Being Human From The Beginning Series

If you are going to start a sermon series on being human, then it would be best to start at the beginning. And the first words of the Bible are found in Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God . . .

And that’s where I want to begin this morning. In the beginning. With God.

Now, I know that not everyone here today believes in the literal 7 days of creation or that God created humanity as a part of that process.

Personally, I hold a traditional view of creation, but I also recognize there are faithful Christians who have wrestled with this scripture in different ways.

Now am I going to put a date on the creation process and argue for a young earth?

Nope, I don’t know when it happened, and frankly that doesn’t bother me, and it doesn’t minimize what I believe.

I have stood at the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza and I have wandered inside the circle of stones at Stonehenge and I realize that people have been around for a really long time. Which only deepens my sense of awe at a God who works across time.

And for me, I don’t need to have God fit neatly into my timeline. I only have to believe that God is the source of all life.

I have discovered that when it comes to creation that most people will align with one or two trains of thought.

In 1802 Anglican Priest William Paley, published a book by the title of “Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity.” And in it he argued that if you found a watch on a beach, you'd assume it had been made by a watchmaker, and not by nature. Therefore, the complexity of the universe implies a divine creator.

3000 years before Paley wrote his book, that thought inspired King David to write these words in Psalm 139:13–14 You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.

The opposite side of that argument was presented by Richard Dawkins in his 1986 book, “The Blind Watchmaker.” In his book, Hawkins argues that natural selection is the mechanism capable of producing immense complexity without any foresight, plan, or purpose.

In effect, Dawkins, an atheist, maintains that all this happened by chance, without the need of a higher power.

For me, believing that all of this is ultimately purposeless requires more trust than I’m able to place in chance alone.

Over the next couple of months, the staff is going to tackle the subject, “What it means to be Human.”

And we aren’t the first to ask that question, King David wrote in Psalm 8:4 what are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?

We’ve just come out of the Christmas season, where we celebrated the fact that God interrupted time to come to earth as a human. But how often do we stop and ponder exactly what that means?

Last Sunday, the staff looked into the book of Philippians to see what it meant for Jesus to be human.

We read in Philippians 2:7 Instead, he (Jesus) gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being.

But the question remains, if Jesus was born as a human being, then what does it mean to be a human being? Is it something each of us can define for ourselves? Or is it more than simply our own opinion?

If we want to understand what it means to be human, we can’t start with what we do, or what we think; we have to start with who we are created to be.

Which takes us back to the beginning. Genesis 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. . . .”

So, let’s start with Humans Were Created by God.

Perhaps, you are a little confused by the plural statements here. “Let us make human beings in our image.”

It’s here we get our first glimpse of the triune nature of God. What we refer to as the Trinity.

Often when we think of the creation process, we simply default to God the Father. We sometime think of Him, singular as the creator. But let’s poke around a little more and see where we arrive.

Let’s go back to the beginning, where we read in Genesis 1:1–2 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.