Advent Week 1: Creation

If you have a copy and you would like to follow along, we're look at those two passages.

Genesis chapter 1, John chapter 1, raise your hand if you need a copy, and we'll make sure to get one to you.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention John 1 · chapter mention

Typically, we study through books of the Bible here at the village chapel, but during the Advent season we do take a break and stay with these Advent themes.

So hoping that you'll be able to follow along with us.

Anybody all need a copy?

Raise your hand.

That's good.

So in Genesis 1 and John 1, what's beautiful about these two passages, they both begin with the same three words.

In the, say it?

In the beginning.

That's right, in the beginning.

And so we have the beginning represented in Genesis, which is the beginning of all things, all creation.

And then in John chapter 1, and I don't think that John the Apostle was doing this sort of accidentally, but rather intentionally.

John 1 · chapter mention

He wanted to connect Jesus Christ, one whom he knew personally.

He was an eyewitness to Jesus Christ.

He was a friend.

He followed, walked along with Jesus on dusty roads in first century Israel, and he sat around campfires.

He heard Jesus preach sermons.

He saw Jesus perform miracles.

He actually was at the cross when Jesus was dying on the cross.

John was the one who stayed there.

And so John writes in the beginning and then begins to talk about the word.

And the word he just he describes to us, he explains, is actually the person, Jesus Christ, God's own son.

And later in John's gospel, he says, these things have been written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing in him you might have life in his name.

I love it when people are real upfront, real clear about their intentions, their purpose in writing.

And John is very clear in that passage telling us that he wanted to make sure we knew Jesus was the Christ.

Christ isn't his last name, that's his title, Christ in this the New Testament version of the Old Testament title, Messiah.

And Jesus is the Christ.

He is the anointed one of God who's come to bring us God's salvation.

So what we have in these two passages really is the beginning of our story of Christmas, as we'll see at Genesis to Revelation.

Our intention across these four Sundays leading up to Christmas, what we call the Advent season, and it's its own thing and it has its own significance, and we need not just think this is just the ramp to Christmas.

There's actually some meaning and purpose that we need to take and be intentional about understanding what the Advent tradition is all about.

But it's basically that we might see the grand overarching narrative of Scripture and that Jesus is actually integrated.

He's essential in all of that.

If we were to summarize the entire message of the Bible in four words, I put them up on the screen there.

It's creation, fall, redemption, restoration.

If you've read the Bible all the way through, you know how these the threads, these four threads, run throughout.

The first two, creation and fall, of course, are part of that very first book in the Bible, Genesis, and the first few chapters of that book.

Most of the narrative, most of the text of Scripture is actually focused on redemption.

That is, God taking the initiative in search of a people he can call himself and making it possible for those people to actually come and be reconciled to God.

And then we have at the end of the corpus of, or the library of books that we call the Bible, we have this book, Revelation, that talks about the restoration of all things, how one day God intends to come and to set all things right at Christ's reappearing.

And so Advent is about two actions that we take: the action of reflecting back in time to that first appearing, because Advent means appearing, that first appearing of Christ, and then looking forward with anticipation to his second appearing or his reappearing when he will come and set all things right.

We're looking backward and we're looking forward.

We're reflecting, we're anticipating.

All of that is really beautiful when you start to see it all run through the thread of the storyline of our scriptures.

Even one of our well-known rock and roll, you know, uh Bono, the lead singer for you two, has come out many times and made statements about faith.

One of the things that he said is that he believes in the poetic genius of a creator who would choose to express such unfathomable power as a child born in straw poverty.

That is, that God chose in this way to come into the world.

He didn't come as a king in the palace at Jerusalem.

Actually, he was born, and we sang it earlier, he was born in a stable, born in a the nativity, as we call it so often.

He came in humble, with sort of a humble setting, and um, so that all who would hear the gospel message might understand that it's an offer to them as well.

It's not just for the elite, it's not just for the wealthy, it's not just for the well-educated, but it's for everyone that Christ has come to bring salvation into this world.

So, what do we talk about creation?

Uh I know that um uh for for some, you might have questions about this.

Maybe you've studied it before.

You you maybe you know what the word cosmology means, and you still you do not confuse it with cosmetology.

