Genesis 1-2:3 – Being Human

Good morning everyone, my name is Mark.

I'm the uh one of the leaders here at City Church.

If you're new or visiting with us, you're you're very welcome as we uh begin this entirely uncontroversial series in the book of uh in the book of Genesis.

Uh there are many people uh here this morning, as indeed uh the September season uh gets underway.

There are many people who come in on a Sunday morning who uh who I don't know uh and who were just getting to know.

Perhaps it is that you have just moved in to the city and you're scoping out churches, you've just started a new job, or you've started studying somewhere, and you come here this morning uh unknown.

Uh but you have an origin story, right?

You have a a backstory, stuff that is brought you here.

And all the people that you don't know in this room, they too have an origin story.

Origins of their family, siblings, parents, country, where they're from, language uh that they uh that they speak as a first language.

Our origin stories also uh contain both the hopes that we have in uh coming to a city like Dublin and the wounds that we carry when we come into this room.

We should never uh we should never uh assume or uh never belittle the journey that it has taken any one of you to sit in this room uh today, both for good and ill.

The job of of us all as a community is to be attentive to, to listen to, uh, and to uh be friends in those origin stories and to respond with with love and compassion.

There's a uh a website uh called 23andMe.

Has anybody done 23andMe?

23andMe is a uh so 23 refers to the the number of pairs of chromosomes that you have.

Uh 23andMe is an online service that will tell you your origin story by virtue of your your DNA, right?

It'll tell you where your ancestors have come from.

You know, those of you who are American, you want to find out are you uh or from the North American continent, might be more fair to say you know you want to know are you of Scandinavian descent, Irish descent, a little bit of German in there, a little bit of Italian.

And 23andMe will figure that out for you.

It'll also tell you what effects your genetics will have on your health going forward.

I was on the 23andM website uh the other day and I was reading some of the testimonials.

Let me uh let me tell you a little bit about Alec.

Alec says Alec uh signed up for 23andMe uh because he was interested in knowing about his health.

But the real surprise came with his ancestry findings.

Knowing the fact, listen to this, knowing the facts changes my sense of identity, Alec said, and it's opened me up to new connections for the first time.

I know exactly who I am.

I spat into a tube and now I know who I am.

23andMe.

There you go.

Uh you can log on, you too, you can spit into a tube and find out who you are.

I find it fascinating.

Like I would really like to do it.

I don't think it'd be a galloping shock.

I'm kind of half Irish, half hobbit.

Um I don't I don't think that the there's anything more interesting there, but we do find origin stories fascinating.

That's why Marvel kind of goes back and does all the origin story movies.

We like to know where we came from.

Why?

Because in a sense, we're all longing for what you what would you say, a sense of place?

We all want to know who we are.

We all want to feel comfortable in our own skin.

That takes time as well, right?

We want to know what is our place, our purpose in the world.

I think we, people of my sort of generation, want to know that more than any other because we're one of the first generations that doesn't have the same uh connections uh into kind of family and uh and occupation.

I imagine that very few people in this room, if anyone does what their father or mother did.

There's a good quick show of hands.

Show, put your hand up if you do, if you currently work the same job or are aspiring to work the same job as one of your parents.

It's like three people out of the 85 or so that are here this morning.

Put up your hand if you currently live in the same country as your parents.

A little bit more, but still there are people that are scattered all over the globe.

You see, we don't, those connections that we relied upon, you lived in the town that your family lived in.

And if you're a guy, you did what your dad did, right?

That was your identity, that was where you got your sense of place from.

And you look around the room, that doesn't happen anymore.

We've moved across the globe, we're scattered across country and continent, we're away from our family, there's no longer any expectation to do what your parents did, and so it's no wonder that that leaves us asking, who am I?

What is my place in the world?

Where do I fit in to these communities?

Where do I fit in and make sense of who I am?

And so people begin to answer these questions, don't they?

They answer these questions by seeking to uh create our own identity, whether it's based on our career, the relationship that you're in, past experience, your sexuality, your your gender, everyone is trying to answer the same fundamental questions.

