BEMA Discipleship

BEMA 1: Trust the Story (2025)

Transcription Status

6 Jan 25 — Initial public release

5 Jan 25 — Transcript approved for release

Transcription Volunteers: Sergey Bazylko, Justin Nunner

Trust the Story

Brent Billings: This is the BEMA Podcast with Marty Solomon. I’m his co-host Brent Billings. Today we’re talking about the creation story in Genesis 1 and the foundation it lays for understanding the scriptural narrative correctly.

Marty Solomon: This is a pretty great place to begin. Foundational lesson for our study, Brent.

Brent: Indeed, Episode 1 is where it begins textually, but for our podcast, we did lay quite a bit of groundwork in Episode 0.

So if you’re coming here and you’re like, “Well, why would I begin anywhere other than Episode 1?” There is an Episode 0 that kind of lays out the broad cultural differences between our understanding of the world versus the biblical understanding of the world. So episode 0 is going to be really helpful for understanding what’s going on. Not necessarily you have to do it, but it’s going to be a huge advantage if you do engage that episode.

And if you’ve been with BEMA for a while, or even if you haven’t, and you’re just like, what is this thing? What is going on? Where do these people come from? Why are they doing what they’re doing? Episode -1 is going to walk through a little bit of Marty’s history and my history and how this whole thing came together, why we started a podcast in the first place, why we’re re-recording these first episodes.

And if you’re going through our podcast quickly and you’re in the middle of this season while we’re updating these lessons and these teachings, you may run into a point where you get ahead of us, because we are releasing these once a week.

You’ll notice that very quickly, because the music will be different, and we’ll probably sound a bit different. So if you want to understand all of that and what’s going on there, episode -1 will have all those answers for you.

So with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get into this conversation, Marty.

Marty: Do you think we sounded a little different when we were younger lads, Brent?

Brent: Oh yeah, and our recording environment was different. Yeah, it’s—I shudder to think about the contrast for somebody who is hearing this now and then they hit an episode where It’s from 8 years ago and we are—yeah, we’re just different.

Marty: With that, we’ll dive right in. Before I get started with this one, I’m going to give a citation, a credit of what highly influenced this lesson for me. Not totally in its entirety. There’s going to be some work at the end of this episode today that I pulled from even other teachers, but especially the first half, first two-thirds that we’re going to talk about today. I heard years and years ago, it would have been 2000, what did you tell me, Brent, it was like 2005?

Brent: 2006. I tracked it down. It’s either June or July of 2006.

Marty: Yep, I want to say it was June, and I jumped in a car after preaching at church one day, and we drove all the way from Boise, Idaho to Colorado Springs, me and a buddy of mine and my wife, and we went and saw Rob Bell there. It was at the Black Sheep. There was a bar there called the Black Sheep, and he did a presentation called “Everything is Spiritual.” And it was his very first one. He’s had a few iterations of that since then. And that’s where I heard a lot of this content for the very first time.

And even what you see online, you can find it on YouTube and those things, and you can watch that very first old version of “Everything is Spiritual.” And the one that I heard isn’t even the same that you find recorded in the produced version that you might find online. When I was there, it was one of the opening shows, I believe, of the tour. And he was doing a couple of different things that I think he ended up changing later.

And this was before Rob Bell was such a provocative name. You can probably just please save your email for that. The one thing we’re not going to do on BEMA is we’re not going to do categories. Like these are good teachers, and these are false teachers. These people have it right, and these people have it all wrong. Like we’re going to think critically along this journey and we’re going to look for good critical thinking. We’re going to find truth wherever we can find it. As far as I’m aware, Brent, outside of Jesus and the teaching of the apostles, I’m not aware of any human being that’s had it flawlessly correct. So we’re just not going to do the “why would you quote him?” We’re just not going to do that.

You’ll hear me reference him a handful of times throughout the journey. And you can just, you know, just brace yourselves for that. And that’s what I want to give, I want to give proper credit. If somebody were to see me do this and they had seen that presentation and they knew that they had seen that before and I didn’t give credit to that, I just have no interest in plagiarizing something because of how that reference might offend somebody. So that’s why we do that right up front.

Brent: Yeah, well, I’ll just say that even the Apostles had some pretty intense conversations among themselves.

Marty: Outside of their Apostolic teaching, they seem to be some pretty human, human beings themselves.

Brent: Yeah, and so, you know, some of the things that we’re going to reference, I like to call what we offer in our show notes and other places, “referenced resources” rather than “recommended resources” because the level of recommendation that something may be like, there might just be a little gem and it’s just like 5% of, of what we’re making a reference to and the rest of it, we would throw away and other stuff might be 95% recommended, but then there’s just this one little thing that just kind of spoils.

It feels like it spoils the rest of it, but it’s like, okay, but we still want to take the things that are useful to us out of there. And so hopefully most of the things we reference are going to be, you know, heavier on the like, yeah, most of this is really good, but we’re going to find stuff that’s useful and truthful wherever we can find it. So there’s some work that you might have to do as far as separating different things. But yeah, we just want to be honest about where we’re getting this stuff from.

