the God of Genesis

I’ve been reading through the Bible in 180 days almost every year since I got married 10 years ago. It’s been so good—flying high over the surface of God’s Word from January to the end of June, sometimes with a large group of fellow readers and sometimes with a small one. Some years it’s been lots of audio Bible; some years it’s been pages of personal notetaking; some years it’s been writing out insights daily or weekly for those reading along with me. I’ve learned so much about the structure of the Bible, the character of God, and the story of Jesus as the Savior of Creation.

With that big-picture foundation in place, I knew it was finally time to dive deep again. And what better place to start than the prologue of the story?

Every day in January, I read through Genesis 1-11, discovering questions and curiosities, noticing truths about who God is, learning new things about who God made me to be, and realizing what a different world we could all live in if we knew the God of Genesis.

He’s a God of order.

The Creation story doesn’t tell us how He made a material universe out of a blank void, but rather how His Spirit formed an orderly world out of a chaotic wasteland. He carefully separated out the different components of the world—light from darkness, sky from waters, land from seas, day from night—and grouped together the different life forms into their kinds: vegetation, sea creatures, birds, and animals. The pinnacle of it all, human beings who were made in His likeness, He created as one and yet also in two: male and female.

He wants to collaborate with humans.

Instead of creating the earth to be a space for Him to practice dictatorial tyranny, He commissioned His image bearers to rule over it together and to participate in the ongoing activities of life-making and ground-working.

He is a gentle parent.

When His image bearers were deceived and betrayed Him, He didn’t get angry. He didn’t make harsh threats. He didn’t leave them alone to think about what they’d done, He didn’t strike them dead on the spot, He didn’t shame them for their stupidity or their nakedness. Instead, God sought them out, heard them, cared for them, and covered their shame.

He models both grace and boundaries.

There were clear consequences for Adam and Eve’s sin, and they were upheld graciously as protective boundaries, not punitively as wrathful punishment. The same gracious boundaries led to the catastrophic Flood—not because God hated or wanted to destroy what He had made, but because the earth was so corrupted that it must be cleansed.

He is clear and direct.

We don’t have to guess or infer or hope to figure out what He wants. When He called humankind to rule over Creation, He said it directly and repeated it several times. When He received Cain’s subpar offering, He clearly communicated how Cain could do what was right. When He made a covenant with Noah, He spelled out the exact terms.

There is so much more, an endless wealth of truth to be mined from these first eleven chapters of the Bible. This month, I’m zeroing in on Genesis 1, and already overwhelmed by the beauty of how God created our world and how the Spirit inspired the Biblical authors to record it.

If you want to join me in any of this, here’s the plan I made (and here’s the notetaking journal I’m using):

• January: Read Genesis 1-11 daily

• February: Read Genesis 1 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly

• March: Read Genesis 2 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly

• April: Read Genesis 3 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly

• May: Read Genesis 4 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly

• June: Read Genesis 5 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly

• July: Read Genesis 6 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly

• August: Read Genesis 7 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly

• September: Read Genesis 8 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly

• October: Read Genesis 9 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly

• November: Read Genesis 10 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly

• December: Read Genesis 11 daily, and Genesis 1-11 weekly

one God and one mediator

My very favorite childhood movie is the original Pirates of the Caribbean. Toward the climax of that iconic film, when Captain Jack Sparrow is attempting to double-cross both Commodore Norrington and Captain Barbossa so that he can secure his freedom, his ship, and his revenge in one fell swoop, the Royal Navy soldier Murtogg asks, “Why aren’t we doin’ what—what Mr. Sparrow said? With the cannons and all?”

Commodore Norrington responds, “Because it was Mr. Sparrow who said it.”

Since I started writing out and publicly sharing my thought process for how and why I’ve shifted away from my long-held belief in strict complementarianism, I’ve had the privilege of participating in some fascinating conversations with both men and women on this topic—some of them in agreement (or at least open to agreement) with me, and some of them strongly disagreeing.

But one common, and unfortunately unsurprising, theme has emerged from these conversations which I think illustrates the insidiousness of the complementarian doctrine: Wise and God-fearing women are becoming suspicious of their own communication with God through the Holy Spirit solely “because it was a woman who said it,” as if the Holy Spirit can only speak and act in their lives through the umbrella authority of a man.

And that’s dangerous territory.

“For there is one God and one mediator between God and humanity, Christ Jesus, Himself human.”

1 Timothy 2:5 HCSB

For example, I’ve noticed that when Christian women talk about their role as wives or women of the church, they will invariably think of some instance where they weren’t “submissive enough” to male authority, and things didn’t go well for them. Even women I’ve spoken with who knew they were being called by God and equipped with His wisdom would see something go awry and think, “This is because I’m trying to lead, and I shouldn’t be, because I’m a woman.”

Or wives who have had serious reservations about their husband’s choices for their family would simply go along with it, things would turn out okay, and they’d think, “God blessed me because I obeyed my husband, even when he was being foolish.”

Thus, submission is no longer a beautiful opportunity for each of us to voluntarily imitate Christ toward one another (as Paul teaches in Philippians 2 and Ephesians 5), but rather a weapon that anyone can whip out to slash holes in a woman’s trust in the voice of the Spirit who dwells within her. It’s the serpent in the Garden all over again: “Did God really say…?” And to question the questioning just comes across as even greater defiance. So we are silenced.

But I’m done being silent, so I’ll ask anyway: What if some of the things that went wrong under the woman’s leadership happened not because she shouldn’t have been leading but because, unlike Barak when he followed Deborah, the men “under” her lacked the humility to follow her? Or because things simply go wrong sometimes, no matter who is in charge?