The questions are these.

Who am I?

The question of identity.

Why am I here?

The question of purpose.

What is the point of my existence?

How did I get here?

Where have I come from?

The question of origins, and then the question, where are we going?

It's the question of endings, the question of goals.

What is the the goal that we're all moving towards?

And here's the thing: you all, we all implicitly answer those questions.

Every worldview that you might be given to begins to answer those questions.

And so this is a slight caricature, but you can answer it for uh for a consistent atheist, consistent atheist, right?

So who am I?

I'm a product of of my atoms.

Why am I here?

Well, for no reason other than to perpetuate my genetic material.

How did I get here through uh through natural selection and random genetic mutation?

Where are we going?

Oblivion?

Different worldviews offer different answers to those questions, and so it's no wonder that the Bible deals with those questions from the very first pages.

Genesis, after all, means beginnings.

It's the origin story of us all, it's the origin story of everyone and everything.

It's it offers insight into our spiritual genetics, as it were.

Why is it that we're doing the book of Genesis, the first 12 or so chapters up until Christmas?

It's not just because I like history, which I do, but because nothing ever changes.

What the book of Genesis offers us is prototypical insights, fundamental insights into how humanity has always been.

So Genesis offers our origin story, and yet it doesn't begin with us.

It begins rather with God.

In the beginning, God.

John Calvin, the uh the French slash Swiss reformer about 500 years ago, in writing his seminal work called The Institutes of the Christian Religion, he says that it is impossible to truly know ourselves without first knowing God.

And so he begins with an examination of who God is before then describing who we are, and that's the right way around.

We must look at who God is, because it is God in whose image we are created.

That's what we will see in just a few moments, and that's fundamentally important, that's what we'll get to.

So the Bible helps us to understand our origins, our spiritual genetics, and why it matters by first asking the question, who is God?

Come on.

There we go.

And that is what we're going to examine first.

Who is God?

Who is the God that is described here in these verses that Jenny read for us?

Verse 1, let's start there.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Genesis 1.1 serves as a headline for the whole chapter.

In the beginning, literally means at some point.

At some point, God created the heavens and the earth.

At some point, God made everything.

Headline of Genesis 1.1, God made it.

And he made it out of nothing.

In the beginning, God created the heavens.

There's nothing else other than the heavens and the earth.

Who made it?

God.

What some people might throw back at you is about saying, well, no, no, this is just one of many uh creation myths that existed in the ancient Near East.

Uh, and they're all very similar.

And you've got you've got the Babylonian myth, and you've got the Christian myth, and you've got the Assyrian myth, and they they all overlap, they're all basically saying the same thing.

That's simply not true.

See the Babylonian myth, for example, uh, in uh the epoch of uh Gilgamesh.

I'm just gonna geek out for a moment.

Uh in the epic of Gilgamesh, the the the chief god in the Babylonian pantheon is a guy called Marduk.

And what Marduk does in order to create is he slays the great serpent, the great serpent of chaos called Tiamat.

He slays uh Tiamat, and out of the the bowels of Tiamat, uh the universe is made and humans are formed.

The point being that Marduk is taking something and refashioning it into something else.

Not so the God of the Bible.

It is only the God of the Bible who creates out of nothing.

He's not taking some pre-formed um cosmic play-doh, right?

And and fashioning it into a tree.

Uh it's not, it doesn't work like that.

God made the heavens and the earth, all that is, all that is, or as Paul would say it, all that is seen and unseen in his letter to the Colossians.

And what he is goes on to do, verse 2, the earth was out form and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep.

The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

The waters in biblical language are always an image of chaos, right?

That's why when you read the book of Revelation, when John says that there was no more, no longer any sea, that's not to bum out all the Australians who like to surf.

The reason why there's no water is because there's no longer any chaos.

John isn't interested in the hydrology of the new creation.

He's saying chaos is gone.

The Spirit is hovering over this chaos, and this is the first thing that we need to learn about God.

God brings order out of chaos.

