2. Genesis 1 and Enuma Elish

that text is you know while on the one hand is wonderfully elegant in celebrating the power of God and so on has been highly controversial and there's been all kinds of battles that have been fought and I would say it sometimes figuratively may be sometimes literally bloodshed over just exactly how we are to understand the great announcements that we find here in Genesis chapter one part of the reason there's been such controversy is because way back in about the middle of the 1800s there was the discovery of what became the most famous pagan creation myth that had ever been found in human history it dates back to ancient Mesopotamia and a group of people that live there called the Sumerians and it was called an Ummah ilish based on the first three words of this myth which translated when on high in nuuma ilish went on high and one of the most interesting features of this creation myth was that it at certain points seemed to strikingly parallel what we find in the biblical text and at other times it seemed of course to depart very much from it and so that caused all kinds of people to come up with all kinds of explanations as to just how in the world we were supposed to understand Genesis 1 in light of now this newly discovered and numa ilish and so to help us think about this I want to do a little bit of quick thinking but this as you recognizes of a line-drawing of what's called Mesopotamia we've got two major rivers coming out of it from the Persian Gulf the righthand River is the Tigris the left hand is the Euphrates and that defines then a body of real estate that's called Mesopotamia literally meaning between the rivers meso between potamia the rivers if you are familiar with that you know the Persian Gulf we've had quite a bit of interest in that region for some years more recently if go off to the east you find Iran modern-day Iran by the way Mesopotamia itself would be Iraq today you go further east you get to Afghanistan Pakistan India and eventually China so that's where we are in the map going that direction straight up you'll run into eastern Turkey from there you get into the Caucasus range east of the Black Sea and from there into Russia you go west that takes you across the northern tip of the Arabian Peninsula to the to the Mediterranean you find Israel Syria down to the South Egypt up to the north Turkey going that way and then straight south is that vast Arabian Peninsula so you've all got that in your mind's eye this of course is a map depicting the ancient region there were major cities in there some of these are mentioned in the Bible some are not Sumer is probably the biblical word Shinar shi Nara least many scholars believe so that's mentioned in Genesis Nippur Ison Larsa or Abraham was from or of the Cal DS you know same place and so on Eric some of those are mentioned in the Bible but anyway that's the most primitive and ancient civilization that we have ever found and so if we think about you know humankind being on planet earth for many many thousands of years that may be the case I'm not disputing that point right now but the earliest actual organized civilized community that has been discovered is here in Mesopotamia hence it's sometimes called the cradle of civilization Mesopotamia was organized according to several dynasties and the earliest of these was called Sumer and Sumer goes in very round numbers from about 3,000 BC maybe earlier to about 23:16 and it was the center of many wonderful innovations for one thing the first time we find something like a city state where a city is organized with its environment environment into a kind of independent political unit seems to go back to Sumer we sometimes think of city-states in terms of Greece and so on but these are the earliest of these that we find they also were famous for cuneiform writing I know most of you can read that easily the the term cuneiform is from a root that means wedge and thus the wedge shaped distinctive character of cuneiform writing gave rise originally to its name the first time somebody dug it out of the ground and they saw those wedges then they used a latin term to describe it along those lines so cuneiform writing was the first form of written sort of alphabetical writing that we have ever discovered and it is very important for that reason and it's of course in this particular form of script that these myths became known to us there were in there is in this region to this day a kind of structure that's called a ziggurat and it looks something like that there's several of these that are still there if you ever travel through Iraq some of you have done military time there and probably have seen some of these but these are there there's there several that are in more or less in ruins this is one of the best-preserved it is in the city of Ur mentioned in connection with Abraham Abraham undoubtedly saw this structure as he was growing up he would have been born after this thing was completed ziggurats were religious structures the priest would go up if you look on the right-hand side of that that long staircase the priest would go up slowly in a kind of religious right to the top of the ziggurat and at the top of it would be a little cubicle room kind of like a chapel or something and in the ancient Sumeria is Sumerian religious