You still know that cosmology is the is the study of the origin of all things, uh, and the and the universe in particular integrates the observational uh astronomy with particle physics to speculate about the origin of all things, and that you also understand that cosmology has its limitations and ultimately it does involve some philosophical speculation as well.

But it leads us to a lot of great questions, which I love.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Let that sink in for just a second.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Perhaps one of the greatest philosophical questions ever raised goes way, way back.

Where did everything come from?

And where did that come from?

And where did that come?

And you just keep going back to the origin of all things.

Who are we?

What does it mean to be a human person?

Why are we here?

What's the meaning of life?

Lots of great questions.

And I'm gonna suggest to you as we go through Advent that in each and every one of these weeks, there are gonna be some really big questions that creation, fall, redemption, and restoration are gonna address.

Now, whether they answer them to your complete satisfaction or not might be another thing.

But here's what I'm gonna suggest to you that for a long, long, long, long time, people have been asking these very same questions.

Where did everything come?

Why is there something rather than nothing?

And the Bible begins to give us, I think, meaningful answers to some of these really big questions.

So no matter where you're at in your spiritual journey, no matter where you're at in terms of your belief or unbelief, uh, I'm glad you're here.

I'm glad we can approach some of these questions and find in them, I think, the kinds of seeds that God has sown into our hearts and minds to draw us to himself, to recognize that we need him and to turn our hearts to him.

And so he comes not only uh planting within us the ability to think about these things and to be haunted by these questions, but he comes in the person and work of Christ, which we celebrate at Christmas time, and during the Advent we're thinking all about it, but we recognize that it begins actually in the dark.

We read this in Genesis 1.1.

If you have your Bibles and you'd like to turn to them, just look at those first five verses again and just take a peek at what it says, the way it describes the creation event itself.

I'll I'll I'll be the first one to say right up front that Genesis is not a book of how God created, it's a book of a declaration that God created and that it's God who created.

Okay?

So it's not meant to be, it unfolds this way, it took this exact number of hours, but even the days, the first day that's brought to a close, even that could be translated or could be understood as an age or an epic.

But here's the point there was a beginning.

And both Genesis and John declare that unequivocally, in the beginning.

And I gotta say, even in modern times that we live in right now, even in postmodern times that we live in right now, most of the scientific community believes there was a beginning.

They call it a big bang.

Not everybody, but most of them will call it some kind of a big bang.

What was the causal agent behind that bang?

Where do the elements come from that were a part of that bang?

I don't have any answers for that.

Why?

Because nobody was there.

So we speculate, whether we're scientists or theologians or philosophers.

But here we have the revealed word of God connecting the dots between the beginning of all creation and the Son of God, who's the Word, as John calls him, and suggesting that the Word Jesus was actually at the creation of it.

And look at Genesis 1 there.

All three members of the Trinitarian Godhead are present.

In the beginning, God, that's the Father, created the heavens and the earth.

The earth was formless and void, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.

So he just spoke it into being.

Isn't that amazing?

And the first thing he speaks into being was specificity after this general statement that he created the heavens and the earth, which must include, if it's the heavens and the earth, it must include everything that we can perceive and everything that we cannot perceive.

Everything that we can see, taste, touch, feel, smell.

All the empirical evidence is there for these things, the earthly things, but the heavens too, the heavenly realm, stuff we can't see, the invisible stuff.

He created all that.

So the big broad sweeping statement begins with: in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, everything.

And then with greater specificity, he begins to enumerate those things which he created.

And he moves from light to some of the more material things and ends up with the sort of, you know, the sort of most beautiful part of his creation when he creates human beings in his own image.

And you can read the rest of the creation story on your own.

I just want to suggest to you that Genesis 1, 1 through 5 at least begins with these statements.

There was a beginning.

There was someone who began the beginning.

There was a creator, a designer.

Okay?

Now this starts to answer some of our big questions, doesn't it?

Why?

If we think everything's just an accidental co-location of atoms and chemicals and just kind of random, then what's the purpose of life?

We should just eat, drink, and die.

Or we should just take whatever we want from somebody else if we can overpower them.

Because however long this existence is, it's going to come to an end.

And if the physical universe is all that exists, if there's nothing immaterial whatsoever in reality, then we should just do that.

What would give us any cause or reason for something like to believe in something like hope, like we talked about today here on this first Advent Sunday?