There is chaos in verse two, formless, void, darkness, chaotic, deep, and what happens, verse three, and God said, Let there be light, and there was light.

God speaks into the chaos, and order comes to pass.

And the rest of the passage shows us this order, even in how the passage is structured.

Let me give you a quick rundown from this image.

Hopefully you can see it.

These are the days, and you'll see a very tight structure between one and four, two and five, three and six.

One on the left hand side, you've got forming, division, dividing, separating, right?

And then five, six, seven on the left hand side, oh sorry, four, five, six, left-hand side, you've got him filling or giving purpose to.

Even the structure of Genesis 1 talks about the order that God is bringing out of chaos.

He does some forming, separating, dividing, and then he does filling or giving purpose to.

One of the chief objections perhaps to a passage uh like this is you know, if somebody's read it before, they might say something like, Well, you know, uh you God doesn't uh it says that God doesn't create the sun until day four, but you've got light and dark.

How does that work?

Isn't that not a contradiction, right?

From the very first passage, God said, Let there be light, but you don't see the sun until verse 14.

Verse 14 says, and and God said, Let there be lights in the expanse of the heaven to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons for days and for years.

Let them be lights in the expanse in the heavens to give light upon the earth.

This repeated phrase, let them be, or let there be, does not mean bring into existence.

It rather is talking about let them function in this way.

In Psalm 33, the Sama says, Let your steadfast love be ever upon us.

It's the same phrase.

The psalmist is not saying, Let your steadfast love come into existence.

He's rather there, let your steadfast love function like this.

And so God here is describing the function, the purpose of the great lights that govern the day and the night, that give markers to seasons and for days.

Good faithful Christians believe in both.

It is important to see that whatever position you hold on that, that it is not a litmus test for biblical orthodoxy.

You mean you might think, you know, uh um people might not say this, but it'd be like, well, uh, I become a Christian, but the whole literal 24 hour thing, you know, I just can't get alongside with that.

Well, that's okay.

I actually don't think that Christianity rises and falls on whether or not they're literal 24 hour days.

They could well be.

Is our God powerful enough to do that?

Yes.

What's my answer?

What's my position?

I don't know.

I don't know.

We can talk about that in the QA if I get a if I get a motor on and we do one.

The point is that Christianity doesn't rise or fall in whether or not you believe in 24-hour days.

The point that that the author is trying to get across here is that it is an orderly creation, forming, filling, day and night.

There's a rhythm to it.

And what we'll see when we look at the Sermon on Work from Genesis 2 in two weeks' time, that one of the things that the day and the night, the 24-hour days does is it gives us a pattern for work and for rest.

That pattern for work and for rest is not something that we have adopted to ourselves.

Countries and societies have tried to change it.

Uh, the uh the Chinese uh the communist revolution tried to change to a 10-day week, and people just they literally died from exhaustion.

It's to show that the the pattern of work and rest is something received that God is displaying for us in an orderly way.

What else do we see?

God brings order out of chaos.

We see for also that He is uh He is the initiator, He is the one doing the creating.

You know, the child asks, you know, who made God?

But that gets us into problems, isn't it?

Because then you can say, well, who made the thing that made God?

And who made the thing that made the thing that made God?

There's an infinite regression there.

At some point, in order to be logical, there has to be a first cause, and God is that first cause, he is that unmoved mover, he is the initiator of creation.

And how does he create this is the next thing to see?

How does he create?

He speaks.

He speaks.

What do we see?

Verse 3, and God said, Let there be light, and there was light.

Or verse 6, and let there be, and sorry, and God said, Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, let it separate waters from waters, and God made the expanse.

And you see, down the very end of verse 7, and it was so.

God not only speaks, but his word is effectual.

There's a repeated refrain all the way down, and it was so, verse 9.

God speaks, and creation obeys.

God speaks, and it is so.

God speaks and he brings order out of chaos, he brings light to the darkness, he brings matter into existence, he fills the earth by the power of his word.

Not only that, but in speaking, he creates, but he also names these things.

You see?

He called the light day, verse five, and he called the darkness night.

Naming something is an act of authority.

