Line by Line with Albert Mohler

This morning, we turned to Genesis chapter two. We begin in verse three. We left off in verse three at the end of the introduction to chapter two. Thus, we will begin anew in chapter two, verse four and verse three, we read.
"So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it, God rested from all his work that he had done in creation."
The institution of the Sabbath is in the very structure of creation, with God himself resting on the seventh day. But that is really the introduction to what then follows in Genesis chapter two as a theological commentary that gives this additional detail in terms of what happened in Genesis chapter one.
Looking back to Genesis chapter one in the creation of humankind we have, in verse 27, "So God created man in his own image in the image of God, he created him," and the next few words are crucial, "Male and female He created them."
So, from the beginning, it was intended that human beings be binary and that the relationship of the man to the woman be the very picture of the perfection of God's creation. The pinnacle of the complexity of God's creation, and the mandated context for what will be one of God's greatest gifts to humanity, which would be marriage. Then there is the command. The command that follows along with the parallel commands that are found elsewhere in scripture have to do with multiplying. We read in verse 28, "And God blessed them. And God said to them, ``Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
This new week's issue of Time magazine was released on Friday. It will be on the newsstand this week. The cover story in the current new issue of Time magazine is on couples who decide not to have children. On how increasingly married couples are deciding not to have children. Even as marriage has been transformed into a lifestyle option by our society, now, also parenthood is being defined in that same way. I'll have some articles up this week about that. I created enormous controversy, not intending to, in about 2003. I published an article on the sin of deliberate childlessness. One of the most basic biblical principles is that you do not divide the goods that God has given. That by the way is exactly what comes down at the end of the book of Common Prayer in the marriage ceremony, "What God has put together. No let no man put asunder. God's goods are not to be divisible.
When God gives us a good thing, it has multiple good aspects. We're not to say I want that one and not this one. For instance, God gives us food for our nourishment. It is also for our enjoyment and in the wholeness of God's creation, the goodness, the enjoyment, and the nutrition should all come together. As God created, marriage and God gave us the gift of family—s even in the Bible family meals are well recognized as is the communal aspect of food. Even in something like the last supper, not to mention the Lord's Supper. So, you have not only nutrition, but you also have enjoyment and you have the communal or relational aspect of eating.
An article that recently appeared in Great Britain, indicated that people who eat alone, eat more poorly and eat more calories. That's just a little indication that when you divide all the goods— a family meal, for instance— everyone's healthier. The dynamics in a family when you have dinner together are remarkably different than when people eat standing up individually at different times in the kitchen. It's a different kind of experience. That's what you might call a rather daily, low-level example of the fact that when God gives us something, it is best when it is undivided. When all the good aspects of it are kept together rather than torn asunder— marriage comes with procreation.
Now, obviously there are exceptions. Two 90-year-old's getting married would not be expected to have children. It wouldn't be because they wouldn't want children, but because they're past the time of having children. The norm is for people to have children who are married. Marriage
isn't just about the husband and then the wife. The very clear implication of the scripture as a whole, and even something as specific as the 10 Commandments, is that what is represented by the husband and the wife coming together is the promise of generations yet to come. In our secular age we're not only dividing the goods, we're denying the goodness of some of the goods that God has given us. That's exactly what this cover story indicates.
What we have in Genesis chapter one is the creation of humankind as man and woman. Again, one of the great confusions of our day is the fact that gender is increasingly seen as something that is perceived rather than real. As much as, we would benefit by talking about that, and will later, at this point, it's just very important for us to recognize that gender—and by the way, if we use the word gender 50 years ago, people would think we're talking about nouns, not about people— but that word is now well understood as the replacement for the two sexes. We need to realize that gender that is being a man or a woman by God's design and decision, is a part of the goodness of God's creation. Again, you divide the goods, great moral risk, great moral injury.
Now, we have more information, in chapter two, beginning in verse four. We begin reading, "These are the generations of heaven and the earth when they were created on the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens."
Well, there you have a very clear indication that what's going to follow is going to be more information than we had in chapter one. " When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground." What in the world was that about? You have plants, but they're not growing. You have bushes that are not in the land. No small plant of the land had yet sprung up. Everything's ready, but it hasn't quite happened yet. What is it waiting for? In other words, it's as if your lawn is there, but it's never growing. It's waiting for something. Was it waiting for the arrival of man and woman. The arrival of the one who is going to have the responsibility for the stewardship and dominion of this creation. The one who is going to till the ground and the one who is going to receive the gifts. And that's a very interesting picture.
In other words, what we have right here in Genesis chapter two in verse four, and following, is a clear indication that humanity is not only not an accident, not only not an imposition on the planet, the planet was made for human habitation. The planet itself, and even the rest of creation is waiting for the arrival of the human being in order for it to flourish. "Then God formed," in verse seven, "Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature."
The Lord God forms the man out of dust. What is the importance of that? Well, from dust we came, to dust we will return. This is a very interesting, interesting point that might not seem to be any more than perhaps some accessory poetry if we're reading too casually. What does it mean that we're made out of dust? It means we are actual stuff.
We are not Gnostics. The Gnostic temptation that's—G N O S T I C— the Gnostics were identifiable groups, especially in the transition of the time, from what we would see as the Old Testament to the New Testament in the first century. In the ancient world, the Gnostics were groups that were unified by the fact that they believed in a secret knowledge. That illumination, and salvation, and meaning in life would come by being a part of their secret group with their secret gnosis or their secret knowledge. But they also had a very strong prejudice against material things, including the body. They believed that the mind was what was superior. The body was a problem. The mind, the human mind, is trapped within a body.
Now, why would they think that way? Well, you might think that way, if you recognize that your brain would do things, your body is not up to doing. If you think that the moral problem of humanity is a lack of self-discipline. This is one of the major problems. In other words, if you don't have the biblical metanarrative and you don't know the Fall, and the Christian account of why we sin, then you might think we sin simply because we're trapped in a body. Because this body wants to do bad things.
The Bible will have nothing of that. The Bible tells us that we are made out of stuff by God's intention. In other words, he didn't just say, "Presto, there's a man." He made man out of dirt, out of earth.
The other day, I saw a cartoon, showed a couple moms with little boys playing in the playground. They little boys are covered with dirt. The one mom said to the other, "Why does this happen?" And the other one said "From dusty came to dusty will return." That's very biblical; we're made out of this stuff and we will become this stuff once again. If we die and we wait for that day of resurrection, we are real. There is no ‘unreal’ to us. God took dust and he animated it. According to what we read here, he breathed into nostrils, the breath, the nefesh, the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. We are the product of God's divine, creative and sovereign act. He did make us entirely by his sovereignty and authority, but he made us out of the stuff he had already made: out of dust.
"And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil."
 Well, here you have a sequence again, that tells us something that many people who've read the Bible and read many parts of the Bible and think they know about creation that they don't know. You don't know it if you don't read chapter two. Chapter two is this theological commentary on chapter one. Here we are told that creation, the growth of vegetation, the thriving of vegetation waited for the arrival of humanity. You had creation, you had vegetation, but until you have the arrival of humanity, you do not have a garden. God created the garden, not for the plants, but for the human creatures, he would put within the garden. Very clear distinction here we also need to keep in mind.
What's the difference between a garden and a wilderness? Well, you look at the garden, you recognize somebody, some somebody arranged this. Nature does not naturally plant itself in rose. One of the wonderful things about being out in the country, we're surrounded by all these farms, many of the Amish farms. We were there long enough to see the second corn crop largely grow. They were seedlings when we got there within a month. It's amazing. Of course, the weather was spectacular, but it was amazing to see how fast this corn grew.
This was the second crop of the season. And I tried to estimate how many stalks of corn were in this farm. I gave up because I know it's possible, but by the time they get large enough, you can't even distinguish the individual stalks. Walking down the row and it's as long as a football field and several times as wide. You start to look at it and you realize, "Look at all these neat rows, they're perfect rows. Anyone you would think looking at this would know someone did this, corn doesn't reproduce itself in rows."
The difference between a garden and a wilderness is design and intentionality, purpose, Also aesthetics. There's something beautiful about rows of corn. You go to a major garden and, you say, one of these gardens might attract a lot of people. You go to one of the cemeteries here in Louisville, something like one of the landscapes designed by Frederick law, Olmstead, such as Cave Hill Cemetery. You look at it, and you know, that intelligence did this.
That's the difference between wilderness and the garden. According to the biblical worldview, one of the purposes of humanity is to create and to tend a garden, not merely to appreciate wilderness. That's one of the reasons why a major worldview conflicts in our age, between those who think that the wilderness ought to reign, and those who think that the garden ought to reign. There are those amongst us—I don't mean here in this class, I mean in our culture— who clearly believe human beings need just to leave everything as it is. Nature should be left unto its own unto itself, unto its own natural processes. But the Bible says that the actual pinnacle creation is not the wilderness. It's the garden. We don't apologize for that.
" A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates."
Well, almost anyone who listens to the news immediately knows the Tigris and the Euphrates, both of which are found in the nation of Iraq. So, we do have some geographic placement here in terms of knowing where this is. Even we know where the headwaters might be. But there is no way in terms of our current geography to know exactly by reading Genesis two, 10 and following, what spot on earth the garden was in. Even finding the headwaters, you recognize that it's flowing out of the garden. In verse 15, "The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it." Not merely to observe, not merely to say, look at wilderness at how beautiful it is.
Wilderness is beautiful. I just spent a good deal of the last month enjoying and looking at what is nothing but wilderness. But the gardens are even better. " The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, 'You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.'"
So there we have the garden, the garden built by God's design and God's intentionality. The garden is an indication, not only that human beings are now to arrive, but that human beings have a purpose, a viceregency. That is to say, we are to reign with God in this garden. We are to be the keeper of the garden, the tender of the garden. We are even to be the expander of the garden. We are to be also, as we are made in God's image, using the capacity God gave us, which is a small picture of himself in which we create. We don't create, as God created ex nihilo, we create out of the stuff he's given us.
But there is something that glorifies God, every time a garden is planted. Every time this mandate is fulfilled in terms of the purpose for which humanity was created, God receives glory. And the Lord, God put Adam in the garden. And he said, all of it is for you. All of it. Every herb, every plant, every, every vegetable, every fruit, all of it is for you. You are not for the vegetation. The vegetation is for you— except for one.
Now this is a very interesting point again, in the Talmudic literature of Judaism. There's some real wisdom here in looking at this. And it comes down to this. Let's say that you are a parent. Let's say that you're a parent, and you create a playroom for your children. In it you put many good things. The ultimate test would be if you put one thing in that room, and you said to the child, "you can have all these toys. You can play with all of them, but not that one." The ultimate test of the child would not be the child's willingness to play with all the toys he's permitted to play with. But his willingness to accept the parent's authority, not to play with the one that is forbidden. And we can immediately identify with that.
There is something about us that makes us want the one thing we shouldn't have. One of the things we need to keep in mind, however, is that we're understanding this at the wrong time. In other words, that Talmudic story makes perfect sense. After Genesis three. It's not supposed to make perfect sense now.
You see right now, if we created a playroom for our children and put in many toys and said, you can play with all of them, but not that one. We would know that the little five-year-old is now going to be more concentrated on the one he can't have, rather than all the rest of them that are there. And why? It's because he's of Adam's seed. It's because he is a sinner. In our sinful state we are going to be inclined to want the one thing we're not supposed to have rather than to enjoy the array of things that are presented to us lawfully. But that wasn't a problem for Adam. You need to hold that thought. I'll just give you a little clue.
