From Creation To Adoption

Sermon for Suites by the Lake – February 21, 2009

“From Creation to Adoption”

We’ve just heard a few snippets of the creation story from the book of Genesis. I’ve titled this message “From Creation to Adoption” because in a short period of time, I hope that we will journey through the story of God’s people, from the first moments of our creation to our adoption by God.

Last month we looked at some of the story of God found in the gospel of John. We looked at how Christ, who was in the beginning with God and who was the one who created all things…we looked at how Jesus Christ came to ‘His own’…meaning he came to us on this planet, and how He was rejected by us because we didn’t recognize Him for who He was.

And so He suffered and died on the cross, really as both the ultimate expression of God’s love for us but also specifically to make a way…a way for humans to return home…to God. His suffering on the cross was in our place, and believing this is the way to eternal life.

Now, I love Jazz. Mom and Dad raised us on Jazz. Miles Davis was one of the all-time great jazz musicians. When I was studying jazz at Humber College, I learned that Miles Davis would talk to students about “The Art of the Kak”. That was, how to make something great and unexpected out of a mistake.

He did that because, for whatever reason, Davis would often start an improvised musical phrase on the wrong note, and then he would have to find a way to make that note seem like he meant it by dressing up the rest of the melody around that note or that mistake.

Now the first thing I notice when recounting the story of creation is that, unlike with Miles Davis, rest his soul, there’s no sense of accident or randomness about it. There’s no sense in which God ever said ‘Ooops!” when making anything that He made in the creation story. There is a sense of God’s pleasure over creation.

Did you notice that after each Act of Creation, God said that it was good! That’s a picture of God rejoicing over what He has made, taking a personal sense of pleasure in the goodness of creation. So rather than any sense of accident, there is a clear sense of intent.

God intended to create everything that He created…including…notably, humanity. Human existence is not a blip or unexpected or an accident of evolution. It is with intent that we are here. And not only that.

Everything God made, He made for a purpose. He made light, water, sky, land, vegetation, animals, and finally people. A

And all of these created wonders were created with some relationship to each other.

That’s perhaps easy to see. There’s a mutual interdependence between these elements of creation, and that actually seems to be part of their purpose. WE, and everything around us, are made for relationship.

And we see also, both in the expressions of God’s pleasure in His creation, in his: “And it was good”, and in the relationship recorded in that second account of creation…we see a sense of connectedness, a sense of wanting to be with the humanity He created.

We see, even this early on in Scripture, signs of love between a Creator and His creation.

So in the creation story we see that all that God created including humanity, including, to bring it home…YOU, God created intentionally, purposefully and out of and with love.

Now the story that immediately follows the creation story…this story of our origins as a species, is another narrative that’s actually pretty dramatic. I’m going to quickly summarize the story because it’s rather lengthy.

After they are created, the first man and the first woman enjoy uncomplicated and unbroken fellowship with God.

God is as a father to them, and they enjoy their freedom and each other in the security of being in good relationship with God.

Now Satan shows up snakely and immediately twists something that God says. God had told these first humans that the world was their oyster and they had free reign to dance and play.

There was just one warning. “Watch out for the fruit of this one tree. Believe me, it’s bad news”.

Now what Satan, in the guise of a serpent, says is: "Did God really say, ’You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?"

To make a long story short this begins a line of questioning and manipulation and obfuscation which leads to the first man and the first woman choosing…an alternate existence to the one God had, in love, intended for them.

The Bible says that this first, great brokenness, this broken relationship between God and humanity was the groundwork for all other broken relationships.