Introduction
Today we’re starting what I hope will be a series of twenty Deep-Dives (but not TOO deep) into the fundamentals of the story of God’s dealings with people.
It’s ambitious because to do it in twenty is going to make cutting corners essential.
To be honest it’s a bit of a challenge … and I suspect it might stretch to be twenty-one.
It’s going to be linked to a project to put into Welsh and English a series of little animated videos that already exists.
Those videos use these same stories as their sign-posts along the way, but those videos will be just three to five minutes with a few questions at the end, to be published and shared very widely for the benefit of people who don’t often come to church.
And I hope WE can be involved in that when the videos are finished, by sharing these little videos on OUR social media, with OUR friends lists, maybe at our favourite café as we watch and discuss their contents with our friends … the way they’re made should make it very easy.
And these same videos, translated into other languages, are actually bringing thousands of people to follow Jesus in the most surprising of countries around our world today.
But this is not that … this is just a set of sermons that expands a bit for our benefit on the stories from the Bible that are in the set of little videos.
So today - funnily enough - we’re starting with Creation.
What would you say our world needs to know about Creation?
1) You were created
Firstly of course, human beings were created in the first place.
Genesis 1:1 says
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
And then Genesis runs through a long list of the things God created when He created both the Heavens and the earth … and what’s happening is that the things IN Creation that are actually part OF Creation which primal people worship … sun, stars, sea, things that grow IN the earth and animals that move ON the earth and things like that … emphasising that these are not ‘gods’ but things MADe by God.
And at the end of the list of things made comes the creation of people, who are clearly NOT to be worshipped either, then, but that nonetheless are to ‘Head Up’ Creation as they are made in the image of God.
And as the image of God, humans come with a birthright and a calling not an assembly plan and a guarantee.
But we’re jumping ahead here.
The point is that along with the rest of Creation, but as a human, you are certainly not an accident.
You are a Creation.
And that’s different.
It is of the essence of your human dignity that you were purposed and created, meant to be … and it is of the essence of that dignity both that you were are no accident but meant to be, and meant to be by the Greatest One of all.
Because you … in all the complexity of your design … were not the product of a random accident, but you were purposefully created, and that by God.
2) By God
I suppose in English we can talk about things being created by random processes and by what look to us pretty much like chance events.
But Genesis 1 and later texts referring to it are clear that where Creation is concerned this is a personal Creation:
So Genesis 1:1-5 (for example) we read:
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God 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.”
It is PERSONAL, and that is the way the creating of things goes on, until in Genesis 1:26 the personal God Who has until now been creating things and creatures finally creates a person:
“Then God said, “Let us make man[h] in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.”
Now, there’s something really interesting to notice here about the God Who is doing this creating.
The Hebrew word used here to describe Him (and ‘Him’ is correct … He’s a person with a gender not a force that is referred to as non binary) … is the word אֱלֹהִים (e.lo.him)
It’s the Old Testament’s most common word for God arising 10,518 times in the Old Testament but just 22 in the New Testament … which is not altogether surprising as it’s a Hebrew word but the New Testament is written in Greek!
But that’s not the only word used in Genesis 1 to refer to God the Creator, and it’s certainly not the only one used in the Bible.
Here in Genesis 1:2 we’re told that although the earth was ‘without form and void’ … i.e. Creation hadn’t happened and nothing was there except God, the …
וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים
(ru.ach e.lo.him) was also there with God in the act of Creation.
We’re being told that God the Holy Spirit was there creating and in fact Colossians 1:16 ff (talking about the Lord Jesus and His pre-eminence) tells us more:
“For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”
You were created as a person by the personal God Who is One God in three and created you NOT as something random but from something else He’d created … the God Who had life in Himself before Creation, now putting LIFE into the material Creation that He the One Triune God has made.
The important thing to notice here is that He made EVERYTHING, out of NOTHING.
3) Out of nothing
Here’s the thing about God.
We might quite often feel we’re working without the resources we need for something and we might say we’re being asked to make something out of nothing.
When we do that, it’s probably not literally true, but we feel the frustration of the impossibility of the situation.
Fair enough.
We CAN’T actually make something out of nothing.
But the thing we learn here about the God Who has made both us and everything else is that He can.
When we first hear of God here in Genesis 1:2 in this account of the beginning we are told:
“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light …”
And God just went on saying ‘Let there be …’ and there was.
Light, atmosphere, seas, land, plants, lights in the skies and animals on the land … ‘Let there be, let there be…’
And there was.
Everything that there is … brought forth out of nothing by nothing but God’s own singular authoritative word of command.
He alone can bring something out of nothing.
And then finally He said:
“Then God said, “Let us make man[h] in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
28 And God blessed them.”
And by now some might be saying: ‘that sounds like fairy tales’ and asking ‘do you REALLY expect me to believe that?’
So, very quickly, let me put it to you like this:
Where will you put faith, and what will you treat with incredulity …
The idea that a vast explosion gave us our complex and well-ordered creation, or the idea that the design we see around us is the product of a personal and creative intellect?