It takes a snake to make that point. It takes a serpent to make that point. There is no reason to believe at this point in the narrative that Adam would've done anything, but to have joyfully accepted the restriction, the Lord has given. That he is to enjoy everything, but the fruit of this one tree. One of our problems—and that's why I hope we are benefiting so much by moving word, by word and verse by verse through Genesis— one of our problems, even as Christians, even as biblically literate, growing knowledgeable Christians, is that we tend to collapse the narratives. We, we, we tend to think of Genesis as one chapter, or especially of creation. We've put it all together and, and we forget there is a sequence here that is of incredible importance. But only now at this point, as we enter back into the narrative of chapter two only now at verse 18 does the Lord God say it is not good for the man to be alone.
So if we had only Genesis one, we would know that God created man in his image. "Male and female, he created them," but we would not know there was a sequence to that. God created the man first. According to Genesis chapter two, the garden is awaiting the creation of humanity. And the one who enters is Adam, out of the dust he made Adam; this is going to be very crucial. Out of the dust, the Lord, God took the stuff he had made, and he formed out that stuff and he breathed life into him. But now in verse 18 of chapter two, the Lord God declares, "It is not good for man to be alone."
Now God has already created all of the other living creatures. He has given them the mandate to multiply and fill the earth. So, we can rightly understand that when God made the rabbit, he made a male rabbit and a female rabbit. When God made the giraffe, He made a male giraffe and female giraffe. Go on down through all the species. But when he made man, he made only Adam, out of the dust. And he places Adam in the garden. But it is not good for a man to be alone.
There's something about Adam that's distinct from a male rabbit. Actually, there are many things, but in this case, there's one thing that is crucial. The rabbit would have no consciousness of being alone, but Adam will. How's God going to make this point to Adam?
Again, we tend to conflate the narrative. We tend to have our Reader's Digest, condensed version. I realize that's an anachronism, many people in those rooms don't have an idea what Reader's Digest, condensed books were. My grandmother had the whole set. About once a month, you got a bound volume with about four novels or nonfiction works in them. They condensed them all down. Instead of reading a 400-page book here, you had an 80-page condensation of the book. Historians now say that was kind of the apex of the middle class, literary culture in America. In the 20th century, people didn't have time to read novels. They read condensations and novels. No kidding, in the 1980s, Reader's Digest decided to condense the Bible.
So they came up with a condensed version of the Bible. A Christian satire magazine did a satire on the Reader's Digest, condensed Bible, and they put it all on one page, and it's hilarious. I wish I had it with me, I'd read it to you. But the funny thing about it is you look at it and it turns out not just funny, but tragic because there are many Christians who actually almost think of the Bible in this condensed way. Which is why we need not to condense it. The very purpose of expositional Bible study is not to condense it, but to take it in its fullness.
One of the ways we condense it even in chapter two, is by saying, "God said, it's not good for man to be alone. And then he created out of man, the woman." That's not how the narrative proceeds. Instead, after verse 18, the Lord God declares, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him." You'll notice the word helper. You don't describe a female rabbit as a helper to the male rabbit. That didn't really fit. But the rabbit is not given a creation mandate to create and to tend and to till, nor to rule and to reign and to have dominion. But the human is, the man was. This word 'Helper' is rightly thought of as a compliment. She is what he needs. She is the completion of him.
Now here's where biblical honesty is very important. This is not any kind of salacious, Biblical reference. It's just the obvious so that we can understand why God created us as he created us, and what it is to mean. Adam is in the garden fully equipped as a man. He has all the physical equipment a man needs, but you realize without a woman, much of this is nonsensical. There is even an Adam's physical constitution in the physical constitution of a man there is the declaration. There is a purpose for this that requires a woman to explain. One of the most interesting things for us to note is that Adam does not make the self-declaration, "It is not good for me to be alone." Adam, doesn't complain to God saying I'm alone. I shouldn't be alone. I'm lonely. He doesn't make a declaration. What's all this for? He appears to be just waiting.
God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him." It is right for him. Nothing else is right for him, nothing else. Only what God creates is right for him. Then in verse 19, "Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name."
So according to Genesis chapter one, the creation of these critters was on the day before. Now these critters are brought individually as species before Adam and he names them. Why didn't God name them? God doesn't have any reluctance to name certain things such as rivers. We just saw that God names what he wants to name. He doesn't name all the critters. He doesn't name all the creatures. Instead, he delegates that to Adam. What's that a picture of? It's a picture of delegated authority. It's a picture of what it means for Adam to be a co-regent with God. For Adam to exercise dominion. The rabbit doesn't name the human, the human name is the rabbit. The animals don't classify us. We classify them. They don't rule over us, We rule over them.
Years ago, I heard the story of a Quaker that had an obstinate mule, which I guess is a redundancy. He was trying to coax the mule into doing what the mule needed to do. The mule wouldn't do it. The Quaker believing in peace couldn't strike the animal. All he could do was try to persuade it, which wasn't working. So finally, in exasperation, he went to the face of the mule and he said, you will do what I tell you to do, or I will give you to a Baptist.
We are to rule over these creatures. And a part of that rule is even to name them. The nomenclature is itself a demonstration of dominion. " Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was no helper fit for him." Nothing is right for him. Now this is interesting, was he looking for something that was right for him? No. Is this a warning against bestiality? Well, no. It's a portrait of the fact that bestiality wouldn't even make sense. Bestiality would be irrational.
Adam can look at them and know they're not for him. He can just observe them as he is demonstrating his delegated authority by naming every one of these critters, he can also see at the same time, there's nothing here for me. Keep going, move along, move along, move along, keep going. And at the end of this process, when all the creatures have been named, Adam now knows there is nothing fit for him.
And then verse 21. "So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
Some crucial distinctions here. First of all, do all of the creating. It's all God's creative act. Adam, doesn't say, "Let me say you, what I want. I want a woman. Here's what she needs to look like. Here's the equipment she needs to have." None of that. The God who created Adam will create the compliment to Adam.
But the second distinction is that when God created the woman, he did not go back to the dust. He doesn't go back to the dust. He goes to Adam and it is a very important distinction with immense theological and spiritual significance. The woman is not a different creature made out of the dust. According to the scripture, the woman doesn't have an independent status from the man so there could be any confusion about the fact that we are for each other. Instead, rather than making her out of the dust and breathing into her nostrils, the breath of life, he causes deep sleep to fall upon the man. And when he slept, he took, it says, one of his ribs. It's the stuff on his side. When I was a little boy, I can remember reading this, I can remember one time wondering if my little sister had more ribs than I had because maybe all males at this point were short a rib. Well, that's a little too concrete. That's stretching the Hebrew, or pointing it a little too much. No, this is, this is not just a rib it's out of the side, the thorax. It's right out of the center part of Adam. It's Adam's stuff. It's Adam's flesh. It's Adam's bone.
The word rib there, the most important part is this is all the stuff, Bone, sinew, flesh. He took up one of his ribs and he closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman. He doesn't make the woman out of the dust. He makes the woman out of the man. And then he brings her to the man. What in the world is Adam going to say?
Well, let's ask the question, "Why does Adam need to say anything?" Well, he needs to say something because as you see in the preceding verses, God said to Adam, you named the creatures. It was an exercise. Not only in Adam's co-regency, in his delegated authority, it was also a lesson to Adam of his responsibility to recognize which creature is which. He still has that responsibility. And now the Lord God presents the woman to the man. In the same way that the Lord presented every living creature to the man that he would name it. He now brings the woman to the man. And now what will Adam say? Look at verse 23. "Then the man said this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called ‘woman’ because she was taken out of man." He names her. The woman doesn't name the man; the man names the woman in the sequence. And what does he name her? He names her me, but not me. If I'm a man, then she is a woman. She's me, but not me. She's the compliment to me. She is not a rabbit. She's not a giraffe. She's not different from me. She is exactly me, but she's not exactly me. She is the completion. She is what I need. She is made for me. "This, at last, is bone of my bones, flesh of flesh; She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man." End of chapter.
Creation of man and woman, enormous theological significance, enormous spiritual importance. The very foundation of our worldview of understanding reality. Not only in the creation of the world and the cosmos and the universe, but the creation of the creatures; but not only the creatures, the creation of the human being; and not only the creation human being, but the creation human being as male and as female. As a man and as a woman. But that isn't the end of the chapter.
Immediately in distinction to the animals In distinction, even to those animals, which multiply by means of heterosexual reproduction. Indistinct to all the rest of creation, now that there is man and woman, what immediately follows is a 'therefore.' Therefore found in verse 24, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed." Very interesting.
Before we leave this, even for a few days to ponder it in order to come back to it, we need to see this: marriage isn't something that comes later. Marriage comes now. Human beings were made for marriage and marriage is made for human beings. God's intention that, human beings as man and woman, pair off in the faithful monogamy of heterosexual marriage is not something that is a process and product of social theological evolution. It is a structure of creation. It is in creation itself. It is so much in creation itself that human beings have lived for thousands of years and every single society, until the last decade., has found its way to the normativity of heterosexual marriage. Even in, in our sexually confused times with now 13 states having legalized same sex marriage, the vast majority of people, even in those states and in these confused times still find themselves to heterosexual marriage. In spite of the fact that the world is going to try to marginalize it and make it merely a lifestyle option still by its very existence, it judges all other relationships as inferior.
I spoke of the division of the goods, Heterosexual marriage in creation, which comes before the fall, is where the goods are undivided. It's where being male and female makes perfect sense. It's where the words 'husbands' and 'wives' make perfect sense. A husband and a wife in this union that makes perfect sense. It is where children naturally follow. It is where all the gifts of sex and of sexuality can be enjoyed without restriction or embarrassment. They're naked in the garden and they are unashamed. There's no division. They enjoy each other. They need each other. They are for each other.
The unitive principle of marriage is there, and the Bible is not shy to say there is something deeply sexual about this. That's why Adam knew he needed a wife. It was never God's creation purpose that he be alone. It was the Lord God who declared it is not good that the man should be alone. And it's God who provides the woman. "I will make him a helper fit for him."
Genesis chapter one tells us that men and women are equally made in the image of God. In the image of God, he created them, male and female; He created them. The distinction between the man and the woman is not one of status. It is not one of theological identities. We are both made in God's image. It is of purpose and pattern in creation. And in creation before the fall, there is already a pattern. The pattern is that the woman is made as a compliment to the man. The word helper here is true. That's true. But the word helper there is not as in slave or servant, it is in helper, as in coworker in the garden.
There's a pattern of authority that is here. There's a pattern of origin that is here. The man comes before the woman and the woman comes out of the man, not out of the dust. But the completion is what you find in the final verse in verse 25. "And the man and his wife were both naked and not ashamed." There's only one way to end up with a man and a woman naked and unashamed. And this is it.
When we come back, we'll pick up with some additional thoughts on what we learn in verses 24 and 25, and then comes immediately the fall. Adam and Eve are not in the garden long in this picture where they're naked and unashamed. Within the sequence of just a few verses, they're going to be clothed awkwardly. And very much ashamed, but it won't be because they're men and women. And it won't be because they are married. It will be because they sin. Let's pray.
Our father, we come before you so thankful that you give us so much in your word. So much that we can never plumb the depths of it or wring out all the meaning of it. But far more than most of us ever know, unless we go word by word and sentence by sentence and verse by verse. Father, thank you for giving us this privilege and for guiding our thoughts and minds. Father, we pray that you will, by your Holy Spirit, impress these words on our hearts. That we would lose none of it and ponder all of it and grow to be more Christlike as we do. We pray this in the strong name of Jesus Christ. Our Lord, amen.

