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SPECIAL REPORT: Preaching Genesis 1-11
FORT WORTH—Matthew McKellar says one’s reading of Genesis 1 affects his reading of Genesis 2 and everything thereafter. Theology begins there.
“This whole creation account in the biblical theme of things is not something that is nominal or something that we dismiss as, ‘Oh, the creation account is in Genesis 1.’ This is central to our understanding of almighty God. To put it another way, if we don’t get the doctrine of creation right, then we’re probably not going to get anything else right.”
McKellar, associate professor of preaching at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, opened the school’s annual advanced expository preaching seminar on Sept. 26 with the topic of “Creation.”
McKellar was one of four presenters at the meeting, titled “Foundation or Fairy Tale? Preaching Genesis 1-11.” Other presenters covered the Fall, Noah’s Flood and the Tower of Babel.
Scripture places great significance on the Genesis account in the Old and New Testaments, he noted.
Preaching the creation narrative promotes the glory of a God who created for his glory and eternal purposes and not out of any need he had, McKellar said. Preaching Genesis gives opportunity to proclaim “the theo-centric emphasis that continues all through Scripture—and I mean it’s all over the creation account.”
In fact, God is mentioned 35 times in the first 35 verses of Genesis, McKellar noted.
“What does that tell us? It tells us that we are not the main focus. It tells us that there is a sovereign God that creates out of nothing. And your people and my people need to hear that, and they need to know that.”
THE DAYS OF CREATION
McKellar said he joins “the great mass of history” in holding to six literal days of creation. Nonetheless, the preacher must understand all of the major views, he said.
The gap theory was arguably the most prominent view among conservative scholars for the greater part of the 20th century.
Adherents of it included C.I. Schofield, who more than anyone else popularized it, and the late W.A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas.
It proposes a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2—a period during which Lucifer rebels, the created order is destroyed in judgment, and a new creation comes about.
James Leo Garrett, a retired Southwestern Seminary professor, said of Criswell’s view: ““Criswell adopts a dispensational doctrine of Lucifer’s heavenly rebellion drawn from Isaiah 14:12-20 and Ezekiel 28:11-19, and his ruining of the created order, in order to explain why a reordering or a recreation was necessary.”
McKellar said the gap theory became “almost the unquestioned view in 20th century fundamentalism.” A.W. Pink, another gap theorist, believed in a recreated earth about 6,000 years old,” McKellar noted.
“I wouldn’t spend 45 minutes on Sunday morning explaining the gap theory,” but be familiar with the various views, McKellar urged.
Also, it is important to note, McKellar said, that scholars disagree over whether the Hebrew words for “formless and void” mean the earth was made desolate, as in a type of judgment, or was created not to be desolate. Gap theorists take the former view.
Other approaches include a literary day theory, sometimes called the framework hypothesis, which views the creation days as literary devices, not 24-hour days, to show what God did, and the revelatory day theory, which views the six days as the time God took in revealing his creation acts to Moses.
“One must remember—we look at creation through three massive barriers: the Flood, the Fall and the sixth day. But quickly, let me say none of us can take off our glasses as fallen human beings and study Genesis 1. All of us approach it on this side of the Fall. We’re affected by the Fall.”
McKellar rejects the gap theory and calls theistic evolution “categorically untenable” and “utterly incompatible” with Scripture.
The creation narrative, McKellar said, suggests “a week of ordinary days and there is no compelling evidence against this interpretation. The only way one could argue biblically for an old earth billions of years old is to propose a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 or to propose one of the ideas just explained.”
The adage, “He who marries the spirit of the age will be a widow in the next,” applies to the creation account, McKellar said.
“Be careful, be careful, be careful … of hitching your exegesis and treatment of Genesis 1 to the latest theological fad out there. Beware of basing your exegesis on the latest scientific theory.”
But naturalism, not old earth creationism, is the common enemy to biblical truth, he said. And theistic evolution undermines biblical authority from the fall onward.
“What does [theistic evolution] say about the nature of Adam, what does it say about the nature of the Fall? All of these things are interconnected.” The Bible teaches not only the “who and why. It also makes explicit claims with reference to the how,” McKellar argued.
In preaching the creation story, there is a richness of material as God gives form to the formless, fills what is empty, and gives light and divides it from the darkness. As with much of the biblical narrative, metaphors and foreshadows abound.
The original readers would have seen the God of Genesis 1 in stark contrast to the pagan gods of the ancient near east, McKellar said. For example, the ancient Canaanites worshiped the sea with its awesome power, yet the God of Genesis 1 not only creates the ocean but fills it with sea creatures and sets its boundaries.
“He has no rival gods in the sea,” McKellar stated. “If you don’t preach anything else, preach the bigness and magnitude of God.”
The term Elohim—used for God in Genesis 1—is a plural form. Elohim’s proclamation on day six—“Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness”—is a hint at what is later revealed through progressive revelation as the trinitarian God, McKellar explained.
Also important in the passage, McKellar said, is that “humanity is the crowning point of creation. We are far more than animals.”
Reflecting on the Sabbath, McKellar argued that God didn’t need to rest from his creating because he was tired but rather to celebrate and enjoy what he had made.
Likewise, people should take one day a week to refrain from work and celebrate the works of God—what the Puritans called “the market day of the soul.”
The culture largely prefers Mother Nature, but belief in the Genesis account is an act of submission to the sovereign God, McKellar stated.
“It’s almost engrained in our idolatrous hearts and minds that we will do whatever we have to do to attempt, in our fallen sinfulness, to rob God of the glory that only he deserves.
“The proprietary rights of almighty God are absolutely exclusive.”
McKellar added, “If I’m going to deny the historicity of the creation account, I’ve got some major problems on down the line.”
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