Fr. Mike Schmitz

Clear thou me from hidden faults.

Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins.

Let them not have dominion over me.

And then I shall be blameless and innocent of great transgression.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my rock and my Redeemer.

Okay, so that, oh gosh, Genesis 1 and 2.

I don't think I can overemphasize the importance of Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2, because if we get these two and tomorrow's chapters wrong, we're going to get the entire rest of the story wrong.

In fact,

the trajectory of the entire Bible, the entire story of salvation.

In fact, the trajectory of Western civilization is based off of the uniqueness of these two chapters, chapter one and chapter two.

Now I say unique, but you think like, wait a second, I remember hearing that there are other creation stories in the Middle East.

There are other creation stories in Mesopotamia.

There's other creation stories around the world.

And you are absolutely correct.

But Genesis chapter one is unique when it comes to all creation stories ever known to human beings.

What do I mean by that?

Well, if you read any of the ancient Mideast creation stories, it always says this, it's always creation born out of violence or born out of sexual domination or even just the sexual act.

Basically, it's very much so that here's the God or the gods that destroy another God or they destroy some other thing

And out of the husk of that thing, out of the carcass of that thing, they create the world.

Or it's that one dominates, sexually dominates the other or sexually manipulates the other and they give birth to the world.