You can find Dr. Mohler's other Line by Line sermons here.

Follow Dr. Mohler:
X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.
For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.

You can find Dr. Mohler's other Line by Line sermons here.

Follow Dr. Mohler:
X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.
For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.

You can find Dr. Mohler's other Line by Line sermons here.

Follow Dr. Mohler:
X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.
For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.

We are continuing our study verse by verse through the book of Genesis. And as we arrive today at the text, we arrive at verse 27 and we've been following through Genesis chapter one, not only verse by, but word by word. And as we have been working our way through the progression of the days first, in terms of the first three days of creation with God forming the earth. And then the second three days of God filling the earth, on the sixth day, we saw that in the beginning of the day, God created the creatures. And in verse 24, we saw, “and God said that the earth bring forth living creatures, according to their kinds lives talk and creeping things and beasts of the earth, according to their kinds. And it was so, and God made the beast of the earth, according to their kinds and the livestock, according to their kinds and everything that creeps on the ground, according to its kind, and God said, God saw that it was good.”
What we saw in those verses here in the beginning of the sixth day is a change in how God addresses those whom he has created. We saw that when he created the things previous, including vegetation and things in the sea and the birds of the air, he said, “let them be fruitful and multiply.” But when he created these creatures identified as livestock and creeping things in beasts of the earth, God said that “they should bring forth each according to its kind. God saw that it was good.” Then God said, “let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing, the creeps on the earth.” Now we saw in looking at verse 20, that when we have the text here, say, “then God said” it's falling in the sequence, obviously. 
But notice that then he speaks in the plural of majesty, which is also an indication of the Trinity. “Let us make man in our image after our likeness.” Now, the language of majesty is that which is used by royalty, such as the reigning queen of England. The Monarch of England never uses the first person singular, but also always uses the plural. “We are not amused” as Queen Victoria famously used to say. We do this. We do that. And it is because the Royal person is considered to be too magnificent to be contained within the first person singular. So many readers of the text here have insisted that what we have here is simply a Hebraic form of the plural of majesty. The problem with that is that we already have a Trinitarian indication in the text, and it comes very early because we are told that the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters as we saw beginning in the text, even in verse two. 
We later find out, of course, that it is the Son, the Incarnate Word, the Logos, who is the agent of creation itself. So that creation is a Trinitarian act. Now, in all fairness, we do not know that from a plain reading of the book of Genesis without the revelation given to us in the New Testament, but we are not reading Genesis as if we do not have the gospel. We're not reading Genesis as if we are not Christians. And we are not reading Genesis as if we do not have the gospel of John that tells us “in the beginning was the Word. And the word was with God. And the word was, God, all things were made through him. And without him, nothing that was made was made.” So when we see, “let us make man in our image,” we have to see not only the plural of majesty, but an indication of the Trinity. But what is God here determined to do? 
“Let us make man in our image.” So, the distinction that comes immediately in terms of the creation of the human creature is that this creature is going to be distinct from everything else to form the earth and everything else that filled the earth by the fact that this being this creature is to bear God's own image, to be made in the image of God. Now, the first thing we learned about human beings here is that we are a creature. That's a very important first Axiom of understanding what the Bible has to say about what it means to be human. We are not self-existent. We are not some kind of cosmic accident. We are a creature. What makes a creature distinct from something that just happens is intentionality and ownership. You make it, you own it. If you create it, it is yours. God created all things. 
We understand that everything that exists, exists precisely because God created it. And the everything that God created, the everything that exists, finds its culmination in the creation of the human creature, who is owned by God, made by God. And yet fashioned by God. Made by God, not just as the other things he has made, even the other living creatures, but this creature is made in his image. We must remember however that there remains always an infinite distinction between the creator and the creature, even as the creature is made in God's own image. The creature is not God. The distinction between the creator and the creature is enduring. It is eternal and it is singularly important, but this creature is made in a different way, according to a different purpose than everything that has come before. “Let us make man in our image after our likeness.” 
Now, some very interesting questions appear so early here in the text. “In our image, according to our likeness.” What in the world does that mean? Do we look like God? That's a fundamental theological mistake. It is the mistake that is at the very heart of idolatry. The assumption that God is like us in terms of a form just perfected. Now we know that this is idolatry by any reading of the scripture, but specifically in Romans chapter one. If you look over at Romans chapter one, you will see the indictment of this kind of confusion. And we should be so thankful again, that we're reading Genesis as Christians armed with all that God has given us in the New Testament. We read beginning in verse 18 “for the wrath of God has revealed from heaven against all in godliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” 
It's this suppression of the truth, that is, seemed to be the first evidence of human sinfulness and all humanities involved in this conspiracy to suppress the truth. “For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them for his invisible attributes.” Not ours, his invisible attributes, “namely his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” Here's where it gets very important for us. “Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened claiming to be wise. They became fools and exchange the glory of the immortal God for images, resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.” 
If you look at the idolatry of the ancient world, in particular for instance, if you even look in many of the Eastern religions, you see images of human beings. Images of human beings, often in an idealized or gigantic frame of reference or dimension. So, if you look at some of the Buddha statues from the east, you'll notice some of them are absolutely huge. They are humanity blown up big. In other cases, the idols are not so physically large as they are physically perfected. And so there has always been the temptation to idealize the human form and to worship that in some idolatrous way. But that is precisely not what it means for us to be made in God's likeness, because God, we are told, does not have a body. He will insist on the fact that he does not have a bodily form. 
He will tell us, even as Jesus told the woman at the well that God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. The human desire to try to create an image, whether it's of a human being or, as Romans one tells us, or of any kind of thing, any kind of creature or created being or created thing is a form of perverted religion, otherwise known as idolatry. The ambition to do that is to cast a lie about God. Armed with that knowledge then, when God says, “let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” we know that that is not a physical capacity, but as we follow through biblical theology, our physical form does imply certain things that the image of God makes clear. It isn't that God has a body that we are a lesser copy of, it is that God possesses certain functions in a perfected and omnipotent way that he shares with his human creatures. The most important issue of the image of God is going to be the fact that we, of all the creatures alone have two capacities. First, the capacity to know him. And secondly, the capacity to rule. To exercise dominion. 
Now first, what it means to be made in God's image is that of all the creatures, we are the only creature able to know God. Consciously to know him. Now God's glory is in all creation. God said, “it's good.” He declared the goodness of all creation. So there's not something the dog is supposed to have that the dog doesn't have. The dog did not lose the ability consciously to know the creator as a result of the fall. The dog was not meant to have this capacity. It doesn't have the capacity. We have a dog, as you know, Baxter, the Wonder Beagle, and Baxter is a very friendly, wonderful dog. He is kind of the prototype of dog. He is well of a certain kind of dog. Not a guard dog. Baxter would be completely incompetent at guarding anything because he likes everybody. 
He likes crooks as well as honest people. He would be the welcoming committee for…although he believes he has a guard dog function because when UPS drops off something and rings the doorbell, he goes as if he's on the attack mode, but his tails wagging. Baxter's not a highly intelligent creature, even by dog standards. You know, there are dogs that can be trained to do all kinds of things. Baxter's not even impressed by that. He doesn’t even think he should aspire to that. But what he is, is absolute loyalty, absolute happiness, and absolute nose. Every once in a while, we will be walking along and he's just sniffing something and he looks up to me as if to say, “you have no idea what you're missing.” I'll just go on record of saying, I think I'm thankful I'm missing it, but nonetheless, he's got capacities I don't have, but he has no capacity consciously to know his creator. 
Now God is glorified in that dog. God's glorified. And that dog does exactly what God intended that dog to do. And doesn't it say something about the joy of the creator in his creation? When you think about how he made all these creatures and decided that each should have this particular shape and form and this particular function, and then you look at some of these animals and you go, okay, if I'm an evolutionist, if I'm operating of a materialistic naturalistic worldview, I'm gonna say evolution did that strange thing. However, if I'm a human being, looking at that who is not an evolutionist, but rather is a believer in divine creation, I look at that and say, God has a sense of humor, a sense of delight in his creation. But in his, as human creatures, he built in, created the capacity consciously to know him. 
The lion and the tiger, they show the glory of God, but they have no idea. The same things true, of course, of the plants and the trees. They're showing the glory of God, but they have no consciousness that they're doing so. Human beings do. From the moment of our awareness, we are aware that we are created. And that means that there is a creator. And the knowledge of that creator is that with which we all have to do. I was reading last night Nietzsche the famous nihilist at the end of the 19th century, in the beginning of the 20th century. The man who defined the argument that God is dead and that we have killed him. And he made a very interesting statement. He said, and I I'll have to paraphrase here, but he said, as much as we have killed, God, God keeps coming back in the grammar, which is an amazing statement for Nietzsche to have made. The very, that we have the capacity to use language. And there are regular rules of grammar. It means somehow, at least by intuition, that there is a creator, we kill him. And he comes back in the grammar. 
I mentioned to you some weeks ago, as we were beginning our study in the book of Genesis, this book recently written by an evolutionary scientist trying to explain to other evolutionary scientists why it is that they're making so little headway getting children to accept the theory of evolution. And you'll recall that she has a very brilliant argument. It took a lot of her for her to come up with this. She said that it seems that children reason from form to maker that children learn. They learned it from their parents. You know, how do we get this house? Well, somebody built this house. You know, how do we get this car? Somebody made that car. You look at a little girl walks in and finds her brother on the floor, having made something with blocks. Well, he made that. She knows that. Well, then they look at each other and they say, where do we come from? Well, the very fact that we exist implies that someone made us. And so this evolutionary scientist said, we're up against a big challenge here, because it seems like, and this is the way she put it, It seems that evolution has encoded even children not to believe in evolution, which is a pretty tough thing to come to terms with. If you're an evolutionist, well being made in God's image means we do know. And this is why also we speak of the kind conscience is a part of the Imago Dei is a part of the awareness of the creator. This is why Adam and Eve, when they sin, hid themselves, and that's why your three-year-old does the same thing. It is because that conscience cries out. 
