it.

Prelude: Clue: “Earth was formless and empty” - so God shapes it and fills it:

1. Separate light from darkness: Day + Night	2. Separate waters vertically: Sea and Sky	3. Separate sea horizontally: land and sea + plants (here plants are in the forming category of landscape)
4. Fill the day with the sun, Fill the night with the moon and stars	5. Fill the sky with birds, Fill the sea with fish	6. Fill the land with animals + Fill the land with humans

It isn’t exactly subtle.

When showing people this pattern, I haven’t had to go far into explaining it before people are able to fill in the gaps without even looking at the text. The explanation goes like this:

What did god create on day 1?

Um… light… night and day?

Exactly! and what did God create on day 4?

looks surprised … day 4? looks through the chapter for day 4 Sun, moon and stars

Aah! yes! so what God created in day 1 is filled in day 4! 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

A Gift for Sunday School teachers

What baffles me the most is why isn’t this the first thing we learn in Sunday school, or RE lessons on Judaism or Christianity? Why isn’t it in the catechism? Why don’t I have a song stuck in my head sung by Bob the Tomato, the donut man or that blue singing book thing that taught me this? (Deep cuts from my 90s christian upbringing)

I’m pretty sure that this governing structure of Genesis 1 is simple enough that my 1 year old daughter who can’t speak yet could understand it.

So why did I have to wait to listen to the Bible Project podcast in my late 20s to be shown this?!!

This Changes EVERYTHING

The implications of this aesthetic are HUGE for the interpretation of scripture. As an evangelical pastor I want people to be able to read the Bible and let God speak to them through it directly. I am not for one second denying the necessity of scholarship and theologically grounded teaching, however with this picture in mind, like a curtain being rolled back, it drastically changes how we naturally read scripture, sometimes giving us tools that make infamously confusing or troubling texts clearer and more digestible without outsourcing these discoveries to pastors, authors or academics.

If we allow our biblical imagination to be fundamentally shaped by the image of God holding back the disorder of non-creation represented by Sea and Darkness, we can see much more clearly.

Two very simple examples

The Flood

God finds himself holding back the waters and making space for a situation where, we are told “every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.”

If we look through our creation Goggles, we see that this makes God complicit in a situation where humans are doing literally nothing other than harming each other and creation. The flood is not God’s doing through direct action, it is what happens when God Lets Go. This doesnt solve all of our problems with the story. But it does significantly shift the tone of Gods action in allowing the flood.

No Sea or Night in Revelation

Two of the many strange features of new creation in revelation often confused me as a child: Revelation 21:1 says there is no more sea, and Revelation 21:25 says there will be no more night. I was always just told that they were universal images of chaos and to be happy with that.

But lets put on our creation goggles: what God separates to make space for life in genesis 1 is: Darkness / Night in day 1 (we’ll look at this in more depth when we discuss sabbath) and, famously, THE SEA!!!

So What?

Those two examples are just simple examples of how this picture changes how we see all sorts of things.

This is the beginning of a series of blogs where I am going to do a bit of an experiment. They will be a series of case studies on how having this understanding of Genesis 1 deep in our consciousness might effect how we see scripture.

It is my hope that anyone who reads these blogs will see the value of reading the bible with the shape of Genesis 1 in the front of their minds. That people will share that realisation with their kids, their friends and their churches.

I would love one day to be able to preach to a Church knowing that most people in the room are as aware of God’s creative move of separating and filling as they are that he said “Let there be light”.