understanding the god or gods would come down from heaven and the priest would go up and they would meet at that point in the middle and the word Babylon meaning gate of the gods actually had its roots in that particular kind of religious expression this is probably almost certainly behind the story in the Old Testament of the Tower of Babel it was probably some Tower like this and the ambitions of humankind at that point where to build the biggest most colossal you know ziggurat that have been built to date and it would outdo all the others and the whole story of the Tower of Babel flows against the backdrop of that but those are fairly commonly available even today to to find over there the cosmology of Sumer and of Mesopotamia and the one that really became more or less the household understanding in the ancient world touched by this religious outlook even in Egypt and other other areas more distant from Mesopotamia look like this all of those little wavy lines on the outside of the circle are a great salt sea it was vast in fact virtually endless unordered void dark it was commonly called the deep the word was qiyamat which was also assigned to the name of a deity a female deity who stood for the principle of disorder the hebrew word t home connected to t amat is viewed generally as essentially the same word just in a different language a little adjustment in the pronunciation but the same word so the word that we read in the Old Testament text that the referring to the deep is the same word and it was this idea of a great unordered expanse of salt water with no organization no meaning just there you see somehow or other and the accounts would vary based on mythological variables but somehow or other there came to be in the midst of this great expanse a kind of bubble that's the circle which was also sometimes thought of as something like an egg it's a very odd expression isn't it in the heap in the Genesis account the Spirit brooded that's a word that is applied specifically to how a mother hens deal with eggs and it's an odd word to use but it's the very word that is used in the genesis attacks there the spirit brooded over the egg you see well in the sumerian myth there was this kind of circle or bubble or egg and within it was a place of order in the midst of a vast expanse of disorder and that was the great contest that was envisioned in an umma ilish was a contest between order and disorder and the fight between them the struggle between them this egg has within it three different levels you see that the level that is above was called the sky and it's demarcated by a great dome the dome was solid the ancient people would go outside they look up they see this what appears to be even to us as we just look outside casually a great dome the dome is bigger if you're in Montana but still the same dome you know and you look up and you notice the color of the dome is blue and the ancients thought ah that must mean there's water on the other side of it so there was water above the dome and they were separated or protected from it by this kind of surface you see under it was a great expanse the kind of atmosphere it was within the dome that they believed the heavenly bodies moved the sun the moon the stars and so on so the dome is way up there in their minds not nearly as far as you know they didn't have a modern understanding but but all of these things were within the dome and they were used to measure time etc the earth is a flat disk floating in fresh water and so if you look at the middle tier there the earth key as it's called was surrounded by a freshwater ocean that was separated from the saltwater that's outside beneath was the nether world something like what's called in Hebrew she all it's kind of a dark place to which people descend upon their death it's a mysterious place even in the mythology of the ancient world there was no clear definition as to what was up you know down there but that seemed to be the place where people went there was no great joy that was associated with it it was strictly a place of just the kind of the end of life and a kind of dark place the nether world and then below that of course you have that kind of underside dome as it were inverted and then once again you're back in the salt sea so that's the way the Sumerians viewed the universe that was picked up by the Babylonians it was picked up by the Assyrians it was picked up even to some degree or with with some somewhat considerable adjustments by the Egyptians and it was the widespread cosmology of the ancient world outside the Hebrew world we're going to leave that aside for a moment but that was the way people commonly viewed the universe at that time the chief deities of Sumer are these I mentioned these because some of these are actually mentioned in the Old Testament on or onnu was the god of the sky or the heavens in leo was the god that was probably the primary one till he was bumped off by Marduk and so Marduk is one that is mentioned in the Old Testament in various prophetic writings he was a Babylonian deity and sort of retrofitted into this sumerian myth but he became very important in later mythological expressions Enki was the god of the sea here's a little cut this guy with my digital camera the other day so there he is inky he was Mother Earth the whole idea of