Why is it hope is immaterial?

What about love?

What about joy?

What about peace?

What are these things and why do we talk about them?

Why are we haunted by these questions?

Where did everything come from?

Why is there something rather than nothing?

And I would suggest to you that it's God who created everything.

He created it in the beginning.

He's the only eternal entity that exists.

And so we've talked about this before.

At Village Chapel is there's a there's a real big line in everything that exists, a dividing line.

And on one side is creator, and on the other side is creation, and we are all a part of creation.

The chair you're sitting in is a part of creation, the light blasting through the windows and giving some of you a little bit of a sunburn on your back of your neck.

That is creation.

And so we're all a part of creation.

And the problem with us, and we'll talk about this more next week, the reason we get to the fall, is that we keep trying to drift over the line and become creator ourselves and take the controls back and be the ones to determine who we are, what we are, what we ought to be, instead of receiving from God this gift of creatureness and this gift of belonging to Him.

But both creation and Advent begin in the dark.

In the beginning, it was just chaos, nothingness, and God spoke, and the first thing he created was light.

Why?

Because it was just dark, nothingness, emptiness.

And darkness throughout scripture stands for a lot of things.

But in the physical universe, what is being suggested here is that the very first thing God created with specificity was light.

And I'm going to suggest to you that that's because he wanted his glory to be visible.

And he wanted his glory to be shared and seen and experienced.

And so he begins with light.

And it's interesting because at the end of the entire Bible in the book of Revelation, it will tell us there's no more need any longer for the sun or the moon.

Because the light of God basically will serve as the light to the entire universe in the new heavens and new earth.

So it's really a beautiful study when you think about all these things and the way it all connects.

So God creates ex Nilo out of nothing, in the emptiness and the darkness, and one of the first things he creates with specificity is light.

Again, book of Genesis, not describing to us, not trying to be a science book and tell us how God created everything, but that God created everything.

And that there was a beginning.

And so too, with the first advent, it began in the dark.

A different kind of darkness was laying across the land.

The Old Testament prophets tell us this.

The New Testament writers echo those Old Testament prophets and tell us that there was darkness in the land.

And here comes the light of the world as John describes him, John who knew him perfectly, or personally rather.

And evidently that this God of the Bible works in the dark quite a bit.

As Advent reminds us over and over again, God always overcomes darkness with his glorious light.

Even in the darkness and chaos of the creation event, even in the darkness and chaos of first century Israel, God was at work.

Even in the darkness and chaos of our own times, I would suggest to you, God is at work.

What is God doing?

What is he up to?

Especially with all the violence, the wars, the rumors of wars, all of that out there, all the suffering, all the poverty, all the acrimony, all of the rancor out there in our world.

Is God still at work in this darkness?

The Bible tells us that God is immutable, that he is everlasting, that he never grows faint, he never grows weary, never stops working, even when we don't understand what God might be up to and why.

God allows this or that to happen.

The good news is that God is on the side of the weak.

He's on the side of the faint.

He's on the side of the brokenhearted.

That's all of us at some point in this world.

Each and every one of us.

I look across this room, I see faces.

All behind all of your faces are stories.

I know some of your stories.

I know some of your stories are quite painful.

Some of your stories, you've been through a lot of storms.

You've faced a lot of giants.

You're in the middle of it right now, some of you.

Some of us in this room don't know that we're about to face a giant or we're about to uh to enter a storm.

We have no clue about it.

And yet when it comes, I guess the question will be this: where will you turn for light?

Where will you turn for hope?

Because if it's all about self-creation, self-determination, self, if you're supposed to just look inside of yourself, you're gonna end up running out of hope.

You're gonna run out of joy, you're gonna run out of peace, you're gonna run out of even love for others.

And that's why we need Christ, and that's why we need him to have come.

Both creation and advent began in the dark, and I love the way that 17th-century German hymn writer Katerina von Schlegel put it.

Uh, she wrote about 20 hymns.

One of them, Be Still My Soul, says, uh, Be still my soul, when light you cannot see.

That trembling skies speak to the fear in thee.

The face of God illuminates the night.

Unending peace and trust, his perfect light.

I love this.

So Advent creation both began in the dark.

God is not in any way hampered by the dark.

He's not in a hurry.

God works in the dark perfectly well.

