Created for God’s Glory | Genesis 1:1-2:3
Brian G. Hedges | May 1, 2016
Well good morning! Welcome to you this morning. It’s wonderful to gather with you for worship today. Today we’re going to be in the first chapter of Genesis, Genesis 1:1 - 2:3.
Last week we began a new series on the book of Genesis. We’re really just going to focus on the first several chapters over the next couple of months. Last week our focus was really on the first three verses of Genesis 1 and the truth of who God is, according to this first book of the Bible. We saw the reality of God. The Bible does not argue for the reality of God. It just assumes it. Then we looked at the theater of God. The world was created as a theater for the glory of God. And then our focus was also on the power of God and how he worked through his word and his Spirit to bring order into chaos and light into darkness. This morning, I want to focus on chapter 1 as a whole, all the way to chapter 2 verse 3 – so really the seven days of creation that are given to us here in Genesis 1.
So let’s begin by reading the text together. I do not have it on the screen this morning, but if you want to find it in God’s word, it should be on page 1! Genesis chapter 1 beginning in verse 1:
Genesis 1:1-2:3
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
6 And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” 7 And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. 8 And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
9 And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.
11 And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. 12 The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. 16 And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17 And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, 18 to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.
20 And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” 21 So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” 23 And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.
24 And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. 25 And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
This is God’s word…
Now my approach this morning is going to be two-fold. First of all, I want to just make some preliminary remarks about the relationship between Genesis, the record we have here in Genesis, and science. And then, after a few moments, I want to focus on the text in three themes that we learn from the text.
First of all, just some preliminary remarks on Genesis and science. Now of course there have been years, now, of controversy and dispute, both between Christians and non-Christians regarding the nature of the origins of the world and also between Christians of different sorts. There seems to be on both the left and on the right the sense that there is a fundamental conflict between what the Bible teaches and what scientists observe.
Now, I believe that God’s Word is inerrant and true, and I believe that God’s world is the product of God’s creativity, and that there is no fundamental conflict between the world and the Word. Where there is a conflict, the conflict is between our interpretation of the world, which is science, and our interpretation of the Word, or scripture, which is theology. When there appears to be a conflict, it’s because either our science is wrong or our theology is wrong. [These remarks are essentially a paraphrase from Hugh Ross, A Matter of Days: Resolving a Creation Controversy (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004) 19-20.] So that’s the first thing to state, and then just to acknowledge that there is this battleground, Genesis 1, even within the church.
I’m not going to answer every question that, perhaps, you have this morning. But I want to just talk for a minute about the complexity of this issue and give some cautions about how to approach it. First of all, let me just note this, that there are a number of different ways of interpreting Genesis 1. Kent Hughes in his commentary surveys six views of just the six days of creation. I’ll just list them off to you. These will not be on the screen. I’ll just list these off to you, just so you can see the breadth of interpretive possibilities.
• The first view is that the days are 24-hour, solar days, so that creation took place in 144 hours, the six days of creation. That would be the young earth creationist view of Genesis 1.
• There are others who believe that these days represented punctuated activity, where these days of creation were periods of activity that were then separated by indefinite periods of time.
• A third view is the gap theory, where commentators and theologians believe there’s a gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, so that the first verse of Genesis represents creation of all of the original matter and material, and then in Genesis 1:2, the world being formless and empty, and then the Spirit of God beginning to move, that God is doing something like a re-creation or perhaps assigning functions to the created world with the matter already having been created.
• There’s the day-age view, fourthly, which understands the days of creation as corresponding to lengthy geological ages.
• Others take a view which has been called the framework view, where the days of creation are viewed as something like a literary device which the author uses to structure and to frame his understanding of creation without intending to convey anything like scientific or historical narrative.
• Then there is the analogical day view, in which case the days are viewed as God’s days rather than 24-hour, solar days, but days within the perspective of God, with whom time is different than it is for us. Scripture does tell us that a thousand years is as with a day for the Lord in Psalm 90 and other places. [See Kent Hughes, Genesis: Beginning and Blessing (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2004) 23-24]
There are other views we can add to just those six. I am not going to answer all of those questions -- because I don’t have all these questions answered myself. I just survey those to show you that there is really a wide array of interpretive possibilities. I don’t think they’re all equally valid, but we do need to reckon with the fact that there are a variety of options here.
