Created In The Image Series

When I was in high school I used to work for the YMCA by my house. The first thing I ever did there was work in the nursery where parents would come and drop their kids off so they could go and work out. The ages for the nursery spanned form 6 month old babies to 6 year olds. Because of the large age span, obviously we would need to focus more attention on the 6 month old babies because they were more dependant on adults for help.

To help us get by, we used to have the older kids do all sorts of different activities to try and keep them occupied. The most popular activity was drawing. We would get out paper and our bucket of crayons and you would see their eyes just light up with excitement. They would sit there at the table and work so hard drawing a masterpiece that would rival the work of Leonardo DaVinci.

Their eyes would be squinted, of course helping them to concentrate better. Their tongue would be slightly sticking out which helps little kids do anything better. They would make careful decisions on just the right colors and scribble away with excitement. When they were finished they would sit back and smile with satisfaction.

Then, it would happen; what all of us in the babysitting room dreaded. The kids would turn and look at us with their big smile and we just knew it was coming. They would grab their drawing, get up from the table and make their way over to one of us. The whole 10 foot walk is almost in slow motion as we are already wrestling in our heads thinking, “I don’t want to lie to this kid.”

They extend their arm towards me, with picture in hand, and say, “I drew this for you. Do you like it?” Of course I didn’t lie as I would take the picture and say, “Ohhhh, thank you. I love it!” even though it isn’t anywhere close to what is actually going through my head. In my head, I look at the picture and think, “What the heck is it? This is art? It is awful!” Sometimes I would even kind of turn the paper over and over, trying to figure out which way is up. I know there are probably many of you who have been in a similar situation.

It’s great though because kids tend to pick up on this confusion. Whether it is the puzzled look on your face or the fact that you are looking at it upside down or something else, they quickly lean into your lap and explain that the picture is of their dog Skippy, flying through the sky with a Superman cape on. Suddenly, as they explain this, an image comes to life on the page and you begin to see the picture. You thank God that you didn’t try to guess because you would have been way off.

In a lot of ways, this situation paints a picture of a very similar situation that a lot of us in this room either have been through or are going through. See, we are all, right now, holding a picture in our hands, trying to figure out what it is. We are turning it around and trying to figure out which way is up and we are smiling at its Author thinking “Gee, thanks.”

That picture that we hold is our own lives as we try to figure out who we are, where we came from, and where are we going. In the same way that the little child’s picture only came to life when they explained it, simply because they were the ones who created it, we also must turn to our Creator to begin to discover the meaning of who we are.

Let’s jump into our text for the night which is Genesis 1:1-27. Instead of turning to this passage in your Bibles, I want everyone to just listen and try to picture what is happening in your mind. As I am sure almost all of us have either read or heard this story a number of times, I want us to try to think of it in a slightly different light. Since we began our conversation talking about a work of art, let’s think of God as an artist as He works through this creative process.

So starting in verse 1, we start with an empty canvas, a blank piece of paper where there are an endless amount of possibilities. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was empty, a formless mass cloaked in darkness. And the Spirit of God was hovering over its surface.”

So God begins his work of art in verse 3. He says, “‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that it was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness ‘night.’ Together these made up one day.” This was only the beginning of what God would do, just the foundation behind the painting that it would become.