Creation and God's Triune Beauty (Genesis 1:1-2:3)

Amen.

And a reading from the twenty-eighth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, starting at the 16th verse, Matthew, Matthew 28, 16 to 20.

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.

And when they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted.

And Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, and behold, I am with you always to the very end of the age.

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Friends, let us confess our triune faith in the words of the Apostles' Creed.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.

He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.

He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.

He descended to the dead.

On the third day he rose again, he descended to the and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

Amen.

And friends, let's take a moment and pause and open up our hearts to the Lord as we enter in prayer.

Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servant's grace by the confession of a true faith to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine majesty to worship the unity.

Keep us steadfast in this faith and worship.

And bring us at last to see you in your one and eternal glory, O Father, who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign, one God, forever and ever.

Amen.

Amen.

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

Well, greetings on this wonderful, blessed Trinity Sunday, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

I'll confess, Trinity Sunday, when I first started hanging out with Anglicans and living through the church calendar, quickly became one of my favorite Sundays because the Trinity is such a wonderful mystery for us to behold, for us to approach, for us to try and apprehend by God's grace.

God is one in being and three in persons.

And we just confess that, of course, in the Apostles' Creed, that we believe in God, the Father Almighty, we believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, and we believe in the Holy Spirit.

And the Athanasian Creed invites us to further reflection.

The Athanasian Creed is the third creed we confess as a church.

It's our lesser known creed.

It says this, so that we worship one God in Trinity and the Trinity in unity.

Not three gods, but one God, not three lords, but one Lord, who are altogether co-eternal and co-equal.

We worship one God, but not a solitary God.

We worship one God who is three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Is this a wonderful mystery?

Yes, it is.

It's a wonderful mystery.

Is it confusing?

Yes, it is.

It is a confusing truth because we are such finite human creatures trying to grapple with the wonderful, overwhelming mystery of who God reveals himself to be, and we're using language to the best of our ability to respond to God's mystery that he reveals to us.

The truth is because it's confusing, it's easy for the Trinity to become kind of embarrassing to us.

It doesn't make sense, and it's something that we're tempted, I think, often to sort of file away.

Maybe because we don't exactly see the relevance of the Trinity.

I mean, God might be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but he's way up in heaven and he's kind of doing his thing, and I'm kind of doing my thing, and I'm not sure that that has a direct correlation with my day-to-day life.

It's very easy for us to file away the Trinity, just like a 19th-century uh Enlightenment theologian, uh Friedrich Schleiermacher, my namesake Friedrich Schleiermacher, very different dude though, uh, filed away the doctrine of the Trinity in his very influential volume, The Christian Faith.

He filed it away in an appendix because to him the Trinity was kind of like this embarrassing footnote to an otherwise intellectually respectable uh tradition of faith and uh and learning.

It's easy for us to file away the Trinity, I think, in our own lives and in our own hearts.

And Trinity Sunday invites us to reflect on this wonderful truth of who God is, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that changes everything.

I think the Trinity is not an embarrassing footnote.

It is a wonderful truth for us to behold, for us to approach, for us to receive this morning.

In fact, a 20th century Swiss theologian Karl Barth puts it the best way I've ever heard it.

He says, the triunity of God, the fact that God is Trinity, the triunity of God is the secret of his beauty.

If we want to know something about what makes God so beautiful, so wonderful, so delightful, then we're being led right into the heart of the Holy Trinity.

And that's a wonderful thing, friends.

Don't we want to know who God is, worship God in spirit and truth, behold his wonders and his delights once again?

We're being led into the heart of the Trinity because it's the secret of his beauty.

The Trinity means God is within himself a community of love.

God is love.

That's what 1 John chapter 4 says.

1 John 4 · chapter mention

God is love.

And the Trinity, as a British theologian Michael Reeves, writes, is the vital oxygen of the Christian life.

It's like a breath of fresh air for us to behold his mystery once again.

And I'm convinced that his actions bear witness to who he is.

God does who he is.

And I think we see that in creation.

We had a lengthy and wonderful reading from Genesis chapter one and part of chapter two today.

The mystery, the secret of God's beauty is his triunity, is the Trinity, and we see that, we see that beauty in the act of creation.

So, friends, let's take a fresh look at creation through this wonderful mystery of the Trinity, and let's behold God's secret beauty once again.

So, just a quick disclaimer as we dive into our Genesis passage today, and it's it's kind of the obligatory disclaimer when we dive into creation texts.

It's just very easy for us to look at texts like this with 21st century eyes and to begin asking 21st century questions of this text.

This is an ancient Near Eastern text.

God inspired this text by his Holy Spirit.

It is his authoritative word, and it's a word that was given to a culture that in many ways is very different from ours.

It's not that it has nothing to do with us, it's that if we're going to understand what this text meant to means to us, we have to understand what it first meant to its original audience.

So if we dive right into questions, I think, about science and about the mechanics of how creation came into being and how that relates to maybe we we want to talk about Big Bang or evolution or however, we're starting to ask 21st century questions and we need to be mindful to begin to ask the kind of questions its first audience asked of it.

I'm not trying to skirt the question, I'm not trying to overstate or understate anything, but let's dive into Genesis 1 as it wants to be known, as it wants to, uh, as it wants to disclose to us who God is.

