Dear God, What Were You Thinking Series

God, what were you thinking? ( Series: Questions I would ask God)

Genesis 1:31-2:3, Isaiah 11:1-10, Revelation 21:1-6

NOTE: Sermon Central friends. As one who has long benefited by reading and extracting from other's sermons on this site. I have finally decided to contribute a summer series "Questions I would ask God." The church members were asked to submit their questions. Feel free to use and adapt as you wish -- John Salley

Dear God, What were you thinking?

Usually when someone lays that question on us, we are standing in the middle of a mess of our own creation … without much hope of straightening things out.

What were you thinking? Implies that we weren’t.

For had we been thinking, we would have done things differently, smarter, better … any other way than the way we did which has now caused such a big mess that it inspires the question: What were you thinking?

I’ve been there a few times. Have you?

What about God?

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As we look around at this world, on the one hand we see it filled with so much beauty, so much good. We see happy healthy families, growing children, and grandparents enjoying their golden years.

But if we look a bit further we begin to see the unhappiness of so many families.

We see broken lives, broken health, rampant disease, and tragic deaths for both young and old.

We see loneliness.

WE see hungry children in drought stricken lands, or the debris field left after the last tornado, the last tsunami, the last war.

So we might come to the conclusion that the world is a jumbled mess with good and evil locked in an endless struggle and no solution in sight.

And we want to ask: God, what were you thinking?

Look at the mess that you made(?)

Could you not have done things differently, smarter, better …

Could you not have figured out a better way to shape our persons, our world, our history – so that we could live in a nicer place today; One that would make a good and powerful Creator God proud?

So let’s ask God that question this morning.

God, when you made our world, what were you thinking?

And to find that answer, let’s hop into a virtual time machine and go back to the beginning, when the world was made -- because while things seem so messed here up in the middle that doesn’t mean that’s how they started.

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The book of Genesis, at the very beginning of our Bible, can be our time machine. It describes the beginning of our world this way: In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters;

another translation phrases it: that the “Spirit of God brooded over the chaos.”

So God was thinking, carefully thinking, and then he begins to create: light, water, land, stars, plants, animals. And at the very end of His creating, God creates someone to continue the process, someone like himself to take these beginnings and further develop them into a growing living work of art. Male and female he created them, and God blesses them and God places them in a garden to care for it and tend it … and God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.

it was very good.

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At the very start of everything, what God was thinking and what God created was “very good.” Everything! So what we are now seeing is not the way it all began.

What happened?

Apparently, something bad happened.

On a planetary scale something very bad happened to God’s good creation.

The Bible explains this world changing bad event as the fall of Adam and Eve. God’s creations that were most like Himself, God’s designated planetary caretakers, being seduced into rebellion, caused the whole creation to become broken – to no longer work the way it had been designed to work.

After the fall, God told Adam:

“Cursed is the ground because of you;

from now on and only by toil, will you get your food.

By the sweat of your brow you will have to harvest the plants of the field and thorns and thistles will grow in your path until the day you return to the ground from which you were created.

Perhaps we need to ask Adam and Eve ….

What were you thinking?

So that is what we have now: something that had begun “very good” but now, because of human rebellion, it has gone sour.

That’s not fare!! you say – blaming all this mess on us.

We may be responsible for the murders, and wars, broken marriages and bank failures. But you can’t blame us for poison ivy, and ticks, and tuberculosis.