Dr. Manny Arango (0:00)

Hey, Bible nerds. This is Dr. Manny Arango, and I'm your host for the Bible department podcast powered by Arma. This podcast follows a Bible reading plan we created to help you read the entire Bible in a year. You can head to the show notes or thebibledepartment.com to download our reading plan and join the journey. To all my fellow pastors, I've got a question for you. Does your city know that your church exists? Listen, I get it. You're preaching, you're leading, you're discipling, you're doing ministry. We are in the same boat. And let's be honest, social media and marketing, not your strong suit. Not mine either. And that's probably the last thing on your mind. And that's why we chose to partner with Church Candy Marketing for our church. Plant the garden. We out here, y'all. They help churches get more actual guests walking through the doors on Sunday without your eye having to stress over ads or algorithms or trying to crack the social media code. Right now, Church Candy is helping nearly 400 churches reach their communities with simple invite ads. And it works. It's super effective. I can tell you from firsthand experience. So if you're tired of being your city's best kept secret, how about you do this? Go to churchcandy.com Manny and book a free consultation book a discovery call. Their team will break it all down and show you how to start seeing new faces at your church this Sunday. I'm in the trenches with you, trying to grow the church. And how about we just start a whole campaign? No more empty churches. So let's partner with Church Candy and get our churches full. The glory of Jesus. Let's go. Like always, I got context. Who's. I got nerdy nuggets. I got timeless truths. I feel like I was about to freestyle. You know what I'm saying? Hey, if you've done the reading for today, we're going to dive in. If you're on a streak, I'm proud of you. If you haven't done the reading, pause this video. Pause the audio. Do not consume this content if you have not done the reading for the day. Genesis, chapter one, two and three. Foundational content for understanding the character of God, the nature of humanity, purpose of the creation. I mean, yo, Genesis, chapter one, two, and three. It don't get no better and it don't get no worse, okay? Because it started off real good, and then Adam and Eve had to go jack it all up. So Genesis 1, 2 and 3. Good, good stuff. Number one, let's start off with some context clues. Two things that I'll say. Number one, it is very, very difficult to understand what's happening in Genesis chapters 1, 2 and 3 without an understanding of ancient Near Eastern cultures. So the creation account that we have in the opening chapter, chapters really Genesis chapter one and two of Genesis can really only be fully appreciated when you read the creation accounts of the Mesopotamian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian cultures that surrounded people of God. Okay. These creation accounts are in conversation with one another, and you can almost see the creation account in Genesis chapters one and two as setting the record straight. So there's gonna be a ton of similarities which tell us that this literature is a product of the culture that it emerges from. But the similarities are not really the most important elements. It is the differences. Because there are going to be things that are going to be radical departures from the Mesopotamian, Babylonian, Egyptian narratives and those narratives based in theology. So let's get into that context. Okay. The very first thing that we realize, okay, Genesis chapter one, we're going to start reading in verse two. Well, we can just start reading in verse one. Okay. In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, verse 2, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. So while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. We're getting mixed messages based on the translation. That word for formless, formless void. Okay. In Hebrew, that's tohu vavohu. And the NRSV niv. Lots of translations are going to translate that as formless void. However, we get the deep and the waters, so clearly it can't be just nothingness. Sometimes in our imagination, we imagine nothingness. But the biblical authors aren't creating a picture of nothingness because it's right here. They're saying that darkness covered the face of the deep. What's the deep? Well, in Hebrew, that's the tahome, the abyss, the deep waters, while a wind from God swept over the face of the water. So we get waters two times right here in the second verse. So clearly there's not nothingness. There's. There's something different than nothingness. Tohu va vohu. I wouldn't necessarily translate that as formless and empty or formless and void. I'd translate that as a wild waste land, a vast, chaotic ocean. And so what we're going to see in this creation account is not that God moves the creation from nothing to something. That's not what's happening. We are not going from Non existence to existence or from nothing to something. Actually, what we're going from and or to in this creation account is from chaos to order. That is the imagery that the biblical authors want us to use. Now, we don't get that imagery because in our cultural context, words like the deep, words like the waters, words like tohu va vohu, words like to home. Those words don't signify to Western American readers that there's chaos here. But for an ancient audience in every creation myth, every creation myth started off as chaos. Now let me give you the next clue that this is a story about moving the. The. The world from chaos to order. It's actually found on day five, and we talked about it a little bit in the book of Revelation. It says in verse 21 of chapter one. So God created the great sea monsters. Okay? Where do those sea monsters go? The tannin. They belong in the t. Home, okay? And they are a classic symbol of chaos. They're kind of like the emblem of chaos. If chaos had a logo in the ancient world, they would