It's an act of governance, of rule.

As you see, that Adam names all the animals.

Graciously gives him that power, that ability to name things.

Why?

Because Adam is supposed to rule under God.

God rules his world by the word that he speaks.

He governs the creation that he has made.

We also see in this passage that God here is the only God.

God is the only God.

Genesis is written in a context of plural worship where people worship creatures, the sun, the moon, the stars.

The river, that the river Nile was worshipped as a god.

And one of the things that Genesis 1 is doing is God is saying to us, saying to its first readers, don't worship created things.

I made them.

Don't worship the sun.

I made it.

Don't worship the waters.

I made them.

I'm desperately sophisticated.

I would never worship the sun.

We all give esteem value to worship to created things.

Whether it's money, power, sex, comfort.

All of those things are created.

God would say, I made them.

Don't worship them.

Worship me.

They are made as a echo of who I am.

You know how blown away you are by that thing that you worship?

How blown away you are when you stand at the precipice of the Grand Canyon.

It's but a it's but a fracture of the marvelous nature of the God who is the creator.

He's saying don't worship it.

Worship me.

I made it.

We are so given as human beings to simply seeing that which is around us.

Our hearts get captivated by created things and we lose sight of the creator.

C.S.

Lewis describes us as half-hearted creatures.

He says that human beings we're like we're like slum children who are content to sit and make mud pies because we cannot conceive of what it's like to have a holiday at the beach.

God in Genesis 1 is lifting our gaze from the created world and saying, don't worship it.

Worship me.

I made it.

We also learn here, just in hint form, that God Himself is a community.

That's a fundamental understanding of who God is.

If you're thinking about Christianity or if you're a new believer, or even just if it's not something you thought about.

It is fundamental to understand that God is relational, that he is a community himself.

And we see hints of it here, right in the very first page of your Bible.

Let me give you two.

When he creates the man and the woman, verse 26, then God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness.

Not my image, not my likeness.

Second piece of evidence is slightly more conceptual.

But there are three players operating here in Genesis one.

There is the God who speaks.

There is the word spoken.

In Genesis 2.

There is the breath of God.

When we read, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters, the word for spirit is the same word for breath.

The word rua is a very breathy word.

And so what do we see?

We see a speaker.

We see a word.

We see a breath.

What we learn as the Bible unfolds is that Jesus is that second person of the Trinity, that word made flesh.

That's how John begins his gospel.

In the beginning was the word.

And the word was with God, and the word was God.

And we read on that he is the creative agent.

Just hints.

Just hints in Genesis 1 that God is relational, that he is a community.

So what?

Why does any of this matter?

Why does it matter that God is the one who brings order out of chaos?

That he is a speaker, that he rules by his word, that his word is effectual, that he is the only God to be worshipped.

Why does any of that matter?

Well, it shows us, and it showed the first readers, that God is not the God, say, of Greek myth.

He is not localized, he is not limited.

He is the maker of heavens and earth.

Is there anything outside of that?

No.

He is not some parochial deity, nor is he an absentee landlord, nor is he the blind watchmaker that doesn't care about his creation.

He is intimately involved in it.

As we'll see next week with the creation of the man, he actually gets down in the dust and forms the first human being.

Our God, the God revealed in Genesis 1, is not cold or unemotional, uninspired or uninspiring.

He is the supreme scientist, the supreme artist, the supreme mathematician and musician, poet and engineer, writer, medic, vet.

He is the supreme orator and chemist.

Every discipline that you are given to.

Anything that it is that you study, God is it par excellence.

And we follow him in it.

And what else do we see about God?

God delights in his creation.

Repeated refrain.

He saw that it was good.

Interesting aside, I'm not going to make any theological point about it, but if you assume that day one is uh is Sunday going by a Jewish calendar, uh then day two obviously is Monday, and day two is the only one that God doesn't call good.

So we can infer that God doesn't like Mondays.

Um again, see?

That's a god that you can worship who gets that that Mondays suck.

But other than that, he delights in the works of his hands and calls it good.