Even when mom and dad aren't in the room, somebody saw me do that. But there is a second dimension. And that is the rule, the dominion that is given, and that comes so early in the text. “Let us make man and our image after our likeness.” And the very next statement is, “and let them have dominion,” that's Lordship, “over all the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over livestock and over the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” Dominion. We sing about dominion, we sing about God's Lordship, his dominion. We don't use that word much for instance, in our maps. Although if you go back a hundred years and you can actually say that precisely, you go back to 1912 and you look at a map, you will see any map in the English language that will use the word dominion in a map of the world, because it's the age of empire. 
And so you have Russia, but you also have Russian dominions. And especially with the British empire, you have Britain, but then you have the dominions and those are the lands over which Britain ruled, even though they were not properly Britain. England had dominion over India, over Malaysia, over Singapore, over about a third of the Earth's surface. The word dominion is now sometimes even used with reference, for instance, especially in historical reference to Canada.  But let's just say we've kind of defined dominion down. I don't think Ottawa worries a great deal about what London thinks anymore. But back during the age of empire, I guarantee they did. The United States was once considered a dominion of Great Britain. Took a war or two to end that claim. But the word dominion is one that we are not able to do without, as human beings with reference, even to how we see the affairs of nations. But here in the very beginning, and it's very important that we remember that we're in Genesis one, the fall is not yet on the horizon. There is no sin, and there is no effective sin. God did not give dominion to the human creature because of the result of sin. He gave dominion to the human creature in the very perfect design of creation. “Let us make in our image, after our likeness and let them,” we went over them. 
So this is to be a multiple creation. This is to be a plural creature. This is not just to be one man. This is to be humankind. The implication that as with the other creatures, this creature is to fill the earth, but that comes later as an order. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. Then verse 27, “so God created man in his own image, in the image of God, he created him, male and female He created them.” Oh, now we have them. We had let them before, but we didn't know who they were gonna be, but now we have them. And the essential new information that comes in verse 27 is male and female He created them 
Now that’s very interesting because in all the previous acts of filling, there was no reference to what we now call gender. To what, in the English language, we would previously call the sexes. It wasn’t necessary, but we do know that even in the world of vegetation, their gender still plays a role. You still have pollen, and you have pollination. You still have seeds, and the things that that imply gender, even in the world of vegetation. It would take a botanist, an agronomist to explain that fully, but somewhere in elementary school or junior high school, we learned that even most trees and most vegetation has a gendered identity. We just can't recognize them very readily. Sometimes they exist in the same plant in one way or another, but when it comes to the, the living creatures, that is the creatures that fill the seas and that fill the skies, and that of course fill the earth in terms of the livestock and the beast of the field and the creeping things, they’re gendered. There's a male rabbit and a female rabbit. There's a male grouper and a female grouper. The animal world is filled with that gendered reality. 
So are human beings, but human beings are named in terms of this gendered reality in the image of God who created him. That is humankind, man, male and female He created them. Now, before we go on at all, we should quickly note here that gender is thus a part of the goodness of God's creation. This is not a result of the fall. This is God's purpose in perfection from the beginning, male and female. You'll notice that there is a listing of two. There's a dichotomy. There is a, there's a bifurcation of humankind, a differentiation, a specialization that comes down to male and female. In order for human beings to be able to fulfill the mandate God give in terms of filling the earth, it's going to take the male and the female. This is a part of the goodness of God's creation. God could have by his sovereign power as creator, he could have assigned asexual reproduction to the things he has made. 
He could have done that for the fish of the sea. He could have done that for the birds of the air. He could have done that for human beings. He did not. A couple things we learned from that before we even rush on from this text. The first thing is that human beings were never made as individual reference. We were never meant to be alone. Now that's going to be declared in chapter two. It is not good for man to be alone, but the reason we know that it isn't good for us to be alone is that it's going to take at least two in order for the human species to survive. It is going to take at least two for the process of filling the earth to continue. It's going to take at least two, because without both, there is no wholeness. 
There is no picture of the species intact, flourishing, and functioning. It's going to take both a male and a female. And that's why in the second chapter of Genesis, we will be told so quickly here in that theological commentary, we're gonna find in chapter two, on the progression of the days that we are encountering here in chapter one, we're going to be told that it isn't good for human beings to be alone. Therefore, we are given the institution of marriage. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife. And they shall be one flesh, husband and wife, not just male and female, but before creation is finished, husband and wife. There are two and only two sexes mentioned here. 
And, and in creation is important that we recognize that it was so. There is no confusion. There is no sin here. Sin manifesting itself later in human experience in grotesque confusions over that, which is so clear here in creation, male and female, it's very clear. The female is made in the image of God. The male is made in the image of God. More commentary on that will come in chapter two, but equally made in God's image. They're not only made for God. They are made for each other. There is a complementarian structure that is built into creation, and there's no confusion here. Now, after the fall, there will be all kinds of confusion here, never more than in our own day. And the confusions that fill our headlines today are confusions that would've astounded people even 20 or 30 years ago. We are living in what in human history must assuredly be the most grotesque and intense period of confusion over that which is so clear here in Genesis chapter one. 
And to that, we will return When we look at the commentary on this text, we find in chapter two. but before leaving the creation of the human creature of man and woman we read, “and God blessed them, and God said to them,” so God is going to speak to his human and creatures. The creature made in his image, the creature consciously able to hear him. And to know that we are being spoken to, he says, “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” That's reproduction. That's what that's about now. It's probably more than that. It's about filling the earth, not only with babies and with progeny, but filling the earth with cities and buildings, and filling the earth with the things that by human industry is we're made in God's image we're able to do. 
I said that even as we have a body that does not mean that God has a big body. It isn't that God is a perfected body. He doesn't have a body, but we actually need a body to be able to fulfill the functions that he has given us. God creates with a word. He says, let there be. And there is, he says, let there be light. And there's light. God doesn't need a hand. God doesn't need an arm. We need them. And we need that even to understand. That's why that when Israel tells the story of how God brought them out of bondage to Pharaoh in Egypt, he'll say he brought us out by his mighty hand and his outstretched arm. Well he doesn't have an arm. And, and that doesn't mean physically that some giant arm scooped up Israel in captivity. No, it's metaphorical language. Israel knew it. And we know it because God doesn't have a hand. God doesn't have an arm. God doesn't actually need a hand or an arm to accomplish what he does, but we do. So even though our body is not rich, small, a picture of what God looks like, our body is what our creator gave us to facilitate what he told us to do. 
I was talking to a dad the other day who told me that he was in a little bit of trouble with his wife, and I could tell this was lighthearted. And I said, what? And he said, well, our five-year-old had a birthday, little boy, and I got him not some play tools, but I got him some real tools. Now, it wasn't a giant toolbox. It was his size, and it was a hammer. And he said now daddy's gonna teach you how to use this hammer. He said I wanted him to have, even at age five, the feeling of a hammer in his hand. I wanted him to feel the satisfaction in that. And he said, unfortunately, he felt the satisfaction in that in ways that were not fully pleasing to mom, leading to a couple of marks on some furniture, which he declared, he was fixing. When you look at that, and you say it comes real early to us, doesn't it? The desire to move things around. 
When I was a little boy, my favorite toys were tonka trucks and that was back when they were made outta metal. And I had a complete construction set. I had drag lines and bulldozers and dump trucks, by the way, I still have them. I don't play with 'em anymore. Let me be that clear. But I still have them. But you know what? I can still remember sitting there in the dirt and making things and just imagining, seeing big people make things. And that was during the time when especially during the space race and then the postwar building boom, you could look everywhere and construction's taking place. We build things. We make things. There's an urge within us to do it. And we are told here that that comes right from the order given to us in creation, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the, of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. 
There's gonna be more to this of course, but I want to conclude by mentioning to you a story that I had to deal with about two years ago, in terms of some media attention. Had to do with the fact that the zoo and Berlin had decided to make the point, the human beings are just like any other animal, just like any other animal. So, the zoo in Berlin put up a special exhibit and they put human beings behind the cage and they identified the creature as homo sapiens. Man. So the people going through the zoo would walk through the zoo and see those human beings here in this cage, over here, you have orangutans and over here you have tigers. And over here you have lemurs and whatever else. And then the reptile house, you have the reptiles, and then the aviary, you have the birds and here you have human beings, but what made that ludicrous and why did that exhibit fail? 
Not because we're not interesting to look at. It's because we know we have to put ourselves in the cage and the zebras did not put human beings in the cage and hammer a sign up front homo sapians Now we're the only creature who can build the cage and put ourselves in it, which just points to the fact that we really aren't just like all the rest of the animals after all. And we know it. Genesis one tells us why and shows us God's glory in it. And there is yet more, a whole lot more to come. Let's pray. Our Father, we are so thankful that you've given us so much in your word, this word, that arrests us and surprises us and tells us what we desperately need to know. Father, our familiarity with this text can sometimes Rob us of the absolute joy of finding in your word that, which is more profound, more clear, more present than many of us would ever have imagined. That's why we thank you for the privilege of going through this text word by word verse by verse, in order that we would gain from it, what we desperately need to know, not only for our understanding of things past, but our hope of things to come and our responsibility in the future. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

You can find Dr. Mohler's other Line by Line sermons here.

Follow Dr. Mohler:
X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.
For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.

