43. Preparing for Genesis: Reading God's Story Well

G' day and welcome to Stories of a Faithful God. I'm Dave Whittingham. Welcome as well to 2026 and the beginning of the third year of stories of a Faithful God.This is going to be a very different sort of episode. Ever since I started the podcast two years ago, I've wanted to look at the Book of Genesis.It obviously would have been not a bad place to start, and I've certainly referred to it plenty of times. It's our origin story. It's the origin story of the whole world.But more importantly, it's where we first meet our wonderful, loving, gracious, faithful God. The thing that's held me back, though, is that lots of people have such fixed ideas about those first few chapters of Genesis.Sometimes it's framed as science versus the Bible, or figurative versus literal or or poetry versus narrative. People often throw themselves into one camp or another. If someone disagrees with them, it becomes very easy to switch off.I guess I didn't want people to switch off, but I hope people have got to know me enough now to see that. I'm trying to read the Bible as carefully as I can and I don't always get it right, but that's what I'm aiming for. Now.The before we start Genesis, I thought it would be a good idea to begin with a kind of bonus episode.I wanted to explain where I'm coming from in reading those first few chapters, and also to talk about some of the pitfalls I think Christians can fall into. There's a danger I'll just offend everyone, but I hope that's not the case.I hope that you'll come with me and that together we'll get a more wonderful picture of the Word of God in Genesis, and through that, a more wonderful picture of God. And so join me on this kind of strange but hopefully really helpful bonus episode of Stories of a Faithful God.Genesis chapters 1 to 11 is a little bit like the Book of Revelation. They're both obviously really important. They tell us where we've come from and where we're going, our origin story and our end goal.They're both massive in how we should understand ourselves. Now, for some people, though, the apparent difficulties of those parts of Scripture meaning they don't want to talk about it.They're too hard, they're too controversial, which is so sad. This is the loving word of God given to us for our good people have died to bring it to us.God's revealed things we could never have worked out on our own. Things we need to Know and understand. Some bits are harder to understand than others, but hard work in them pays off in great blessing.Of course, there are other people who almost only ever talk about Genesis or Revelation, as though if you only understood one or the other, every problem you've ever had will be solved, or every non Christian will suddenly turn from their evil ways and live. It can feel at times like they forget that there are 64 other books in the Bible.And just like we need Genesis and Revelation to fully understand those other 64 books, we also need those 64 books to fully understand Genesis and Revelation. We should be very cautious of anyone who seems to build almost everything around one part of Scripture.Inevitably they'll misunderstand that part of Scripture that they say they love so much. Because people are often so passionate about their understanding of the early parts of Genesis.It can lead to our own Christian version of cancel culture. Cancel culture has something right in it.That is, there are times when we should say, I'm going to have nothing to do with that person or that organisation. Jesus even tells us that sometimes we should do that.What cancel culture gets wrong, though, is that it cancels people without listening properly to them. It's reactionary. One false comment and bang, you're cancelled.There's no loving attempt to understand, no loving attempt to engage, no willingness to entertain the possibility that the other person might be right. I've certainly been guilty of this. As a young man, I felt certain that I understood Genesis 1 and 2.When I encountered people who believed the exact opposite, I just wrote them off straight away. They were obviously wrong and not worth listening to.Funnily enough, when I was older and wiser and did start listening, I actually came to agree with them. I'd been such a fool in the past.Another problem with cancel culture is it lifts every form of disagreement to the level of heresy in its most extreme form. People sometimes say that a person is not a Christian if they don't believe the same as them about Genesis 1 and 2, that's profoundly unbiblical.John 3:36 says, the one who believes in the Son has eternal life, but the one who rejects the Son will not see life. Instead, the wrath of God remains on him.Every Christian has some wrong or flawed understanding, something we truly believe which one day will be shown to be wrong. But if we're trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior and King, we're saved.So when we disagree with other Christians, we need to have the grace to listen, the grace to disagree, the humility to accept that we might be wrong and the wisdom to learn from each other. There's a danger when we read any passage in Scripture to just give in to a highly simplistic reading, not a simple reading.Some parts of the Bible are very simple, like the passage I read out before from John chapter three. A simplistic reading, though, is a reading that ignores the context, ignores how the words are put together, ignores other parts of Scripture.It's when we fail to do the hard work in a passage and we just rest on a solution that sounds simple but is really distorted. Take for example, when Jesus hands around the cup at the Last Supper and says about the wine, this is my blood.I've heard someone say Jesus says it's his blood. It's obviously his blood. And so we just have to believe it. And that sounds really simple. It sounds like there's no argument to be had.It sounds like disagreeing would be disagreeing with Jesus. But really, it's quite a simplistic reading. It ignores the context of