Marty: Absolutely. With that, here we go. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. So in the beginning, God—Elohim is the word that’s used there. Elohim is the word for God—Elohim created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and void—and the Hebrew expression for formless and void, Brent, can you remember?

Brent: Tohu va’vohu.

Marty: Tohu va’vohu. That is a fun phrase to say and it is chaotic nothingness. And so we translate it formless and void, wild and waste. We translate it a lot of different ways, but tohu va’vohu. If you were to put nothing, this is my favorite explanation. If you put nothing in a blender and hit whip, you get tohu va’vohu. And everybody says, but you put nothing in the blender. And I say, absolutely. It’s nothing, but it’s even worse. It’s chaotic nothingness. That is tohu va’vohu. So in the beginning, Elohim created the heavens and the earth, the earth was tohu va’vohu, and the ruach, the spirit, ruach is the word for spirit, the spirit of God. Hovered—merahephet is the word for hover. It was hovering. It hovered over the waters.

There’s a species of dove over in the near east. It hovers in a single spot, like just almost like a hummingbird. Like you’re used to a hummingbird just kind of like floating into an area, just staying there. But its wings are moving like a million miles an hour. This dove, its wings are just moving like normal. And yet it just stays. And like one, it’s the weirdest looking thing if you’ve seen it, I’ve seen it a number of times in my time over in that region in Israel.

And it’s just fascinating. That’s the idea of merahephet-ing. So you have the world being tohu va’vohu, chaotic nothingness, and the spirit is merahephet-ing over the surface of the deep. And God said, “Let there be light.” And so in these first opening verses, we see this God interacting in a sense in three different ways. This God Elohim is creator, in the beginning God created, the heavens and the earth. This God is spirit, the Ruach of God, the spirit of God, hovered over the surface of the deep. And this God is—on some level, there’s a relationship to word.

So creator, spirit and word, and God said, “Let there be light.” So there’s Creator, there’s Spirit, and there’s Word. There is this threeness to this God, kind of right off the bat. And Brent, I’m just going to let you, how about you just read us the creation story. Pick up there at the beginning and send us through whatever it is, Chapter 2, verse 3.

Brent: Yeah, a couple notes before we do that. There is a presentation for this episode. So it’s a PDF of some slides and you know, those things that Marty just said, those three elements that you see with Elohim. That is your first slide. And then the second slide is going to be the different days of creation.

So you can follow along with that as I’m reading. Show notes, by the way, in your podcast app, usually you scroll down or swipe sideways or something, but you should be able to find those links in there. If for whatever reason, you can’t find them in your app, you can always go to bemadiscipleship.com and if you type slash episode number, so: bemadiscipleship.com/1, it will take you directly to that episode page and you can load that up at your leisure.

Marty: Sounds good, and we’ll jump in and hear the words of the text itself.

Brent: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault sky. And there was evening and there was morning the second day.

And God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry ground land, and the gathered waters he called seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation, seed-bearing plants, and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it according to their various kinds.’ And it was so. The land produced vegetation, plants bearing seed according to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning the third day.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times and days and years, and them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth. And it was so. God made two great lights, the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth to govern the day and the night and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning the fourth day.

And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and it moves about in it according to their kinds and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth. And there was evening, and there was morning the fifth day.

And God said, Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds, the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind. And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in in His own image. In the image of God He created them, male and female He created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number. Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground, everything that has the breath of life in it, I give every green plant for food. And it was so. God saw all that He had made and it was very good.

And there was evening, and there was morning the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day, God had finished the work He had been doing. So on the seventh day, He rested from all His work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it He rested from all the work of creating that He had done.

Marty: And that is a beautiful story. I mean, it’s obviously a beautiful story because it’s the first story of the Bible, but it’s even just a beautiful story as a piece of literature. This piece of literature is a form of poetry, and every literary scholar that I am aware of that takes that work seriously in a peer-reviewed context notices that this is poetry, whether it’s Mesopotamian, Sumerian, there might be some complexities and nuances, but this is poetry. And that’s helpful for us as we look at it. And that strikes us as odd sometimes.

Sometimes people want to push back against poetry as if poetry means it’s not as good or not as true or that it didn’t even happen. And that’s kind of beside the point. The form of literature itself is poetry. It has a cadence to it. It has a rhythm.

Day 1, light and darkness. Day 2, sky and waters. Day 3, land and seas. The sun, the moon, and the stars in Day 4. Birds and fish in Day 5. Beasts and humans in Day 6. And then 7. There is a back and forth. There is a poetic cadence to the whole thing. There are refrains, Brent, that kind of help indicate that what we’re working here is a cadence and more poetry. Did you notice any things that got repeated over and over again?

Brent: I mean evening and morning is the one that kind of stands out the most.

Marty: It is the one that stands out the most. It also is phrased a little odd. I think we’re used to hearing it if we’re used to the biblical story at all, but it’s backwards if we pay attention to it. Like we talk about days in terms of morning and evening, and yet this story keeps saying evening and morning. Why is it backwards? We might come back to that a little bit more. Did you hear any other refrains in there?