We are continuing in our verse by verse study of the book of Genesis. We are arriving at verse 20 and it is the fifth day of creation. It has often been noted that of the six active days of creation, there are three days of forming the earth and there are three days of filling it. In three days God forms the earth and thus the earth is ready for habitation, but in the next three days, he fills it. Now he is going to fill it with living creatures.
In verse 20, we read, “And God said, ‘Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth, across the expanse of the heavens.’ So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.’ And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.” (Genesis 1:20-23)
So on the fifth day of creation God, in this sequential, developmental understanding of the formation of the universe as we know it here on this planet, fills the seas and fills the air. Now, if you've ever been in a place where there is no life in the sea, you'll notice how troubling that is. If you go to the Dead Sea, for instance, which has such a high mineral content that there is no aquatic life in it. No one goes fishing in the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea has that name because its waters are death to live creatures. And it appears that it's just this sea of death. 
Meanwhile, you go to any living water and you'll notice very quickly that there are things in it and you don't have to be Henry David Thoreau on Walden's pond to have the experience of noticing that the water's alive, that there are things in that water. When you're a little child and in the shallows of a pond you play with tadpoles and little minnows. The little minnows come to surround you and you realize there are live things in this water. You’re there placidly and a fish breaks the surface of the water or a bird flies down and grabs a fish and goes off with it. Or you see other evidence of life in the water. I was just again down with some folks in salt water and you realize how alive it is. On the boat that I was on, there were two little boys and they were six and eight. And they yelled, “Shark!”, which turned out to be a false alarm. It wasn't a shark, there were two porpoises that were playing in the wake of the boat. Their eyes got so big as they realized these animals were there and behind them were many others. One eventually said, “How many are there?” Well, there's one, no, there's two, there's three, there was an entire pod of porpoises playing in the wake of the boat. And, uh, they were clearly having a blast. And you realize, yes, the seas are filled with all of these creatures filled with fish and crustaceans and plankton. And of course filled with sea mammals as well. 
God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures.” And you've seen these, for the first generation now, these massive pictures of these schools of fish in the depths of the sea. Now we have the ability to put these cameras down in the very deepest depths of the deepest part of the ocean, such as the Mariana Trench in the Pacific. There are creatures that are particularly created in order to withstand the almost unbelievable pressures of water at that depth. They are not handsome creatures, by our estimation, they are fearsome creatures. They look like something that could have been drawn by some kind of science fiction artist, but that's the point, isn't it? No science fiction, no imaginative depiction of what these creatures might look like is any stranger than how they actually look. By the way, one of the things that we've noted is that in ancient records, in ancient historians, there are records of creatures that people thought were invented. Yet now we know that some of them are simply these creatures in the great depth that sometimes get washed up on the shore or they get caught in a fishing net. All of a sudden you realize this thing's not mythological, it's altogether real and altogether is ugly as we were told. Fearsome sometimes. 
But what we have here are swarms. The point of verse 20 is God's creative intention that the waters would not just be alive here and there, sometimes under certain circumstances with life, but the life would simply swarm within the waters. And thus, he said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth in the expanse of the heavens.” So in the seas and in the skies, God designed and created swarms of creatures. Great flock of birds. Not only flocks of many birds, but flocks of many kinds of birds and many flocks of their kinds, and also there in the sea. So God created the great sea creatures. Now, what are these great sea creatures? Well, they are certainly the whales and there certainly are the other large fish. There are some incredibly large fish and not only the great sea creatures, but every living creature that moves with which the water's swarm. 
That word swarm comes again. In other words, it is indicating how fertile the earth is, how fecund the world is, how filled with life the world is. So having formed it, God now fills it. He doesn't fill it in a small way. He doesn't fill it with a sporadic evidence of his creative activity. He doesn't put these creatures just here and there. He puts them in the seas where they swarm. He puts them in the sky where they swarm, every living creature that moves with which the waters swarm according to their kinds and every winged bird, according to its kind. Now the word that's translated bird here really means anything with wings. Just like the fish commonly refer to everything that's in the sea, even though we know some of them are mammals, so also when it says birds it is speaking of all winged creatures. As you know, there are some winged creatures that buzz and hover as well as those who fly and glide. And God saw that it was good. 
Before we go on, we need to recognize there are a couple of other cues to God's glory in creation evident within these verses. For instance, it says, “God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds”. That word, according to their kinds, that phrase is very important. It is repeated, of course, with the winged birds, “and every winged bird, according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.” God creates creatures according to their kind. Now, this is an indication that God has created species. God has created categories of animals. God created horses and cattle, as we shall see in the next day. But at this point, he has created all kinds of things that fill the sea and all kinds of birds and winged creatures that fill the air. Every one of them is according to its kind. It will reproduce according to its kind. 
When God created the trees, he said, and looking back here at verse 11, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” Now the importance of this really can't be overstated because in confrontation with the dominant secular scientific worldview, that says that all life simply comes from one common source and developed along different trajectories and a different developmental patterns to the world that we know today filled with living creatures, animate and inanimate plants, vegetation, and then the animal kingdom and humans and all the rest, the scripture clearly says that God's intention was reflected in the specific, sovereign designation of what we might call species, kinds. That's evidenced in the fact that trees bear fruit in which is the seed so that what will reproduce will be its kind. So also is the seed in the animals that swarm in the sea and those that swarm in the air, such that you have reproduction according to kinds. 
There's several implications of this. First of all, again, God's creative glory is in the variety of the kinds and his delight in the kinds. It's not just our delight, observing them. We need to remember God's delight in creating them. That will become even more evident as we follow through, but at this point, just looking at the things that are in the waters and the things that are in the air, they just like the trees, are to reproduce according to its kind. There is a mandate for them to reproduce “And God blessed them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas and let the birds multiply on the earth.’” God's mandate to reproduce is another implication of each of these creatures according to its kind. Two things here, first of all, God blesses them and secondly, God commands them. God blessed them, commanding be fruitful and multiply and fill. Be fruitful, multiply fill. 
I want you to notice that God here is commanding creatures. At this point, he is commanding sea creatures, air creatures. He is commanding fish and birds and he is commanding them to multiply. Now he commanded the trees to multiply, but not by speaking to them in the same way, but rather, “Let this happen.” But you'll notice, to these creatures, he speaks directly, “Be fruitful and multiply.” God speaks to those that he's created and tells them to multiply. God plants within them a desire, even rightly described as an instinct, to multiply.
God's blessing is in the command to multiply, but it's also a command to fill. In other words, God's creatures by God's own creator assignment, bear responsibility to continue his work of filling. God forms in three days, God fills in three days. But God fills in the beginning by creating the species, the kinds, and then by commanding them to multiply. It will be a pattern we will recognize as we get to the creation of humankind on the sixth day. So the blessing is in the command to multiply, which is a command to fill. The earth as God has created it is intended to be filled. Filling is a blessing.
God continues his activity. As we follow along with verse 24, “And God said, let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds - livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds. And it was so.”
God says, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures.” Now these are gonna be on the earth, not in the sea, not in the sky, but walking upon the earth and as we shall sea creeping, as well as walking. “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds - livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” So, livestock. From the very beginning, God intended some animals to be domesticated. That's livestock. Livestock is differentiated here from the beasts of the field. Livestock are those animals that we have domesticated but God domesticated them first. In other words, God made certain animals to serve human beings rather directly. Livestock is a term that makes no sense in the wild. It only makes sense in civilization. Livestock is a sign that these animals are created in a particular way to serve the needs of humankind. 
“Livestock and creeping things.” Between livestock and beasts of the earth we've got creeping things. Creeping things are part of God's design as well. Now, at this point they creep, creeping things. The clearest meaning to this is low on the earth. They're creepy little things.
The word creepy to us is a negative word, unless you're a fifth grade boy. For most people, creepy is a designation of things you would rather not run into. Close to the earth. At this point they don't slither, they creep. Only after Genesis three do we have things that slither. No one ever uses the word slither positively. You never say, “Here's the queen, she just slithered into the throne room.” That just doesn't work. You don't say, “Here's grandma, she just slithered in the house.” That doesn't work. Slither is a negative word, traveling on one's belly, as the Scripture will say. At this point there are creeping things and the creepy things are necessary too. These creeping things are a part of the glory of God's creation. These things that are frogs and reptiles and lizards and all these things. Livestock and creepy things and beasts of the earth, these beasts - does it not interest us that God in his sovereign action in creation thrilled in the variety of the beast of the earth? 