What I want to do now is give you three cautions as we’re thinking about how to approach Genesis specifically in relationship to science. Three cautions.
(1) The first one is this: we need to draw a distinction between evolution as a philosophical worldview and the more biological aspects of evolution, such as the mutation of species, natural selection, and so on. As a philosophical worldview, we might more properly call that philosophical naturalism. That’s the view that matter is all that there is, and that matter has always existed. I think it was Carl Sagan who said that the cosmos was, and is, and always will be, using kind of biblical language to describe his understanding of the eternality of the material world and saying that’s all that there is. We need to draw distinction between these two different expressions or aspects of evolution. As a philosophical worldview that views the material world as all that it is, as naturalism, the scriptures are clearly in a fundamental contradiction to that worldview.
There are, however, many Christians who interpret Genesis 1 in a way that allows for some of the more biological aspects of evolution, such as mutation of species and natural selection. I give you just one example of this, which is Tim Keller. Tim Keller in his book The Reason for God makes this statement:
“I personally take the view that Genesis 1 and 2 relate to each other the way Judges 4 and 5 and Exodus 14 and 15 do. In each couplet one chapter describes a historical event and the other is a song or poem about the theological meaning of the event. When reading Judges 4 it is obvious that it is a sober recounting of what happened in the battle, but when we read Judges 5, Deborah’s Song about the battle, the language is poetic and metaphorical.
When Deborah sings that the stars in the heavens came down to fight for the Israelites, we understand that she means that metaphorically. I think Genesis 1 has the earmarks of poetry and is therefore a ‘song’ about the wonder and meaning of God’s creation. Genesis 2 is an account of how it happened . . . I think God guided some kind of process of natural selection, and yet I reject the concept of evolution as All-encompassing Theory.” [Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (Dutton: New York, 2008) 92]
Now, understand: I’m not saying that I agree with Keller on this perspective. I’m not at all sure that I do, but what I want you to see is that here is a very well-respected evangelical theologian, reformed theologian, and pastor and preacher, who accepts some aspects of evolutionary theory even while holding it within an interpretive framework that affirms that God is the ultimate origin of all things and while still believing in the inerrancy, in the infallibility of scripture. It all has to do with how Genesis 1 is interpreted. So we need to make a careful distinction when talking about evolution. It’s one thing when we’re talking about evolution as philosophical naturalism; it’s another when we’re talking about very specific aspects of evolutionary theory.
(2) Here’s the second caution: we need to be careful with the text of Genesis, and careful in two ways: that, first of all, we do not squeeze it into the mold of current scientific theory. Surely this has been one danger among Christians who, over the last 150 years or so, have tried to interpret Genesis in ways that make it compatible with evolution and, in doing so, sometimes ignore very clear features in the text. We need to not do that. We need to not try to squeeze our interpretation of Genesis to fit any kind of theory. We need to let the text of Genesis stand on its own. But on the other hand, we need to be careful of not over-reading the text, supposing that it provides answers to questions that the original author didn’t have. In some ways, I think approaching Genesis 1 with questions about evolution is fundamentally a mistake because Moses was not in any way dealing with the whole question of evolution. The theory had never been invented. He’s dealing rather with the cosmological origins of the world. He’s dealing with theology. He’s writing to a group of people who are surrounded by pagan nations who believed in many different gods. They believed in a pantheon of gods. They often identified elements of creation with divine beings, and Moses is writing to show that there is one true God, and this God is the origin of all things and is sovereign over all things.