Brent: The fact that it was good comes up quite a bit.

Marty: Yes, absolutely. It’s this goodness after each day. Actually, it’s missing on Day 2, if you’re paying attention, but it gets 2 of them on Day 3. But I digress. It was good Day 1, it was good, it was good, it was good Day 4, it was good Day 5, it was good Day 6. And at the end of creating humankind, God steps back and says it’s tov meod, which is in the Hebrew, “very good.” Tov is good, meod is very. God steps back after making humanity and says it is very good. So this poem has a repeated cadence of goodness.

There is a goodness worked into this poem. I would say that there’s kind of like two different energies in this poem. On the one hand, this poem is about creation. So it’s about creating, but the thing that really stands out at the end of the story is what, Brent?

Brent: The fact that God rests.

Marty: Resting. So this poem has like a back and forth between a creating energy and a resting energy. This poem as a piece of literature is this beautiful story that has a cadence to it and this back and forth nature to its telling. But let’s really kind of make sure that this isn’t just some crazy newfangled idea that biblical scholars have come up with. Like, let’s really let’s lean into this and see if we really do think that this is poetry and not just some, again, we talked about this in episode zero, Brent, the Western mind always wants to focus on what happened and how it happened.

So we really focus on the what and the how versus the who and the why. And we’ve gotten into that with the creation story. We often talk about the what and the how. It’s about the facts. It’s about the facts of creation. What happened factually, and how did it take place? And yet the story doesn’t seem to be concerned with that, because it’s not doing a very good job if those are its concerns.

I’ll give you some examples. There’s light without the source of that light. Light is made in Day 1. The source of that light, the sun, not showing up until Day 4. I have plants without the sun. So I have plants without the sun that’s necessary for them to grow. I have days. How have we always measured the day, Brent?

Brent: By the sun.

Marty: Throughout all of human history, we have measured days by the movement of the sun, whether we knew it was us moving around the sun, or the sun moving around us is beside the point. Measuring a day has always been in relationship to the sun. But the sun’s not made until Day 4, which raises the question, how do we know that the first three days are even days? Like, we’re not dealing with a science, a lab report that’s trying to tell us what happened or how it happened. That’s not its concern.

It’s not about the how. It’s about the Who, God, and the why. So we have a story that’s about creating and resting. When you look at the story, Brent, actually, if they jump to the next slide, you’re going to notice that actually, on the first three days, God doesn’t actually create much of anything. God separates. The first 3 days, God separates light from darkness. He separates the waters above from the waters below. He separates land and seas. And then the next 3 days, God fills what he has previously separated, which kind of gives you a sense that there’s 3, and there’s 3.

So there’s 3 days of separating. There’s 3 days of filling. And it gives you a sense that there’s almost like a middle, like there’s a middle to the story. Like you could take the story and you could fold it up on itself. To further show you this. It’s not just that God separates and that God fills, it’s that God separates and then He fills what He previously separated in order. So, if you look at Day 4, the sun, the moon, and the stars go in the place where light and darkness come from. The birds and the fish go in the sky and the waters. The beasts and humans go on the land and the seas.

So, Day 4 corresponds to Day 1, Day 5 corresponds to Day 2, and Day 6 corresponds to Day 3. This story definitely has a front half and a back half that correspond directly to each other. There is a line down the middle of the story where you could fold the story in half, almost like a mirror, where the front half is being reflected in the second half.

Now, in the ancient world, this was a common literary device. It’s not just found in Hebrew, it’s found in other languages as well. It’s called a “chiasm”, or sometimes the formal term “chiasmus”. And a chiasm can show up in a lot of different forms. It can just be a parallelism, it can be an inverted parallelism, but this literary device means that side 1 is talking to side 2. And there are multiple kinds. I know Kenneth Bailey is a scholar that has talked about the multiple different kinds of chiasmus that you might find.

And when you start to dive into this, and maybe before we even do, Brent, before we start diving too far into this, like, let’s make sure that what we’re dealing with is, like, let’s just make sure that we’re seeing the cadence, we’re seeing the rhythm, we’re seeing the poetry. Have you noticed me mentioning anything particular numbers? Have I mentioned any numbers so far more than once?

Brent: Well, we have the 3’s, the 3 days on the front, 3 days on the back that mirror each other.

Marty: Absolutely.

Brent: So 3 is definitely a play. We had a few other things that were 3 as well.

Marty: Absolutely. We had the threeness of God at the beginning of the story. Some have pointed out that when you go to the end of the story, the mention of God creating shows up 3 times. So God creating is mentioned 4 times in the entire story, but the last three show up like verse 27, and then verse 1 and verse 3 or something like that. So there’s threeness of creating at the end. There’s a threeness to the creator. There’s 3 days of separating. There are 3 days of filling. There’s also how many days, Brent? How many days we got altogether?

Brent: 7 days.