how Jesus speaks in the Gospels. For example, elsewhere he says he's a door.He also says he's a vine. I've never met anyone who believes that Jesus is actually a physical door or a physical vine. What about these words from Jesus?In John 6:51, Jesus says, I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.Now, if that literally means what it sounds like it means, why did the disciples not try and take bites out of Jesus then and there? It's because they understood that he had a bigger meaning, that the bread language was language pointing to a bigger truth.Of course, some people will use this idea to make the Bible say anything they want to read into it their own thoughts and their own meaning. They'll use very sophisticated arguments, but they're just making it up.The way to guard against both extremes is the simplistic reading and the believe whatever you want reading is simply to do what your third grade teacher tried to teach you to do. Read the words on the page. Read them in their context. Let the text guide you to know when it's being metaphorical and when it isn't.It's true in any text, but it's especially true in the Bible because God is the only author who never makes mistakes. The Bible perfectly interprets the Bible. The key to understanding it is there in the text.We need to listen carefully to the fullness of what God is telling us and that's just as true when it comes to the early chapters of Genesis. Regardless of what position you hold, it can be easy to be simplistic or to make it say what you want it to say.And both extremes can stop you asking hard questions about the passage. Notice I haven't told you what I believe about these early chapters of Genesis yet. I'm just trying to keep you guessing.I will let you know in a little while, though. Another difficulty we can have as Christians is when we try to use things outside the Bible to understand or verify the Bible.The Bible is the word of God. It should be the ultimate authority for understanding the world. Not that it tells us everything about the world.It doesn't explain the structure of DNA or how to build a helicopter. But when it does tell us something, it has the final say.When we look for evidence outside the Bible to prove the Bible, though, it's not entirely wrong. When the Bible tells us something about the world, we should expect to find evidence of that in the world. But we can fall into a trap.The trap of thinking that those things have a greater authority than the Bible, that those things are right and the Bible has to either agree with them or the Bible is wrong. Really, though, it's the other way around. Take history, for example. Lots of the Bible is set in times where there are other historical sources.And those sources can help provide colour to our reading of the Bible. Who was Herod the Great? What are Romans doing in Judea in the first century? Why was everyone so scared of Assyria?And where on earth is this place called Babylon? It's about 100 kilometres south of modern Baghdad, by the way. We need to understand, though, just how limited historical sources are.There's a lot we can know, but lots of that needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt. There's also heaps where we can see a big picture of the past, but we miss almost all the details. They're lost to history.And that's led people to make the mistake of saying that the Bible is wrong. For example, crucifixion. For a while, historians said we know. We know that the Romans never nailed people to crosses.They tied them to crosses with ropes. Therefore, the Bible is wrong. It says that Jesus had nail holes in his hands.It sounded like a strong argument until archaeologists found the bone of a crucified man with the nail still in. Turns out that the Bible was right all along. And stories like that have happened time and time and time again, over and over.The Bible's been proven to be right when some historians thought it was wrong. As Christians, we can and should be confident to say when the current historical theories disagree with the Bible, those theories must be wrong.Of course, there are parts of the Bible that aren't historical writings in the normal sense of the word, even if they're telling us about history. For Genesis chapter one and the creation of the world, no human was actually alive to observe it and pass it on.You don't have eyewitnesses like John and Matthew or researchers like Mark and Luke. So even though we have an account of the creation, we only have it purely by miraculous revelation.God's revealed to Moses what's happened and what to write. Outside the Bible, there can't possibly be corresponding historical sources.When people try to work out the beginnings of the universe and humanity and plants and land and life, they have to resort to science outside the Bible. That's the discipline that has the greatest ability to try and work out things that far back in the past. So what is science?Science is a fundamentally Christian endeavour. You don't have to be a Christian to do it. And there were people who did it even before Christianity was around.But it's really flourished and grown in societies where parts of the Christian worldview has seeped into the way people think. If you think that the world is in chaos and ruled over by petulant gods, science doesn't make any sense.Science relies on studying an ordered world where an experiment can be repeated because the universe is stable. God's created an ordered, stable world. Water at the same height above sea level will always boil at the same temperature.If you do an experiment with that today, I should be able to repeat that experiment tomorrow. Because the world is ordered. God made it ordered.If the Greek gods were in charge, the water might not boil today because you said Athena was more beautiful than Aphrodite, and now Aphrodite is getting her revenge on you. That's why people are generally more excited about science when they have a worldview that's been impacted by Christianity.The attitude you need to do good science