So we need to be careful not to try to squeeze Genesis into a mold that it doesn’t fit or over-read the text and think that it provides answers that it just wasn’t written to provide. And most importantly, I want to caution parents and teachers of children and/or of new Christians. When you’re teaching your children about creation and about God in his relationship to creation, place the focus on God as the creator and the sustainer of all things, his good intentions for creation, and his divine purposes for human beings. Not on the age of the earth. Not on the length of days, or in an attempt to thwart evolutionary theory. I think we do a disservice to our children - we do a disservice to scripture - by trying to deal with these scientific questions, rather than focusing on the theological intentions of the text.
Gordon Wenham, I think, is a very astute commentator on the Old Testament and on the book of Genesis, and this is what Wenham says:
“The Bible-versus-science debate has, most regrettably, sidetracked readers of Genesis 1. Instead of reading the chapter as a triumphant affirmation of the power and wisdom of God and the wonder of his creation, we have been too often bogged down in attempting to squeeze Scripture into the mold of the latest scientific hypothesis or distorting scientific facts to fit a particular interpretation.
When allowed to speak for itself, Genesis 1 looks beyond such minutiae. Its proclamation of the God of grace and power who undergirds the world and gives it purpose justifies the scientific approach to nature. Genesis 1, by further affirming the unique status of man, his place in the divine program, and God’s care for him, gives a hope to mankind that atheistic philosophies can never legitimately supply.” [Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15. Word Biblical Commentary (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1987) 40.]
I think that’s a very good word. If you want to do further reading of Genesis, I would recommend Wenham’s commentary on Genesis. So that’s my second caution. Now here’s, briefly, a third one.
(3) Whatever your views, whatever your stance on Genesis 1 – and my guess is there’s quite a variety of perspectives on Genesis 1 in this room today – whatever your stance, whatever your views, hold your position with both humility and with love for others. Humility, because you might just be wrong. And love for others, recognizing that there are smarter and godlier people than you and I who disagree. For example, on my desk right now I have The Battle for the Beginning by John MacArthur, and I have The Reason for God by Tim Keller, and a stack of probably a dozen or so other commentaries, none of which entirely agree with one another. Now these are all highly educated people. These are very devout Christian people. For the most part, these are evangelical scholars and teachers and pastors, and yet there is not uniformity or consensus in exactly how to approach Genesis 1 and the questions of science. I think it’s a little bit arrogant for those of us who have much less learning, much less education, have studied these issues much less, for us to be so dogmatic in our stance that we’re quick to demonize other believers who have a different perspective than we do. So be cautious with that. Hold your position, whatever it is, with humility and openness to learn new things and with love and charity towards others.
Now with that rather long introduction out of the way, let’s dive into Genesis 1 itself. I want to simply – I’m not going to cover every verse – but I want to make three basic points.
1. God’s ordering of creation
2. God’s preparation of creation
3. God’s purpose for creation
I want you to see something about God’s ordering of creation, God’s preparation of creation, and then God’s purpose for creation. Let me just give a little hint about how to maybe best watch the slides this morning. Okay, there’s a lot of content in the message, and I’m just giving kind of some schematic details on the slides for your convenience, to help you track with what I’m saying. I may not say everything that’s on a slide. I’m certainly going to say things that are not on a slide. Pay more attention to what I’m saying. Don’t try to get everything down in the notes. There will be a transcript available, and I’m happy to send you these notes, which have more than I’ll actually be able to say this morning. So first of all: God’s ordering of creation.
1. God’s ordering of creation
The first thing I want to do is just make some observation about the literary structure of Genesis 1 and how it conveys to us something of God’s artistry and creativity in the whole creation of the world. There’s a number of ways that the passage does this, that shows us something of God’s creative order that he brings into the world.