be the logo, the mascot for chaos. So Yahweh, he's not moving the creation from nothing to something. He's actually moving the creation from chaos to order. And so this is what this God does. He moves life from chaos to order, which is the exact same thing he does with a new believer. The exact same thing he does in your own personal life. He moves you from chaos to order. And I think that there's a theological. Sometimes our theology becomes more important than just biblical exegesis. And in the west, we have a theology of creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. And we will protect that theology instead of actually, like, doing good hermeneutics on the biblical text and doing good exegesis. The. The passage, the creation account that we actually have does not support creatio ex nihilo. That's Latin for creation out of nothing. It actually supports a theology of order from chaos. So we get dragons, we get monsters, we get chaos. This is the stuff that's right here in Genesis, chapter one. That's. That's a good amount of context. We gotta keep moving. I'll give you a nerdy nugget. I'll give you something that would have been absolutely wild. Verse 27. So God created humankind in his image. In the image of God. He created them. Male and female. He created them, okay? God blessed them. God said to them, be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion. This is radical. If you read the other creation accounts, the gods are creating humans because essentially they're lazy and they need humans to work. So the gods are creating humans to essentially be slaves. Also in the creation accounts, there are different classes of humans. Also in the other creation accounts, the genders are nowhere near equal. In this creation account, Yahweh doesn't create Adam or Eve because he's lonely or because he's lazy or because he's in need or because he needs humans to give him food. That is not this God. Yahweh is self sufficient. He is not creating humans for any selfish need or want or desire. He's creating humans out of an overflow of love. How do we know that there's an overflow of love? Well, verse 26 says, Let us make humankind in our image. These are plural words. So when we say God, the moment we say God, we are talking about a trinity. When we say God, that means the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. When, when we say the word God, we mean Yahweh, we mean Jesus, we mean Holy Spirit. That's what God means. Now a lot of people think that God just means the Father or Yahweh, but no, God means the Trinity. And the reason that the Bible can say that God is love is because he's a relationship. Okay? God the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Spirit, the Spirit loves the Father, the Spirit loves the Son, the Son loves the Father. The, the, the God that we worship is a community of relationship. And out of the abundant overflow of the love that exists in the Trinity, we are created. We are a product of the love that exists between Yahweh, Jesus and Holy Spirit. That is the origin story for humanity. We were not created to slave away. We weren't created to give God food. We weren't created because God didn't want to do stuff for himself. We weren't created because. No, no, no. We were created out of the overflow of the expression of the love that existed between the Trinity. And both genders are blessed. Both genders are made in the image of God. This would have been radical. Okay. Radical in the ancient Near Eastern culture. Okay, next little nerdy nugget I'll give you. If you look at the creation account, in days 1, 2 and 3, God forms. And then on days 4, 5, 5 and 6, God fills. On days 1, 2 and 3, God forms. And then on days 4th, 5 and 6, God fills. So here's what does not happen. God doesn't. I don't know make the whales and then just have to hold them over here in space while he gets the ocean ready? No, he forms first. The oceans come first, and then he fills the oceans. He makes the land first. He prepares the environment first, and then has animals. Okay, so another. This is just another subtle expression of the order in which Yahweh is creating. Okay, when you think creation, you should think ordering. So often when we think creation, we just think, okay, there was nothing, and then God made something. But the reality is that the picture that we get here in Genesis chapter one of Yahweh, of the Creator, is not just of a God that's bringing something out of nothing, but of a God who's bringing order to chaos. This theme is going to culminate because on the seventh day, we actually get the climax of the creation account. The climax of the creation account is not the sixth day when God makes humans. It is the seventh day when God rests. Why is that the climax? Well, because in an ancient Near Eastern context, the proof that the deity has created order is that that deity finally rests in that order. So what happens in Genesis is that Yahweh moves from hovering over the chaos to resting within the temple that we know as Eden. And the reason that God can rest in Eden is because it's been ordered to be a temple for the divine presence. Deities only rested in temples, and temples were highly ordered spaces. Okay. And deities only rested when there was order, and order is what happened in temples. Okay, These are a cocktail of ideas in the ancient world that may be foreign to us. In our world, a temple is where humans worship, but in this world, a temple is where deities reigned. They rested and reigned the same way that a king would rest on his throne. They're not resting on the throne and take a nap. They're resting on the throne to rule. Okay, so the pinnacle of the creation account is day seven. Now, God has moved the creation from chaos to order. He is now resting in that order. And now we're going to get a chaos monster who's going to come into the Garden of Eden. How do we know that there's a chaos monster? Well, Revelation chapter 12 actually tells us that the dragon that John sees in a vision is the