That is to say, the matter matters.

You've been given to kind of to forms of spirituality, the thing, no, no, it's not a it doesn't matter what you do in your body, or I've got to kind of beat my body into submission, you know, it just really matters if I'm spiritual.

A very spiritual person.

You hear people say that?

A very spiritual person.

No, no.

Genesis 1 shows us that God is interested in the physicality of the universe that He has made.

He is interested in matter, He delights in it, and then He encourages us to delight in it.

So delight in God's good creation.

Given who God is, who are we?

Perhaps the most mind-blowing part of this passage is verses 26 to 28, when we read that human beings, we are made in the image of God.

Verse 26, then God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness.

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 every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

So God created man in his own image.

In the image of God, he created him, male and female.

Express the image-burenness of God.

We are made in the image of this God who creates.

So what does that mean?

Well, it means many things, but let me give you a very quick rundown.

It means that we are made for community.

You need to be with other people.

I know you might say that you're an introvert, and that's fine.

That just means how you operate in community.

We all need to be with others.

In a society that prizes individualism and individual expression, one of the things that creates is loneliness and disconnection.

People in our city are desperately lonely.

Why?

Because they're made in the image of a relational God.

We are created for connection.

God says, let us, not let me, or I will.

We crave community because we are made in the image of a communal God.

What else does it say about us?

It says that we're made to have dominion.

Second half of verse 26, let them have dominion, let them rule, let them govern over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, the livestock.

Basically, you we are God's vice regents.

We are his deputies on the earth, and so have a duty to steward creation rightly.

We are given dominion.

One of the ways that is expressed that I've alluded to, and we'll look at more next week, is that Adam names things.

God names, Adam names, both expressions of rule, of governance.

He then blesses them, verse 28, and says, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.

He tells them to go, to create, to be curious, to explore, to fill and to cultivate.

God creates, and he sends us out to create.

We do not create in the same way, we do not create out of nothing.

I have never created anything out of nothing.

I don't know if you have.

If you have, you might be a witch.

Um you should be careful.

Uh, it doesn't happen, right?

We do not create in the same way that God creates, but it's an analogous creation, right?

We're sent to fill the earth, just as God filled, so we follow him in that work.

What it also tells us about being made in the image of God is that your identity, your origin story, your place, who you are, is a glorious gift.

Your identity is a gift.

We are made in the image of God.

Your identity is something to be received and lived into, not to be created ourselves.

The entry of sin into the world in Genesis 3 has caused us to reject this notion, this notion of a given identity.

And as a consequence, we're left in search of who we are.

The end of Genesis 3, it talks about how the man and the woman were they were sent out and they began to wander east of Eden.

All of humanity has been wandering east of Eden.

Trying to find our way home.

Every single one of us wants to find our way home.

What Genesis 1 tells us is you've been created in the image of God.

Receive that identity with all of the dignity and the value and worth that that holds, and live who you were made to be.

Some people, in order to form their own identity, cling to their achievements, or they place value on their life because of how useful they are.

There's an awful story six or seven years ago about a man who was seeking to end his own life because he was suffering from a progressive neurological condition that they were calling, that they called locked-in syndrome.

Basically, his brain was fine, but his body was shutting down, and he wanted to end his own life.

And the reason why he wanted to end his own life is because he said he was no longer useful.

We must be very careful.

As tragic as that situation is, and the deep sympathy I have for that man who is now passed away, and for his family, we must be very careful not to base a person's value on their usefulness.

Being the image of God is of great value, and it is something that is it is immutable, that cannot be taken away.

Being made in the image of God is not just a nice idea, it is actually fundamental to our understanding of the world and how to operate in it.

Being the image of God is fundamental to our understanding of ethics and of justice.

Why don't you murder people?

I think, well, that would kind of go bad for me.

But one of the fundamental reasons of why we don't just kill at will is because of a belief that human beings are made in the image of God, and that means that they're valuable, inherently valuable.

Why shouldn't we end the life of those that we deem undesirable because of their race or their sex or their point of gestation?

Because they are made in the image of God and they are inherently valuable.