Marty: 7. So we might start to look at the poem and ask ourselves, are there any patterns of 7? We might notice that the first verse has 7 Hebrew words in it, 7 times 1. You might notice the second verse has 14 Hebrew words in it, 7 times 2. You might notice that the word earth appears 21 times in the poem, 7 times 3. There are 35 words in the seventh verse, seven times five. God is mentioned 35 times in the poem, 7 times 5. It was so is a phrase that shows up seven times. And the phrase and God saw shows up 7 times in the poem.

Now, as I originally heard this, the teacher said, “Well, if I’m seeing patterns of 3, and if I’m seeing patterns of 7, it only raises the question, I wonder if I will see patterns of 10,” which we all laughed at because we thought that was a clever little funny joke until the teacher said, “Actually, you do end up finding that the phrase ‘to make’ occurs 10 times in the poem. The phrase ‘according to its kind’ occurs 10 times in the poem. The phrase “and God said” occurs 10 times, but wait, Brent, it gets better. 3 times it’s talking about people. 7 times it’s talking about other creatures. The phrase “let there be” occurs 10 times in the poem, 3 times in reference to heavens, 7 times in references to the earth. You have 3’s and 7’s and 10’s. You have literary devices. You have a mirror down the middle.

This is a striking piece of literature. This is a beautiful piece of literature. This is a stunning poem. It’s not a scientific lab report. It’s not trying to tell us exactly what happened and the facts of how it happened. It’s trying to tell us something even bigger and even better. It’s a chiasm.

Now, when the ancient audience encountered a chiasm, they knew what to do with it. A chiasm was like a treasure hunt. In the ancient world, Brent, the Eastern thinker believes that you will have a better, a more intimate interaction with a learning lesson. You will be transformed if you can discover something versus simply being told something. Like in the Western world, we like to just tell people, it’s about information. It’s about information distribution. We’re just trying to give you the information, give it to you, get you to memorize it, that kind of stuff.

The Easterner believes, I will understand that information on a deeper, more intimate level if I can discover it. And so the Easterner isn’t just trying to tell us how it is. The Easterner is trying to somewhat bury it. Now this isn’t Bible code, do not mishear me. Chiasmus is not Bible code. Chiasmus is well-documented in lots of Eastern languages, even some Western languages. It’s a literary device and it’s employed on purpose so that the reader can discover something. We talk about Easter eggs being hidden in movies or music. It’s the same idea.

The author is burying something, some treasure that the author wants you to find. Now, when you find that you have a chiasm, the chiasm can often be, like we said, different things. Brent, on the next slide, we have some versions of chiasm. A chiasm can be A, B, C, C, B, A. That’s called the inverted. That’s an inverted chiasm. A, B, C, C, B, A. A chiasm can be non inverted, it can be just parallel ABC, ABC. If you go to the next slide, you will see it in another form ABCDCBA. It can be inverted. It can not be inverted. Genesis 1 happens to be both, Brent, if you can believe it or not. This is not the easiest chiasm to see. It’s kind of weird that Genesis 1 introduces us to chiasm, and it is complex, complicated chiasm. It is both ABC, ABC, and it is also ABCDCBA. What do I mean by that?

Well, I told you that Day 4 corresponded to Day 1, Day 5 corresponded to Day 2, and Day 6 corresponded to Day 3. That tells me it’s an ABC, ABC chiasm. But if you look at the very form, just the very structure of the chiasm itself, like If you were to look at your NIV Bible, Brent, you’ll see that Day 1 is what I like to call a baby paragraph, and Day 2 is a mommy paragraph, Day 3 is a daddy paragraph, Day 4 is a daddy paragraph, Day 5 is a mommy paragraph. These are very technical theological terms, by the way, for you. Baby, mommy, daddy, daddy, mommy. And then Day 6, it would be a baby paragraph, wouldn’t it? If it wasn’t for the creation of what, Brent?

Brent: Of humanity.

Marty: Yeah, humanity. Which, I mean, if you’re reading this, especially in our modern scientific era, like, just lump humans in with the beasts of the field. We’re like the beasts of the field. Like, the story seems to awkwardly want to make humanity not a beast of the field. But if you were to take humanity out of the story, like, if you were to take that paragraph of the creation of humanity, just pull it out, just kind of pluck it up. Then you have baby, mommy, daddy, daddy, mommy, baby. And you see the inverted nature of this creation tale, this creation chiasm. And when you do that, what you can do is you can actually find the center. When you find an inverted chiasm, an inverted chiasmus, an A, B, C, D, C, B, A chiasm, that’s a literary device that points you quite literally, quite literarily to the middle of the story itself. It’s like an arrow pointing you towards the center. And this can function in a lot of different ways. We’re going to study a lot of chiasms before we’re done. Brent, lots of them. In this case, you could take Genesis 1 and you could count the Hebrew words.

Again, you have to keep the humanity paragraph, keep the humanity paragraph kind of plucked out, remove that. But I’ve had multiple grad students do this and confirm it. Brent, you said you’ve done this before. You’ve actually counted Hebrew words to find the middle.

Brent: Yep, I did it myself. It does work.

