In the Beginning: Forming and Filling

There was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Alright. Good job. I don't have to do all the talking today.

There's a reason why I had you read all that, and we'll come to that in a moment. So we're going to play a game to start the sermon. This is a game involving popular song lyrics that people get wrong all the time. I'm going to say the wrong lyric and the name of the artist, and then y'all can say back to me the right lyric.

Excuse me while I kiss this guy by Jimi Hendrix. Purple Haze. Kiss the sky. Right? Excuse me while I kiss the sky, not this guy.

See that girl, watch her scream kicking the dancing queen by Abba. Digging the dancing queen. You're not kicking the dancing queen, right?

Every time you go away, you take a piece of meat with you by Paul Young. A Piece of Me. Right? Nobody's taking a piece of meat with them.

Sweet dreams are made of cheese by the Eurythmics. Of these, right? Not cheese. These.

Even flow mozzarella butterflies by Pearl Jam. Nobody knows, right? Even flow thoughts arrive like butterflies. There's no mozzarella, but butterflies is in there.

Gotta love the Starbucks lovers. They tell you I'm insane by Taylor Swift. Got a long list of ex lovers. They'll tell you I'm insane. Very good.

So listen, why are those funny? Because so many people mess up the same lyrics in the same way. We've heard these songs over and over again, maybe just in elevators, but you've heard some of these songs over and over. And they fall into categories where people have just gotten used to hearing the same lyrics.

This morning, as we pick up the book of Genesis, I'm trying to help us hear the lyrics and hear them for what they actually say—not what we think they say or what we're taught they say. I want us to actually listen to Genesis one because, as I said last week, Genesis one isn't necessarily interested in answering the questions that we come to ask of this text. We come to this and we're like, how is this going to work with dinosaur bones? Help me understand how this exactly works with carbon dating. The reality is that's not a bad question. We want to know about the Big Bang, but the people who first received this text did not bring those questions to it. This text is trying to answer different questions.

I want to remind you that the Bible did not come to us shrink-wrapped, dropped down from heaven, and written in English. It came to a particular people in a particular time, in a particular place who spoke a particular dialect of a particular language and had very different concerns—some similar, but some different in terms of what they were trying to understand. So it's easy for us, like with those lyrics about sweet dreams made of cheese, to keep mishearing Genesis. But here's the thing: it matters a lot more that we hear this book correctly.

If I know some of why we're here this morning, it's because we want to know God. We want to hear from God. We want to experience God. We want to understand God's ways. We want a living, vital relationship with God. So it matters a lot more than whether you mess up Taylor Swift lyrics, right? This really matters to us—that we would hear what God wants to tell us from this passage and what the original people who received this would have heard and understood.

The Problem in Genesis One

We're going to start with the problem of the passage. Maybe you didn't notice there was a problem, but there is one. I want to ask you as we go through Genesis one through eleven this fall: is there something here that I'm supposed to notice?

Look at verse two. There's a problem in verse two. God has made the heavens and the earth, but we read this:

The earth was without form and void. — Genesis 1:2

Now, those are two fun words to know in Hebrew. I'm going to teach you some Hebrew words this morning. Tohu, Bohu—they rhyme with each other, right? T-O-H-U, B-O-H-U. Tohu is formless. Bohu is empty. If you took tohu and bohu and put them in a blender and hit the frappe setting, this is what you would get. As you poured it out, you would get chaotic nothingness. Chaotic nothingness.

Now that sounds like nothing to Western ears, but to Eastern ears, that's a problem. Chaotic nothingness is not nothing. It's something, and it's something not good. Chaotic nothingness is a huge problem.

So the rest of what you spent all that time reading is the answer to how that problem is solved. How is verse two going to be answered? How is the problem of chaotic nothingness being solved?

And this is being solved by a poem. We talked about this last week. Even if you don't know anything about Hebrew poetry, you can tell this is a poem just by the repetition. "And God saw, and God said, and there was evening, and there was morning, the blank day, right?" Like all those things tell us there's a structure here that tells us there's something going on in this. Somebody built this passage. This isn't, like I said last week, a lab report. It's not written like an IRS audit. This is written like a poem. And therefore it's confusing—it may be confusing to us, but it's trying to communicate in its very language and structure something really important.

