One Story: Creation

Unified Story

The greatest question that any human needs to answer throughout the story of their lifetime is this — “Who do you say that Jesus Christ is.” As the church, and as Christians, we need to be very clear about our answer to this question, because if our answer is not, “Jesus is God who came and lived among us, whose death saved us from sin and death, and whose resurrection has enabled us to live new and renewed lives,” then we have got some problems that we need to work out.

But assuming that this is who we say Jesus Christ is, the next greatest question that we need to answer is, “What is the Bible?” On this, there are many different streams of thought that have developed over the ages. Is it a divine rule book? Is it a history of the world? Is it a secret code? And “How did it come to be?” Did it drop out of the sky? Was it literally dictated by God? Is it purely human? Or is it something else.

My hope over the next several weeks is to give you some language to use that will both help you articulate what the Bible is and how it functions as a vehicle for making the will and activity of God known to the world. But I don’t want to just give you language to describe it. I want you to broadly understand how the Bible functions.

So what I’ll say over and over again is this. “The Bible is One Story that leads to Jesus.” And what I mean by this is that the whole thing, every word of it, every smaller narrative serves the purpose of informing and propelling forward the story of God’s relationship with humanity, and how that relationship finds its ultimate climax and fulfillment in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

What we will find is that our answer to “Who is Jesus Christ” comes to us through our Bible, if we are astute and diligent enough to read it on its own terms. So for 8 weeks, I know that feels like a lot, but for 8 weeks we are going to overview the Bible together. We can’t cover it all. I can’t even ask you to read it all in that time. But I will cover major themes throughout the story as they are revealed and together we will discover how this whole thing revolves around the man Jesus Christ.

Beginnings

So today we begin our journey where any good journey should begin. Page 1. Genesis Chapters 1-11 are going to be our starting point, and the over arching theme here is going to be creation, which likely makes some sense to you. Now this chunk of scripture is going to take on 2 major parts. Chapters 1 and 2 detail the act of creation, while 3-11 detail what I call “decreation” (others call it the fall but I like the term decreation for reasons that will become clear shortly.) So keep that in mind as this discussion moves forward.

Here’s the start of things for us.

Genesis 1:1–2 NRSV

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

You’ve probably heard these verses like a million times, but I hope to maybe unlock something here in the very beginning of this thing that helps us to see the ways and purposes of God.

So when I was a kid I loved Legos. I think most kids do. And the beautiful progression of lego enthusiasm is you kind of go from these extra big legos called duplos, to just bins of random smaller lego blocks, to actual sets of legos that you buy which are meant to create a specific thing like a castle, a house, the millenium falcon from star wars, like whatever. But regardless of what kind of stage in the lego game you are in, when you get those babies home from the store and rip open the package and dump them on the floor they are just this chaotic mess of bricks that cause unforseen pain on the foot of innocent people trying to walk through the room.

They are, in essence, everything needed to build what they are intended to build. Yet, they are a mess. They are useless. They are… well they are dangerous.

And this is really the scene that we’ve got at the beginning of our Bibles. God’s creative action begins, and we aren’t told that everything was looking good. Actually the opposite. The earth was a formless void it says. The Hebrew actually creates a little poetic moment here… the words are Tohu va Vohu, which we often translate “formless void” or more accurately formless and void. But they simply mean “wild and waste.”

The point here is that God is looking at a floor filled with meaningless unorganized lego bricks and he’s like man this isn’t good. Nothing is in its right place. Its wild and it’s a waste of its potential. This isn’t good. Not to mention that there is this thing called the deep, which is an ancient conception of chaotic waters that threatened to swallow up any living thing. We’ve got a not great situation here. But we’ve got the wind of Spirit of God hovering over the water and things are about to make sense.

So what God does next is he takes to ordering this disorder. To making something tame out of what was wild. Giving form to the formless. So he creates, over three days, realms. He makes the sky, the sea, and the land. In ordering the elements, God creates a place for the creatures that he is creating, a place that is suitable for sustaining life, that are clearly defined and separate from one another. Then days 4-6 he creates the sun and the moon, the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and the animals of the land, with the climax being the special creation.

Genesis 1:26–27 NRSV

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

And this, not even so subtly sums up the point of creation, like what creation really was intended for. God’s creation is a life giving, life sustaining action that make order out of chaos. It tames the wild, gives purpose to what is wasted, and then shares the blessing and responsibility of maintaining that tame and purposeful life giving state with humanity, his images here on earth.

Are we good? Is your brain exploding. Do you need a drink of water? Ok good. Because this foundation is like… everything. Theres so much more here, but we have to move on. But I love this stuff. Oh my gosh do I love it.

Toxic Fruit

We are going to jump ahead a bit. But the gist of Chapters 2 and 3 is kind of a retelling of the creation, with special emphasis on the place that God creates called Eden, and how all of the life giving goodness that fills the earth flows out from the center of the Garden, which houses in its middle the tree of life. And God places a man in the garden, makes a woman, and then tells them don’t eat from one specific tree. And they mess up and eat. And get the boot from the garden.