serpent. Okay, so these images are totally connected in the Bible that dragons and serpents are one and the same. How else do we know that Adam and Eve are standing in front of a dragon? Well, we know that Adam and Eve are standing in front of a dragon because the curse on the animal is that they will crawl on their bellies and eat dust. Which means that a snake is just a dragon that has lost its legs and limbs. That is what a snake is. An original snake prior to the fall would look like a dragon. So that means that Adam and Eve were standing before or in front of a chaos monster. And by partnering with the chaos monster, they usher chaos into the world. Okay, so now the animal, the beast known as Satan, wants to plunge creation back into chaos. Okay? He doesn't want creation to go from something to nothing. He wants the creation to go back to tohu vavohu. He wants the creation to unravel. And we'll really dive into that when we talk about the flood narrative. Bible nerds, I have an announcement. My brand new book, Crushing Chaos releases May of 2025 in pre orders are officially open. When I began to learn Genesis in its proper context, I learned that the creation account is not primarily about God creating something out of nothing, but rather God bringing divine order to the chaos of the cosmos. That one nugget was a game changer for me because I've been preaching to all the kids in my youth group that peace was a solution for their anxiety. But really God's solution to chaos is never peace, but rather order. Peace isn't something that you stumble into, is something that you intentionally step into. And that starts with aligning your life with God's order. I think that this book is a game changer. It's nerdy, it's practical, it provides a very contextual understanding of the book of Genesis. And if you grab a copy, you'll learn why there's a huge dragon on the COVID Head to the link in the show notes to pre order or head to crushingchaos.com to see the really dope trailer that we made for this book. I think it's time for you to crush the chaos in your life. And that starts with grabbing a copy of this book. Now back to the podcast. Let's get a timeless truth. Okay, here's one of my favorites. This helped me and my wife a lot when we were battling with infertility. Verse 28, chapter 1 says this. God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply. Now I'm using Logos Bible study software and I'm just going to click on the word and, okay, and it gives me a bunch of Hebrew information here. And it's going to say conjunction. And so then, and so. And then the translators chose to translate this as be fruitful and multiply. But it's very much like a better Translation to translate this, be fruitful than multiply. I think that when me and my wife were struggling with infertility, we would get upset every single time people got pregnant around us, especially when ratchet crazy people was getting pregnant. And here's the revelation that I got just by translating this a little differently, that God's goal is for fruitful people to multiply. Me and my wife are fruitful. The enemy's goal is to get untrue people to multiply. And the enemy's goal is to also get fruitful people to not multiply. And so the, the enemy didn't have to attack like any of my family's, any of my ratchet family members with infertility. The enemy would only attack fruitful people with infertility. And so I started to see it as an encouragement. The reason that it's hard for us to get pregnant is because the enemy is scared of this fruitfulness, multiplying. Not all multiplication is fruitful. Cancer also multiplies, but it's not fruitful. And so this is my timeless truth, that if I take care of the fruit, God will take care of the multiplication. If I'm faithful to be fruitful, what does that mean? To have love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, goodness and self control. Like if I can just be faithful over letting the fruit of the Spirit be evident in my life. John 15 Stay connected to the vine so that you could bear much fruit. Endure the pruning so that you can bear much fruit. It's to my Father's great glory that you bear much fruit. God's goal is for me to be fruitful. So often the enemy wants to distract me and make me focus not on the fruitfulness, but on the multiplication. I can't take care of the outcome of multiplication, but what I can do is steward the call to be fruitful. Be fruitful and multiply. Be fruitful and multiply. Or as I would say it today, be fruitful, then multiply. Be fruitful, then multiply. You take care of the fruitfulness. God will take care of the multiplication. And instead of wondering, why is it that all these other people seem more successful than me, why does it seem like they are multiplying and I'm not multiplying? Could it be that the reason that the enemy has not put a roadblock to their multiplication, could it be that it's because they actually are unfruitful? And what Satan is trying to do is to get chaos to multiply? And your job is to make sure that you are ordered and fruitful. And if you could do that, I believe that God will be faithful. All right, we got context clues. We got nerdy nuggets. We got timeless truths. Guess what, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to see you right here tomorrow. I want you to get a streak going. I'm currently on a streak right now. I've cold plunged the last five days and. And if I can cold plunge, you can read the Bible. All right, so let's get a streak going. I love you guys. I'm so proud of you. I'll see you right here tomorrow as we continue our trek through the book of Genesis. Love you guys. Peace. Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department podcast. You can find us online and learn more about the show at thebibledepartment.com and on Instagram hebible department. If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive deeper into the Bible, you can get free access to our library of courses@thebibledepartment.com we'll see you back here tomorrow.