Our theme this year is Hope Found Here, and this month we are considering the Hope we have in our Creator, our Heavenly Father, the one who created everything we see, and everything we can’t see.
Our English Bible starts with the book of Genesis, and the first words we read in Genesis is “In the Beginning God”. These words have been translated fron the original Hebrew, 'bereshith bara Elohim'. These words refer to history (there was a beginning, bereshith), then to creation (bara, He created), and then to the Creator, Elohim. God, is the Creator, He exists, He is not a product of man’s imagination, He is real, He is the basis of our Hope.
The Bible begins with the account of God creating the heavens and the earth and everything in between: stars and insects, trees and galaxies, planets and animals, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, and human beings, us. God is the one who creates all things and orders all things. He is the one who has made us, He is the one who has made everything.
If you are one of those people who have pondered if the chicken or the egg came first, Genesis clearly tells us that God created Life, and then told it to be fruitful and multiply. Whatever your views of science and the Bible, of creation or evolution or Intelligent Design the Bible teaches us that everything begins with God. God was in the beginning, actually, God was prior to what we consider the beginning of creation.
God is eternal. This is something that our finite human minds struggle to comprehend. We expect things to have a beginning and an end. God has been here since before we arrived and He will be around long after we’re gone.
God has always been and always will be. He is eternal. Life begins and ends with God. He comes first, not us.
Does it seem like I’m pointing out the obvious? Maybe I am. But I think that sometimes we need to be reminded of the most basic aspects of our faith.
Why? Because even as Christians we don’t always act or live like God comes first, do we? Just think of something simple, like how many of our sentences begin with “I” or have “I” as the main subject: “I’m going to do this today.” or “This is how I feel.”
Our thoughts revolve around ourselves and many of our feelings are ultimately self-centered. Almost without thinking about it, we put our thoughts, feelings, and even actions first. We often put more trust in our own abilities than in those of our Creator. Often our hope is based on what we think we can accomplish rather than placing our hope and trust in God.
Friends, our Hope, should be in God. The Bible teaches us that Go is the Alpha and Omega, He is the beginning and the end. In The Message Bible the author Eugene Peterson introduces the book of Genesis by saying: “First, God. God is the subject of life. God is foundational for living. If we don’t have a sense of the primacy of God, we will never get it right, get life right, get our lives right. Not God at the margins; not God as an option; not God on the weekends. God at center and circumference; God first and last; God, God, God.”
“God First” not me, not my hopes or desires, God’s plan and purpose first. God comes first, He is before all things, He is meant to have first place in our lives.
The first “day” would not have come into being without God, and God still creates our days. Without God we would have no hope, our days would be nothing, no order, no purpose, no existence.
With God we have hope, we have purpose, we have a destiny ordained by God. We have hope in our Creator, God has created us, God has provided a way for us to be saved from the penalty of our sins by trusting in Jesus as our Lord and Saviour.
When we repent and turn to Jesus, when we become His follower, His disciple, the Holy Spirit comes and resides inside us, He empowers us and helps us to be the people God created us to be, He helps us to be the people God has saved us to be.
Ephesians 2:10 says, “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.” God is the creator of the heavens and the earth, and God is our creator.
Genesis 1:2 describes the earth as “formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters”. God took something that was without shape, a formless empty void covered in darkness and He made something. God gave shape to the shapeless. God brought order to where there was no direction, He gave form to something that was formless.
This illustrates four things about our personal relationship with God.
First, without God’s creating and saving power in my life I am a formless void. Apart from God I have no purpose, no direction, no meaning, no hope. The earth was completely without order, purpose or direction then God’s creative hand shaped it and made it what it should be. That was the earth before God began his creative work, and that is like us before we allow God to begin His creative and saving work in our lives: formless, hopeless, empty, in darkness.
Second, it tells me that I cannot create my own life, I cannot make myself into what I should be. I cannot give shape and meaning or hope to my life. God is the Creator, only he can turn the formless void of my life into something that makes sense and is worthwhile. Only God can create something worthwhile out of me and my life. When God created the heavens and earth, He brought into existence something that never before had existence. What God creates is unique and the same is true of you and I. Just as He brought something new and unique into existence at the beginning of creation, He does the same when He takes the formless voids of our lives and recreates us.
The third thing is this: When God recreates and saves us, we become something entirely new from what we were before, and when He does, our lives will never be as they were. We are transformed. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ.”