So let me remind you of the first people who received Genesis One. The Hebrew people received what are called the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch, when they were coming out of Egypt to Mount Sinai. They're called the five books of Moses because Moses traditionally has been thought to have written them all down and given them to the people. And so the people had been delivered from slavery in Egypt, brought through the Red Sea pursued by Pharaoh's army, and brought to the foot of Mount Sinai. But if you remember the story, they had forgotten lots of their past. They'd been in bondage for four hundred years and they'd been surrounded by and brought up through—even Moses had—the gods of Egypt, and they didn't know. So when Moses shows up and he's like, "God has come here to rescue," they're like, "Who is this God?" And that's what this passage is trying to answer for us: Who is this God and how is this God different from the gods of the other nations?

Now, the gods of the other nations trafficked in chaos. They were like Marvel superheroes who were crazy. That's what they experienced. That's what many of these stories read like. These chaotic temperaments of these pantheons of gods—for Egypt and Sumeria and for Babylon—were gods who were temperamental, prone to great acts of violence. They seemingly had no reason for what they were doing and they could go off at a moment's notice. And you could say if you're answering the question, "Who is this God?"—the answer of all the other nations is chaotic Marvel superheroes. But this idea of chaos and there being chaos at the beginning, chaotic nothingness, is a problem. It was a problem for them. They're wanting to understand who this God is, but chaos is actually a problem for us too, isn't it?

I mean, don't we live right now in what we'd consider a chaotic time? We've had a pandemic. There's fears of global terrorism. We've got an environmental crisis going on. People are worried about the stock market. I mean, is there something to be afraid of and anxious about in this world? Is there? Yeah, lots, right? We are also people—we're not afraid of chaotic Marvel superheroes, but we are afraid of all of those kinds of forces at work in our world. And if you're growing up right now, you're like, "Man, this is a crazy world I'm growing up into." Yes, it is. It's a time of chaos.

Look, so this morning, this passage is telling us really two things: You can trust this who, this God, and you can trust this God's why. You can trust the who and you can trust the why.

One disclaimer I said again last week so you don't send me emails: Yes, there are within our denomination four acceptable views of the way you read Genesis chapter one that are assumed and presumed by all the churches in our denomination as legit—six literal twenty-four hour days, an analogical view, a day age view, and a literary framework view. And I'm teaching this morning again from a literary framework view so that we listen to what Genesis really has to say to us. I'm not trying to debunk any of those others. If you hold on tight to one of those others, that's great. I just want to hear what Genesis is actually saying in the lyrics.

Trust the Who

So let's look at this together. Remember that this is a poem that was written from a very different perspective from the way you and I think. Let me use two other categories for how thought is constructed in our world. Okay, so you have a Western view, a Eurocentric view of thought, which is that you state a premise and you give bullet points for why that premise is true, and then you give a conclusion. And that's how most of you were probably taught to write a paper in high school. But this comes from an Eastern mindset.

An Eastern mindset is not so interested in bullet points. It's not so interested in a logical statement. Actually, an Eastern mindset is like the best way for someone to learn something is to discover it. And so what we have in a lot of Genesis is truths that we're actually invited to step into and discover. And there's something to discover in this poem.

Again, this is one of the reasons that we need cross-cultural discipleship as a church, not only in how we relate to other people, but even how we understand our Bible. This Bible—we need to take off the set of glasses that we normally wear, the assumptions we make about the world, and put on a different set of glasses and a different way of seeing. So what is it that we can discover in this poem?

The Pattern of Creation: Forming and Filling

Let's look at this together. I've got a couple slides. So here are the days of creation—the seven days of creation. Now, did you notice that there's a correlation between the content of some of these days? Let me give you an example. Look at day five. Fish and birds are made on day five. Now, what's the space in the world that fish and birds tend to inhabit? The water and the sky, right? Which are from day two.

All right, let's look at day four. Day four has the sun, moon, and stars. Now again, use your imagination with me. What is the space that the sun, moon, and stars tend to live in? Light and darkness, right? The heavens. So day one. And then look at day six: animals and humans. We sometimes swim and we sometimes get in airplanes, but in general, we tend to inhabit the space that was made on day three.

So there's this correlation. And if you notice, what God does in those first three days is not so much create but separate. And in days four through six, God tends to take the thing that He's made and fill it up.

See the first three days: He's separating. The second three days: He's filling. And it does so in exactly the same order, the corresponding order. He separates, separates, separates. Then fills, fills, fills. Now what this is—if you could draw an imaginary line right there through the passage, it folds up on itself. It's like when you cut out a heart. You know how you cut out a heart? If you try to cut out a heart and you freehand it, it looks more like a human heart, lopsided. But you fold it in half and you cut, right? And it's a perfect match. If you can picture this, this is what this passage is doing. One through three, four through six. It's a perfect match.