Marty: Verified by the Brent Billings. And you can get to the center and what you find at the center is the word, the Hebrew word moadim. The Hebrew word moad is the root word there. Moad, which is the word for “season.” Moadim is “seasons.” In this NIV, this newer NIV, it translated it “sacred times,” I believe, Brent. Is that correct?

Brent: Yes, sacred times. Which, initially I kinda felt like, “eh, feels weird,” but it actually works in some ways too.

Marty: It does. By the time we’re done here, I think we’ll end up having appreciation for that translation. It used to be seasons in the old NIV. It’s when God creates and it’s right where you’d want it to be. Brent, if there’s 7 days, where would you want the middle of this chiasm to land?

Brent: Right on Day 4.

Marty: Like right towards the beginning of Day 4. That’s where it needs to be. Well, sure enough, the middle word in Genesis 1, moadim, shows up when God creates the sun, the moons, and the stars to govern the days, the years, and the seasons, or however, do you have that verse in front of you, Brent?

Brent: “Let them serve as signs to mark sacred times and days and years.”

Marty: So in this translation, it would be “sacred times” would be the word moadim. Now the word moad and moadim is 1 of 4 words that Judaism will use for Sabbath. Not “the Sabbath.” There are 4 different words that refer to different kinds of Sabbath, Brent.

There is a word that means “the Sabbath,” like “the Sabbath.” At Friday sundown, go until Saturday sundown, the Jewish Sabbath. There’s a word for the Sabbath, Sabbath, Sabbath. There’s a word that just means just stopping, ceasing. There’s a word that that word means to Sabbath, to stop. And that’s another Hebrew word. There’s a word that talks about any non-7th Day, day of rest.

So if you are following the Jewish calendar, You might have Jewish holidays that fall on like a Tuesday. And it’s actually like Yom Kippur is an absolute day of rest, complete day of rest. And yet it’s not the Shabbat. It’s not the Shabbat that happens every Saturday. It is a Shabbat. And there’s another word for that.

So there’s the Shabbat, there’s a Shabbat, there is Shabbat-ing, stopping, and then there’s the idea of festival, party, sacred times, seasons is the other Hebrew word. That word is moad, moadim, the seasons or the sacred time. And so this word is what ends up at the center of your chiasm.

Brent: Okay, but what, why? What does that even mean?

Marty: Feels a little anticlimactic, doesn’t it, Brent? It’s like, yeah, we did all this work. We dug for the treasure. We found the treasure. The metal detector is going off. We pull it out of the sand and it is moadim? Like, come on, like, what is, what is, what is this all about? So let’s unpack this.

Why could this be our treasure? Well, Brent, who traditionally, I’m not saying literally historically, but traditionally speaking, who was the first people to hear this story? This story comes from Moses. And who would have been the first group of people to hear this story told way in the books of Moses.

Brent: Yeah, so the Israelites who were in the desert with him.

Marty: Yeah, they’ve arrived at Mount Sinai. Moses goes up on the mountain. He comes back down with the Torah. The people that hear this story in this form for the first time in the books of Moses should be the people of God, the Israelites at Mount Sinai. The Israelites just came out of where, Brent?

Brent: Out of Egypt.

Marty: Story of the Exodus, out of Egypt, the Passover. And what were they doing while they were in Egypt?

Brent: They were slaving away, making bricks and other stuff.

Marty: Absolutely, they were slaves, and I’m sure they had lots of jobs. And yet the 1 job that we hear about in the Bible is the job of brick production. So we’ll just work with this idea of producing bricks. Like if you’re a Hebrew slave, your value is tied in Egypt. Your value in Egypt as a Hebrew slave is tied to brick production. How many bricks can you make? That’s what Egypt wants to tell you. That’s where your value lies.

How many bricks can you make? You are a brick maker, and your value is tied to your brick production. Even if you somehow find a way, Brent, to resist this narrative, this imperial narrative from Egypt, even if you find a way to say, “You know what? I don’t buy that. I know my value is not found in my brick making.” On a very practical level, your value is still found in your brick making, because if you stop making bricks, are you of any value to the empire, Brent?

Brent: Not really.

Marty: Oh, They’re probably not going to keep you around for very long. And if you’re not around making bricks, then you can’t be of much use. If you’re done away with, you’re of no use to your wife and your children. And we probably know what they’re going to do to your wife and your daughters if you’re not around to be there to provide. And if you’ve been, we probably know what they’re going to do with your sons. Like, in a very practical way, you have to make bricks and your value, your identity, your security is tied to your brick production.

So God rescues this group of people from this reality. He brings them through the Red Sea, leads them through the desert to Mount Sinai. And the very first lesson, the very first lesson He wants to teach them, this is the first story, the very first, like of all the things that God could teach them when He comes down, when He sends Moses down the mountain. Like, where is he going to start this whole story?

The very first lesson he wants to teach them is, “I need you to know how to take a break”. We said this story was about creating and the story was about resting. We said that at the end of this creation story, God has to rest. The middle of this story is about festival/party. The word at the center of the story is Moadim. It’s about parties and festivals. I need you to know how to party, God says. I need you to be reminded every single week with Sabbath that you are not valued because of what you produce, but because of who you are.