First of all, there’s the use of formula in Genesis 1 that just is somewhat repetitious, over and over again. Gordon Wenham, again in his commentary, makes this observation just from verses 3 and 5: that there are seven standard formulae that comprise the description of each stage of creation. (1) There’s an announcement, “God said.” Ten times in this chapter it says that God said something, and so a divine word of command brings about some effect, some creative and powerful effect. (2) There’s the command, secondly, “Let there be.” (3) Then there’s the fulfillment of the command, “And it was so.” There’s an execution of the command where, so for example, light appears in obedience to God’s command. (4) There’s also God’s separating. Over and over again, God is separating either waters from waters, or light from darkness, or so on. (5) There’s fifthly an expression of approval, “God saw what he had made,” and he says, “It is good,” or sees that it is good. (6) There’s also, sixthly, a subsequent word, where seven times God is either said to be naming the elements of creation or pronouncing blessing upon them. (7) And then this seventh element, or the seventh formula here, is the number of the day, this formula that, “There was evening and there was morning: the first day,” and so on, reflecting the Jewish concept that the day began at dusk rather than at dawn. That’s why you have evening first. That formula is just repeated over and over again, the elements of that, leading to a very carefully constructed narrative here in Genesis 1 on to chapter 2, verse 3. [See Wenham, p. 17-18]
The second thing to note here about the literary structure is the use of numbers. Now this is really interesting. It may seem like minutiae here, but it’s really interesting when you note the use of numbers in the whole crafting of this passage. There’s a Hebrew University professor, Umberto Cassuto, who pointed this out, how there’s a system of numerical harmony that’s just woven into the passage. The six days of labor with the seventh day of rest, that’s the obvious thing, but then there’s a number of other details that also kind of make up this tapestry. So, for example, the words “God” and “heavens” and “earth,” which are the three nouns of the opening verse, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Those three nouns are repeated in the creation account in multiples of 7. So “God” occurs 35 times, 5 x 7. In addition to this, the first verse of Genesis has 7 words in Hebrew. The second verse has 14 words. The seventh paragraph, which deals with the seventh day, has 3 sentences, each of which has 7 words, and the middle phrase in these sentences is the phrase, “the seventh day.” You take details like this, and what becomes clear is that this is very carefully, artfully constructed literature. Okay? The narrator, the writer here, is very clearly using all kinds of literary devices to compose this story of creation. I think that points to the artistry of God, who is bringing creative order to the universe. [The references to Cassuto are found in Hughes, p. 25]
Then there’s another thing to note here, and that is the arrangement and the correspondence of the days of creation themselves. You may remember last week that we looked at Genesis 1:2, that the earth was formless and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and we said that that represented this primordial chaos, the chaos of created matter before the world was actually formed and filled by God. But what you see in the days of creation that follow is that God actually brings form and fullness to the created order, and there’s a correspondence in the days of creation itself. So, for example, on day one, God forms light. On day four, he ordains luminaries, the greater light and the lesser light, the sun and the moon. He ordains these to give light to the world. On day two, he forms the sky and the sea. On day five he fills the skies and the seas with birds and fish. On day three, he forms the land, and on day six he fills the land with animals and with human beings. What we see God doing in this very carefully constructed description of creation is meeting these conditions of formlessness and emptiness. The world was without form and void, but God brings order. He brings form, framing the creation in a specific way, and then he fills the empty creation with creatures. [See Hughes, pp. 24-25]
All of this is showing us that God brings order to the chaos, he brings light to the darkness, he blesses and he sanctifies his creation for a very special purpose. An interesting study for you to do in Genesis 1 would just be to go through and underline every verb that is used of God in this passage. The passage tells us that God created, God said, God saw, God called, God separated, God made, God blessed, God gave, God rested, God sanctified. All of those verbs are telling us of the blessing of God upon the created world as he forms it and he frames it and he fills it with divine purpose. You might think of this creation account as something of a painting. It’s not giving us photographic clarity about the scientific origins of creation as much it is giving us a very artistic portrait of God the creator and his artistry and his skill and his wisdom in creating the world. So point number one is God’s ordering of creation.
Secondly, notice God’s preparation of creation.