Medics in the room.

What's the cornerstone of medical ethics?

That human beings are made in the image of God.

What is ethically permissible as you think about things like medical procedures?

It is very good to think in this sort of way.

Imagine for a second that if you are a medic or you're thinking about medical ethics, that every human being is an old Renaissance painting.

An old Renaissance painting, right?

And it's slightly faded and worn.

Your job is to restore the image, not to change it.

Medical ethics, ethics in the world is about restoring the image.

We don't get to further distort it or to paint over it.

So something like this is like IVF, right?

All the medical ethics are kind of what you do with the material, let's put that to the side for just a second.

One of the things that IVF does is it restores the image of God medically.

It restores the created purpose.

Okay?

It's an act of image restoration, not of further marring of the image.

Like so many cosmetic surgeries and things like that.

It's fundamental.

Finally, as our as image bearers, we are made to fill the earth and subdue it.

This is what we call the cultural mandate.

God tells the man and the woman to go out into the world, to develop societies and cultures, to paint and to make music, to build infrastructure and policies.

Why?

Because we image a creative God.

For the Christian, this command to fill the earth, to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it finds its fullest expression in Jesus' words at the end of the Gospels.

At the end of Matthew's Gospel, Jesus says his disciples to go and to make other disciples.

That is the Great Commission.

The Great Commission is the fulfillment of the cultural mandate.

To truly fill the earth and subdue it is to fill the earth with new disciples of Jesus.

To subdue the chaos of sin and to bring new life to being by the power of God's Holy Spirit.

Filling the earth is achieved by gospel proclamation.

That is not, that is not in any way, I'm not denigrating any other act of working.

As we'll see next, uh not next week, the week after next.

But simply to say that it finds its fullest expression in our going to the nations, in our filling the earth.

Let me end very quickly with the what the goal of creation is.

The goal of creation is at the start of chapter two.

The heavens and the earth were uh were formed, and all the hosts of them, first one.

And on the seventh day, God finished his work and all that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he has done.

So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on the seven because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in his creation.

It's one of the reasons why I don't think that uh Genesis 1 is advocating for uh for uh literal 24-hour periods, because the seventh day doesn't have it.

There's no evening and morning.

What do we even infer?

The seventh day still is going on, the seventh day is the goal.

Rest is the goal, rest is still there for us.

God rested.

Why do we tell him because he's tired?

No.

Because rest is the goal of creation.

God gives us, both in our wake, a pattern of work and rest, but he shows us a greater, a greater insight into where all of the world is going.

The journey of creation is the journey towards rest.

Rest from weariness, yes, but rest from our wandering, rest from our wandering east of Eden, trying to figure out who we are, rest from our self-reliance, rest from trying to uh to please others, rest from trying to please God on our own terms.

The goal of creation is to rest in the God who made us, to rest in the identity that He has generously given us, not just in creation, but in redemption as the Bible has unfolded.

Because the word of God, that agent of creation, that word of God, as we saw, was made flesh for us.

And that word of God has spoken again, as Peter alluded to.

He has spoken light into our darkness, he has spoken order into our chaos, he has spoken life to our death.

Jesus, the word made flesh.

Perfectly images God and has perfectly put God on display for all to see.

He images God in a way that we never could.

And by his death and resurrection, he restores our image, he restores our identity.

We are now new creation people, all of us who are trusting in Jesus, no longer wandering, no longer wondering who we are or what our place is.

And that word made flesh looks at us and says, Come to me, all who are weary, and I will give you rest.

Rest is the goal.

That's why the writer of the Hebrew says that there remains a rest for all of God's people.

And we should yearn and strive to enter that rest.

A rest from works righteousness.

A rest from our deadly doing.

When we rest from our self-justification, we can truly give ourselves to the works that God has made us for.

When we rest from worshiping the creation, we can enjoy it for the good gift that it is.

When we rest from trying to prove ourselves, we can truly steward the creation around us, working with excellence and fulfilling the creation mandate of making more disciples of Jesus and calling them into that rest that He offers.