Earth having a kind of maternal quality goes back as far as human memory runs and so the idea of Mother Earth going clear back to Nina or SOG this ancient goddess yeah these were the four kind of top deities then you have some subordinate deities one of whom is called seen or Nana that's the moon god if you look up there there oh my there it is you see my little thing so that little crescent you scene that was the moon-god ooh - or shamash was the sun-god annona or Ishtar was the god of love and war ii star is the name Esther and so Esther in the Old Testament whose original name was but you know what her Hebrew name was it was but you know put up your head it was I know I'm blanking on Hadassah remember that Hadassah was her Hebrew name but she was given a name by the Persians who also had picked up some of these the name Ishtar or Esther so there's a little shot of Esther sure she was better-looking than that the first dynasty was Sumer and that goes down to about the Year 2300 the second dynasty in Mesopotamia was called the Akkadian after its chief city Akkad and the first king of the Akkadian dynasty was a guy by the name of Sargon or Sargon the great and there's a kind of funeral mass that was associated with him he controlled that much region so he really did have a very expansive Empire at a very early time in human history down here of course is the Persian Gulf but it extends way over into Elom up into parts of Turkey that whole little Crescent is called the Fertile Crescent and he controlled a fair amount of that last week we talked about Sargon in connection with the Assyrians he's usually called Sargon the second he took his name honoring this first Sargon who had lived hundreds of years earlier and was the King of this Akkadian dynasty all right a Numa ilish was a discovery that was made by a guy named Austen Henry Layard I mentioned him last week he was like a British adventurer who lived in the mid-1800s he was the early version of Indiana Jones only better and for real you know and he was a guy who believed the Bible fundamentally I don't know what the state of his heart was but he share a common conviction that when the Bible was told these historical details that it was actually understood is a true and reliable account of ancient historical information and so he believed on that basis that there must be a city of Nineveh somewhere it had never been found many liberal scholars at the time believed that Nineveh was pure Nineveh was pure myth it didn't exist and Austen Henry Layard was determined to go and prove them wrong and so he went out and had many adventures his whole story is a is a kind of a fun rollicking account all by itself but in the process he discovered the site of Nineveh he had to he had to do a lot of searching but he finally found it and he discovered its location and then as he began to excavate he found within it a probably maybe the single most famous and important archaeological discovery of the 1800s which was called the library of Ashurbanipal Archer Bonney Paul was a Assyrian King he lived in round numbers about the year 650 BC he was not only a great military character but he was a great scholar and so he wanted to accumulate in one place all of the writings of the ancient world that he deemed to be worth keeping and saving and so he assembled them in a very well organized way in a huge library and this library was you know secured and so on and then over the passage of time it fell into obscurity and it was discovered by Austen Henry Layard obviously all of the writing there was in cuneiform so they couldn't read any of it but Laird was smart enough to figure out that this is probably important stuff unfortunately his archaeological technique was a little rough compared to modern standards he just went in there with an axe and began chopping up these things and loading them on the backs of wagons and hauling it off of course to the British Museum where it safely kept to this day and so what you find is a lot of these artifacts that were discovered there are now housed in the British Museum and they were reassembled kind of like putting together a great jigsaw puzzle it took about 30 years to figure out how to read cuneiform so from the time it was discovered it was about 1880 before somebody really kind of cracked the code and was able to start reading this and most of what was found was pretty pedestrian you know IRS records that kind of thing but but some of what was discovered was to say the very least surprising and just kind of captured the public imagination and two documents in particular that were translated and got a whole lot of attention where this creation myth known as an umma ilish and the epic of gilgamesh which has within it a account of a great flood and we're going to look at that next week so next week we're going to look at the Gilgamesh epic and the account of a vast flood over the whole earth and a guy who built a boat and survived the flood thereby and it comes out of pagan literature discovered an astral body Paul's library in 1850 and so it's a very very interesting and intriguing account that will look at separately but right now we're interested in the other of these great discoveries which is called the Numa ilish I just wanted to run you forward a little bit to hear the Third Dynasty of Mesopotamia