The fourth point is this: God takes us and shapes us using the material of our lives as He finds us. Not only does God create something new and unique out of us and our lives, He does it with who and what we already are. So for us God creates and saves and redeems us using the stuff of our lives: our talents, our failures, our successes, our strengths, our weaknesses, and our past.
God can redeem even the worst parts of us, and use it for His glory. God can take what is formless and without order and give it shape, direction, purpose, hope and destiny. For those who love God, for those who know Jesus as Lord and Saviour, nothing is beyond the redemptive power of Jesus.
The Apostle Paul says in Romans 8:28: “we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purpose for them.”
We are formless without the creative and saving work of God in our lives, and without God we are also in darkness. When we are in darkness, we can’t see clearly, in the dark we can stumble and fall...
Have you ever had a power cut at home? Have you ever had to wander around in the dark?
Sometimes when we wander about in the darkness, we can get hurt. John 3:19 says, “judgment is based on this fact: God’s light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil.”
Without the presence of God in our lives, we are living in the dark, living in sin, heading for a lost eternity away from God. God’s love brings a light into our darkness. Trust in Jesus brings us from darkness into God’s marvellous light.
In Genesis, God speaks, and there is light. God speaks and there is hope. God is the only source of light and hope for us. Only the light God speaks into being can dispel the darkness of sin. Only the light God speaks into being can shine in the darkness and not be overcome by it. We can know that light in our own lives, that light, is Christ, the light of the world.
Let’s return to Genesis 1:2, “The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.” The word for wind in Hebrew, RUACH as in Greek, PNEUMA, is the same as the word for breath and Spirit.
Here we have the Spirit of God present at creation, and when it says the Spirit “hovered” over the surface of the waters, the verb here has the sense of ever-changing velocity and direction – just like wind. I’m reminded of what Jesus says about the Spirit to Nicodemus in John 3, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
The ever-changing movement of the wind in Genesis – of the Spirit of God – is movement with a purpose, movement with a creative purpose, to bring life out of nothing, to give form to the shapeless, and to bring light into the darkness. Only the Holy Spirit enables us to perceive Christ for who He really is. It is the Spirit at work in our hearts, that moves us to accept Jesus as Lord and Saviour. It is the Spirit who applies the work of Christ to our lives!
In John 15 Jesus tells his disciples that “apart from me you can do nothing”. Genesis 1 teaches us this truth too.
The earth was a formless void, no plants, no grass, no trees, no fruit, no life. The Earth was dark, desolate, unproductive, then God brought light and life and hope. Listen to Genesis 1:11 “Then God said, “Let the land sprout with vegetation—every sort of seed-bearing plant, and trees that grow seed-bearing fruit. These seeds will then produce the kinds of plants and trees from which they came.” And that is what happened.’”
It happened. When God speaks, when He acts to create, things happen. Fruit gets produced. The same is true with us, isn’t it? Can we really be productive without God in our lives? Can we really produce anything of eternal value?
Without Christ in our lives, we are desolate, like the earth at the beginning of Genesis. But with Christ we are productive: we, by the power of God, produce the fruit of the Spirit that Paul talks about in Galatians 5:22,23, and a harvest of righteousness, as it says in Hebrews 12:11. This is God’s doing not ours.
All of this is true if, and only if, God comes first in our lives, just as God was “in the beginning” in Genesis. Unless we learn to make God the priority He should be, unless we deliberately and willingly hand our lives over to Him, we will be left formless, desolate and in the dark without hope.
As I draw to a close, I suppose the most important question for me to ask is this:
Do we want to remain void and empty, without direction, purpose or hope, wandering in the darkness of sin or will you allow God to take you and mould you, and form you into something uniquely you, to bring you, “out of darkness into His marvellous light” ? (1 Peter 2:9).
In theology there is an important Latin phrase that gets used when we talk about God creating the heavens and the earth: creatio ex nihilo. In English this means “creation out of nothing.” This was how the world began. There was nothing – and God created, brought something fundamentally new and unique into existence.
Where before there was nothing, now there is something. This can also be true of us, when we come to recognize that it is God who comes first, and that is only God who can take all of our nothing and make it into something.
Hope is found here in our Creator.
Hope is found here in Jesus our Lord and Saviour
Hope is found here in with the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Hope is found here as God speaks light and dispels darkness.
When we find ourselves empty, in darkness, without hope, God can bring transformation into our lives. For only God creates, and our hope must be in Him and Him alone.
