Wait for the Lightning: A Sneak Peek
Chapter 1: Just so you know
I don’t do systematic theology very well.
Systematic theology is where you create a more-or-less eternal statement about (to borrow a phrase from Doug Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) life, the universe, and everything. The nature of God. The condition of humanity. What, in fact, is reality?
A million years ago when I was in seminary we spent a great deal of time studying systematic theology. We dissected and analyzed reality to make it fit someone’s system of thought. We categorized life into suffering, joy, vocation, sin, and lots of other columns that lie beautiful and lifeless like butterflies tacked to a board.
You can’t categorize reality. You have to live it, and that’s dangerous. When I wrote the first draft of this chapter, it was a rainy January day. Rain in January in Minnesota is a Very Bad Thing. The roads, the trees, the mailboxes, are all coated with ice. Cars shoot off into the snowbanks and find that the ice atop the snow is not thick enough to support them. Tow trucks skate and slither from there to here rescuing weary Saturday drivers standing by their stranded vehicles, coming down off a terrible adrenaline high. (“Why didn’t I just stay home?”) This is a metaphor for life. It’s slippery and dangerous. Sooner or later you will end up in a ditch or you’ll run into someone who is driving three miles an hour trying to be Very Careful.
What possible good would it do to try to systematize the experience? The result might read very much like a driver’s training manual. “Under icy conditions, drivers must take extra caution to leave adequate stopping distance between vehicles. Reduce speeds and remain alert in order to avoid difficulties. If possible, travel should be delayed under such conditions. If you must drive, allow extra time. In the event that your vehicle begins to slide on the ice, steer into the slide in order to correct. Reduce speed and exercise extreme caution.”
All good advice. But it bears zero resemblance to the actual experience of driving on ice: the adrenaline, white-knuckled, screaming-at-the-person-sitting-in-the-passenger’s-seat-while-the-world-seems-to-rotate-three-hundred-and-sixty-degrees- around-you-at-fifty-miles-an-hour-just-before-you-call-the- towtruck experience. The systematized version bears as much similarity to the experience as a carefully pinned dead butterfly on cardboard bears to a gypsy moth swooping through the dark in search of a candle.
Like the driver’s ed manual, we try to categorize and quantify and understand God. We attempt to pour the wide ocean of God into the tiny little hole in the sand of our brains. If you want to understand the ocean, don’t try to analyze it. Take a kayak out beyond the breakers and you’ll know the ocean in a whole new way. If you want to understand a thunderstorm, don’t read about low pressure systems and cumulonimbus clouds. Instead, when that purple wall cloud comes rushing in from the southwest, climb an oak tree and hang on for dear life while you wait for the lightning. Listen to the branches creak and groan. Feel the lightning smack and pop into the forest around you. Wonder if the sheets of cold rain coming down will extinguish the flames. (This is also a great way to learn about prayer, by the way.) If you want to know about love, don’t start with a book. Go get your heart tangled up in a relationship with someone who really matters to you.
Genesis isn’t giving us a systematic picture of all the truth about God in a nicely categorized passage. We do a lot of damage when we try to make the Bible into systematic theology. The creation story in Genesis is like a chaperone at the beginning of a dance introducing us to our new partner. “Jeff, this is the universe. Universe, meet Jeff.” I hold out my hands cautiously. I think we’re going to do the waltz I stumbled through in fifth grade phy ed. The Universe grabs me with an iron grip and whirls off into a tarantella. All the while God is grinning and playing his fiddle and singing faster and faster. (Look closely at Michelangelo’s painting of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and you can see an uncanny resemblance to Charlie Daniels. Accident? I don’t think so.) At this point I have a choice. I can say, “Sorry, broke a heel, thanks anyway, thirsty, need to get some punch.” I can go sit along the edge of the gym in the dark. Most of us sit over there, watching the dancers and complaining about the band.
Or I can fumble and flop and try to keep up and laugh and get my foot stepped on and sweat and enjoy every second of it.
It’s only fair to tell you that dancing terrifies me and I’m horrible at it.
Theology, the study of the things of God, is about context. It’s about living in love with God where you are, in this particular slice of life, to the deepest and fullest extent possible. As we’re working through Genesis, you might think I’ve missed something important. Go back and focus on it and figure out why that piece is stuck in your throat. What is God saying? That’s your context. I’ll be over on the other side of the forest, climbing as high as I can, hanging on for dear life, waiting for the lightning and laughing my heart out.
Chapter 2: Why study Genesis?
There are several good reasons. For one, it’s a foundational text that has shaped our culture and our world. These words written in ancient Hebrew carry a strength and power that weaves through our own art and literature like no other text.
Genesis lays the foundations not only for art and culture, but for knowing God. These words set the foundation for knowing God as Creator, obviously, but also as Redeemer.