was called a khaldiya is the general region of lower Mesopotamia that region kind of north of the Persian Gulf and so in the Old Testament says that Abraham was from ur of the chaldeans virtually certain that it's referring to this particular city it was a major city it was the capital of the third dynasty the years here went from about 12 21 down to around the year 2000 Abraham was probably born a little bit later outside of this time frame maybe about the year 1951 so he was born in the shadow of these great civilizations of Mesopotamia at an intermediate period when there was no great single power dominating the region but it was still probably the most sophisticated civilization of the world at that time I'd like to talk a little bit to you just about the content of aneema a leash if we had about an hour and you had the patience we could work through the details of this I'm just going to say to you in in terms of just one descriptive adjective to describe an umma a leash bizarre you know it has it has some of the most wild and crazy' images and strange details that you could imagine some of it is really quite incomprehensible confusing but on the whole you begin to pick up the general drift of the main story of it so scholars continue to puzzle over the details and you'll find commentaries written on a Numa leash and that sort of thing is certainly out there if you're interested in hunting it down I don't want to take you through all that because there would be three people in class next week if I did so I'm just I'm going to give you I'm going to give you the quickest kind of overview of the main kind of thread of the story and then I want to get back into Genesis chapter one a Numa Elyse begin by the way it's in seven tablets and those seven tablets correspond very roughly I don't want to push this point at all but very roughly to a kind of seven days of creation it is impact in seven that there's not a not a nice neat tidy correlation with the Genesis account but there's seven tablets and seven movements that correlate roughly roughly with the Genesis account the basic story begins with a great unordered primeval chaos as I was mentioning earlier this kind of great expanded salt sea there were two deities associated with that one was called up sue a PSU and the other was called Tiamat T I am UT t Ahmad was the one by the liveness ability I am ATT Ahmad is the one that became the the most dominant of these two both of them stand for chaos both of them stand for that which disintegrates things causes things to kind of fall apart and so the ancient Sumerian view was that there was a kind of contest between that which orders and that which disorders and Tiamat especially was the goddess of disorder and was always the one who was trying to bring disorder in you know that's why all of us who have had kids or grandkids around the house for a week or so and then they leave you feel like you've been visited by Tia Mott you know what I'm saying you're just and so that's that was they they had that experience too and they had to attribute it to something and so that was their mythological understanding now a Numa Elise goes through a rather convoluted story of the evolution of various gods and so on I'm going to bypass all of that but simply to say it arrives at a certain point at certain primary gods who become the great champions or heroes of the story one is on ooh the god of the sky one is eahhh connected with the earth er ei R th earth and another one was Mar Duke who was the Babylonian God who comes in and really becomes the great hero of the story so what you have is a face-off and kind of the climactic moment of the myth between T Ahmad on the one hand and Mar Duke on the other and Marduk makes a deal with the other gods and says look I will go to battle with qiyamat I will risk my existence in this conflict but the deal is if I win then you need to make me the chief deity and I need to get all of the most honorable titles and so on so that was a deal so all the other gods and it says bought off on that okay you're our man go in there and do your best and so Marda goes to battle against qiyamat and as the story unfolds what he does his strategy is he defeats her first of all by using wind rouha he uses wind and it's a very strong wind that he blows and it's so powerful it forces open her mouth and she cannot shut her mouth because the wind is blowing in and then he takes his spear and he throws it into her mouth and it goes down into her gullet and she is slain and so he defeats Tiamat and then he splits her in two and he takes the upper part of her and pushes it up and it becomes that dome you see keeping out the chaos that's outside and the lower part of her becomes the earth now to be honest I don't know if any self-respecting Sumerian actually believe this you know I think I think the ancient people were smarter than we give them credit for and many times they knew perfectly well that they were dealing with myth this is myth but myth of course is story intended to convey a thought or an idea or a philosophy or some understanding of you know the way things are without anyone actually thinking that somehow in some sort of history these things actually happened but you know people differ on that but anyway that's the way the story goes once Marduk has been