01/11/2026 - Genesis 1:1-9, 24-27, 31

When God began to create the heavens and the earth— the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters— God said, “Let there be light.” And so light appeared. God saw how good the light was. God separated the light from the darkness. God named the light Day and the darkness Night.

There was evening and there was morning: the first day.

God said, “Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters to separate the waters from each other.” God made the dome and separated the waters under the dome from the waters above the dome. And it happened in that way. God named the dome Sky.

There was evening and there was morning: the second day.

God said, “Let the waters under the sky come together into one place so that the dry land can appear.” And that’s what happened.

(Skipping to v.24)

God said, “Let the earth produce every kind of living thing: livestock, crawling things, and wildlife.” And that’s what happened. God made every kind of wildlife, every kind of livestock, and every kind of creature that crawls on the ground. God saw how good it was. Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.”

God created humanity in God’s own image,
 in the divine image God created them,
 male and female God created them.

(Skipping to v. 31)

God saw everything he had made: it was supremely good.

There was evening and there was morning: the sixth day.

~

I’m going to guess that this is probably not the first time you’ve read Genesis 1. It’s a beautiful poem bringing to life the process of creation, where God spoke the world into being. And that’s often how we tell the story in Sunday School, right? In the beginning there was nothing, then God said “let there be light,” and then there was light.

Except when we read this passage, we find that’s not entirely true. In our quest to make the story easy to tell to children, we often omit extraneous details to make it easier for them to understand and to focus on the main message we’re trying to convey to them.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. For one thing, it makes creating visuals to keep kids’ attention a lot easier. I can still remember my Sunday School teacher putting the sun in one corner of the felt board to represent day, and the moon in the other corner to represent night to show the first day of creation. On top of that, children’s brains are still developing, still processing the world predominately in dichotomies.

And the creation story in Genesis 1 really lends itself to telling the story as a story of contrasts.

God begins creation by separating things into their opposites - the light and the darkness, the land and the water, the sky and the sea all get clearly defined. Along with that, the refrain after each section of creation is “There was evening, and there was morning,” opposite times of the day. Both of these motifs together makes it so easy to tell the creation story as one of easy divisions, neat boundaries, and simple, clean creation. It makes it easier for kids to understand so that they can focus on the message we’re trying to teach them - that God created the world because God loves us.

But most of us aren’t kids anymore, even if some of us are still kids at heart. We’ve grown up to realize that the world is a lot more complicated than the easy boxes that we’re often taught to put things in so we can understand them. And our ability to hold more nuance and details means that we can and should return to those stories that we remember from our own Sunday School days and try to find those details that may have been left out.

And that’s what we’re going to be doing for the next few weeks. We’re going to go back to some of the stories in Genesis that we learned in Sunday School and take another look at them to see what the details that were left out can teach us now. And for those of us who didn’t grow up in the church or weren’t taught these stories, hopefully you’ll get to learn them for the first time with more of the details and nuance from the start.

So let’s go back to Genesis 1 and reclaim some of those little details that got lost in our Sunday School lessons, and see what they might be telling us today.

To begin with, God did not create the heavens and the earth out of nothing. There was already something in existence, namely, water. Even the earth is already there, although without form or shape. Some other translations have this as “formless void,” “jumbled and disordered,” or even, “complete chaos.” So the creation of the world in Genesis is not the beginning of all things - it’s just the beginning of the heavens and the earth as we know them. There is already something that has existed before, something that has existed in a state of chaos.

God is not creating something out of nothing, instead, God is calling out creation from these primordial waters that God’s spirit has been hovering over for who knows how long.

And the first thing that God does is turn on the lights.

Now we often think of this moment as God speaking, then the light suddenly appears alongside the darkness. But when the light is called into existence, it isn’t initially separate from the pre-existing darkness. God will tease them apart later into “day” or “night.” So when God calls light “good,” God is not saying that the light is good because it is separate or different from the darkness. I don’t think the implication here is that the darkness is bad. I think this is actually a peek into God’s character and delight at creating something.

And I hope this is something that we can all relate to. We’ve all had different projects throughout our lives, and sometimes we can be surprised and delighted at how well they turn out.

