Transcript
In the beginning, there was nothing. And in that time before time, nothing happened for a long, long time. But in that pregnant pause before time began, the spirit moved.
And God reached out into the darkness and began to gather up all that nothingness like a woman taking in bed sheets off the clothesline. God gathered it in and pressed it down and rolled it between the palms of his hands until it was the size and shape of a pea. He held it between his fingers and God spoke to it.
One single word, God said, be. And in the first nanosecond of recorded time, nothing became something. And it exploded outward in every direction, stars and dust, swirling gases tumbling together, forming galaxies, great fires lighting up the darkness, suns that over billions of years circled around themselves, small companions, planets, some too hot, some too cold, some just right.
One little planet cooled and began to gather water, water that sang with wind and rain and waves, tiny, tiny things over a billion years or more began to change and learn new ways of being. The water taught them how to make air, how to make shells, how to use light for food. Eventually, life itself crawled out of the water and onto the land.
And plants stretched themselves upward, learned to drink sunlight and rainwater. Trees grew tall and straight and strong. Seas were filled with every kind of swarming life.
Birds learned to fold themselves like wings and fly. Animals grew clever and crafty, big and small, and through it all, through every tiny change and every great surprise, God watched, not as a passive observer, but as an active participant, calling each new thing into being. And just at that moment when you might have thought that even the divine imagination was exhausted, God called forth a being made in his own image.
One who could look up at the stars and wonder. One who could tell stories and sing songs. One who could care for plants and animals and others like himself.
God breathed into his creation love until it filled every part of what God had made. And then God rested. Not because he was tired, but because he needed time.
God needed time to delight in his creation. Imagine that you were there for all of that, somehow miraculously drifting through time and space, and that over time you came close to the face of this beautiful blue-green ball we call the earth. Imagine coming even closer until you could see clouds and mountain ranges, rivers and forests, coming closer still until you came to rest in a beautiful, beautiful garden made by God himself.
In the distance you could see him at work, bending over his new creation, scooping clay out of the riverbank, forming it into the shape of a man, breathing his own breath into its nostrils until the man stood up, a living being. Now this is a very different story than that other story. This is not a story about God and the universe, but a story about God and us.
God put the man in the garden to tend it and keep it. He told him, you can eat fruit from every tree in the garden, but not the tree in the center of the garden. In the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.
So the man went to work, but it wasn’t long before God realized that it wasn’t good for the man to be alone. He said, I will make him a suitable helper. And God began to make animals and bring them to the man.
And the man named them, and whatever the man called them, that was their name. But still a suitable helper was not found. God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep.
He took a rib from the man’s side. He stretched it, formed it into the shape of a woman, and he brought it to the man who marveled at the sight of her. He said, this at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.
I will call her woman, since she came from man. The two of them were as naked as the day they were made, and yet they were not ashamed. Now the serpent was craftier than any of the other creatures the Lord God had made.
And one day it said to the woman, did God tell you you can’t eat from any of the trees in the garden? She said, no, we may eat from all of the trees in the garden, well, except for the tree in the center of the garden. And the day that we eat from it, we shall surely die. But the serpent said, no, you won’t.
You won’t die. You will become like God, knowing the difference between good and evil. And that sounded good to the woman.
And when she looked at the tree, she saw that it was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes. She reached out, took some of the fruit, and tasted it, yum, delicious. She gave some to the man, and he tasted it.
And in the moment that he did, their eyes were opened, and they saw that they were naked. They covered themselves with fig leaves. They hid in the bushes.
In the cool of the evening, when the Lord God came walking in the garden, he called out to them, but they didn’t answer. And he called again, and this time the man stepped forward, blushing, clutching fig leaves to himself. Where were you, said the Lord? And he said, I heard the sound of your voice, but I was afraid, because I was naked.
And the Lord said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten the fruit from the tree in the center of the garden? And the man said, well, the woman, the one you gave me, she gave me the fruit, and I ate it. And God turned to the woman, and she said, well, the serpent that you made tricked me. God turned to the serpent, who for the first time in a long time, didn’t have one word to say.
God said, for doing this, you will crawl on your belly and eat the dust of the ground. He turned to the woman and said, for doing this, you will have pain in childbirth, and yet your desire shall be for your husband. He turned to the man and said, because you have done this, the ground will no longer produce for you as it has.
You will earn your living by the sweat of your face. And then God put them out of the garden, put them out to live somewhere east of Eden. It was punishment, yes, but punishment laced with mercy.