successful in defeating Tiamat he then does a couple of other things once this expanse has been created the sky and so on he puts in them stars Sun Moon and specifically it stated that they are put there to regulate seasons times days weeks years and so there's a understanding that the heavenly bodies are there is a kind of celestial clock the other thing that he does is he creates humankind he creates us and so the other thing that's interesting is there's some kind of connection between human creation and this God who has defeated the forces of chaos so that's the basic storyline of Numa ilish now when we you know turn to the biblical text I think most of you would rant that is bizarre as an uma ilish maybe there are at least certain points where there's intriguing parallels and that of course has been one of the most fascinating aspects of the discussion as to how exactly do we understand the connection between these two a few little details this is by no means an exhaustive list but are some of the ones that may be of interest in our present conversation one of the parallels is that in both accounts both in an Ummah ilish and in the Genesis account great acts take place by virtue of the spoken word in Genesis God said let there be light in an Ummah ilish the gods speak and things happen but I want us to always keep our eye not just on similarities but on differences the big difference between the Genesis account of God speaking and the account that we find in the creation myth is that in the creation myth the speaking is kind of like magic incantations you see the gods say certain words that are sort of like voodoo or some kind of you know formulas statement that by some sort of magic causes things to happen notice how in Genesis there's none of that God isn't doing any incantations God's power is not questioned God speaks and it happens you see so you've got a parallel but you've also got what clearly represents an alternative understanding of the nature of the power of God another point that's similar but where there's a little bit of difference is the nature of light both accounts have light coming into the picture before the Sun is created it's always interesting isn't it we of course think light comes from the Sun the ancients didn't think that way they thought of light as a prior reality the Sun shines but there would be light even without the Sun would be their view that seems to be the biblical view God creates light you see early in the story later two or three days later he creates the son and this does represent in both counts an idea that the power of God comes in as that which brings order in the place of chaos and one of the most primitive and ongoing understandings of humankind has been that light implies order darkness implies disorder even if I could just right now do a little experiment and shut off all the lights in this room and plunge us into darkness would you feel that that was an organizing experience you know we immediately feel the trauma of being plunged into darkness and we're not so sure now where things are well the you know humankind has had that understanding all the way through so the bringing of light has always been associated with bringing order to a place of chaos and in both accounts we find it happening but again in the case of the Genesis record God simply speaks and the light is there whereas in the new militia counted it involves much much more of a contest much more of a question as to what the outcome is going to be everybody's biting their nails they're not so sure who's going to win this battle in the Bible there is no contest isn't that interesting there's no contest there's no battle no question nobody's standing around wondering who's going to win this is not a contest this is God acting but God acting in a way that was comprehensible to the ancients you see another another little detail that we see this by the ways in this and in the second day is the creation of this dome the obviou the we mentioned this earlier the idea that there's a great dome up there and that there's waters beyond it seems to be the assumption of the Genesis account doesn't it speaking of waters above the firmament or the Dome waters below that does at least on the face of it sound strikingly like what we find in an Ummah ilish again what's different however you then once again there's no contest there's no question where the power lies God simply speaks these things into being he just announces it let there be an expanse let there be a dome let there be a firmament it happens and it was sold you see these are powerful words to a Sumerian reading that Genesis account we don't know if they ever had a chance to because they predated the Hebrews by a thousand years but you know to a Sumerian reading that that would have been a slap in the face to their account of creation because here's a deity who doesn't have to fight here's a deity was not you know in the least bit disturbed by the vicissitudes of the created order he suddenly speaks and it was so you see and a great power of a statement like that he is supposed to say there's a different way of thinking about the creation than this bizarre conflict of all kinds of competing forces that leave us in a great deal of concern in question about what the outcome might turn out to be we have other