is also fundamentally Christian. It's an attitude of humility. Humility to recognize that you don't know something. When you come up with a theory, you can't just say it's true.You need to have the humility to accept it might not be true. It needs to be tested. And if the test proves you wrong, you have to have the humility to accept that it was wrong.If the test goes well, you have to submit your findings to other people. So they can repeat the test to see if you got it right or if you were just fudging or misinterpreting the results.To elevate humility so highly, it isn't a Roman idea or a Persian idea, it comes from the Bible. So to say that science and the Bible are at odds with each other, it's utter nonsense.Just like with history, though, people can put too much faith in it. There are some things that science can do very well.The fact that I can record into a microphone that leads into a computer where electricity is adjusted to store information down at the atomic level, that's all due to science. The fact that I'm alive and haven't died countless times is because of the scientific study of medicine.But there are other things where science is very weak or limited. Science relies on gathering as much data as possible.But when there's hardly any data, it's very hard for science to make any sort of definitive statement. Science also relies on things being repeatable. And some things you just can't repeat. For example, you can't repeat the Big Bang.Or if you did, no one would be around to talk about the results. So you can't actually prove the Big Bang. You can only have a theory about it.You might like that theory, you might think it's the best explanation for the data that you have. But the moment that you say it's proven, you've actually gone beyond science. The biggest limitation on science, though, is sinful people.Just as science works when people are humble, science is ruined when people are arrogant, selfish, fixed in false beliefs.When people are doing science sinfully, they can select data that matches what they think, ignore data that disagrees with them, not chase down information when they don't want to see it. I was watching a scientist being interviewed once. He'd done this amazing amount of research on DNA and the origins of humanity.He and his team had taken huge amounts of human DNA samples from all over the world, comparing them, looking for links, using the data to find common human ancestors. Naturally, the interviewer asked, what did you discover? He said, well, it's amazing.We discovered that every single human, no matter where they are on the planet, every single person has come from one woman. Well, that can't be right. So one group of women. Do you see what he did there? He did the science, he collected the data.The data told him every human's descended from one woman, a result that matches perfectly onto the biblical account. But he didn't want to accept that result. And so in the blink of an eye. He changed the conclusion.As Christians, we shouldn't be so skeptical about science that we mock every conclusion. We should embrace science, do science, explore God's world.But we should also recognise that sin plays a massive part in the conclusions some people reach, especially around certain topics. Another way science is limited is that it's unable to deal with the miraculous work of God.Not because science is bad, it just isn't able to do that particular job. Science can't explain how Jesus can reconnect a spinal cord just by speaking.It can't explain why Jesus can turn five fish and two loaves into enough food for thousands. It can't explain how Jesus was able to rise from the dead.Those are all examples of God's miraculous intervention to change the normal operation of the world. And science can only deal with the normal operation of the world in our modern scientific age.Some people want to say that that means the Bible isn't true. But that's ridiculous. It puts too much faith in science as a way to understand everything in the universe.It assumes science can show the whole picture when it can only show a part of the picture. As Christians, we're confident that Jesus rose from the dead.We're confident of that not because of science, but because of the historical eyewitness accounts contained in the Bible. But that means we also believe that there are times where God does things differently to the normal order of things.He occasionally overturns scientific principles.I find it really strange when Christians who believe in the Resurrection can't entertain any understanding of Genesis 1 that doesn't fit within modern scientific norms. It's illogical. We have to remember the God we're dealing with, and sometimes he does things differently.So if the Bible is 100% reliable and other things, while helpful are not 100% reliable, what does the Bible actually say? Different people understand Genesis 1 and 2 differently.That doesn't mean we should throw our hands in the air and say, oh, you can't really understand it. Or worse, you can choose the meaning that most pleases you. God wants us to work at understanding what he said.He's told it to us for his glory and our good. One of the first questions to ask is, is the description of God's creation of the world figurative or literal?Is it picture language pointing us to a deeper truth, but not actually meant to be read as though it really happened that way? Or is it history? Another way people talk about this is the long earth, short earth debate.Is the Bible really telling us that Adam and eve lived roughly 6,000 years ago. Did God create the world in six 24 hour periods, or is that just a metaphor for six periods of time?Some people argue that Genesis 1 is figurative or picture language because it's poetry. Poetry often makes use of figurative language. William Shakespeare said, all the world's a stage.He doesn't mean the world is a literal wooden platform in front of an audience, but it's just a nice use of imagery. When it comes to Genesis Chapter one, though, I think that argument falls