One of my ambitions is to go on a safari. I would love to be there in Africa and see so many of these beasts that I grew up watching on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. That was one of those instances of child abuse in my childhood, because that came on at a time that often conflicted with evening church on Sunday night. One had to be very sick in my household to see Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom or the Wonderful World of Disney. The Wonderful World of Disney turned out to be for Methodists and other people who did not have Sunday night church. The wonderful world of Sunday night service is where I was as a son, but every once in a while we would get to see it. There were other times when we could see Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. You remember there was Marlin Perkins who was the kindly zoologist or least posing as the expert and he had on his safari jacket and he had his distinguished mustache and he had his very specific elocution as he spoke of each of the animals. Then there was Jim, the poor guy that actually had to go risk life and limb to show you these animals. And so Marlon Perkins would say, “While, I'm here safely in the studio,Jim will be down here with the boa constrictor.” You know what that’s like. You look at it and for most of us, it was an amazing thing to see. 
In the great age of exploration it was fascinating to people, especially in Great Britain and in the United States to come face to face with these things, even by means of a photograph. They had heard of them but they really didn't get to see them. In the age of exploration, they would bring back taxidermy models of these things. Sometimes they would fill zoos with them. The great day of the zoo was when all of a sudden in the age of exploration and as east India tea companies going to places they would, they would come across these things. You'd have Sumatran tigers brought to London and you would have polar bears brought to Berlin so that people could see these things face to face. Many children, as I did, had a great acquaintance with these animals by means of the National Geographic magazine. When you had these pictures that came, I devoured every single issue of National Geographic. Now we have Animal Planet. We have 24/7 wildlife shows. Why? Because we're fascinated with them. We're fascinated with the ones that are cute and cuddly, such as the koala bear, which turns out isn't even a bear. And we're interested in those that can kill us. There's a great fascination with the things that will eat us and do so evidently without any tinge of conscience. God made these beasts, these creeping things, and the livestock, each according to its kinds.
“And it was so. And God made the beast of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.” 
Now, when we began at verse 20, we saw when God created the fish and the swarms in the sea, the birds and the swarms in the air, he said, “It is good.” And God saw that it was good. Now he declares again, that it is good. On the fifth day of creation, we had the waters and the birds created. On the sixth day of creation we have the creation of the living creatures on the earth and eventually also the crowning glory of creation in terms of the creatures, the creation of men and women, of humankind. “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’”
Now you need to notice as you look at the different commands, you'll notice that as you follow through the sequence, something now changes. God said in verse three, “Let there be light.” God says in verse six, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters.” God says in verse nine, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear.” God says in verse 11, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed.” God said in verse 14, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night.” God says in verse 20, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures.” And God says in verse 24, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures.” And then God says in verse 26, “Let us make man.” Do you notice the difference? There is a pronoun here that is nonexistent in the previous commands. The previous command just said, “Let there be, let there be, let there be, let there be.” And because God sovereignly said, “Let there be,” it was, just as he said. But now God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” 
Now, what is this pronoun to indicate to us? Would this indicate merely a linguistic convention known as the plural of majesty? It could be. The reigning Monarch of England never uses the first person singular because he or she represents the nation. So queen Victoria, for instance, famously said when she wasn't amused, “We are not amused.” She meant she, herself. That's a we. The rest of us are an I. “We do this.” “We do that.” That's the plural of majesty. Is that what's going on here? Is this throne language? Is this royal, majestic language? Well, it's certainly royal and it's certainly majestic, but that's not what is going on here. Or Is God referring back to all the things that he has made and including them in the plurality of this pronoun, us, let us make man? No, the animals aren't invited to help make man. The beasts of the field, the livestock, they're not invited to participate in this. So why the plural pronoun out of the sequence? It is because God here is about to create the only creature made in his image. And as he does so, he says, “Let us”.
There are clues already to the fact that there is a plural point of reference here. You don't find it in the sequence of the first five days. You don't even find it in the beginning of the sixth day with the creation of the livestock and the creeping things and the beasts. You find it in the first two verses. “In the beginning,” we read, “God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” From Genesis one on onward we will come to understand that the Spirit of God refers to God's active presence in his creation. God is transcendent so he is apart from his creation, but by his Spirit he is present in creation, though not part of it. And he is active. His spirit is never inactive. His spirit is never merely a witness. His spirit is never merely a presence. It is always an active presence. We will come later to know to name this Spirit, the Holy Spirit. We will come to understand in the New Testament, the ministry of this Spirit. We have here a Trinitarian reference, but if we were not Christians, we would not know how to understand this. You say Trinitarian, you just mentioned the Father, not yet named as Father, but we know this is the Father and the Spirit. That's two. Where is the third? Well, we come to know, by means of the New Testament, that Christ is here. And to that we will turn subsequently. But at this point with this strategic verse, it is important for us to recognize that God says, “Let us make man in our image.” In the New Testament, in the gospel of John, in the prologue to that Gospel, we read that Christ is the Logos, the Word through whom the Father created everything that is. We have here, the Spirit of God, his active presence in creation. We have the Creator, who will be designated as Father, and of course that designates relationship. He isn't a Father yet until he has created the human creatures who will know him as Heavenly Father. And we have Christ whom we know to be present here by means of the New Testament. 
Here we have a distinction in how God speaks, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Now the word likeness becomes important here. What kind of likeness will this be? Well, since there is no body, God does not have a form, this likeness is going to have to mean something else. But the important thing for us to recognize here in this sixth day of creation is that we have reached a climactic point. It is climactic in the sense that everything that has been created in terms of the forming and in terms of the filling has gotten us ready for this. This is something different than whatever has come before. What has come before is the creation of living things, including vegetation, trees that have seed in their fruit, according to their kinds. Then the swarming things of the sea, each reproducing according to its kind, the birds of the air, each reproducing according to its kind. Then we have the creation of the creatures on the sixth day, these who are livestock and creeping things and beasts and God speaks to them and says to them, “Reproduce.” And they do. And they will, according to their kinds.But there's more. 
God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our lightness.” And we shall see something that isn't said of any other creature, “And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” What we have here in the sequence of creation, by the time we arrive here in the highest point of the sixth day, is that it turns out that the forming and the filling was to come to a climactic conclusion in the creation of the one creature made in God's own image. He will not be, himself, imaged in creation by means of an idol. He will not, as we shall see, allow any idol even to be brought into his presence, but he stamps his likeness on this final creature he creates, when in this Trinitarian reference he says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”. You'll notice that what is immediately said thereafter is, “Let them have dominion.” It's not said over anything else.
The fish aren't told to rule over the birds. The birds aren't told to rule over the giraffes. The beasts aren't told to rule over the livestock. The livestock aren't told to rule over the creeping things. They simply do what they do. They operate by what we will later call instinct. They have a very, very specific place within what we would call their habitat or their environment, and they stay there. They will act in ways that will sometimes seem very complex. Termites will build these massive termite mounds that you see in Africa. Bees will operate with what must be described as a bee civilization. Beavers build dams, they act in amazing ways, but they don't have dominion. Beavers build dams but they don't arrest cattle. Termites build these magnificent mounds but they don't hunt birds. In other words, each has its own slot. Each has its own role. Each lives out that role to the glory of God. The termite building its mound thinks it's merely building a mound because this is where they live, and this is where they reproduce, and this is where they colonize. He doesn't know he is doing it for the glory of God. He's not taking dominion, he's just operating by instinct.
You watch the beaver, he's doing the same thing. A farmer one time who told me that his land was being flooded because every time you turn around, the beavers would build a dam. And he said, “I would just go back and destroy the dam.” He said, “I know that sounds mean but it was my farm or the beavers. They can move somewhere else.” The problem is they wouldn't move anywhere else. Tear down the dam and a week later there'd be another dam. He'd tear down the dam and they would build another dam. And he said he'd actually look at the beavers and they would stare at him. He said, “I wasn’t gonna kill 'em, I just wanted them to stop flooding my land.” Well, they're not taking dominion. They're simply operating out of instinct. If they were smarter beavers, they would have moved down somewhere. And if they were beavers with dominion, they'd shoot the farmer. They'd tear down his house. That's not the way they operate. Each of these creatures, each of these living things before the creation of humanity, has a place where it displays the glory of God but does not do so by means of dominion and does not do so consciously. 
We have to pause here in order to say that when we come back to look at this sixth day of creation and its conclusion and the creation of the human creature, we're going to note that the storyline of the Bible now begins in terms of God’s dealing with humanity. In order to get that story right, we have to get it right from the very beginning, which means we have to understand everything that has been given us here in Genesis one, and later in Genesis two, to understand who is this creature we are. Why are we different than all of the other creatures? Why is God's glory in what he is assigned to us? And what purpose does all of this point toward in terms of the drama of redemption that will follow?
Forming and filling. There's so much here to recognize, so much here to ponder, but as we close at this point, we need to recognize that the verdict in all of this has been uniform. It's good. Everything is as God wants it to be but he isn't finished yet. 
Let's pray. “Father, we are so thankful for all that you give us in these verses in a sequential understanding of your creation, that fills less than a page of our text, but fills the earth with your glory. Father, we pray to keep these things alive in our minds as we ponder them in our hearts. We pray that your Holy Spirit will apply these truths to our hearts, to conform us to the image of Christ until we meet again. And we pray this in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.

