Big Bible Basics Introduction

It is helpful to begin with some background about our God, the Creator of this vast and beautiful universe and all that is good within it. As can be seen from creation, our Creator obviously delights in great diversity in the universe. And it is a diversity bathed in beauty and wonder. God is not only the Creator of the beautiful physical universe, but our God is also the Creator of our souls, spirits, and minds that allow us to appreciate the beauty and wonder of all creation. In human terms, we can say that God is so much beyond genius, beyond what we can ever comprehend. What we call human genius at its best is only a small glimpse into the unfathomable intelligence of our Creator. 

God is also the Creator of communication, with written language being a chief means of communication that can be kept as a somewhat permanent record over historical time periods. And so it is no surprise that our language can sometimes have very clear meanings and sometimes have very subtle meanings – to enable the various purposes of communication. So, our Creator God can be both clear and subtle in His communication to us in the Scriptures. 

It is understandable, then, that our multi-faceted, beyond-genius God has used language for Genesis 1 that can be interpreted and has been interpreted on many different levels. To the Israelites thousands of years ago, Genesis 1 was a way to let them know that their God was different than all of the other gods around them. Genesis 1 also gave the Israelites a pattern for Sabbath rest that was commanded in the laws given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Genesis 1 has also been interpreted as an origin story about who we are in essence as human beings, that we were made in God’s image. Genesis 1 has been interpreted as a lesson about our place within creation, as care-takers of the earth and everything that has the breath of life.

For the last century or two, however, mankind has begun to miss out on the harmony between Genesis 1 and science. But now, we are coming to appreciate that Genesis 1 can also be interpreted as an appropriately accurate, high level summary of events that science has also begun to describe in greater detail. While the Genesis descriptions touch on only a few events that happened during the various phases of creation, these accounts are nonetheless appropriately accurate concerning events on the creation timeline. There are many books and writings that focus on Genesis as poetry or exalted prose, as our origin story, or as describing our responsibility as care-takers of this earth. But the harmony between Genesis 1 and science is a story that is not yet widely understood. So, explaining that harmony between Genesis 1 and contemporary science is the focus of this short course. 

We would suggest that reading Genesis 1 from this Old Earth Creationist perspective is likely one of the ways that was desired by the Creator for us to understand Genesis 1. The growing harmony between Genesis 1 and science is an extraordinary witness to the Creator being the ultimate source of Genesis 1. As mentioned in 2 Peter 1:21, Moses was no doubt being moved by the Holy Spirit as he wrote this chapter. How else could a 3000+ year old text describe events from billions of years ago, and describe those events in the correct order in a way that is fundamentally in harmony with the descriptions from the science of today? And since that is the case, then it is quite reasonable to believe that reading Genesis 1 with an understanding of its harmony with science could have been foreseen and intended by our great Creator.