One of those theories fills me with total incredulity, and the other fills me with a sense that the evidence suggests that something like that looks like the way that it surely must have been.
The reason people don’t want to accept that a benign personal, creative intellect gave rise to all we are and see is that conceding that God made the world entails accepting the validity of His authority and living for the purpose for which He made us and put us here.
Which is what comes next here in Genesis …
4) For this purpose
Now HERE is the purpose He has made us for and the reason tat He created us ‘to be His image’.
Wow!
Hold up a minute!
You’re used to hearing that people were created IN God’s image, and I just used a meaningfully different expression there, as I said ‘AS His image’.
Genesis, and other Old Testament passages, and also Israel’s surrounding culture in the Ancient Near East give us a good idea of what ‘the image of God’ means.
Many scholars draw a parallel between the image of God in Genesis and images of kings in the ancient world.
Rulers could not be everywhere at once, and travel was slow. So they would erect monuments or statues of themselves throughout their kingdoms.
These “images” let everyone know that the king’s rule extended wherever his image was found.
Another kind of image in the ancient world was an idol, a physical object that represented the god in the temple.
Idols were not necessarily considered gods in themselves … they were sometimes (we’re told) statues that let you know the god was in some mysterious sense “present.”
Statues of kings and of ‘gods’ help us understand what it means for humans to be made in God’s image: humans are placed in God’s kingdom as his representatives.
- Richard Middleton puts it well in The Liberating Image.
He suggests that the image of God describes “the royal office or calling of human beings as God’s representatives and agents in the world.”
The phrase ‘Image of God’ means that humans have been given “power to share in God’s rule or administration of the earth’s resources and creatures.”
But the authority for it still lies with Him and we fulfil this role as ANSWERABLE to Him for doing things HIS way.
So the point in Genesis 1:26-27 now becomes fairly obvious:
“Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish…birds…cattle…wild animals…creeping things” (NRSV).
Humankind, created on the sixth day, has been given the authority to rule over the other creatures God had made on the fourth and fifth days.
They have that authority because humankind is made to be God’s image.
The phrase “image of God” is not about what makes us human.
It is about humanity’s unique role in being God the King’s royal representatives in creation.
Once we understand what image of God means in Genesis, we will be in a better position to see how this idea is worked out elsewhere in the Bible.
Now of course there is much more to say in the rest of the Bible, because as the perfect human being, Jesus is the TRUE image-bearer.
You might say that Jesus is the only truly and fully human figure who has ever lived.
By looking at the crucified and risen Son, we see what “human” really means, not the corrupted dysfunctional version that stares back us from the mirror, or that we see in others.
Colossians 1:15-20 makes the same point in a different way. Jesus is the “image of the invisible God” (v. 15) …
{For more see https://biologos.org/articles/what-does-image-of-god-mean }
But for our purposes here today let’s just notice that God created humanity to be His image, His (as it were) Royal stewards, ruling over the rest of His Creation IN HIS WAY … but that’s going to come up again in the next two weeks!
Spoiler alert … humanity is going to make a fist of things, but as God created things He’d built in a safeguard so that this wouldn’t happen.
5) With protective partial knowledge
So to recap: you were created by God, out of nothing, for this specific purpose to rule over Creation under His delegated authority like an image of a distant King set up there …
And then in Genesis 2 we get a little more detail about the Garden … the Paradise … that God put humanity into to be its keepers:
Genesis 2:15-17:
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden,
17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
As created in that Garden humanity was in a Paradise that depended on their only knowing what they needed to know, so that they would only do what they needed to do … they weren’t aware of different definitions of what might be right and wrong!
And not taking God … the authoritative creator and Ruler of His world … at His Word on this matter was going to lead to knowledge that led to rebelliousness being engrained in humanity, who would only be the worse for it.
More on that next time, but let’s bring this to a conclusion for this week.
Conclusion
So the story of Creation in Genesis 1-2 teaches us that God is the authoritative Creator Who has made us and all things intending for us to live in paradise according to His plan, with a purpose to fulfil as His image there.
So it is no wonder that Psalm 19 could declare:
“The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”
Nor that Psalm 139:14 could rejoice:
“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.”
Humanity knew only God’s good purposes back there in the Paradise we were created to enjoy, and humanity was protected there in continuing to fulfil God’s purposes in His Paradise by being forbidden by His authoritative Word to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil … because, obviously, if you don’t know evil or what evil is you simply can’t do it because you know nothing about it!
So the Bible’s account of the world the universe and everything is that God created His world and His people out of nothing, doing it by His authoritative Word, intending that Paradise and Divine image-bearing would bring us joy as we shared our life with Him … joining His people to walk with them happily in the cool of the day in the rest time that followed on from good work done.
His purpose was to empower and bless His people and with them His Creation … but we’ll see how that worked out next time.
Table of Contents
5) With protective partial knowledge