You can find Dr. Mohler's other Line by Line sermons here.

Follow Dr. Mohler:
X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.
For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.

You can find Dr. Mohler's other Line by Line sermons here.

Follow Dr. Mohler:
X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.
For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.

You can find Dr. Mohler's other Line by Line sermons here.

Follow Dr. Mohler:
X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.
For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.

This morning we have the privilege of beginning a new book. In terms of ministries of expository preaching and teaching, it is often the case that time flows by teaching rather than by the chronology of the calendar. I was just recently in California with the ministry of Dr. John MacArthur who has preached through the course of 40 years through the entire New Testament, word by word. And when people talk about when they were born there, they will say I was born during the Gospel of John. And we got married during the epistle to the Romans. And our children went to high school during the Gospel of Luke. That's the way it works. In the ministry of Dr. WA Criswell, at the First Baptist Church of Dallas, people would say, “I joined the church during Exodus, and that my mom and dad came and joined the church during Isaiah. An expository ministry is measured by text more than by time. And I say that as a word of warning. 
We are entering into the book of Genesis, and we are entering into 50 chapters of the book of Genesis. Children will be conceived and born, and may well enter into higher education, by the time we find ourselves at the end of this book. And we need to say right up front, that's the plan. To rush through Genesis would be to miss the point of going word by word and verse by verse through this book. As we consider what it means to begin in the beginning, we need to recognize that there is a hunger on the part of any thinking person to understand exactly what the book of Genesis will address for us. 
Every worldview has to have an account of how things came to be. This is one of the most fundamental human needs. This is something we're going to track as we follow along, not only in the doctrine of creation, but in the other absolutely fundamentally important truths that are revealed in the book of Genesis. Without the book of Genesis, we would not know the who in terms of creation. Without the book of Genesis, we would not know the how, but more importantly, we would not know the who and the why. We would not know for instance, what has happened to human beings without the account of the fall that we find in Genesis chapter three. We would not understand a great deal of the confusion that marks humanity without the account of the Tower of Babel. We would not understand God's covenantal promises to Israel without his doings with Abraham. And that is just what we might say comes in the first half or first third of the book of Genesis, with far more to come. Every worldview has to have an account of why there is something, rather than nothing. Every worldview, every thinking mind, has to rest upon some assumption, some revelation, some claim as to how things have come to be. And by the way, this starts very, very early. 
There was a book recently written by an evolutionary scientist who is trying to answer the question, why is it that very small children tend, by the very disposition of their minds, to disbelieve in evolution and to believe in intelligent creation. And this scientist thought, “well, we're gonna have to answer this question because it turns out that children are not blank slates when it comes to something like creation.” And this is true of children. Not only those who have Christian parents, and are raised in Christian homes, and are taught the book of Genesis. It is not just children who've been exposed to the storyline of scripture with creation, fall, redemption and recreation. It's children in general, it's children across cultures, it's children in secular homes and in Christian homes. Children are not naturally born evolutionists. So this evolutionary scientist, perplexed by this reality, did a study and discovered that, this is gonna be shocking to you, that when they see something, assume that someone made it. Now, how do they come to that conclusion? They come to that conclusion because just about everything they see is explained by the fact that someone made it. Who built the house, somebody built it. How did this building come to be? Somebody designed it, somebody built it, somebody furnished it. How did all this happen to be? How did the park come to be? How did my school come to be? How did all these things come to be? And then when they look at the world, they look at what we would call the created order. They see exactly the same thing. Nothing I know happened by accident. 
Not only that, children, and this is a very insightful point of her research, children very early assume that the greater the detail of the object, the greater the intelligence of the one who created it. Now, where in the world will they get that idea? Well, they know what they can build. You give them blocks, they'll build a house, but they're not gonna live in it. They'll look at the house in which they live, they're rational creatures, it's a lot more complex. It requires knowledge they don't have. It requires strength they don't have. Needless to say, it requires financial resources they don't have. They get to live in it. They know they didn't build it, but they trust that someone built it. When they look at the world, they come up with the same understanding. Every intelligent mind asks the question, as did the ancient philosopher: why is there something rather than nothing?
Genesis begins the biblical story at this point. As we look at the opening of the book of Genesis, we recognize that, as we are looking at the first words of the book of Genesis, we are looking at the first words of the Bible. Now, in what sense is that important to us? Well, it's important to us because we need to recognize that the Bible is not an accidental ordering of books. The canon of scripture, the 66 books of the Bible, the 39 books of the Old Testament, the 27 books of the New Testament, these are not randomly arranged. And when you think about it, each one of the testaments is arranged in the way that genuinely does make the most sense to us in terms of the storyline of the Bible. The New Testament, for example, does not begin with a book of Acts. It does not begin with the epistles of Paul. It begins with the four Gospels because we cannot understand what the New Testament is about unless we begin with the promise of Christ, the birth of Christ, and the earthly ministry of Christ. And only then are we able to turn to the birth of the Church in the book of Acts, and the spread of the gospel in that same book, and then the life of the churches, and instruction of the churches that follows, and all that continues. And of course, the book of Revelation at the end is the book that is most intensely, although not uniquely, but it is the most intensely focused upon those things yet to come. 
And as we come to understand the New Testament, we see that thus there is a natural order between the Gospels, and then history, and then pastoral exhortation, and finally the prophetic apocalyptic text that comes at the end of the book of Revelation. So also in the Old Testament, where would we begin? We divide the Old Testament into certain kinds of literature. First of all, the Pentateuch, the five books that are written by Moses, the five books of the law, that which is known primarily amongst the Jews as Torah. There the story begins. Then after that our historical books, beginning, of course, with Joshua and following through the historical books that deal with the monarchy of Israel, then there is the wisdom literature and that is the Psalter of Israel. And of course it includes also the book of Job and the Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes, the book of Proverbs, and most centrally the Psalms themselves. Then follow the prophetic literature, which is the rest of the Old Testament divided between the Major Prophets and the Minor Prophets. Now, when I heard that as a boy, I heard that like the major leagues and the minor leagues. That is not the case. We're not talking about the importance of the prophets. We're talking about the length of their books. The Major Prophets are named major simply because of the size of the books, and the Minor Prophets, known collectively as the book of the 12, are grouped together at the end. So what we have here is a natural way of beginning, and we're also dealing with those things that not only in terms of temporal priority, but of logical priority, come first. 
We can't imagine starting the New Testament with the book of Acts, because how can you begin, for instance, with the day of Pentecost when you don't know what has come before it? How in the world could we begin anywhere else in terms of the book of God in the Old Testament than with the book of Genesis? Because if we didn't begin here, we'd have to keep coming back to this over and over again, because it would be impossible to talk of anything that follows without making constant reference explaining questions that we should have explained before. That's why in the wisdom of the Scripture, we have Genesis up front. 
Genesis, of course, as we just said, is one of five books of the Pentateuch. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These function much like the Gospels in the New Testament. They are the fundamental set of books that establish the storyline to which everything that follows is absolutely accountable. When you think about the five books of Moses, the five books of the Pentateuch, without them, you really don't know how in the world the storyline is going to work. You don't know what's come before, and you really don't even understand the promises that have been made that are yet to be fulfilled. As a matter of fact, if you just look at the number of words in the Old Testament that are invested in the Pentateuch, and then you think about the chronology of time that is invested in the Pentateuch, the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, then you'll recognize that so much of what we know, not only about the Old Testament, but of course about the entire Scripture is found right here in these books. And in particular, in the book of Genesis, the word Genesis comes from the Latin meaning origin, or it's literally in the beginning, the Genesis of all things. This is how it has to start. We have to begin in the beginning. 
When we look at the book of Genesis, we need to settle a couple of issues up front, including the issue of its authorship. Now here there are controversial issues that have only become controversial in the last 200 years. If you take 20 centuries of church history, if you go from the book of Acts until the time of the dawn of the 21st century, for 18 of those 20 centuries, no one seriously questioned that Moses was himself the human author of the first five books of the Bible. The rise of historical criticism, and especially of that which is known as higher criticism of liberal biblical criticism, an anti-supernaturalistic attempt to understand the Bible as a human historical artifact, about 200 years ago, there arose arguments that Moses didn't write the Pentateuch and that Moses couldn't have written the Pentateuch. Now, here we come across some arguments. So we're just gonna have to consider them head on. 
Now the main argument does not come from where the middle school class would go. I can remember knowing that it was believed that Moses wrote these books. And then the first time I read through the Bible cover to cover, and I did it from Genesis to Revelation, I just figured that's the way you're supposed to do it. I still think, by the way, that's a good way to do it. I was about 13 and I got to the end of Deuteronomy and it talks about the death of Moses. And I thought, how do you write about his own death? That is the middle school objection to the Mosaic authorship. And the simple answer to that is it was completed by someone who finished the work, documenting the death of Moses, and that that's not really a problem. That's a middle school problem. 
The larger problem is in the rise of historical criticism, there arose the theory that what we have in the Pentateuch, in the first five books of the Bible, is not the work of any single inspired author that was written contemporaneously with the time of Moses. But rather what we have is the work of four different historical sources each with his own political agenda. And what we have is an edited colation that is known as the Graf-Wellhausen theory of the Pentateuch, dividing the five books into four different strains: J, E, P, and D. And that's the Deuteronomist, the Priestly, the Elohist, and the Jahwehist. And suggesting that what you have here is an edited, politically motivated compilation of things that emerge, at least many of them, from far after the centuries after the time of Moses. Now, I say that just in order to say that if you were to go to any liberal, biblical seminary, anywhere in the modern world, they would tell you that that's exactly what the Pentateuch is. It is a human collection of different writings edited over time for different political purposes, some to support the monarchy, some to support the priestly class, the Deuteronomist limited to the purpose in Deuteronomy. And if you do that, and if you look at the Pentateuch in that way, and if you take that kind of approach, not only to the Pentateuch, but to the entire scripture as logically you must, then all you're gonna do when you read the Bible is read about the beliefs of ancient people. And all you're left with is an historical argument, that there were many people who lived thousands of years ago who actually believed things reflected in these texts. And what we would do is an archeological kind of study, a deconstructive literary exercise, in which we would try to say, alright, I think what they meant by this was they evidently believed that because of this reason, they wrote that for this purpose. But let me just remind you that if that's what you believe about the scripture, then all you're left with is the historical imagination and curiosity of what ancient people believed. 
We are not approaching the verse by verse, word by word, study of the book of Genesis because we are interested primarily in what ancient people believed. We are approaching this book because we believe that it is indeed the inerrant, infallible word of God that was indeed revealed by God to Moses.
Now, understand that when you're talking about authorship, in this case, that in the scriptures there are different ways that authorship is attributed. For instance, you have books in which authorship is clearly irrelevant such as the book of Hebrews. When we went through that book verse by verse, we were reminded of the fact that we don't know who wrote Hebrews and evidently, since the Bible is sufficient, we're not needful of knowing who wrote the book of Hebrews because evidently we're to read the book of Hebrews without reference to any particular congregational cause. Evidently the Holy Spirit would have us to read the book of Hebrews without trying to understand what was happening in the timeline of the human inspired author at that time. Contrast that with Paul. Paul's letters are clearly marked. Paul identifies himself: “Paul, an apostle of the Lord, Jesus Christ.” And it is important in our understanding of the Pauline epistles, the Pauline letters, to know that Paul did write this. Paul will tell accounts of his own personal life and of his own personal testimony in his letters. And furthermore, it's important for us to know in the flow of the letters what was going on. When he writes to the Romans in Romans chapter one, “I long to be with you, but I've been hindered from coming to you.” We understand that that fits where, in the book of Acts, it tells us that he received a vision of a man from Macedonia who called him to Greece, prevented him, delayed him at least, from getting to Rome. And you understand, while evidently there, the authorship by the epistles identified to Paul, the Pauline authorship then becomes very important. 
That's certainly true also in a letter like Second Peter because Second Peter is making the point that what he relates, the inspired author, the human author of Second Peter says that “it is important that you know that I am an eyewitness of these things.” And thus, it's not just church tradition that identifies Peter as the author of Second Peter, Peter identifies himself as the author of Second Peter, and says, “You need to know I was there when it happened.” If Peter thus is not the author of second Peter, then whoever did write Second Peter lied. 
There is another form, however, of attributed authorship. And that fits what we're talking about here. And that comes down to this. We know that the books of Moses are rightly associated with the Mosaic authorship, not mostly because of anything found within Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, or Deuteronomy. We come to understand that within both the Old and the New Testament, the authorship of Moses is so assumed that, referring to Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the subsequent witnesses of scripture will refer to this as “Moses said.” So it's not there in the beginning. Genesis 1:1 does not begin “Moses, appointed by the one true and living God.” Rather, it simply begins, “In the beginning.” When we talk about the attribution of these five books of Moses, we know that this is clearly a link to Mosaic authorship and to Mosaic authority. This is our understanding of how to begin an understanding of the book of Genesis. 
