Stroll through Scripture for Sunday, September 7, 2025

Based on Genesis 1:1-2:4a

Last week we had the end of the story – Revelation 21 and 22.  We heard about God making creation good again.  This week we hear the beginning of the story – God creating and calling it good.  

This theme can’t be ignored, no matter how hard humanity tries.  Even in Christian theology, there are strains of belief that want to claim that creation isn’t good, will be discarded, and that we escape to some far-off heavenly kingdom.  Except nowhere in Scripture does it offer that.  

Instead, we hear about God making creation good.  And then we’ll hear about God walking in creation with the created creatures.  God has always been interested in dwelling with creation.  

One of my favorite translations of this creation story is from “The Five Books of Moses” by Everett Fox.  It’s a translation from the Hebrew that attempts to hold onto the rhyme and rhythm in the original Hebrew.  English translations lose so much of that.  Here’s just a taste of it:

“At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters-“   Do you hear the patterns, just in this small section?  

There are so many features of this first creation story.  For one thing, the overall theme is about God creating order out of chaos.   In the creation story that happens through the creation of functions and functionaries.  Days 1-3 separate things – light/darkness, water above/water below, dry land/seas.  Then day 4-6 God creates functionaries to provide order for those separations – sun/moon to govern light/dark, creatures of air and see to govern water above and water below, land animals and humans to govern the dry land.  

This isn’t just a story about how God created things.   It’s also about the Temple, one of the key aspects of Jewish understanding about the world.  This creation story is often called the Priestly version because of how it sees creation through the lens of the Temple.  The thought being that this story describes the ordering of the world as God’s cosmic temple which makes a space for God to swell with humanity culminating in Sabbath.  This becomes an essential pattern of Scripture.  

Questions for further reflection:

• When you read this creation story, what do you notice about it?  What jumps out at you?
• Creation stories offer listeners some valuable insights about how things came about – groups, nations, even faith.  What are the creation stories in your life that offer you foundational insights?