And this is why there’s that awkward blurb, that awkward presence, the creation of humanity in the story, because this story is primarily about our place in it. Genesis 1 is being told for our benefit to tell us about who we are and our place in creation. You are not valued, you are not worth something, you don’t have value because of what you do and produce. You are valued because you are a part of God’s good creation. And God says, I know you’ve been making bricks every single day. Every day—every day—every day.

Lesson number 1 is I need you to learn how to take a Sabbath every single week. I need you to learn how to throw regular parties to remind yourself that you are not primarily a brick maker. You are not primarily a human doing. You are a human being. Leads me to this thought, Brent, why does God rest? Does God need to rest? Is God out of divine creativity units, Brent?

Brent: I wouldn’t think so.

Marty: God is resting because God has done everything there is to do. Can you read that verse like, I think it was Genesis 2, I think it was 1 maybe, it might’ve been the last verse of Chapter 1, but there’s somewhere in there it said, “God finished the work and so he rested.”

Brent: 2 verse 2.

Marty: All right, 2-2, give it to us.

Brent: By the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing, so on the seventh day He rested from all his work.

Marty: Okay, so God finished the work and so He rested. Why did God rest? Because the work was done. Like there was nothing, He doesn’t need to rest because He’s physically tired. God rests because there’s nothing more to do. Nothing is missing. Nothing is lacking. The Hebrew concept here is shalom. Everything is in its proper place. There’s nothing more that God could do for His creation.

The end of my lesson here has been shaped by a teacher that we’re going to learn a lot from. I’m going to say his name a lot. It’s Rabbi David Forman. And Rabbi David Forman had an illustration once in one of his teachings about the artist. The artist has to know when to stop. The artist has to know when to say enough. If the artist keeps creating, he’s going to destroy his work of art. Like if you think about Michelangelo’s sculpture of David, the famous sculpture of David. If there’s one more chisel blow, one more strike of the hammer on the chisel, he ruins the whole sculpture. He has to know when the sculpture is done. He has to put the chisel down and say, “It is finished,” in a sense.

I’ve also heard, I think actually the illustration I originally heard from Forman is imagine the Mona Lisa. Like, Da Vinci has to know when to stop painting. I’ve had I’ve had a student come up to me once and say that’s actually like a really bad example. They were an art major. And they said, rumor legend is is that Da Vinci worked on the Mona Lisa until the day he died. I don’t know if that’s true. But that’s what was told. And so maybe that’s not even the greatest example there.

Brent: Well, and Michelangelo too. I’ve had somebody comment to me that Michelangelo is the only, that we know of, the only uncircumcised Jew in the world. So probably could have used just a little more chiseling.

Marty: The David there on that statue probably needs another strike or two from the chisel. Somebody get a moil in there. I love that. So there you go. So that’s that idea.

Brent: I think the illustration stands though, I mean, we know, like if you continue to add paint, layers of paint to something, well, pretty soon you have more paint than canvas. And it’s like, what are you doing? The whole thing collapses on itself because it’s not meant to just have this endless creation, this endless addition to everything.

Marty: Absolutely. And so God finishes, because there’s nothing more to do. God knows that it’s done. And he steps back and he says, “I just want to enjoy it. It’s so good. It’s tov meod. Creation is so good.” And then he says, “I just want you to enjoy it with me. Just come. Just come enjoy.”

We always want to say that creation is perfect in our Western world, but perfection is a Greek idea, Brent. It’s static. Like when we think about Heaven being perfect, Heaven kind of seems boring. That’s because perfection is a static concept. But creation wasn’t perfect. Creation was good. It was dynamic. It was loaded with potential. Like it was ready to go somewhere.

God made creation, and then he endowed creation with the ability to keep creating and keep producing. He put mankind in the garden, and the next story told them to take it somewhere. Like creation is good. It’s not perfect. Creation is pure. Creation is shalom. But creation is going to go somewhere. And so if we notice, you talked about one of the refrains, Brent, and one of the refrains is missing from day 7. Which refrain is missing?

Brent: The evening and morning one.

Marty: The evening and morning. Rabbis have pointed out it’s almost as if day 7 never ends. Every day of creation has the refrain. It was evening and morning the 1st day. It was evening and morning the 2nd day, evening and morning the 3rd day, evening and morning the 4th day, evening and morning the 5th day.

It was evening and it was morning on the 6th day, but there’s no evening and morning the 7th day, and the story just kind of hangs on without an evening and a morning, without an end, almost as if there’s this invitation from God, “Will you trust me on this story? I’m inviting you to enter into my Sabbath rest. I’m wanting to invite you to trust.” We say this phrase in this study all the time, Brent. We will talk about trusting the story.

