God's Good Creation

God’s Good Creation

Date: Sept 7, 2008

Scripture: Genesis 1

We want to look for just a few minutes this morning at “God’s Good Creation.” And there are two things that will help us set the foundation for understanding creation.

1. “In the beginning...” Those first three words of the entire Bible have been the subject of much discussion down through the generations. Still today, theologians (and others) debate what “in the beginning” really means. In the beginning of what? In the beginning of time? In the beginning of God’s creativity? In the beginning of the earth as we know it? In the beginning of what?

And the reason we have those kinds of debates, is because we as humans, being the limited finite creatures that we are, can never quite put our finger on what the “beginning” of anything, really, is.

For example: When does LIFE begin? That’s been a very hot topic for years.

When does life really END. Another hot topic.

The answer to those two questions have all kinds of ramifications and serious consequences depending on what answer we settle for.

Other questions about beginning that can be debated, but the answers don’t, perhaps, have nearly as weighty consequences, are things like:

When did my house really begin? Was it when it was completed, or the first brick was laid, or the foundations were started, or the excavators came in with bulldozers, or the surveyors brought t heir instruments, or the architect drew his plans, or the developer had an idea, or some man somewhere had the first idea of house? (Preacher’s Commentary, Gen. 1:1-31).

The point of recognizing these unanswerable questions is so that we can understand, that no matter what the beginning was - that God ordained to be the very first words of that which is the basis for our faith, and therefore our life, and therefore our eternity. No matter what that beginning is referring to.....

2. In THAT beginning, God...

No matter what that beginning was, God was there. And so we come to understand that even before we consider God’s creation, we consider GOD - the Creator.

ILL: An astronomer was lecturing to a group in France, and declared, “I have swept the universe with my telescope, and I find no God.” A musician in the crowd appropriately rebuked the astronomer: “Your statement, sir, is as unreasonable as it is for me to say that I have taken my violin apart, have carefully examined each piece with a microscope, and have found no music.”

Right from the very beginning, whatever that was, - there was God, the Creator. And it is through his creation that we can learn five very important things.

The first thing that creation teaches us with the very first words of scripture is that:

1. There is only one God.

We hear the reverberations of what that one true God, through Moses, would eventually give to the people of Israel - and what Jesus, as God incarnate, would give to the religious leaders of his day, and to all of us today, that there is, and shall be, no other gods, before the one true God.

Before we consider the creation. We must acknowledge the Creator.

“In the beginning God created...”

This morning we are sitting out here in this beautiful park, enjoying the sunshine, hearing the rustling of the leaves in the trees. The children are over under those trees playing games. And so we are experiencing today, as part of our worship, the wonder of God’s creation as we are in it. But not only are we worshiping IN God’s creation today, we ARE God’s creation. And I want to draw your attention to something which I believe is very significant in this first chapter of Genesis - the opening book of the Bible.

The Bible says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

In the first few verses we see that God created the water and the sky and the land, and he separated the light from the darkness. He brought order out of the space that was chaos. And at the end of verse 10 we see that God stepped back, looked at what he had done to that point and “saw that it was good.”

Then we see that God made growing things, plants and trees and seed-bearing fruit, the kinds of things we have enjoyed so much from our gardens this summer and as the harvest approaches fast, the corn and the peas and the soy-beans. And then we see at the end of verse 12, once again God stepped back, looked things over and he “saw that it was good.”

Then God made the stars and two lights, one big one, one not so big, to shine down on the earth to govern the day and the night and he saw that it was good.