For me, my senior year of high school, I ended up having to take introduction to art because there were no other classes available at seventh period that I could take. I went to a really small high school, so this wasn’t unheard of. But I was not looking forward to it in the slightest. To this day I’m really not good with drawing or painting or trying to make anything that has to look recognizable. My brain just can’t translate what I see or think up to my hands. So I figured I was in for a semester of getting Bs and Cs because my teacher wouldn’t be able to identify anything that I had made - and to be fair, I did get a few of those.

But then we got to our unit on pottery, and as part of that, we got to use a pottery wheel. And I honestly figured it would go the same way as everything else I’d tried - I’d give it my best effort, it still wouldn’t look good, and my teacher would give me a B for that effort at least. But to my absolute surprise, I had a knack for it. My first attempt on the wheel I actually ended up with a pretty cool little dish that was even and symmetrical. I was so surprised and delighted that I had actually been able to make something that I had envisioned in my head, that it was actually a good piece of pottery.

And I think that’s what is happening here. Light is God’s first creation in Genesis, and who knows how long God was thinking about it before God created it? But then God stopped thinking about it, and started creating, and the first thing God created was good.

And I think God was delighted by it.

But that’s just the beginning. The next few verses are God organizing and creating order out of the light, the darkness, and the primordial waters.

The light and the darkness part ways to form day and night.

The waters divide to form the sky and the seas.

And then the seas part to form dry land.

But we know that the world isn’t divided into such neat categories.

Sure, we have night and day. But we also have dawn, and dusk, and twilight - times when the dark of night and the light of day intermingle, where the moon hasn’t tucked in the sun for its rest yet.

We have the water in our oceans and seas and rivers and lakes, but that water gets drawn up into the skies to form clouds, then returned to the land as rain and snow and sleet.

And even the water and the land on earth intertwine in swamps and bogs and quicksand, places where sometimes we’re not sure where the land ends and the water begins.

Even in the places in creation that seem to be so neatly divided into two separate things are actually more connected than it can first appear. So maybe the writer of this poem in Genesis never meant for us to see only two distinct things.

Maybe we were meant to also recognize the dusk and the dawn and the twilight between the day and the night.

This poem in Genesis isn’t meant to be a literal retelling of the creation of the world, because it’s poetry. And poetry is meant, first and foremost, to be beautiful and to make you think beyond what’s just written on the page. It’s to make you ask where the sunrises and sunsets are. It’s to make you wonder how God created everything - why, for instance, did God speak light into existence, but call the earth to create the creatures that crawled on the land?

Because that’s exactly what God does in verse 24. God tells the newly formed land to produce living creatures - God doesn’t directly make them. Why did God want the earth to have a role in creating new life as well?

And the point of all of these questions isn’t necessarily to answer them. I’m so sorry to everyone who likes concrete answers to questions, because that’s just not how Scripture works. Instead the point is to ponder the questions, to see what you can pull from the passage at that moment in your life.

For instance, I really was just pondering about why God called the light good after creating it. It’s something we talked about in seminary, and that’s the interpretation that myself and several of my friends still prefer to this day. But even if you don’t resonate with that interpretation of Genesis 1:4, and you think God called the light good for a different reason, I still hope it gives you something to think about.

Because we don’t have to agree on how we interpret Scripture or view our faith in order to learn from each other. In fact sometimes disagreeing with someone can teach us more than agreeing with them.

That being said, there are still things we witness, both in Scripture and in our lives, where it’s absolutely clear what we’re seeing. No matter what anyone tries to convince us we’re seeing otherwise. And it’s okay to stand firm in that.

But when there is room to question, when there is room to explore and wonder and learn from the sunrises and sunsets, we should do so. Part of learning and growing is figuring out what is day and night, and what is dusk and dawn and twilight.

So where are the sunrises and sunsets for you? Both in your daily life, and in your faith and spiritual journey? Where might you be willing to live in the twilight for a bit to see what you can learn?

Because God doesn’t create only in the day and the night. God is also waiting in the dusk and the dawn to create new life as well.