Day 7 has no end because it’s God’s invitation to trust the story. And when we say that, we’re not talking about trust the story that God’s telling in your life. We’re talking about trust the story of Genesis 1. Trust that God has made a good creation, not a bad one. Trust that this is also true about you, that you, that we as human beings, are a part of this good creation. We are not a mistake. We are not fundamentally at its core—we are not necessarily the problem to all of creation. We are a part of creation’s goodness that God’s love is enough.

This is where God’s story begins. It strikes me that we often start the story a bit too late. We love to start the story of the Bible in Genesis 3, with our sin and our struggle and the problem. But what we do is we miss the story of Genesis 1. And this is an invitation to trust that this is where God means to start his story.

Brent: By the way, the phrase “the 7th day” occurs 3 times at the end of the story. So just, you know, another one of those patterns.

Marty: Ooh, fantastic.

Brent: But yeah, all of these patterns and some of them, you know, the things that occurred 10 times, I mean, it was so it’s not particularly burdensome, but according to their various kinds, by the time you get to the end of some of these things, it’s like, okay, I’m just glad I’m done saying the same thing over and over again.

Because to us, it feels repetitious. but to these writers, they’re actually saying something with these patterns. And I want to go back to this evening and morning idea and like the backwardsness of it. Like we are, many of us are so familiar with it and we just don’t even think about it.

But if we stop and think about it, it is backwards from how we typically think about a day. So what, why is it, why is it backwards? Surely there’s purpose behind it as we’ve seen with all this other stuff, like there’s purpose to what’s going on here. So what is the purpose of evening and morning?

Marty: Jewish wisdom would say it’s the very wisdom that we find in this story. It’s worked into the very way that a Jewish mind defines the day. For the Jew, the day does not begin in the morning when you wake up. For the Jew, the day begins at nighttime when the sun sets. And that’s a very poetic way for Jewish wisdom to say, “Your day does not begin with your production.

You don’t get up to start your day. You go to rest to start your day. Your day starts with rest. Your day does not start with brick making. It’s one more way that God has baked into every single day, reminding you that your identity is not in being a human doing, it’s in being a human being. It’s not what you do, it is who you are.

And I understand this as a dad. Like, I understand that my kids, I love them so much. And my love for them, my value of them has nothing to do with what they do, how good of grades they get. We sometimes believe those lies. We sometimes even give those impressions. My love for them is about who they are. I love them before they do anything, before they make any mistake or accomplish any great task, before their triumphs or their defeats. I just love them. I love them when they go to bed like that. I love them when they go to bed. But I love them as they are, even when they’re doing absolutely nothing.

I remember my daughter was little. I used to come home and I used to just kind of walk in there before I would go to my own bed for the evening, and I would come home from work if she was sleeping, I would sneak in there and just kind of sit by her bedside just to appreciate her. That’s how God feels about His creation. He says, “Trust me that I feel that way.”

So a lot of students when they learn this will come to me with this realization, like they have this realization that we need to practice Shabbat. Like we need to practice a Sabbath rhythm, which I totally love. I don’t think that Gentiles need to practice a Jewish Shabbat. I don’t think Gentiles need to go observe some Jewish observance of Shabbat, but this is not about Judaism yet. It will be later in the story.

This is about all of creation. This is about Jew and Gentile and livestock and land and fruit and trees and sky and rain. This is a very creation-oriented observance. This isn’t just about being Jewish here in this creation story. And so, yes, I think there’s this beautiful thing that we need to learn.

I know Walter Brueggemann has wrote about the Sabbath as Resistance, I believe, is one of his books. And what an amazing idea. So my students pick up on this in the creation story. It’s a way that we can tell ourselves the truth of Genesis 1, the truth of the story. And so a lot of my students will want to know how do we practice Sabbath?

My family has had a mantra since my kids were little, since my kids were two years old. We say, “We rest, we play, no work, God loves us.” I wanted my two-year-old, my three-year-old children to be able to say it and understand it. So we have those four things. We rest, we play, no work, God loves us. It’s a whole day that reminds ourself that we are loved because of who we are. And so we don’t work.

There are things that we do. We rest, we sleep in, we take it easy. We get the rest that we need to remind ourselves that we’re loved. We play. We play because creation is good. We play because the center of the chiasm and the treasure is moadim. We don’t work because it’s not about our production. And we do all this because God loves us.

There’s things that we don’t do. There’s a couple of things that I do, Brent, that are kind of funny. There’s some things that I do that bring me great joy. Like I shave my head every day. I don’t know why. I hate it. I mean, I know why. I prefer the look of a shaved head. It’s just a style choice for me. But I hate the work of shaving my head every single day. It’s so—ugh. But I get up on Sabbath and it’s the one day that I don’t shave my head. And I walk into the bathroom in the morning and I think to myself, when I look in the mirror and I go, “I don’t have to shave my head today.” And it brings me great joy. It’s like this reminder, like this joyful, like, “Ah! God loves me.”