details here as you know we have the placing on the fourth day of lights in heaven that is again a parallel between the two Marduk places the Sun the moon and the stars in this you know expanse of heaven to regulate to time the calendar is aware of the day and the year and so on we have a similar kind of thing in the Hebrew account Genesis chapter 1 and that was again a point where there's a considerable amount of similarity but again the differences I think are notable that that in this case God is simply placing those things there by his sovereign authority and that they will become the the rulers under God's control of life and the way we live it the calendar by which we live and so on and that became a very important part of the Hebrew understanding there figurative understanding of these heavenly bodies was that they were somehow associated to rule on earth when the Genesis says let them rule the Hebrews actually took that rather seriously and they had an understanding that the powers of great civilizations whether it was Babylon or Assyria or whatever were backed up in some sense by heavenly powers principalities that was a Hebrew understand he's never taught in the Old Testament as such it's implied in parts of the Book of Daniel but nevertheless it was a common view that was associated with the Hebrews and others as well that's why when you read in the Old Testament of great political upset you see the collapse of a great civilization oftentimes the figurative description of that will be in terms of the powers of heaven being shaken up the Sun darkened the moon not giving its light stars falling from heaven that kind of language is found in the Book of Isaiah for example chapters 13 and 14 to describe the collapse of Babylon a political power but the figurative way of saying it is to tie it to those celestial bodies that are ruling the collapse of Babylon would be the collapse of babylons stars if you will and that kind of figurative language has carried all through the scriptures it's why sometimes we in our non Hebrew tradition don't get it we read in the Bible the Sun doesn't give its light and we think how that going to happen you know we wanted we want to immediately interpret it a little bit to woodenly the Stars fell from the sky imagine that well the Hebrews didn't take it they weren't saying the stars are actually going to fall from the sky would only take about one of them to do us in you know it wasn't that at all it was that this is describing the great collapse of political power and this all goes back originally to that sort of Genesis view of the nature of the heavenly bodies and how they functioned in human experience the fifth day we have the creation of these great sea monsters again in the pneuma ilish they are threatening creatures in Genisys they are fully under God's control but maybe one of the most striking points of similarity and difference comes in the sixth day with the creation of humanity in the biblical account we are said to be created in the image of God there is some in both cases connection between humankind that is distinctive with respect to the relationship to God or the gods in the pneuma Elisha counts however we are created to be slaves humankind are created to serve the gods in a kind of slavish fashion our lives are conceived of as being hard lives of rigor in which we are doing all we can to please the gods in a kind of quid pro quo worship so the ancient Sumerian view was that the gods needed my help and so I would bring sacrifices those would nourish the deity and in turn the deity would maybe answer my prayer quid pro quo this for that deity I'll do this for you if you do that for me and we have all kinds of reliefs and so on from from that time in history in which you see that sort of religious practice being you know sort of depicted the Bible knows nothing of quid pro quo worship that's why the Old Testament says if I were hungry I wouldn't tell you I own the cattle on the Thousand Hills you know God doesn't need our worship God doesn't need our sacrum we don't sacrifice to God for him we do it for us that's that's something we need you know he doesn't need that and the Genesis one account is already giving us that and it's giving us an entirely different understanding of the dignity of human kind notice that in Genesis one human kind are created in the image of God not just with his blood but to bear his imprint his signet ring we are placed here to rule let them have dominion nothing of that in Anu melis there's no sense of the dignity of our state our status we are - we are to expand this place of order we're placed in a garden but the garden is to be pushed out and this growth of order is to continue taking places we in service to God's great destiny for us do this labor of bringing as it were Beauty where there was ugliness and so on and all of this is part of the great celebration of our worth you know well this is very foreign to the to the kind of thing we find in an Ummah leash so what I'm trying to say in all of this if you could go to you'll follow me with the details here is you have this surprising correlation followed by at the same time some very surprising and interesting differences Genesis one has been subjected by in two interpretative efforts that go on a whole spectrum of options so on