THE STORY OF GOD: CREATION-RECREATION
THEME: GOD CREATED BY MAN AND CONTINUES TO RECREATE MAN.
TEXT: TITUS 3:3-7
It always seemed like hours in that chair. In a small kitchen in an old farm house, the chair was always located on the right side of the table. Grandmother always sat on the left side. This chair is still there day. The chair never moved because the stories never changed. They were told over and over again. The same stories of how her husband died and her son David had to look after the family farm at thirteen. The stories of the men working in the fields and grandmother cooking breakfast, lunch, and supper for over ten men each day was told often. The disgust of my grandmother over Donald her oldest son having to do dishes because his wife did not feel like it was recalled periodically after the cooking story was told. In that chair I heard about my mother having her leg ran over with the tractor, in that chair I heard about the values of hard work, and the honor in saving money for a rainy day. In that chair I heard the stories of my life. Though as a teenager these stories seemed pointless. So often I read the paper as grandmother would go on with these often told accounts from the past. Oh how today I would love to sit in that chair in that old farm house and hear those stories again.
All of us need to sit in this chair again. Not the chair at grandmother’s house, but the chair with God. We all need to sit down with the Lord again and listen to the story he wants to tell us. The Bible was never to be read in bits and pieces. The Bible is the story of God for every generation. It is the past with a look into the future. Much of the Bible is told through typologies. There is the Old Testament that is interpreted through New Testament eyes. One of these typologies or sometime we say foreshadowing is the creation-recreation story. And this is the story we want to focus on this morning. We will tell the Gospel story of God through three typologies. In this series, we will look at the creation/recreation account, then the first Adam/ second Adam stories, and finish with the exodus/Christ event in the Bible. We need to sit down in the chair next to God and allow Him to tell us His story again.
The story begins on a positive, glorious note. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). God desired to create a world for humanity. God being naturally relational because of the permanent existence of the trinity, God desire to create a world suitable for his prize creation—man. God was pleased with his handy world as he pronounced “And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). God continued his creative work in making humanity. “Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die." Then the LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him” (Gen. 2:15-18). In God’s prized creation, he made it that man would not be forced to love Him. God allowed man to have freewill. The only limit of man’s choices was to reframe from eating of the tree of good and evil. God created a perfect world, for his perfect creation man. But man was not satisfied with his one limitation and through the tempting of the serpent; Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden tree and fall from God’s favor. With this one decision, sin entered the world for all time. God perfect and good creation was destroyed by man’s disobedience. Genesis 3:6 records “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.” God was heartbroken over man’s choice to reject his will. Ever since this day, humanity has been corrupted. Man is full of sin and rebellion. The Bible is full of statements concerning man’s sinful condition. Man’s heart is now evil from his youth (Genesis 8:21). The beautiful world that God created for man was rejected. Man was sent from the garden of eve into the harsh world of weeds and warfare. Everything that God intended for man was lost in this sin. The world that God intended was no more.
Even as we sit in this chair today, listening to God we realize the wickedness of this world. The world is evil. Man is rebellious. On December 11, 2007, A chill came over Rita, one of his ex-wives, when she heard that Royce Clyde, her former ex-husband was accused of fatally beating his 2-year-old stepdaughter for not saying "please" and "yes, sir." The report states that the man became violently enraged when she would not say “please” or “yes sir.” He grabbed the little girl by the throat and smashed her head into a kitchen cabinet. He is accused of killing Riley Ann Sawyers, and it is reported that he stored her body in a shed for two months, and then dumped her in Galveston Bay. Riley was known as "Baby Grace" for weeks after her body washed ashore in a plastic box until a police sketch caught the attention of a paternal grandmother in Ohio. Stories like these remind us of the powerful reality of sin in this world. How could a man kill in cold blood his own step-daughter? How could a man murder and hide her little body for months. How could a man dump her lifeless body in a river without ever confessing to his sin? I guess in the same way that a brother killed his brother in Genesis 4; Just as man became so evil and wicked that God destroyed all of humanity except for Noah and his family in a flood. The Bible world became a missed up place as today’s world is a missed up place. There was never God’s intention for humanity. This was never God’s desire for his creation. How could man become so sinister when he had such a great start in this world?
God realized that he had to help the problem. There was no way that man could solve his sinful nature. There was no way that man could cleanse himself of his sinful desires. Sin entered the world, and only God could stop it. God knew he had to restore man to his rightful condition. He created man, now God had to recreate man. This is the story of creation and recreation.
A while back, Neil Anderson called my father-in-law. Nick, the father-in-law is talented with furniture. Neil had some old antique chairs that he wanted to have restored. They were run down, broken up, and useless. There would be no way for Neil to fix the chairs. But Nick could, he had the talent and ability to restore the broken down chairs. So Nick sanded, painted, and restored the chairs to their original glory. And this is what God is doing for us. He is restoring us to our original glory. What we were created for, he is recreating us for this purpose once again. So we need to stay seated in our chairs and listen to the rest of the story. Because the rest of the story will make all the difference in this story that God is telling us. He is going to renew us as Nick renewed the chairs. We could not do this work ourselves, but there was one that could. And we know this master craftsman. His name is Christ.
And Christ has the ability to recreate us. This is the beauty in the Bible story. It does not end with man has sin, it ends with Christ has died. And when we come to Christ, we can receive regeneration. We are remade, we are recreated. 2 Corinthians 5:17 states “Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” When we become Christians we are recreated again. The Bible word for this is regeneration. The original language behind this word means “be born” and “again, or once more.” It is the idea of rebirth. It refers to our spiritual rebirth. Titus 3:3-7 speaks of this event. “For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that being justified by His grace we might be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” Paul is talking about the regeneration that takes place at our baptism. This act is all of God. It is an instantaneous, one time event that happens in the moment of conversion. It is a divine act, it is the work of God on our behalf, and it is the inner change of the sinner’s nature. In regeneration, God restores, or recreates our nature. This is what Paul was talking about in Romans 6:6-14 “knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin, once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law, but under grace.” The beauty of salvation is that God regenerates us. He changes us. It is like he has created us again. We are new, we are free from sin. And this is all of God. He did this, we receive this. He made us again. He restores us again. We are recreated in his image. God does all the work. He has all the ability. He can change our nature in baptism. He restores us to our former glory. We are remade by the Lord. What a blessing, what a privilege that God has given us.
And like an old run down chair. The value is there as an antique. It is precious, but it is beaten up, it is dirty, it is cracked by wear. And like an old chair, he needs a master craftsman to fix it, to restore it. The chair needs to go through regeneration. The chair must be restored to its former glory and position. And this is what God as done for us. We can not recreate ourselves; we were as powerless as an old chair. But when the master Christ works with us, he can restore us, he can rebuild us. He can fix us again. We are all broken down chairs that need the regeneration by the washing and the Holy Spirit to restore us to our original glory. We need the master craftsman to work with us. The next time you sit down in an old antique chair, remake the work that it took to restore it, but ultimate remember the work on the Cross to restore you.