down for a few reasons.Firstly, even if it is poetry, poetry doesn't have to use figurative language. Poetry is all about emotion, and it'll use whatever language technique it can to convey that emotion.Sometimes, often that can be a very straightforward literal meaning. To use an example from biblical poetry, take these words from Psalm 106. Starting at verse 6, it says, both we and our ancestors have sinned.We have done wrong and acted wickedly. Our ancestors in Egypt did not grasp the significance of your wondrous works or remember your many acts of faithful love.Instead they rebelled by the sea, the Red Sea. Yet he saved them for his name's sake, to make his power known. That's poetry, but it isn't figurative. It's telling things exactly as they were.But is Genesis Chapter one actually poetry? I would argue no, it isn't. Some say the repetition of ideas in there makes it poetry. Evening came, then morning the first day.Evening came, then morning, that's the second day, and so on. But that doesn't make it poetry at all.If you read through the later chapters of Joshua, as the land of Canaan's divided up for the Israelites, there's heaps of repetition. Joshua 13:15, to the tribe of Reuben's descendants by their clans, Moses gave this as their territory.And then in verse 24, to the tribe of the Gadites, by their clans, Moses gave this as their territory.Then in verse 29, and to the half tribe of Manasseh, that is, to the half tribe of Manasseh's descendants by their clans, Moses gave this as their territory. And it keeps going like that through all the tribes. No one in their right mind thinks that's poetry just because it has repetition.The better question is, does the language of Genesis 1 work more like a psalm? All the Psalms are poetry or more like a historical narrative. And the answer is, it's much more like a historical narrative. It isn't a poem.Some people say Genesis chapter one is figurative because it isn't trying to say how the world was made, but why the world was made and who made it. Therefore, the time language is just a figurative device and unimportant. I used to say that it made it easy not to think about it.But it's nonsense, of course. Genesis 1 tells us how the world is made. It's made by God speaking. He makes it in this particular order, in this amount of time.To deny that is to remove huge parts of the chapter or write them off as irrelevant. Of course, the chapter doesn't give all the detail you might want.Chapter two highlights that by giving us a much more detailed account of the creation of Adam and Eve. That tells us there's more to the story than just what we read in chapter one. But there certainly isn't less than what we read there.Some people say Genesis chapter one is written to speak against other creation myths, and I think that's true. I think Genesis sits in stark contrast to other beliefs that existed three to 4,000 years ago.It gives a different depiction of God as opposed to the pagan gods, a different reason for the existence and role of humans, a different value to the world. All of that's true. The problem is when people use that to say, well, you shouldn't take Genesis 1 literally.That seems to me to be such a strange conclusion. And again, a conclusion I used to reach. But it makes no sense for a couple of reasons.Firstly, if the text was written to challenge other beliefs at the time, if it's saying, no, the world wasn't made that way, it was made this way, then it would fail. If its description isn't a real and accurate description.God's saying what the Mesopotamians and the Assyrians and the Canaanites all say about how the world started. It's all wrong. This is the real account.And so the fact that it's written against those other religions should give us more confidence in it as a factual account, not less.But also, one of the cornerstones of our belief about the Bible is that even though each part of it is written at a particular time in the context of that time, to people of that time, it's also God's word to us across time. So, for example, Paul talks about whether the Corinthians should eat meat sacrificed to idols.That's a discussion in a place and time where animals were sacrificed to idols and then the meat was sold on for people to eat. Now, in my context here in Australia, that's not really an issue. The meat I buy has had nothing to do with any religious purpose.But God's still teaching me across the Time gap and across the cultural divide, he's teaching me the evil of idolatry, the cleanness of all food, the freedom I have as a Christian, but also the importance of giving up my freedoms in order to love others.That being said, though, I could certainly imagine going into some people's houses, either in Australia or around the world, where I could face exactly the same issue that Paul's talking about with the Corinthians. God's word speaks across all times, into all cultures.So if Genesis chapter one challenges ancient creation myths, surely that means it's also able to challenge modern wrong beliefs about the beginning of the world.When the scientist dismisses his evidence that all humanity is descended from one woman, surely Genesis can rebuke him and say, no, that's exactly what happened.So because God's Word is still relevant today, because there seems to be no evidence that the beginning of Genesis is poetry or figurative, because it presents as a text that's simply telling us the way things were, then that's how we should understand it. Some people argue, even if the whole thing isn't figurative, maybe there are still figurative elements of it, like the word day.Surely day could possibly just mean time period. God made the world in six stages or six periods of time. If you want to say it's figurative, though, the pressure is on you to prove that.You've got to have a really clear reason for why it doesn't mean exactly what it sounds like it means in the text. And I just can't see any reason in the text to suggest it's being figurative.I suspect that the reasons for wanting it to be figurative