There's a fancy poet word for that called chiasm—c-h-i-a-s-m. You'll be hearing a lot about this today. So it goes like this: a-b-c, a-b-c. There also is another kind of chiasm, which goes like this: a-b-c-d, d-c-b-a. But this one, in terms of the content of this poem, it looks like this: Forming and filling. Forming and filling. First three days, second three days.

So what's interesting is how those two movements answer the problem of verse two. Tohu—it's formless. Bohu—it's empty. Tohu—it's formless. God separates; He forms. Bohu—it's empty. So He fills.

God Over Chaos

This is what God's doing in this passage. Think about what this tells us: this God is not just a creator, but this is a God who makes order out of chaos. Remember in verses two and three, what do we see? There's chaos over the earth, but the Spirit of God is hovering over the waters. The waters were a symbol for ancient people of chaos. What does it tell us about where God is? The Spirit of God is over chaos. He's got it under control. He's in charge. That's really, really important to them. God is in charge of all things.

Why would the people of Israel, leaving four hundred years of slavery, need to know that God is in charge and is over chaos? Why would that be important to them? Well, this is what it tells them: God is separating you from Egypt for a purpose. God is still separating. And it may feel like all that leaving of Egypt was crazy and chaotic, and you had to do it in the middle of the night. Can you believe it? Right? God has a purpose. God is making shalom—which is a big, like, testosterone-filled, Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson-like picture of peace. God is making order and peace out of chaos. He's over all of it. And what does that mean? You could trust this God. This God—He's in charge.

Now, do we need to hear that today? Yes. Do we need to know that God is over the chaos of terrorist states and a pandemic and a stock market and our kids' education? Anybody? Can I get a witness on this? Right? Yes, we need to know this: you don't have to be shackled to your fears. God is at work. God is not chaotic. He is up to something.

I think, like these Hebrew people, we forget that all the time. We're prone to really forget that. There's so much that's disorienting to them and to us. I mean, think about these people leaving Egypt. Yes, it's been horrible. Yes, it's been enslaving, but it was at least stable. We knew where lunch was coming from, right? But leaving this—as hard as it is to go into the unknown, taking your babies. Let's be honest here: taking your babies out into the desert. What happens in the desert?

People starve in the desert. Following a former Egyptian murderer named Moses that nobody's ever heard of before. Crazy? A little bit. We're gonna walk through the middle of this ocean, the sea. Crazy? Yeah. So all of this feels like chaos. And you know, they receive this reminder: this is who your God is. This is a God who creates order out of chaos. This is a God who separates for a purpose. This matters to them. They're like, I need this. They needed to know that God was absolutely reliable and absolutely in control.

Imagine someone piloting a small airplane. If you've been inside or looked in the cockpit of a small airplane, it's got an instrument panel up here. And one of the essential parts of pilot training is that you trust your instruments. You trust your instruments even if they don't feel right. Even if you're like, I think I'm going down into the ground, I guess I better trust my instruments. Even if you can't tell and your eyes are telling you something's wrong, pilot training says trust your instruments.

When people don't do that, bad things happen. For example, Kobe Bryant's plane got really mixed up on which way was up and which way was down and flew into a mountain. Buddy Holly thought he was climbing when he was really descending, went straight into the ground. Bad things happen when pilots do not trust their instruments.

This is what's hard: trusting the instruments when you feel really disoriented. When what you see with your eyes is like, I don't know if I can rely on that. And what you feel in your gut, you're like, I don't know. Trusting the instruments.

This story though, this history, this prehistory of Israel—the creation story—says you got to trust the instrument. You got to trust what the Lord is saying to you. This bohu, tohu bohu structure is saying God is in control. You can trust Him. But second, it tells us this: you can trust God's why. Not just who He is in His character, but His why, His purposes in the world.

The Structure of Creation

So let's take another look at this. Did you notice that this poem has yet another structure to it? Think about the size of each of the days. How much material is allotted to each day? Day one is like a little baby section. Day two is like a teenager. Day three is really long. Then day four is really long, like adult size, super size. Day five is teenager. Day six is baby. And then it's got a big old tail to it, the creation of humanity.

So you get this structure that looks like this: baby, teenager, adult, adult, teenager, baby. And then all this extra material that sticks out because it's so long on humans, which we're going to come to in a couple of weeks. And as I said last week, there's also a bookend to each of these sections. The end of it is emptiness. God rests. The beginning of it is emptiness. There's nothing.