And what if God has called a wife to protect her home and family even when it means putting her foot down on her husband’s foolishness, like Abigail when she defied Nabal? What if wifely submission is actually not another facet of prosperity theology, directly proportional to the measure of your blessing?

When we teach that the primary role of women is subjection to men (at minimum, to their own husbands), we inevitably end up with men who feel very little need to actively seek the guidance of God (because it’s implied that they have God’s blessing on their decisions simply by being male) and with women who feel they need not only the guidance of God, but must also take the extra step of getting approval from their husbands or other relevant male authority figures. The ultimate result across the board is that the voice of God Himself is diminished or even dismissed.

Hear me when I say: A wife’s submission to her husband is good. A husband’s submission to his wife is good. Christians’ submission to fellow Christians, to Christ, and to worldly governments and authorities is good. Submissiveness, humility, and peacemaking are key characteristics of Christ and outworkings of the Spirit that Paul encouraged the early churches to strive for.

Pigeonholing all women into a place of perpetual, one-sided, mandated submission to their husbands and/or other men merely because they are women is not good. At best, it leads to an unhealthy hierarchical dynamic that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to reflect the full image of God. And at worst, it sets human men in the place of Christ as mediators between women and God, leading to deception, disobedience, abuse, and even idolatry.

Let us tread carefully.

counterculture or kingdom?

My day job (besides taking care of my own babies) is helping families build healthy and sustainable sleep foundations for their babies and toddlers. One of the first things I try to instill in every set of parents I work with is the following principle:

Respond, don’t react.

When you respond to your baby’s crying in the middle of the night, you might pause for a moment and listen. You might evaluate the sound of their cry. You might compare it to how they normally communicate with you when they’re hungry, sick, cold, or just annoyed. Based on all of that information, you’d then decide what kind of response they need, and offer it to them accordingly.

This way of operating allows your baby, not yourself, to be the guide of your actions—in contrast with when you simply react, rushing to stop the crying in any way that you think might work, even if it’s not what your baby needs.

I think a lot of us as believers and believing churches could stand to work on this.

Among congregations that highly value the Bible and the holiness of God, there is a temptation to recoil from the secular culture and go in the opposite direction—ironically, instead of actually following the guidance of the Bible.

We react instead of responding.

Consider one example from my formative years: A book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye was published in 1997, at the height of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board’s extremely popular and widespread “True Love Waits” abstinence campaign. The book and the associated purity culture movement gained enormous traction in evangelical Christian circles. And it was a reaction to the Sexual Revolution’s influence on church youth in the 1970s and 1980s.

But instead of achieving any meaningful “purity” or teaching a healthy sexual ethic, sound data now overwhelmingly indicates that the principles of purity culture primarily succeeded in warping an entire generation of Christians’ understanding of sex and sexuality (see the work of Sheila Wray Gregoire).

Or how about another that is both as old as time and very current (and, clearly, on my mind): The effort to stop any movement toward true mutuality in husband-wife relationships, let alone toward equality of men and women in a church setting, has in the past several decades largely been a reaction to the feminist movement. More recently, it has gained a new momentum as we recoil from the confusion in society around gender and the gender binary.

And instead of putting on display God’s glorious Genesis 2 vision, in which men and women work in equal partnership to achieve His goals on earth and reflect His nature, the church’s grip on complementarianism has only succeeded in handicapping our witness by Christianizing the idea that some human beings naturally rank higher than others. This idea is anti-Scripture, anti-Gospel, and anti-Christ, but nevertheless has been used by the church to justify atrocities throughout history, from slavery to the Holocaust to many forms of abuse.

When the Bible calls us out of the patterns of the world, it doesn’t say “Observe the way the world is going and run in the opposite direction.” Instead, the Word of God calls us to discernment. Discernment is what we need to navigate an environment that is rarely black-and-white. Discernment is what we need if we intend to respond instead of react. Discernment is what we need when the answers aren’t easy.

Discernment is what keeps us off the endlessly swinging pendulum of react, react, react.

Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.

- Romans 12:2

Like taking a moment to breathe and tune into my baby’s cry in the middle of the night prevents me from acting out of my own panic or frustration and allows my baby’s need to dictate my response, taking the time to investigate the Scriptures and listen to the guidance of the Holy Spirit when we notice unholiness in our culture allows God, not the culture, to be the leader of our actions.

Doing a 180-degree turn away from the culture does not make us holy or our culture better. There are often pieces of goodness even in the parts of our culture that we find most abhorrent, and in our haste to react, we lose the good along with the bad. Thus the traditional Christian church, desiring rightly to uphold Scripture’s clear teachings that men and women are not interchangeable, at the same time lost hold of Scripture’s clear teachings that God made men and women absolutely equal in both calling and value.

Holiness comes through transformation—transformation that takes place through the renewing of our minds. Our thoughts, intellect, reason, perceptions, judgments, and determinations must be made completely new. We think of the kingdom of heaven as the “upside-down kingdom” not because it operates exactly opposite of how earthly kingdoms do, but because it operates in a way that is entirely foreign to all of us. It is not instinctive, it’s transformative. To be part of that kingdom, we can’t just change course; we must be born all over again, into an entirely new way of thinking, understanding, judging, acting.

Then alone can we discern the heart of God, which doesn’t fit neatly inside any of our comfortable categories.

But if we study our Bibles through the lens of our culture, it will be culture, not Scripture, that gets the last word.