don't arise from the text, but arise from our modern cultural explanation for the age of the world. And so we want to impose that on the text.In the same way, there are some people, even people who work in churches, who don't believe that people can rise from the dead. And so they come up with a figurative explanation for the resurrection.They say something like, jesus rose in our hearts, but that isn't what the Bible says. The fancy term for getting information from the Bible text is. Is exegesis. Ex means out of. You're taking the meaning out of or from the text.That's the right way to do it. The opposite is asegesis. As means into. So you're putting meaning into the text rather than getting meaning out of the text.I think the figurative reading is an example of asegesis. It's imposing an unnatural meaning onto the text.When I used to hold that view, I had to examine my heart and ask, why do I want this passage to say something it really doesn't seem to be saying. I realized that basically every single thing I'd ever heard about science assumes. It assumes a very different account of the origins of the world.Not that that's not based on some evidence. People have used some evidence to reach those conclusions. But most of the time those conclusions are taken as fact rather than being challenged.And because that idea is so all pervasive, I'd just absorbed it as unquestionable reality.It wasn't really until I'd done the hard work on Genesis 1 and 2 and become convinced that it really is saying what it sounds like it's saying, that I started to see the massive holes in the assumptions our world makes, assumptions that are called science but aren't really. On the other hand, I think the text of Genesis 1 does give a possibility that not all the days mentioned there are necessarily 24 hours long.It's not definite. You don't have to believe this, but there is room within the text itself for this to be the case.One of the remarkable things about the creation account is that God creates light on day one. And the light comes to define a day, evening, morning, first day over. But amazingly, God doesn't create the sun, moon, and stars until day four.So it begs the question, why create the sun, moon, and stars? God obviously doesn't need them for there to be light.The passage tells us he creates them to govern the day and the night, to define what's a day and a season and a year. Which makes me ask, what does an ungoverned day look like? Could it go for 20 seconds? Could it go for a hundred years? Could it go for a thousand?Was it exactly the same as our day? The passage doesn't tell us, but I think it leaves room to at least ask the question about those first three days.Let me raise one final question that people ask before trying to wrap this up. Some people say, surely, surely there is so much evidence that the universe is billions of years old.Surely it would be unreasonable to discount all that evidence. Surely if God really only created the world 6,000 or so years ago, he's made it in a way that tricks us into thinking it's older.For example, starlight. What do you do with starlight that would take billions of years to travel to Earth? Surely that means the star was made billions of years ago?I would argue, no, that isn't the only conclusion. And no, God certainly isn't trying to trick us. Instead in Genesis 1 and 2, God teaches us that some things will look older than they actually are.Take Adam, for example. God creates him as a man, an adult man old enough to get married on the same day he is created.God gets him to name all the animals, not really the work of a newborn baby. And it's completely logical for God to make him like that. If God made him as a baby, who would look after him? Who would feed him?It makes sense to create him much more fully formed.That means, though, that if you saw him 24 hours after he was made, if you jumped in your time machine and traveled back to his second day on Earth, you might make the mistake of thinking that he was 20 or 30 years old. But that's not God tricking you because he's told you that that's the way he made Adam.You simply have to trust God that Adam isn't as old as he looks. It's the same with the stars.God makes the stars on the fourth day, but to make them visible from Earth that night, he also has to create the beam of light through space for however long that beam needs to be. Any light leaving the star today would have to travel billions of years to reach us.But at the creation, God made it so it would appear straight away. God made it in a way that it would look older than it is in order for it to work straight away from the beginning.So the fact that our sun looks 4.6 billion years old doesn't mean it is 4, 4.6 billion years old. God just made it in exactly the right way so that it could start working.So because I can't see any reason in the text to say that Genesis 1 and 2 is figurative, and because our sinful world has very strong motives for believing an origin story that's different to the Bible.And because sin ends up distorting the scientific picture of our origins, and most of all because the passage reads as a historical narrative, then that's how we should take it. We don't have to be scared or worried about that. God's told us what he's done for his glory and for our good.If you've made it this far, thank you for listening to my ramblings. I hope it's been helpful. I'd love to hear your thoughts or questions.Get in contact at the website faithforgod.net so much of what I've talked about in this episode has been shaped and helped by discussion with others. So I'd love to hear your thoughts. The next episode will get back into what I'm really excited about, telling the Bible story starting in Genesis 1.As I said, it's our origin story, the shared origin story of every person on the planet. We all share a common story, and more importantly, we're all made by and for the same God.He's such a wonderful God, and we're certainly going to see that in Genesis. For now, keep trusting Jesus and we'll talk again soon.