And whatever your darkness, whatever my darkness that we're facing right now, He is at work.

You can trust that He can do that.

As you look back through space-time history and you see Genesis 1 and John 1.

Secondly, not only did creation and advent begin in the dark, but as we look at the story of Christmas from Genesis to Revelation, we also see that we were intentionally designed and we belong to our Creator.

This is massive.

This is a huge shift.

And it's sort of at odds with the way our culture thinks right now.

But it has really important implications for what you think about yourself, what you think about the next person, what you think about your neighbor, what we think about the people that live in another country, what we think about people that don't believe what we believe, what we think about people that don't live the way we think they ought to live.

All of this is impacted by what we believe about God.

And that's why it's so important, I think, that we get this right.

If we were intentionally designed and we belong to our Creator, then we can rest in God's design.

We can rest in God's love for us.

We can relax.

We don't have to be caught up in the nervous failing and frustration that our culture wants us to think that we can just take the reins ourselves and be our own creator.

And then we're just constantly confused and constantly filled with anxiety.

The greatest longing in the human heart, I think, is for belonging.

But more than that, it's for belonging to our creator, knowing that we belong to him, knowing that we are in right relationship with him.

And that's why Christ came.

So if that goes back to the beginning, and if in Genesis chapter 1 and 2 we see that human beings were created in the image of God, male and female, he created them to bear his image.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

Now we know what the reason for our being created was, that we might bear God's image.

It's not, we weren't created so that we could just go out and till the land or just that we could go out and just work our jobs or whatever.

And nothing wrong with those jobs.

But they're just not meant to be the center of everything.

The fact is, too, the way I look at other people is affected greatly by the way I answer the question, what does it mean to be a human person?

If it means that every human person was created in the image of God, now all of a sudden every human life has intrinsic value.

Now I actually am being told by Scripture that every single person, from the womb to the tomb, every life has intrinsic value.

Why?

Because it was created in the image of God.

And that gives great meaning, purpose, and hope to us as we consider what it means to be a human person.

It would be hard to miss the epidemic of selfishness, the smothering darkness and unbridled chaos that fills the cultural wake following the other kind of thinking, that we're just supposed to be our own creator.

We're just supposed to take the reins ourselves.

It becomes more and more obvious that human beings simply cannot bear the weight of creator responsibilities.

We have neither the power nor the wisdom to be self-sufficient.

And that that flies in the face of a lot of what we hear day in and day out in the world in which we live.

The beauty of the message of the Bible is that each and every human person is part of God's creation and belongs to our creat we belong to our creator because we bear his image.

Creation, Paul Chip says, is not meant to be a stopping point for your worship, but rather a stimulant.

In other words, the fact that you were created, that you were designed in God's image, and even the fact that the world, as you look around, you see that there is some beauty and some order out there, even though there is some chaos in a fallen world, there's also much beauty, much order, much that points to intelligent design, that much that points to a creator and a designer who loves beauty and order.

And all of that's really good for answering the question of is there any purpose or any meaning to life?

And leading us then to the response of worship, as Paul Tripp says, the creation that we see around us isn't, we're not supposed to just stop and go, oh, cool, light on a candle.

Let's just fixate on that.

I love the warm fuzzies of Christmas.

Well, so do I.

But the only reason I love them is because it's about Christ having come.

It means this is a game changer.

It means all of history is pivoting now.

God saw how desperately dark we were and invaded the darkness and came as the light of the world to begin recreation.

So we have that Genesis one passage about all creation, and that John one passage about the beginning of the new kingdom, the inauguration, if you will, of the kingdom of heaven come to earth.

And it's a be it's it drives us to worship.

The third.

And final point that I want to make today when I think about the story of Christmas, Genesis to Revelation.

Not only did Advent begin in the dark and creation begin in the dark, and God working in the dark all the time, and not only were we intentionally designed and belonged to our Creator, but notice, I think, from John chapter 1, the proclamation of Advent is that Jesus Christ, the light of the world, has come and he's broken the power of darkness.

John 1 · chapter mention

Sometimes you may feel, like I do, that we're drowning in darkness.

We're drowning in despair.

We're drowning in chaos out there.

Maybe you feel that way.

I don't know.

Maybe from time to time you sense it.

And then you anesthetize yourself with something, or we all can.