So this is what you have: you have double chiasm across the sky. Double chiasm. This is like Hebrew professors everywhere are standing up and cheering. You get the one on the content. I know this is really nerdy. I'm really excited about this. You get this like the ABC, ABC structure, right? Then you get baby paragraph, teenager, adult, adult, teenager, baby. And on each end of the hourglass, you get an empty section on either end. Double chiasm. So awesome.

You're like, why? What is so exciting about this? Fellow people at rabbi school this morning, why are we excited about this? Because there's always treasure in the middle of the chiasm. We're going on a treasure hunt. That's a process of discovery. And you all love treasure movies, right? National Treasure with Nick Cage, Treasure Planet, Goonies, which is my favorite. So you're looking for treasure, and this is what a chiasm does. It always is like a big sign, especially this kind right here, pointing to the middle, pointing to the very middle. There's a treasure in the middle. Look for the treasure in the middle.

So what is the very middle of this passage? The word Moad. The word for season. This is what we're seeing. The word Moad means season or appointed time. That's in verse 14. It's the dead center of the whole poem, the middle word Moad.

Now, you all are like, that's not really all that exciting. Season, appointed time. Well, hang with me. Isn't this entire poem about God's work in time? Isn't this about God separating things by time?

He seems to really emphasize, "and this day, and there was this day, and there was this day." It's like God is really emphasizing that there is a breakdown, flow, and trajectory to His timing. This poem is all marked out about God doing things in His Moad, His appointed time. This is what Israel needed to know, and I think it's what you need to know.

Why would Israel need to know something about God's Moad, God's appointed time? Because remember, the people had been in bondage for four hundred years. And they may be wondering, why now? I mean, you could have come generations back. Why didn't you save us during this time period, my grandparents' time period? Why didn't you come as soon as we got in bondage?

And the answer—why did God wait? Moad. God is never in a hurry. God is always working on His schedule. He's always doing things in His season, His appointed time. Now who likes that? Not one hand goes up. Right? Because like the Israelites, they're not like, "Oh, yeah, we love it." No. We're like, we don't understand. "God, where are you?"

Let me ask you this: Why do you need to know about God's Moad, His appointed time? I mean, aren't we also confused and disoriented? And it seems like you're late all the time, God. And after that question, we go like, "Do you care? Do you see? Don't you notice what's going on?"

See, another way of saying that is we think that God's timing is wrong. We're always saying, "It's not our timing." And when God's timing isn't our timing, we're always like, there's a problem with God's character, His care.

God Works in His Own Pace

The writer of the poem is therefore making yet another point through your favorite word this morning—chiasms. He's making another point, which is this: God works at His own pace. God has His own appointed seasons. Nothing is random or haphazard. It's a super ordered creation narrative that preached to the Hebrew people. Just because we don't see His purposes right now doesn't mean there aren't any.

The Bible is filled with appointed time statements. Let me just remind you of a couple of them. Sarah, Abraham's wife, gets pregnant in her old age at the appointed time. Ecclesiastes has this great poem about things happening in God's appointed time. To everything there is a Moad, right? God tells them to observe Sabbaths and festivals according to God's calendar, appointed time.

And in Galatians, the Septuagint version of the New Testament reads this:

When the appointed time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. — Galatians 4:4-5

God didn't send Jesus four hundred years earlier than he did, or two hundred twenty years later. Why three BC-ish? I don't know. Because it's God's Moad.

I can't stand before you as a pastor and say, "I know the why for all of God's Moad and what appears to be too fast or too slow." But God has a why. And this passage is saying to us: you can trust God's why. God is not in a rush. God is not in a hurry. He forms, He creates, He fills all in His own Moad.

And so this is really important to you too, I think. Some of you are wrestling this week like, "Where is God? What is he up to? Can I trust the things that he's doing or not doing in this world? The things that I've been waiting on and praying over for years? The ways that I have been waiting?"

Yes. I mean, we have to ask these questions again. I know this is probably not what you want from your Genesis one sermon. And after this service today, I promise, we'll have a Q and A. You can ask me all the questions I can't answer, but we can talk about views of Genesis one. I'm happy to try to talk about dinosaur bones and evolution. But look, what is God up to in His appointed time?

Forming and Filling Throughout Scripture

It tells us. God is up to resolving tohu and bohu in His appointed time. He is always about the work of forming and filling.