the one hand I've read and probably you have to those have taken the view of Genesis 1 this is simply the Hebrews borrowing from Babylonian mythology it's just warmed over myth and that's all there is to it an end of conversation you know and that you'll find that in some circles and to this day you can pretty commonly find that view out there then I have other people on the other side of the spectrum you know them as well and they want to make Genesis one a as a scientific explanation of what God did seven thousands of years ago and that's exact amaura you could have taken pictures of that stuff you know there's people out there like that maybe in this room I don't know but kind of a just kind of an insistence the Bible says it that's the way it is if you don't believe that you don't believe the Bible end of conversation I've had that kind of conversation and when I say I'm not so sure of that they just call me a liberal I'm you might like to know that I'm moving in interesting circles in my life and I have and I've been in some places where I was called a liberal and in other places where I was called a conservative or fundamentalist that means I must be right right doesn't mean that that's all I can figure I'm a Presbyterian that's what I am and Presbyterians famously try to find the balance the middle way you know and that's what I want to try to suggest to you here I think both of those views are fundamentally misguided to say the Hebrews simply borrowed from the Babylonians is not to do any kind of justice really to the Genesis 1 text to say that we have to take however the the terms of Genesis 1 as describing in some court of literal fact what actually happened does present some colossal problems you know the I think proper approach here is to say that God is speaking in a way that was comprehensible to the first people that we're going to read this text and if we are going to comment in a kind of artificial insistence say oh no it's got to be scientifically accurate you know that is what gets us into difficulty because what does scientifically accurate mean what does it mean you know we live in the air what what is it xx is it 2011 already you know and we have an idea of what scientific accuracy means we have a certain view of the world and so on you realize if we went back 500 years current up-to-date scientific accuracy would look very different right wouldn't it and if we went back a thousand years current up-to-date accepted scientific accuracy would look very different and if we went back 1500 years it would look different yet so we've got times in history when Flat Earth was scientific accuracy we have times in history when Newtonian physics was scientific accuracy we live in a time when Einstein ian's physics is about who knows in 500 years maybe some new genius will come and give us a new vision of scientific accuracy and you realize if the Bible spoke and what was contemporary scientific accuracy for us today it would by the majority of people have looked at this been viewed as wrong because it wasn't scientific by their standards why would God strap himself to that my own conviction is if God did speak to us with scientific accuracy none of us would get it you know John Calvin says God lists to us in his word now Lisp he means that was kind of the term that was used in his day for baby talk God comes to us in this remarkable book so profound you can spend a lifetime multiple lifetimes examining it and Calvin says what God is doing is speaking to us here in baby talk if God actually spoke to us with the wisdom he has it would so transcend our understanding it would be utterly incomprehensible to us so as you as a grandparent speak to a two-year-old in very limited tiny words vocabulary that hopefully is comprehensible to that child because you love that child so God gets down on his hands and knees and speaks to us in tiny little syllables that we can understand because he loves us and why should we be offended if God has decided in the original formulation of this text to take the world as it sort of casually appears and that explained that behind all of that is a great sovereign God who was in no contest with anybody who simply spoke these things into being he did the things that were apparent to the human eye in such a way that there could be no question that he is the god of gods lord of lords and that we are bound to worship Him and if we get lost in the deep weeds of well you know is this scientifically accurate we have utterly missed the point the point is that God is God he did it and he did it by methods that we probably certainly don't get yet but that he did it and that that can be a foundation for worship it seems to me is a perfectly legitimate meaning to draw out of this remarkable Genesis 1 text so if that makes me a liberal so be it that makes me a fundamentalist who cares you know what I care about is the Word of God this great truth communicated and the Lord Jesus Christ who was declared to be the one in whom all things consist and so if that's what we get out of this text then I think we got the right answer

Channel: Bruce Gore

Views: 192,949

Keywords: Enuma, Elish, Genesis, Creation, Bruce, Gore, Sumerians, Ancient, Mesopotamia

Id: QGT4GghrTY0

Length: 45min 45sec (2745 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2015