Genesis Part 2

 Almighty God.

 One of the first debates that immerged between early Christianity and the Roman Empire was whether an emperor could be God. Questioning the assumption that a likeness of the emperor should be placed in the temple and worshipped. You can see how that might happen when there is someone at the pinnacle of an authoritarian political hierarchy with a tremendous amount of power and influence. It happened several times in the 20th century and it is still happening today in a country like North Korea and this is indeed what did happen throughout the Roman world at the same time Christianity emerged and began to spread.

 The Christian response to that idea was never confuse the specific sovereign with them principle of sovereignty. Given human nature it seems unlikely to me that an idea should emerge which says human beings should willingly subordinate themselves to something greater than themselves. Subordinate ourselves so much so that even the King or Emperor should subordinate themselves to a higher principle and we still believe that to this day. If you live in a moderate civilised democratic society today your president or your Prime Minister is still subordinate to the law of the land. Whatever the body of laws is there's a principle inside that that even the leader of the nation is subordinate to it. 

 In the 1970 it was when Nixon belief expressed in his famous interview with British journalist David Frost that once the President had decided to do something it became legal that ultimately became his undoing  Without the principal that everyone is under the law we can't even have a civilised society When the leader turns into something that is said to be above such principals, when the leader is seen as all wise and all powerful then things go seriously wrong. That’s certainly what happened in the early Soviet Union and that is what happened in Maoist China and what happened in Nazi Germany. This principle of sovereignty, the idea of an Almighty God was imbedded in society as far back as the Old Testament book of Judges when leader after leader went wrong because they were all seen to be doing what they felt was right in their own eyes rather than being subservient to something higher. That thing being the revealed will of God. I believe that the West in particular has always had civilisations which are predicated on that idea that the state is subservient to the individual.  The idea that a countries legal system is predicated on the fact that the law is rooted in the biblical idea of a Holy God is what underpins a well functioning properly grounded society. Democratic societies from the earliest days recognised that individuals have intrinsic value because there's something about us all that is divine. It's at the base of our legal system, and the cornerstone of our civilised society is the notion that everyone is equal before God.

 In the final analysis the Word of God (The Logos) described in John Ch 1 says the divine lives in is the individual and not the state. In the New Testament the opening of the Gospel of John was designed to parallel the opening of Genesis. I think that's idea is also closely associated with the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and manifesting himself in individuals.

 The Bible is a book that's been written both forward and backwards in time. In some sense most books exist in that format because they first exist in the mind of the author as the one who inspires them because the author knows from the beginning how things might end. This is infinitely more so when we consider the Spirit of God as the inspirer of this book.

 Over the course of nearly 1000 years the European perspective has trained the human mind to interpret everything that is known within a single coherent framework. The idea of a created universe. By accepting the initial truism of a created universe, we access a world view which tries to attune people to the necessity of believing in an absolute truth. Many historians argue that the scientific revolution initiated in the 17th century would have never got off the ground if it hadn't been for Christianity. Later in the late 1800s Nietzsche announced that God was dead, but Nietzsche also say what a catastrophe that might. Nietzsche although proclaiming the death of God also understood that by doing so, we were knocking the pillars out from under of the base of western civilization. We did that the moment we began destroying this representation of the idea of God and people began to lose there understanding of the importance of this book called the Bible and the divine wisdom contained within it. Nietzsche even foresaw that because of his ideas within 100 years hundreds of millions of people might potentially die because of the replacement of these underlying truths.

I have unpacked these Old Testament stories before in a church service sermon, but I am looking at them again from a hopefully broader aspect partly because I want to learn more about them. When I'm preaching, I'm usually trying to tell people that which I know for sure. But this series of open-ended podcast has a more ambitious personal objective. You see, there are a lot of things about these books and stories that I don't know yet and I am just I'm trying to make sense of them as we progress together. I have been studying these ancient Biblical books for a long time, well over 40 years now. I am not an academic but the Bible is unique in that no matter how educated you are no individual is educated enough to understand the complete significance of the biblical stories. But I'm going to do my best and I hope you enjoy the journey we are setting off together on today. However, before I get into the texts beginning at Genesis Ch 1, I’ll begin in the next podcast by taking about the origins of this first book of the bible thinking about where it sits within the Pentateuch, and the Old Testament and indeed to whole bible.