I also do things that are a struggle. I’m an organized freak, Brent. I love the dishes to be clean. I like the bed to be made. I like my life to be in order—but on Sabbath, I don’t wash the dishes. My wife would tell me I don’t wash the dishes, period. But we don’t do the dishes. We don’t make the bed. We don’t do the things. And even though I walk into a room and it’s dirty and my insides go [panic sounds], and I kind of like—ehhh—this is a day that reminds me I’m not loved because my life is in order. I’m not loved because, and so I do things that bring me joy. I do things that challenge me.

But the whole point is that Sabbath is a truth-telling day. Sabbath tells me the truth. And the things that I do and the things that I don’t do and the things that bring me joy and the things that challenge me, Sabbath is about telling me the truth that God loves me. That it is enough, that God’s made a good creation and it’s His world, not mine, and we’re going to be okay.

That’s what Sabbath—that’s what I’m trusting when I do that. It changes my posture from scarcity to abundance. Sabbath has the ability to change my posture from self-preservation. If I trust the story, I’m not trying to preserve self. I trust the story. I have everything that I need. I don’t need, there’s plenty for everybody. It’s not scarcity, it’s abundance. There’s plenty for everybody to go around. So Sabbath leads me to a posture of self-sacrifice every day of the week, not just on Sabbath. Sabbath will begin to change your heart. Sabbath will help me encounter two different kinds of freedom. There’s the freedom that says I have the freedom to do this. So how dare you infringe upon my rights?

Sabbath teaches me a different kind of freedom, a freedom that says I have the freedom to say yes and no to the things that bring life, that bring joy, that bring shalom, that bring healing. This is what we see in the life and ministry of Jesus. And Sabbath helps remind me, it helps point me in that direction. It helps get me where we’re trying to go. And this is why it’s so important, Brent, to start the story in the right place. When we start the story too late, we end up telling the wrong story. We have to start the story where God wanted to start the story. And that is in Genesis Chapter 1, not Chapter 3.

Brent: It’s an important reminder because we’re so used to this other way of thinking about who we are and where our value comes from. This is going to take time. This is very difficult. It’s wildly simple and yet so complex and complicated and challenging and—in some ways it changes everything about how we look at the world.

Marty: Absolutely. Students will often write me and they’ll say, “Am I doing it right?” Which if you’re asking the question, “Am I doing it right?” the answer is no, no matter what you’re doing or not doing, because you’re still trying to figure out if you’re doing it right. Sabbath is this thing that releases you from that,  “Am I doing it right?”

Now we rest, we play, no work. God loves us. This isn’t about doing it right. It’s not about performance. It’s not about checkboxes. It’s the one day of freedom that reminds me that I am simply loved no matter how I’m doing it. And it’s a great reminder. So we probably have some resources, Brent, that we can throw in there. We talked about Sabbath as Resistance from Brueggemann.

We probably should recommend The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel. That’s like a Jewish classic. He’s probably one of the greatest thinkers of the modern era in Judaism. Small little book, but it will be dense in substance. So there you go.

Brent: Yeah, just this beautiful set of images and ways to think about Sabbath and try to slowly wrap your mind around what the Sabbath might mean and how you might engage it. But yeah, it is dense. So don’t be fooled by the—I think it’s like 120 pages or something like that. Don’t be fooled. Don’t be fooled by the page count. You’ll need some time to get through it, but it’s really good.

Marty: Absolutely.

Brent: So that does it for this first episode of BEMA, Marty. And just as you’re beginning this journey, I think we want to encourage people to keep moving because there’s a lot of stuff here—there’s a lot of concepts that are going to be unfamiliar and the ability to just keep moving and not get stuck in one place because the ultimate goal of this series, these first 5 seasons of the podcast, are to give you this overview of the Bible.

And if you get stuck in season 1, And then you never get to experience the grand narrative that God is telling in the world. And so I know it’s going to be so tempting because we—I mean—even on this episode, we’ve recommended so many things to check out as further resources. You could stop for a few weeks and read through all those books and that’s cool. But also then you get stuck.

And so I would encourage people to move through these first 5 seasons and have that full picture of what God is doing, and then go back and dive deeper on the stuff that’s most interesting because you don’t even know what’s ahead of you. Like you might think like, “Oh, this season 1 stuff is really interesting,” and it surely is, but you’re going to get to season 4 and you’re like, “Oh man, I wish I would have spent all my time here.”

So just keep moving and you can go to bemadiscipleship.com, check out the groups page on our website. You can find a group to join or you can start your own either way. We’ll help you. We have resources that will help you accomplish that because doing this stuff in community and being able to wrestle through this stuff together is really important. So all of that is there on the website. Utilize those resources.

And thanks for joining us and beginning this journey with us. We’ll talk to you again soon.

Patrice Ward: Hi, I'm Patrice Ward, a BEMA listener originally from Bermuda, residing in Boise, Idaho. Here is the prayer from Episode 1's Companion.

God, as we begin this new journey through the Text together, we pray you soften our hearts to create that space with celebration and rest for you to come and feel.

Give us peace when the chaos of our fears or doubts trouble us, for you are bigger than our questions and greater than our worries.

Give us patience and grace with one another and ourselves, as we seek to love you, love others, and become people of the Text—people of you.

Amen.