2. God’s preparation of creation
Now, my family, we’ve had four children, and every time we have had a child, Holly kind of goes into this “nesting” phase where she’s preparing for the baby to arrive. So I think I’ve painted a nursery four times, now, you know, and kind of changing the décor a little bit, and actually with our last one, we’d gotten rid of everything. We’d gotten rid of a baby bed and all this stuff, so it was kind of matter of re-gathering new furniture, bringing it in, and she’s preparing for this child to arrive, to make the home hospitable to this new life. And that’s a wonderful thing. That’s a very God-like quality of preparing an environment, of ordering an environment. And what we see in Genesis 1 is God is very skillfully and very carefully preparing the world. And he’s preparing the world with a specific purpose. What’s he preparing the world for? He’s preparing it for man.
Now John Sailhamer is another great Old Testament commentator, and he drew out something that I had not caught before: that in Genesis 1, the word that is translated “earth,” is actually the word that is most often translated in the Pentateuch as “land.” Land. The lion’s share of the focus in Genesis 1 is on God’s preparation of the earth, of God’s preparation of the land, separating it from the waters, filling it with animals, preparing it for human beings. He’s preparing the land to be a fit place of habitation for human beings.
Now, when you connect that to the rest of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, and you remember that in Genesis through Deuteronomy, the driving theme in Genesis through Deuteronomy is God’s covenant with his people, his covenant with Abraham. What is his covenant? His covenant is to give them seed, that is, children, to give them a land, promised land, and then to bless them in this land. “Abraham, look up at the sky, you see the stars? So will your children be. Through you and your seed, all the nations of the earth are going to be blessed.” This is God’s promise to Abraham, and the whole Pentateuch is really an outworking of that basic promise.
When you connect the Genesis story of creation with its focus on God preparing the land and then blessing the man and the woman, and when he puts them in the land, when you connect that to the Pentateuch, what you see here is that the whole story of Abraham and Israel is meant to be something like a new creation, where the paradise that was lost, the land that was lost by Adam and Eve because of their sin, is now being restored to Abraham and his descendants and to his family as God gives them a land, as he makes them fruitful and multiplies them and as he promises to bless them if they will be obedient to him.
Now, the sad story, of course, is that Israel was not obedient. They were not obedient, and so eventually they lost the land. And just as Adam and Eve are exiled from the garden, so Israel is exiled from the promise land. That mirrors very much the human condition, that we have been exiled from our true home, and what we’re looking for is new creation. We’re looking for the restoration of paradise. Well, Genesis 1 is showing us God’s preparation of this original world for human beings. We could put it this way: that God was preparing the world to be his kingdom on earth.
The Old Testament theologian Graeme Goldsworthy has defined God’s kingdom in this way: he says, “God’s kingdom is God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule.”
Well, that’s what you see in Genesis 1. God creates man in his image. They’re in God’s place, the world that he created and prepared for them. They’re under God’s blessing—under God’s rule—and they are given dominion. They are to extend the kingdom. They are to extend the reign. So the world, in a very real sense, is created to be God’s kingdom where they will live under God’s blessing.
Well, that has tremendous implications for how we look at both the created world itself, and also how we look at human beings and the nature of human beings. I’m not going to deal with that this morning. We’re going to come back and talk more about that next week, especially—what does it mean that man is created in the image of God and is put in this environment with this mandate? What does that mean for us as human beings? That will be our focus next week.
3. God’s purpose for creation
But thirdly, and lastly, the thing I want us to see this morning is God’s purpose for creation. God’s purpose for creation. So we’ve seen here that God orders the creation. He brings order to the chaos. He prepares the creation, especially preparing the land itself to be a fit habitation for human beings, but what is God’s purpose in it all?
And we get some clues about the purpose of God in creation from some of the imagery that is used in Genesis 1. I don’t have the time or space to actually flesh this out in great detail, but what scholars have observed is that there’s all kinds of resonance between Genesis 1 and the descriptions of the Tabernacle and the Temple in the Old Testament. So that God essentially was creating the world to be his cosmic temple.
I’ll give you just a couple of examples of this. In Gen. 1:14-16, we have the record of God making the lights or appointing the lights, creating the lights to be the lights that rule by day and by night. He’s establishing the rhythms of seasons here. It’s interesting that word that’s used for “lights” in that passage is the word that, in the rest of the Pentateuch, everywhere else outside of Genesis 1, in the Pentateuch it’s the word for the “lamps” of the Tabernacle. The lamps of the Tabernacle. Now, that’s not accidental. These kinds of details are deliberate.