Thus, we consider what we are about to confront in the text of the book of Genesis is that, which is the God inspired, word for word God-inspired text with which scripture, both in terms of the canon of scripture and the storyline of scripture begins. When you look at the actual text of Genesis, the first verse is one of the most familiar verses of all the scripture. It's short, it's poetic in its concision. It's not overly elaborate in terms of any use of words, and yet it encompasses the entire story. So in other words, it's almost as if the entire storyline of the Bible comes down to this first verse as being equivalent to getting the entire story underway with far more here than we might imagine in the economy of words. 
“In the beginning.” Where else would you start here? We have another problem: in the beginning of what? This isn't in the beginning of God. As we will learn in scripture, God doesn't have a beginning, but we have a beginning. Our story has a beginning. The story of the cosmos has a beginning. And isn't in the beginning God created himself. It's “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The storyline begins chronologically just the way, in our hearts and in our imagination, we want it to start. We don't want it to start at some subsequent point that will only make reference back to what happened in the beginning. We need to start right in the beginning. And the first words of God's inspired word begin right there “in the beginning.” The beginning is an interesting word because when you think about how to start a story, you start with some beginning.
If you tell of who you are, if you start to tell your own autobiography, if you sit down next to someone on a plane and you just try to identify yourself, you have to start somewhere. And eventually, if you're gonna tell your story in any adequate way, you're gonna have to go back to your beginning. Well, where was your beginning? Well, I was born in Lakeland, Florida, October 19th, 1959. You've all been wondering about that. Lakeland, Florida, there in Polk County. And I was born. And that's the beginning of my story. 
By the way, even though I was there and I have paperwork to prove it, I have no living memory of the occasion. I'm dependent upon others to tell me in the beginning. However, you don't have to get very old until you realize that's not an adequate beginning because something happened before you. So as you're a child, you begin to push the beginning back. You discover that these huge people you know as your parents also had a beginning. Where were you born? And when? Prehistoric times it sounds like. But nonetheless you begin to understand, “My parents are both born in 1936 in Plan City, Florida. Just about 15 miles away. Seemed like a long time away when I was a little child. It's shorter than the distance between my home and Highview Baptist Church right now. But nonetheless, that's where they were born. I wasn't there. Then I have to take that on faith. They told me they were born in Plant City, Florida. 
Eventually, when doing a genealogical project, I saw their birth certificates. Low and behold, there is proof that they were born in Plant City, Florida, but I'm still taking it on faith. But then you come to understand that it doesn't go there. You go further and further and further and further back. I have a professional genealogical study of my paternal lineage going all the way back to the early 17th century in Basil, Switzerland, complete with marriage certificates and birth certificates and cemetery information and the ship's log of the ship thistle upon which my great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather came over from Switzerland and settled in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Amish family. I come to understand, at least that part of the family. But you know what? That's not even an adequate beginning because that only goes back to the early 17th century. That already implies there were 17 centuries prior to this. And not only that, there's time prior to that. So our beginning is problematic because we're never sure we can get far enough back. We just have to, at some point, trust there's enough beginning we can go forward. That's why if we had to have the genealogy traced for every one of us in every way we possibly could, in order to know who we are, most of us would never find out who we are. There's not enough documentation. 
Well, you think about the beginning of an organization, or you think about the beginning of a church. So someone says, “when was this church founded?” Well, it kind of depends on what you mean. This church was organized in Louisville, Kentucky to a certain date, but it was actually founded by the Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew chapter 16. It was actually inaugurated in the second chapter of the Book of Acts. So that's when this church was founded. It had a beginning. But the church as a story, before there was a church, in other words, the beginning's problematic for any of us. 
The beginning we're talking about here is not the beginning of God in which there's no beginning. It is rather the beginning of the cosmos, the storyline of creation. And here we find a very simple statement that the most important thing we come to understand is not a when, but a who. The central issue of Genesis 1:1 is who. “In the beginning,” introductory language, “God.” 
Now let's just assume that we're considering a condensed version of the scriptures. Back about 30 plus years ago, Reader's Digest, which was famous for condensing novels in other books, and putting them out in a very popular series of readers, a reader’s digest of condensed books, decided to condense the Bible. It was a rather controversial project as you might imagine. One Christian magazine lampooned it by condensing the Bible down to a hilarious paragraph. And you realize it really can't be done. And the Reader's Digest’s condensed Bible, despite the hopes of Reader’s Digest, did not become a bestselling book. It just resists that kind of condensation. But you know, if you were to consider how to condense the Bible down to just a few statements, you could certainly imagine condensing the Bible down to, if you just had to, if you were running out of time, and you had to say what the Bible's about, you might go first to John 3:16, “For God to love the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him might not perish, but have everlasting life.” It certainly condenses the storyline of Jesus, the account of Jesus and the Gospels and the teaching of Jesus concerning why he came, and the meaning of his life, death, and resurrection. It’s all right there. God's purpose in the incarnation is right there. 
But you know, you could say that everything in the Bible comes down actually to the first four words in the English translation of Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God.” Now the reason why that's important is this, not only is Genesis 1:1 primarily about the, who, the who explains everything that follows. Not everything that follows in Genesis, everything that follows, period. Because as the author, and as the originator, as the designer, and as the creator of all the cosmos, then, as BB Warfield, the famous Princeton theologian, said, “He by definition names it, claims it, and owns it, such that everything that follows follows from the fact that it's his.” He is the agent who creates in the beginning. God created the heavens and the earth.
 Now, another interesting thing here, of course, is if we were reading Genesis for the first time, if we don't know anything else about the storyline of scripture, and we don't know anything else about Christianity, or even if we didn't know anything about Judaism in terms of the Old Testament, and we just picked up this book and we read “In the beginning God created the heavens on the earth.” How would we know who this God is? Well, which God? Does it not strike you as something odd that it just says, “God.” By the time this was written, there were already various paganism and idolatries. There were already alternative accounts of creation and how the world came to be. The peoples around Israel had their own accounts. They had their own understanding. After all, we're talking about Moses here through whom this came to be written. And by the time you're talking about Moses, you're talking about the people of Israel in captivity to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Egyptians had their own creation story. And they had their own collection of gods. And of course they're all around them, the Canaanite and all the others that as we shall see, Abraham certainly would have known. In fact, out of which Abraham himself came, they had their own creation stories. They had their own gods. 
Why the simplicity of this statement “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” God, is that enough? Well, here, we need to understand something else about the entire storyline of the Bible. The entire storyline of the Bible, beginning in Genesis 1:1, identifies the only God that matters as the God who created the heavens and the earth. As a matter of fact, what is going to distinguish Jehovah, YHWH, the God of Israel, is going to be that he actually did create all these things. He is the only uncreated being. Everything else is created. And when, last week, we were looking at Isaiah chapter 44 and the issue of idolatry, one of the things that became most clear, the folly of idolatry is in the fact that the idols are things that are made. God isn't made, He makes. So even though we have the simple statement “In the beginning God,” it's because the Holy Spirit would have us clearly to understand that the only God that is is the God who does this. And as more is revealed about him in his word that follows everything we will know then is tracked back to the fact that the God who exists, the one true God, is that God whom created the heavens and the earth.
 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Thus, the first thing we know about God is that he is the creator. And that is a title that he will retain throughout the entirety of the biblical canon. He is the one who creates. Remember your creator in the day of your youth. He again will claim of himself, “Did I not make you, Job?” at that great climactic conclusion to the book of Job. God will speak to Job and say, “Excuse me, let's remember the difference between us. Were you there when I created this? Were you there when I created that? Obviously, even Job is in the position of saying, “No, sir.” Which isn't even necessary. It's not even answered in scripture. It's so clear. But God says, “look, I was there. I did this. You look at that creature, I made that. You look at that artifact, that wonder of creation, I made that. Where were you? Which one of us is God? I'll tell you which one's God. It is the one who is creator, not the one who is created. 
“In the beginning God created.” You’ll notice the singularity of this. God creates alone. He doesn't require others to be about his task of creation. What we will learn as we move forward through Genesis chapter one, and also as we look at Genesis chapter two, is that God will create verbally. He will speak. And when he speaks, it is created. He doesn't have to have minions and workers. He doesn't have a construction crew. He simply speaks and it is.
“In the beginning God created.” Created is a verb. God is acting. One of the first things we learn about God is not only that he is the origin of all things, that he is the one who has created, and thus He is sovereign over all things. That establishes the fact that he owns all things, but it also makes very, very clear that he acts. God acts. God, not merely is, God acts. That becomes very important too. Because one of the things we will learn about his human creatures is that we are made in his image. And a part of what we're going to learn, that Genesis will reveal, is about human beings being made uniquely in God's image. We too, verb, we act. A part of what it means to be made in God's image is to be able to act. And by the way, also to create. We do create things. The problem is that we don't create in the same way that God creates. We create out of stuff. God creates the stuff. We're gonna learn, as we look through Genesis one, that it is essential to understand God's creation as ex nihilo. We'll talk about that. That is the Latin term, as the word “genesis” itself is a Latin term. That means out of nothing. He doesn't create out of stuff. He doesn't take preexisting stuff because nothing's preexisting except himself. He creates the stuff. 
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In other words, the totality of all there is. In the ancient cosmology, limited as they were in their prehistoric ignorance, they assumed that everything that was was either seen by looking down or looking up. In our advanced sophistication, so much wiser and accumulated so much knowledge and wisdom, since then having gained so much in our understanding we're in a different position. Except we're not. We still know that everything that is to be known in terms of creation is by looking down or looking up. In other words, it's here on this earth or it's out there in the heavens. In other words, our world picture may be more sophisticated because of our astronomical and scientific knowledge, but we're stuck in the same human predicament. We're looking up and we're looking down. God created the heavens. We look up everything and we see God has created. You put the Hubble telescope up there, which Moses didn't know about, and the Hubble telescope can look millions of light years out into the future, or I guess actually into the past. And what does it see? It sees the heavens. That's what it’s looking at. In other words, there is no dimension other than this, the heavens and the earth. This is everything. He created everything that is. You look down, everything you see, God created. You look up, everything you see, God created. 
The distinction between the heavens and the earth is crucial here, but mostly because together they represent the totality of everything that is. The first verse of scripture tells us, most importantly, who: God. Which God? The God who does this, as we shall see. The only God who deserves to be called God. The God who will say, “bring no other gods before me.” The God who will say, “Where were you when I did this?” The God who will say, “Remember who I am. I am the creator of all things. I made it. I own it. I claim it. I rule it. It's mine.”In the beginning the God who already existed. In the beginning he created, he acted. He freely acted. Nothing was constraining him to have to create. No external force required him to create. He created because he freely willed to do so. And as we shall see, he tells us why he willed to do so. In the beginning, God created, he acted, he willed. He sovereignly created out of nothing, as we shall see, the heavens and the earth, everything that is. 
Now, just imagine where we would be if we did not have those few words. We wouldn't know the who. We wouldn't have a clue of how to know the why. We wouldn't know the what. We wouldn't know anything that is absolutely necessary to our understanding of the storyline of scripture. But now we know everything we need to know in the beginning. And now as we follow word by word, through the book of Genesis, we're gonna learn a great deal more. And we will be coming back time and time again, to Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Let's pray. Our father, we are so thankful that you have given us not only in this passage, but in your word, access to your truth. And otherwise we would never know. Father you have to tell us these things because we have no access to them but by the free and merciful gift of your revelation. Father, thank you for giving us Genesis. Thank you for giving us the entirety of scripture. But thank you this day for giving us this one short verse with which the entire canon of your word begins. In order that we can understand where to begin in the beginning. And  father, we are so thankful to be reminded by this text, informed by this text, instructed by this text, that we begin not with a when, but, most importantly, with a who. And so father, we end by praising you as the one who created us and created all things and rules over us and rules over all things. Father we conclude by thanking you that we know you not only as creator, but as redeemer and thus in thankfulness. We come to you in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. Amen. Look forward to being back with you next Sunday for verse two.

You can find Dr. Mohler's other Line by Line sermons here.

Follow Dr. Mohler:
X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.
For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.

You can find Dr. Mohler's other Line by Line sermons here.

Follow Dr. Mohler:
X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.
For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.

You can find Dr. Mohler's other Line by Line sermons here.

Follow Dr. Mohler:
X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.
For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.