Instead of a death sentence, God sentenced them to a new kind of life. Eventually, the woman conceived and bore a son. She called him Cain.
Not long after that, she had another son. She called him Abel. Cain was a tiller of the ground.
Abel was a keeper of sheep. One day, Cain brought an offering to the Lord, the first fruits of all that he had grown. And Abel brought his offering, a fatling from the flock, to offer as a sacrifice.
God accepted Abel’s offering, but he did not accept Cain’s. It made Cain angry. His countenance fell.
God came to him and said, why are you angry? Why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, you will be accepted. But even now, sin is lurking at your door. You must resist it.
But that anger that was inside Cain turned into hatred. And hatred turned into something more. One day, he invited his brother to go to the field with him.
And while they were there, he rose up and killed him. God said, where is your brother Abel? And Cain said, am I my brother’s keeper? God said, even now, your brother’s blood is calling out to me from the ground. And because of this, you will be cursed.
The ground shall no longer produce for you. You will be a wanderer and a fugitive upon the earth. But Cain said, Lord God, my punishment is too great to bear.
I will have to wander the earth. And whenever I meet someone, he will want to kill me. But God said no.
And I don’t know that it happened like this, but it might have. That God pressed his thumb down into the blood that was still warm on the ground, Abel’s blood, and pressed that mark onto Cain’s forehead. So that whenever people saw him, they would see that he was a man of blood and one to be avoided.
That envy, that anger, that hatred, that murder, began to spread through the human family like a virus, until eventually everyone had caught it. God looked on the wickedness of the world and it grieved him. It seemed that the imagination of every human heart was only evil continuously.
And God was sorry that he had ever made them. Can you imagine? But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. God came to Noah and said, this is my plan.
I plan to wipe out all of creation. Everything that lives and breathes upon the earth will be destroyed by a great flood. But you have found favor in my eyes.
And I want you and your sons to build a boat, a big, big boat, one big enough to hold you and your family and two of every kind of animal. So they went to work. And over the course of a year, they built this enormous boat.
Not very beautiful, but certainly seaworthy. Noah patched every crack with pitch so that it would not leak. And on the right day, the Lord called two of every kind of animal to enter the ark.
Called Noah and his family to enter the ark. God shut the door of the ark and then opened the floodgates of heaven. Broke open the fountains of the deep.
It rained for 40 days and 40 nights. And that ark began to float above the surface of the earth. Rain filled up the basin of the earth until it covered the highest mountains by 15 cubits.
All the time, Noah and his family, all those animals bobbing on the floodwaters above it. After five long months, the floodwaters began to go down. And after a full year, the ark rested on the top of Mount Ararat.
Noah sent out a raven to see if it could find dry ground, but it came back. And then a dove that came back. A week later, he sent the dove again.
It came back with an olive leaf in its beak. And a week after that, when he sent out the dove, it did not return. Noah opened the door of the ark.
He and his family stepped out onto dry ground. They were so grateful. They offered a sacrifice to God.
The smoke went up like sweet-smelling incense. God smelled it and said to Noah, I promise you this. Never again, never again will I destroy the earth with a flood.
Never again will seed time and harvest, heat and cold, winter and summer, day and night, come to an end. When you see my rainbow in the sky, it is a sign of my promise. It would have been a good time for Noah to promise that he and his family would never again sin.
But they didn’t. And then they did. And once again, sin went through the human family like a virus.
It spread across the ancient world. Those people, as they moved eastward, came to the plain of Shinar. And there they settled.
And they had bricks for stone. They had pitch for mortar. They said to themselves, let’s build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, as if they wanted to go up there and knock God off his throne and take his place and rule over all creation.
When God saw what they were doing, he said, if they keep this up, nothing will be impossible for them. And God devised the most clever strategy. He decided to mix up their language, to confuse their speech, believing that if they couldn’t communicate, they couldn’t cooperate, which is still true.
Those people spent a day or two babbling to each other in languages no one could understand, and finally dropped their trowels, came down from the scaffolding, and wandered off in every direction. This is why now, in the world, there are people of every kind in every place who speak so many different languages. But what was God to do? God, who from the very beginning had only wanted a relationship with his people, only wanted them to know him and love him and serve him, what was God to do? He looked around and looked around, and finally his eye fell on a man named Abram, who was married to a woman named Sarah, a childless couple, living in the middle of nowhere.
But God had some experience with making something out of nothing. And God said, ah, this is perfect. This is something I can work with.