And even something as simple as Christmas seeds, all that can sometimes sort of just serve as an anesthetic.

Oh, that makes me feel warm and funny.

Hey, how about a box of puppies?

Wouldn't that make you feel good right now?

You know, and I love all those little animal video things on uh the little, are they called gifts or gifs anymore?

Okay, good, thanks.

Gifts.

That's what they are.

I love those, man.

I think they're great.

But it's all just for a moment.

Just like standing beside the ocean is a moment, just like standing in front of the mountains is just a moment, just like standing at a sunset is just a moment.

And there are road signs that point me to something much greater than themselves.

The creation is just screaming, there's a creator.

And that he wants to set things right, is what the Bible tells us.

It gives us this hope that the light of the world has come and that he's come to dispel the darkness.

I used this quote last week, and I thought it was worth repeating this week.

The creator creatively became the creator to recreate his creation.

That's what Jesus has done.

The creator became one of us to make it possible for us to be reunited with God, to be reconciled, to be restored, to be redeemed, to for things to begin to be set right.

And that's what Christ has done for us.

And so for us, that's why it's good news.

How does all this address those big questions?

How does it impact who we are, our understanding of what it means to be human, our understanding of why we're here and whether there's meaning to life at all?

Well, every human being, again, created in the image of God, now I start to see my neighbor, now in a different light.

Now all of a sudden, the same way Christ came to a world full of lost sinners, the same way Christ came to redeem a rebellious humanity of which I'm a part, He came for me, He loved me so much, I now can turn and love others because it's the light of Christ that's pushed back the darkness in my own heart and my own life as I surrender to him and as I follow Jesus in life.

The meaning of life is to glorify and worship God with our heart, soul, strength, and mind.

And to love our neighbor as ourselves.

This is what Jesus, the light of the world, has come to do through those who believe and follow him.

Throughout the Bible, as I said, darkness can represent a lot of things: emptiness, nothingness, ignorance, willful rebellion.

Darkness leads us to cynicism, covetousness, fatalism, frustration, meaninglessness, self-pity, joylessness, discontentment, the foolishness of self-sufficiency, greed, arrogance, apathy, purposelessness, and hopelessness.

Are you on that list?

I am, a couple times.

And so we stir ourselves up to be reminded that Jesus, the light of the world, has come to recreate his creation in each and every one of us.

There are far too many of us who've been trapped in the bondage of spiritual darkness.

Maybe that kind of darkness describes some of the condition of your heart or your mind right now.

Advent reminds us that God is still at work, even in the darkness of our own time.

He is creating and he is recreating to bring us life in the first place, and then to bring us the light of life in the second place in the person of Jesus Christ, the light of the world who came to rescue us from our bondage to sin and the enslavement to darkness that so has overtaken us.

As we consider these four themes from Scripture: creation, fall, redemption, and restoration through the Advent season, we will see that Jesus is specifically connected to all of them.

He was a part of creation.

We'll see that he's the answer to the fall.

We'll see that he is our Redeemer, that he is the one who will come and be the one to restore as we study each and every week along the way.

What's the proper response to that coming Christ, to the one who one day will come to set all things right?

Well, 300 years ago, the Father of English hymnity answered this question for us in from all that dwell below the skies.

From all that dwell below the skies, let the Creator's praise arise.

Let the Redeemer's name be sung through every land by every tongue.

Let's pray.

Lord, thank you for coming.

You didn't have to come.

You didn't owe it to us.

We didn't have a claim on you.

You and your goodness, because of your great love, because of your faithfulness to your promises to redeem, to rescue and restore.

You came for us.

You drew us to yourself.

You may be calling some by name even now, as we sit here today.

So we pray, Lord, that you'll open the eyes of our hearts so we might see you, we might see our great need for you.

As we come to this table to give you thanks for making it possible for us to be reconciled to a holy and righteous God by your death on the cross.

We give you thanks for your body broken, your blood shed for us, for the remission of our sins.

I pray that not a person in this room would leave this place under any load of guilt or shame, but that we would all turn to you, repent from our sin, turn to you in faith, believing, and trust and hoping in Christ, our Redeemer, who has brought us new life and hope and joy and peace.

We give you thanks because of your great love for us.

In the name of Jesus, we pray.

Amen and amen.