This is the beginning of decreation. The disobedience of humanity has broken part of creation. Humans had a job to do, to maintain the order of creation on God’s behalf, by ruling over it just as God would have. They have proven themselves not to be terribly reliable, but not all hope is lost. However, humans are going to make pretty quick work of that.

Genesis 4:1–10 NRSV

Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord.” Next she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground. In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!

Here we have the detail of the first murder, the first real act of violence, which if creation’s purpose was to sustain life, is an act of decreation. Even the language, your brother’s blood is crying out from the ground. The very same ground from which God created all life is now saturated in death.

This toxic reality, the reality of violence fills the earth, until we get this grievous scene in Genesis 6.

Genesis 6:5–8 NRSV

The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.

Violence and evil have become the main vocation of humans, they have become agents of decreation rather than agents of creation that God had created them to be. And so He’s like “that’s it” And you likely know whats going to happen next. God decides to accelerate the trajectory that humanity is on, and commits an act of decreation where the sky, land, and sea become one again in the flood. The earth is again formless and void, temporarily, with the exception of Noah, his family, and the animals who came 2 by 2. But when the water recedes, Noah and his family start this project all over again, with the promise that this isn’t ever going to be God’s plan again. He’ll figure something else out when humans can’t get their act together.

Which they don’t. The world is repopulated, and humans definitely do take to being creative again, but they focus their energy on trying to build a tower to the heavens to be like gods. This perversion of the mandate to rule creation on God’s behalf causes God to spread the humans out across the earth, a final creative act on his behalf to populate the earth and set the stage for the next movement in the story which we will talk about next week.

Tell Me About Jesus

So that’s all well and good, but how does this part of the story lead to Jesus? Well perhaps in the most obvious way, we find these words from the Gospel of John.

John 1:1–5 NRSV

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

It turns out, Jesus (aka the word) was not only there in the beginning with God, but was the primary creative actor in all of creation. This carries true into our understanding of Jesus as a miracle worker, one who had power over the elements. Jesus who did these amazing things (among others)

Calmed a storm Mark 4: Control over the Skies

Walks on water Mark 6: Control over the sea

Uses Dirt to heal a blind man’s eyes John 9: Control over the earth

Not to mention creating water out of wine, multiplying loaves of bread and fish, and the list goes on and on.

Jesus is the creator in chief. The one who came, in human form to model for us the way that God has called humanity to act in this world in creative ways, rather than our typical means of destructive acts that lead to decreation.

But you are like, well we can’t do miracles, we aren’t God! True. I’m not saying that you and I are called to go out and control the elements like Jesus can. But look at the other aspects of Jesus’s creative personality.

Being Creative Creatures

Jesus created life through the power of his presence in the world. He created communities out of ragtag assemblies of broken, outcasted, hurting people. He created new life by meeting people where they were, inviting them to the table, and speaking God’s truth about them into their lives. He created a new world order that called people back to their original purpose. He created creators. People who created the movement we now know as the church. A flawed but effective institution that drove most if not all of the creative innovation of the western world. We created institutions of higher learning that encouraged the creation of new disciplines that probed our world and make it more life sustaining. We built hospitals that pioneered life saving technologies and procedures. Orphanages that gave new life to those who were given a death sentence by the world.

Creation is in our DNA. It’s what we’ve been called to. To be people, a community that engages in the act of sustaining and protecting life. But so often we let ourselves slip into cycles of decreation. In our brokenness, in our sin, in our self-centeredness we fall short of living into our mandate to build and sustain a world that supports life. Instead we tear down our world with violence, indifference, intolerance, infighting, and general disobedience to the calling that God has placed on our lives to rule this world on his behalf.

You see, although there is a lot more to this story that leads to Jesus, it begins at the beginning with God’s creative action and the purpose that he has given to each and every one of us. If we are not actively working towards being persons and a church that supports God’s creative activity, then we are actually working towards decreation. So it’s up to us to be creators of communities, creators of new life by inviting people to God’s table, by speaking truth and love into their lives, by calling them by the names that God has given to them rather than the names that the world has called them. It’s our job to join in the creative, culture transcending work of the church, the greatest creative force present in the world today.

We are able to do all of this because of the fact that God used death to create life. The cross, the greatest weapon of deconstruction, where the world tried to kill God, became a vessel that unleashed the creative power of God on this world. Death was turned over, and out of that grave came a new and remarkable creation, the glorified body of Christ, the blueprint of the new creation that is to come when a new heaven and a new earth join together to make an eternal and permanent home for God and his people to enjoy forever.

This is the story of Creation. A story that finds its culmination in the person of Jesus. Its a story that in its early stages found its home in a garden. And Jesus’s story, in its latter stages found its home in a garden as well. But just before that, Jesus shared a meal with his disciples, a meal that they shared with their disciples, who shared it with theirs all the way down through history to us sitting here in worship today.

This meal is a meal that made very real the promise that God made in creation. An offer of bread and the cup, signs of a new covenant. A new partnership between God and Humans to create a new and life giving world. Its a meal that we take together seeking to share in God’s life creating, life sustaining mission to our world.

And so, The Lord be With you.