These few chapters set up the issues which the rest of the Bible deals with. Not only do these chapters set the stage for the biblical texts, but also for the 2000-year sweep of biblical history. For those who are willing to accept these texts as God-given foundations, they explain our own history. They shed light on the grand movements of world history as well as our own intimate, personal histories.
The rest of the Bible takes these chapters very seriously. Jesus referred to them multiple times and obviously considered them foundational.
Those are just a few reasons for studying Genesis.
There is plenty of conflict in our day about the idea of God creating the world. Most people who care about the creation-evolution debate have isolated themselves into a particular camp and there’s very little dialogue about Genesis anymore. It’s interesting that the people who seem most engaged with these stories in the last few decades are the psychologists. They dig into these texts to explain who we are and why we do what we do. Jordan Peterson, for example, is a Canadian psychologist who draws massive crowds and a huge online following as he discusses biblical texts from a psychological perspective.
Digging into Genesis comes with a few challenges. We need to recognize that we are a secondary audience. God speaks through the Bible to each person who will hear. So you can hear his voice in these texts. But when we come to study these chapters, we need to know that we’re not the initial audience. You probably don’t speak or write in ancient Hebrew. Our culture and approach to reality is very different than those ancient people who were the first audience of these texts.
The Hebrews were surrounded by many diverse cultures. Each people group had their own religions and their own gods. Some of them had their own scriptures. The ancient Babylonians had the Enuma Elish. They believed in a creation story that revolved around Tiamat and Apsu. They read the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The Babylonians are just one example. The Canaanites, Hittites, Egyptians, and many others impacted the ancient Hebrews during the centuries when these scriptures were being written down. That shapes these words in significant ways.
We live in a much different context, making assumptions that would be foreign to the ancient Hebrews. We typically come to these Genesis texts asking When and How. Those are the two questions that have generated so much conflict in our world. When did the universe come into being? How did it happen? We tend to define truth in a very narrow way. We pit scientific truth against spiritual truth and see them as separate things.
The ancient Hebrews asked questions that might never occur to us. They asked Who and What and Why. They asked, what does this mean for us today? They saw the spiritual and physical worlds as intimately intertwined. Genesis 1-12 is designed to carefully answer these questions. If we are willing to suspend our own questions, we might find ourselves learning a lot from the ancients.
There are some good reasons to ask when and how the universe was created. Various ways of answering those questions generate a lot of heat around the Bible. I won’t address those questions much in this book. I don’t want to spend my time looking in the rearview mirror and arguing about the past.
Those ancient Hebrews focused on the present, though they looked to the past to answer questions about the present. Learning from their example, we’ll ask questions like these:
Who is God? What is he up to?
Who are we? What is our situation?
Why do we do the things we do?
What does God want for us?
My goal in this book is to approach Genesis in this kind of a Hebrew way. I don’t worry much, honestly, about what happened fifteen billion years ago or in 4004 BC or whenever. It’s not that I’m unconcerned with history. I’m an avid student of history, especially biblical history. But in this context, I want to approach Genesis in the way that Hebrew thinkers might approach it. I want to comprehend what’s going on in our lives today.
So fair warning: I will consistently sidestep the questions of the Big Bang, how old the earth is, whether “yom” in the Hebrew of Genesis 1 denotes a twenty-four hour day, etc. I’m not even going to speculate about the dinosaurs and where they fit into the timeline. I won’t deal with it. That’s really going to frustrate some of you in a book about Genesis. Maybe it frustrates you because you approach this book as if it is about what happened back then. I’m approaching it as if it will tell me who we are in the present, why we do what we do, and most importantly, who God is.
I can hear you thinking: Yes, but if Genesis isn’t true, then the rest of the Bible isn’t trustworthy either.
Let’s get this one out of the way right off the bat: Genesis is true. It is God’s word, holy and without fault. Like the rest of the Bible, it is true. If you let it, Genesis will read you. That’s what the Bible does, as the writer says in Hebrews 4:12. “For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires.” Scripture reads us.
That’s the way I’m going to interact with Genesis, because it’s God’s word. Historical truth is only one kind of truth, and not the most important kind. We too often confuse something being factual with it being true. The most important truths go far, far beyond being simply factual. (If this is your issue and you really want to dive in, see the Appendix on biblical authority at the end of the book.)
If you want to focus on what happened in the past, that’s your option. Maybe you’ve argued so much about what happened back then that you can’t even get out of that box when you’re dealing with Genesis. If you think narrow post-Enlightenment definitions of “truth” can somehow put God in handcuffs and make him play by your rules, you’ve got a lot more brass than I do. He was the one that caused the text to be written in this way, after all.
Here’s my suggestion, if you want to think about the past: Go read a book about something else. I don’t want to frustrate you. Pick up one of the gospels and read that. All your concerns about historicity are totally legitimate in the gospels. Have fun.
Still reading? Okay. Here we go.
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