Welcome to the beginning of the New Year and our nine-month journey through the Old Testament. I want to encourage you to make a commitment to plug into one of the community groups that meet during the week and to complete the Growth Seeds, our daily devotional. The combination of Sunday services, mid-week community groups and Growth Seeds will help you in your quest for spiritual maturity in 2004. Last week we talked about fulfilling our four main points of our life travel by establishing in 2004 Spiritual Training, Physical Training, Financial Training and Evangelistic Training.
During the next nine months we will be reading through the Old Testament as part of our spiritual training. What we glean from this overview will help us not only in our spiritual training but the other three areas of discipline as well. The study will also be available on tape for $2 ea for the series or you can listen to it on line. So lets get ready to dig in.
There is so much we could look at as we begin, in fact, we could spend the rest of our lives in Genesis so understand, you might have favorite passages you enjoy, and I might not spend time there. It doesn’t mean they don’t have meaning, it just means for the purpose of this overview, I did not have time to park and dig out all the great nuggets that are available.
I want to begin our study by looking at the question, when does good go bad. It happens, we have probably all experienced it, a relationship that goes south, and a friend who does the seemingly incomprehensible. It doesn’t have to be as notorious as Gary Ridgeway, Jeffrey Dalmer, Ted Bundy or whatever number of serial killers you can think of. When good goes bad it may not be a physical act of aggression that plummets a person from the goodness scale, it could and most commonly is another form of action or deed when some falls from the good graces of life. It is a problem as old as time.
Before we can say something has gone bad, we must first acknowledge the existence of good. To do that, lets go to the beginning of creation, the book of Genesis. The problem begins to develop in the first verse. As we look at how good goes bad, we need to understand some key issues along the way. The first being…
1. God created.
It tells us that right off the bat. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
This is probably one of the most controversial statements in the Bible, especially today where our worldview denies the creation by God because it denies God’s presence. There has always been a clash between accepting God’s creation and man’s attempt at creating God. History has shown the worship of the sun, moon and stars, it has seen people model images from stone or wood and bow down and worship these created objects as some form of deity. Human sacrifices have been offered up as appeasements in an attempt to manipulate or influence these created gods of this world in a vain attempt to gain favor. Although it wasn’t until our modern setting when the separation of those who hold to the truth of God the supreme being and creator of the heavens and earth against those who hold there is no god but ourselves, has come to the forefront of debate, discussion, and eventually legislation.
Bernard Ramm wrote, “This deep moving secularism—life without God, philosophy without the Bible, community without the Church…was an irresistible tide.”
Man has replaced the first verse of Genesis, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth with evolution, genetic mutation, and chaotic happenstance. In order to justify flawed thinking, in order to elevate man as god of his universe, society has sought to explain away divine creation, failing to realize, you can write it out of the books, you can legislate it from public schools and public places, but you cannot remove it from the factual truth, God created the heavens and the earth.
What is the standard for good? That’s the next thing we need to understand…
2. God created good.
Here is how it works. First, God created. Genesis goes on to say; Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said let there be light, and there was light.
We have Father God creating, His Spirit hovering over the water, and He speaks the word and light comes into existence. John 1:1 tells us in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Verse 14 points out The Word became Flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. The Word is Jesus Christ, so at Creation is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I point this out because we need to recognize the God of the Old Testament is the same God as the New, and although the Trinity in its makeup is somewhat of a mystery in its detail, it is nonetheless God in three persons, working in harmony to create. And together they created good. Look at these verses of creation…
And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning-the first day.
6 And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water." 7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the expanse "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning-the second day.
9 And God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear." And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground "land," and the gathered waters he called "seas." And God saw that it was good.
11 Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds." And it was so. 12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening, and there was morning-the third day.
14 And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. 16 God made two great lights-the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning-the fourth day.
20 And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." 21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth." 23 And there was evening, and there was morning-the fifth day.
24 And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind." And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, [2] and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
29 Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground-everything that has the breath of life in it-I give every green plant for food." And it was so.
31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning-the sixth day.
Throughout His creation, God would look back on His work and say, it was good. If everything God created was good, then where does the bad come in?
We jump over to chapter 3, the serpent, we have come to identify as Satan, slithers into the garden. Verse 1 tells us Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. Up until this point, everything was good. God was meeting and having fellowship with Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve were having fellowship with each other, and life was in harmony. Elsewhere, things were not going well. Revelation 19:9 informs us of a problem in heaven, And the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. For some reason, only God totally understands, and something for us to write on our list of questions to ask Him, instead of destroying Satan when he tried to take over heaven and have creation worship creation instead of the Creator, God packed Satan’s bags and sent him and a third of the angels who tried to overthrow God, down to earth as temporary earth guests. The good news is an eviction notice has been issued for his stay here. The bad news is the final date hasn’t been filled in for him to see, yet.
No matter, Satan and his defectors are here on earth, and he made his presence known in the garden when he said to Eve "Indeed, has God said, ’You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?"
2 The woman said to the serpent, "From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat;
3 but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ’You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’"
4 The serpent said to the woman, "You surely will not die!
5 "For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
6 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.
The point is…
3. Man allowed good to go bad.
A willful decision, a choice made to become like God. It didn’t work in heaven for Satan so he tries it out on earth. They say insanity is doing the exact thing over again and expecting different results. Satan brought his insanity to earth and what was good began to go bad. Sin came into the world; the choice to choose evil over good and since that day, it has become a common selection.
All of us have made wrong choices at some point in our lives and we live with the consequences of those choices. When God was creating God understood the frailty of man and He was already at work to provide an escape route, for us to be able to hit the refresh button on the computer of life, to delete the bad things and permanently remove them from the hard drive record of our lives.
Romans 1:25 reads, They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever. Our society, our lifestyle, makes it easy for us to worship creation. That’s why God sent His Son, the Living Word, to earth…so that we could exchange the rotting fruit of our life back in for what is good, wholesome and pure.
Our first step begins by going back to Genesis 1:1 and acknowledging He is God, the Creator of the heavens and earth and because He is God, I want Him to be the Creative force of my life, to run things according to His design. Then I need to go to Genesis 3 and acknowledge I have taken a wrong path, that I exchanged the truth of God for a lie, twisting what God intended to fulfill my own desires. There is a simple word for that, it is called sin. And if I am going to operate in the design of the Creator, Father God, then I am going to need to repent and allow God, through the work of His Son Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit, clean up the mess I have made, rewrite the program of my life, and begin to live with fresh perspective and outlook knowing God has forgiven and forgotten my errors of the past, and now I need to let Him be the Chief Operations Officer of my life.
Would you like to do that? Maybe for the first time, maybe in renewal to a past commitment? The awesome thing about God is when we go bad, because He is the Creator of all, He can turn us right back to good again…
Lets close in a prayer of commitment to Him
