Friday August 5, 2022

Day 3 of our "days of creation" discussion. I want to encourage you to do your own research in this area. For many people, the idea of asking questions about God's word can be difficult. Whether we realize it or not, we do it all of the time, mostly subconsciously though.Rarely do we ask these questions in a formal way. Today, we are continuing to look at

Genesis 1:12-13
12 The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good. 13 There was evening and there was morning, a third day.

Today, we are going to get into some subjective questions and answers. I posed some of these questions yesterday, like "what was the original intent of the creation story?" Did God intend the creation story to be a scientific text of how the world was created, or did God intend to simply give the Israelites an answer as to how the world came into being? When Genesis was written (or, when we believe it was written) there were a few different creation accounts already around. Although the Israelites are an ancient people, there were plenty of civilizations that existed before them. Pretty much all of these civilizations worshiped a god or gods-and a few of them had their own account of how the world came into existence. Allow me to submit to you, that the reason our Heavenly Father gave the Israelites the creation account was to push back against the other creation accounts that existed at the time. The main difference between the creation account found in Genesis, and those found in the pagan accounts is the idea that there is a singular being who spoke the world into existence. That the "one true God" preceded everything else-He had no beginning and has no end. This was a vastly different idea , never before thought of. What God wanted the Israelites to understand was that Yahweh preceded all of creation and was therefore greater than His creation. For example: many cultures worshiped a "sun god." Except, why would we worship the creation, instead of worshiping the creator. God was always trying to get the Israelites to understand that worshiping the creation (like a golden calf) was a slap in the face to the One who created all things (including us). This is why God would not allow images of Himself, this is also why God warned against idolatry. The Israelites were surrounded by cultures that practiced idolatry, and worshiped the creation, rather than the creator. This is why it was so important for the Israelites to have an account of how all things were created-to be reminded to worship the creator and not the creation.
So, am I saying that the creation account in Genesis is simply a fanciful story? Absolutely not! This is where theological academia has gone off the rails (in my opinion). They will look at the historical context of the creation story, then conclude that it it simply a "story," meant to put forward an idea, to help curb idolatry amongst the Israelites. This assessment is wrong, and over allegorizes scripture. We can ask good questions of scripture, but still believe that what God says is "yes and amen." We will continue our chat tomorrow. God Bless. Tomorrow we will look at the difference between the KJV account of creation vs. the NASB translation-and explore the significance of the word "the."