Let's think about this in the Bible. Genesis two is the second version of the creation story, and it shows us God playing with clay, right? It shows us God. He doesn't speak humanity into being in that one. He shapes the first man, ish, and he blows into his nostrils the breath of life. He is forming. He's filling.

What about the tabernacle? God gives His people all these instructions on how to build a tent so His tent can be in the middle of all their tents and He can camp with them, and they can be with Him. And God gives incredibly precise directions for the forming of that tent. God provides the materials for that. And then what happens when the tent's completed? His presence fills the tent.

Same thing with Solomon and David. David says, "I want to build a house for You, God, like I have a palace." God gives him incredible instructions on all the supplies. God provides all the supplies.

And there's all this really complex data around forming it, and then God's Spirit does what? Fills it. The day of Pentecost, God assembles all these people from all over the world, different peoples and tongues and languages and tribes. He forms them into the New Testament church, and He fills them with His Spirit. And in Revelation chapter 21, the new heaven and the new earth, God is building a gigantic city. It's in the shape of a cube, and He has all these specifications. It's really weird looking, right? But it's God forms it, and He fills it, and He's in the very center of it with His people.

This is what God's up to in the world. God is into forming and filling. I mean, this is what God's doing in your life. He's forming you into the image of His dear Son Jesus. If you're a Christian, He's filling you. He's separating. He's changing.

Are you confused about what God's up to in your life? You're looking around going, I feel kind of stagnant as a Christian. I don't know what's going on. I don't understand why God is not answering my prayers in the way that I want Him to.

The answer to all the questions of "What is God up to?"—God is up to forming and filling. All of His actions, all of His delays, all the ways He's at work in your relationships, all the ways that you're lonely and you're hungry for relationships, all of those are God's plan for forming and filling you. He, in His Maad, is making you into the image of His Son.

And what does that mean for you? It means you can trust Him. It means you can trust Him. You don't have to be in control. You don't have to make life work. In fact, you can't make life work. Let's just all be really honest. There is an illusion that we are in charge of our lives and we can make things happen.

You can trust God in His timing in the lives of your children, in the lives of your parents. You can trust God in His timing even when you are still waiting. God in His Maad is forming and filling. There's a God who is shaping, who is separating, who is at work all the time.

Look, I will say this though—if you do not know Jesus, you have no such confidence. Your world is chaotic and it seems like a giant mess because it is. There is still chaos in this world, and you feel it very keenly. And if you don't know Jesus, you can have no confidence that there's any purpose to this.

But if you're here this morning, I got to tell you, I believe that God is doing this with you. He's like, I have some plans. I want you to understand that I have plans for you if you will step in. If you want to hear about how to have a relationship with Jesus, I'm happy to meet with you after the service and talk about what it means to have a living relationship with Jesus and that you can have confidence in this.

Trust the Who and the Why

Here's the call of this passage again today: Can you trust this who and can you trust the why?

When I was a kid, I used to love to watch telephone pole climbers—people who worked for the electrical company or the phone company. They would come out and put these spikes on around their ankles, and they had this special belt that hooked around the pole. You could watch a telephone pole technician just go straight up. Try to climb anything straight up and you get splinters, right? It never worked for me. And they would just go up like Spider-Man.

I talked to one of the people who was working on my street growing up and I said, "How do you learn how to do that?" He said, "When I first started out learning to work for the telephone company, I would just rely on the spikes and I'd end up going up this telephone pole and sliding down because I hadn't got my footing in deep enough. It took me a while to understand that when you're climbing up the pole, you've got to learn to rest against that belt. And it feels the opposite of what you should do, right? You're leaning back. That's the area you don't want to go is back. You're leaning back away from the pole so that the belt catches."

We're people who are constantly wrestling with troubles in our lives that we can't get around, that we can't figure out. We don't know how to rest in what God has told us about who He is and what He's up to in the world. And until we do so, we end up with life being jabbed and poked. We end up with splinters in us from constantly sliding back because we think it's all up to us to get traction in this life. It's all up to us to make all this stuff happen.

And God's calling us over and over again: Will you trust? Trust the story. Trust the Lord who's writing your story, past and future.

Can you trust the one who's doing all things in His mode? Let's pray together.

Father, we confess to you that this is hard for us. We pray, Lord, that You would take these truths and write them deep into us. Lord, help us remember, just like the Israelites, Your character, that You're over the chaos of this world, that you're always forming and filling. You're always working in the lives of your people in your timing for our good. Lord, we pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.