Family Comes From The Heart Of God

Open your bulletins and look at the two Bible verses at the top of our worship liturgy for today, in the box that says, “Words to Ponder.” We have all heard those two verses many times before, but I want to be sure you understand some amazing things in them this morning.

Could we read them together? “Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Genesis 1:26-27

Through most of the first chapter of Genesis there is one God operating. Its “God said, God made, God said, God made,” and so on. But then, in verse 26, it’s not one God operating, God says, “Let us make humankind in our image.” Who’s the us? It’s a very early reference to the Trinity, this amazing concept that permeates the Bible, that there is one God, but this God exists in three persons, working together. In the very core of who God is, there is fellowship, there is love, there is giving. Three expressions of the one God, who always work together, always honor each other, defer to one another, and love one another.

Some of you may be wishing that I would make this clear and understandable for you. But I can’t. I don’t understand it myself. We often come to understand things we don’t understand by discovering that the new thing is like something we already understand. But the Trinity is beyond my understanding, a mystery. There’s no one quite like God.

But any God worth his salt ought to be higher and greater and more wonderful than our puny brains can comprehend. So mystery is OK.

But there is a very big clue to what the Trinity is like in the second verse we read, something that brings it all closer to us. Could we read the second sentence, Genesis 1:27 together again? “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

Whatever God is like, he made us like him. We are in his image. And right here, when the Bible is talking about what it means to be like God, what does it say about us? It says that when God was creating us in his image, he made us male and female.

The God of the Bible is one God, eternally existing as three persons. And maybe three persons being one is too much for little old humans to pull off, but two persons being one, a man and a woman, we have a shot at that. And I know there are days when just being married to one person is about all we can handle. But when marriage goes well, that’s a taste of what God is like. You know the feeling at a wedding, with all the hopes and dreams of a couple who are madly in love with each other. That’s a taste of what is deep inside this one God in three persons.

And today as we celebrate Don and Marilyn’s 59th wedding anniversary, I think we can look at them and see something of what the trinity is like. You see Don and Marilyn together an awful lot, don’t you? You see them watching to be helpful to each other. You talk to one and it isn’t long before they’ll mention the other. I think that after 59 years of marriage they really love each other.

And I’m sure they’ve had their ups and downs, maybe still some rough spots even after 59 years of marriage. They’re just as human as any of us here. But haven’t we all seen glimpses of something wonderful there? Know that what we see is a chip off the old block, a reflection of the love and devotion in the very heart of God, a reflection of the fundamental purpose of the universe.

We all have seen people who live by the business model: if it makes money, do it. We’ve seen it lived out to the point of people crazy to sell bundles of mortgages that were riddled with fraud, but offered the promise of getting rich quick. And we’ve seen it lived out to the point that people were so greedy to make fast money that they would buy these bundles of risky, risky loans. Greed took a whole bunch of very smart people and turned them stupid. And we’ve seen the fruits of greed as our whole economy is now severely injured and barely limping along.