Genesis Week 1
In the dying days of June I read these words in the letters column of the Herald from a man called Rogerson, who as far as I know is no relation of mine! "very few people now believe that God gave man dominion over the creatures of the earth. We now see that woodlands, fens, forests, and wild animals are all part of a complex and mutually dependent web of life; damage one part and you damage the whole."
Very few people now believe that God gave man dominion over the creatures of the earth.
This view which is a direct challenge to christian orthodoxy is not an uncommon one in our present society. Indeed in the late winter and early spring of this year at the behest of Presbytery, the Kirk Session carried out a survey among non-church goers to find out what they believed. I think the overwhelming lesson that we learned was that people are profoundly ignorant about God. Gone are the days when we could assume that if people didn't come to church they had rejected God on the basis of sound knowledge. But out there in our community there are people who are as profoundly ignorant of the Bible and of Jesus as any lost tribe we may find up the Amazon river. This then must be to the forefront of our thinking about outreach to our community. No longer can it be sufficient to simply invite people to come to church. We must be prepared in both the spoken word and the written word to defend and explain our faith to those outwith the fold. It is not in truth a situation that totally surprises me since in recent years I have found that many who come to communicants classes own no Bible and some don't even know how to use them. These comments are not meant in anyway to belittle those who come to the classes I simply use this as an illustration to add weight to my argument about the profound ignorance that exists outside the community of the church.
And it not just ignorance that abounds we also find that superstition abounds. Ideas that we all go to heaven down a tunnel of light as we leave our bodies at the moment of death....ideas about tarot cards, fortune tellers and many others can be found a common currency on conversation. It is not that people have rejected Christianity on the basis of rational science it is in truth that they have simply never heard the Gospel. I have even had people light up cigarettes during wedding services in the church ......... not out I am sure of deliberate discourtesy but out of total ignorance. At most funeral services, I like all other ministers have to tell the mourners to stand up to sing hymns and to sit down when we have sung them. And this ignorance about the mere mechanics of the church speaks volumes about the deeper ignorance of the faith that lies behind their actions.
So why then you may ask are we going to spend the next few weeks or months in the Book of Genesis? Is this Book not wildly irrelevant to our current needs? Is it not this book not the very reason why so many have departed from the Church over the last seventy years? In some ways the answer to these questions must be YES. But it is, at its simplest and most profound about how we view the world. The concept current for most of this century here in the west is that people are basically good - if we just treat them properly and give them decent homes then everything will work out for the best. How often have we heard that kind of argument? Everything from breaking church windows to murder is excused because of environment, upbringing or childhood abuse. Does this theory and its practice explain our world? Does it explain mass murder, aggression, street crime, Hitler, Stalin and mass murderer West and his wife? I don't think so! Is the world becoming a better and brighter place year by year? Are we evolving towards a better future? I think we would all agree that we are not! I think we would all agree that such a world view has been proven to be invalid simply by looking at and living in our world.
I hope over the next few weeks we will be able to see quite clearly and come to understand - the real view of the world and of people as we find it laid before us in the Word. I hope also that we will be able to see clearly that as a theory it holds water - for when we test it against the laboratory of life we will find it works -not just in parts but totally!
Genesis is the very foundation of our faith. Without it there could have been no letter to the Romans. Indeed so important a book is it that the ancient hebrews had a law forbidding anyone under thirty expounding the first chapter of Genesis. What wisdom there is in that!
I think it would useful here to quote from a book by Robert Jastrow, one time Director of NASA. His book is called, 'God and the Astronomers'. In it he reviews different theories concerning the origin of the universe and then notes:-~
"Now, we would like to pursue that inquiry further back time, but the barrier to further progress seems insurmountable. It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory; at this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
And so it is that we begin our study of Genesis. In the short time we have available in our temporary home we can go no further today. But in Genesis we will find the answer to many questions from the "What's the purpose and point of life to the ordinary questions of Why is there so much suffering in the world.....". We will I hope find the answer to the confusion of our times and that you may find yourself better equipped than before to answer those awkward questions that arise in dealing with the non believer.