And then you’ve got the seventh day, where God rests from his creative work. You connect that with other places in the Old Testament, for example, Isaiah 66:1, where the Lord says, “Heaven is my throne, the earth is my footstool. What is the house that you would build for me and what is the place of my rest?”
You put all that together, and what it means is this: that the created world is meant to be God’s cosmic temple, his dwelling place, his resting place, the place where he puts an image of himself in the temple. That image is the man and woman created in his image. And he does so with this sovereign, divine purpose: to reveal his glory, to demonstrate his glory to the world. So the world, then, is God’s cosmic temple, created for his praise and his glory.
Now, one of the best arguments for this comes from another Old Testament scholar, John Walton of Wheaton College, who’s written a very interesting book called The Lost World of Genesis One. He’s also written a full commentary on the book of Genesis. I’m not going to read all the quotes to you. I’m going to skip the quote that I initially was going to use, but, again, I recommend that book if you would like to read a plausible—if not entirely convincing—a plausible understanding of Genesis 1 that deserves a lot of thought.
Now, let me end in this way: as we’ve looked at God’s ordering of creation, God’s preparation of creation, and God’s purpose for creation, I’ve alluded to three images that this narrative gives us.
• We could think of God’s creation and the record of creation here as a painting that displays for us the artistry and the creativity of God. [See Hughes, p. 26]
• We can think of the world as God’s kingdom, the place where God intended to rule with God’s people in his place, under his reign, and under his blessing.
• We can think of the world as God’s temple, the place where he displays his glory, and supremely does so in the man and the woman.
Now, of course, we know the subsequent narrative: they sin, they are banished from the garden, they lose at least some aspects of the divine image, they dishonor the glory of God, the temple is lost, the land is lost, the garden is lost, and so on. You want to know what the good news is, the good news of the gospel? The good news is that Jesus Christ, who is the true image of God, the second Adam, the one who restores what the first Adam has lost, that Jesus Christ, in his death, his resurrection, his ascension, and his future return, is bringing about the reversal of all the effects of the fall in the old creation. He’s bringing a new creation.
And when you get to the last two chapters of the Bible, Revelation 21 and 22, you know what you find? You find all kinds of language harking all the way back to Genesis 1 and 2. You find Eden language, you find creation language, you find temple language, you find language that says that God himself is going to be the glory of that place. He’s going to be the light! Darkness is going to be banished! In other words, this new creation is going to be brought about as Christ himself makes all things new.
So the good news for us this morning, brothers and sisters, is that God is still bringing order to chaos. And he has done that supremely by sending his Son into the darkness of this world, to face that darkness head-on, in our place on the cross. And by leaving that darkness behind in his tomb and leading us into the resurrection life of new creation, of God’s eternal rest, of the final morning of that day which will be forever new. The final rest of creation—that’s our hope today. And we can’t read Genesis 1 rightly unless we read it in relationship to Revelation 21 and 22, and see how these two segments of scripture give us bookends to the great story—the great story—and that story is the story of God the creator and of God the re-creator, God who is bringing light to our darkness.
Let’s pray. Father, we thank you that you are an almighty and sovereign creator God. We thank you for the artistry and the creativity and the power displayed in creation. We thank you for the divine purpose in creating this world to be a fit home and habitation for your people. We thank you for the hope and the promise of your kingdom on earth. Even as we lament the presence of darkness and of sin and suffering in our world and in our own lives, we also hope - and we place our hope supremely in Jesus Christ, who as the second Adam came and took our sin and defeated the darkness, defeated the king of death and rose in triumphant victory from the dead, bringing an inauguration to the new creation. So focus our hope and our minds on these glorious truths this morning, and even as we come to the table this morning, we come celebrating with the elements of creation, with bread and with juice. We come to celebrate the new creation realities that are ours in Christ. Would you draw near to us as we fix our hope and our faith in him. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