I think Genesis chapter 1 tells us less about the scientific how of creation and more about the theological who of creation.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

Genesis 1 wants us to behold the beauty and majesty of our creator God more than anything else.

It wants us to look at the creator and say, wow, he is wonderful.

More than getting caught up in any one particular theory, we behold the wonder of the creator and we say, wow, that is an amazing God.

The point of Genesis 1 and 2, I think, is as succinct as biblical scholar Walter Brugemann puts it.

He says, the point of Genesis 1 and 2 is that the creator creates creation.

The creator creates creation.

And that seems pretty intuitive, but once we start unpacking that, we suddenly realize what a powerful and wonderful mystery that is.

Because who is this creator?

Who does he show himself to be?

Why does he create?

What's the purpose of his creation?

What's the meaning of the creation?

And what what about the creation?

What does he think about creation?

Why did he create at all?

Why is there something instead of nothing?

See, let's step into a moment into the mindset of someone living in the ancient Near East, someone who might be reading this text for the first time.

See, there's many different ideas of how creation came into being in the ancient Near East, and most of them have something to do with violence.

They have something to do with competition between local deities and local gods vying for control, vying for power and influence over one another.

It has a lot to do with these power struggles, with scandals, with very adult themes, the kind of things you'd see in HBO programming, right?

It has a lot to do with this constant struggle for power and influence in the spiritual realms.

And somehow, either through an act of violence or through an through an accident, creation came into being.

And the truth is, I think these similar or similar narratives to these ancient Near Eastern narratives, as primitives as they might seem to us, seem to play out in their own way in our day-to-day.

Because we seem to live in a world of competition.

We seem to live in a world that vis for power and influence.

We fight to get to the top of the hill and then we fight some more to stay there.

Through sex, through money, through power, through these cultural idols of ours, we seek to gain power and influence over one another.

These ancient Near Eastern narratives seem to play themselves out in our own context today, in our own way.

In the midst of all this, the author of Genesis has a very stark contrast and statement.

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

So let's notice how many gods he's talking about here.

He's not talking about a whole pantheon.

He's not talking about many small cat small g gods vying for control or competition with one another.

He's talking about one God, one sovereign God who reigns and rules over all things.

He's talking about a creation that was not an accident or a result of competition.

He's talking about a creation that was purposeful.

He's talking about a creation that is meaningful.

You see, and this leads us to the heart of Israel's confession about who God is.

Deuteronomy chapter 6 has this creedal statement that the Lord your God, the Lord is one.

Deuteronomy 6 · chapter mention

In contrast to all these pagan polytheistic beliefs surrounding them, the people of God confess that there is one God, one God who reigns supreme over all things, and this one God created everything through a sovereign and purposeful choice.

He created the heavens and the earth, the material and the immaterial together, and it is good, and it is purposeful.

So Genesis continues to say that the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.

And the spirit, God's spirit, that is his ruach, his it can be translated as spirit or wind or breath.

The ruach, the spirit of God, was hovering over the face of the waters.

And the word picture we get here is as though a potter is molding a vessel with his own hands.

God is not disinterested in creation.

God is getting his fingers dirty in creation.

He's delighted to get into the garden of creation, so to speak.

Rachel and I have been getting into gardening lately, and it's hard to get involved in your garden without getting your hands dirty.

But it's a delightful thing.

It's not a burdensome thing, is it?

God is delighted to get involved in his creation and mold it.

And in a similar way that the spirit hovers over the face of the deep here in Genesis 1, the Spirit will hover as a dove over the waters of Christ's baptism.

The Spirit is molding and shaping and renewing and forming creation according to God's purpose and his will.

So God says, Let there be light, and there was light, and God saw that the light was good.

God's purposeful action results in something good, not an accident, not something God would rather forget, or not something that God has to compete with or subjugate.

God looks at creation, he says, That is good.

And notice, by the way, how God creates.

God creates by the power of his word.

He speaks the word and creation responds by coming into being.

Well, the earliest Christians didn't miss this significance.

John begins his gospel with familiar words by saying, in the beginning was the word.

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

That is to say, this word that brought creation to being was coequal, co-eternal, existed with God since before the beginning.

He, John continues, that is, he's a person, he was in the beginning with God.

All things were made, created through him.

He's the agent of creation.

He brought everything into being.

And without him not anything was made that was made.

In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

Notice Genesis chapter 1, day one, God separates the light from the darkness.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

Notice who's the light for the earliest Christians.

The word that spoke creation of the being, the word that was the agent of creation is the light that is the life of men and women and believers everywhere.

So notice Jesus Christ, God the Son, is the eternal word.

That's what we confess in our creed, isn't it?

That God the Father created heaven and earth.

He's the initiator of creation, that God the Son, the Word, is the agent of creation, and the Spirit hovers and forms and shapes creation according to God's purpose.

So what does creation tell us about God's triune beauty?

It tells us that creation is a great delight to God, that he is purposeful in his creation.

We don't live in an accident, and we certainly don't live in a creation that's a result of violence and competition.

Because if we did, then there's nothing more for us than violence and create and competition in creation.

There's nothing more than vying for power and influence and control over one another.

But because God was delighted to create, because God is a community of love in his very self, and that love overflowed into creation, now we live in a creation that has purpose and meaning, and our life finds its purpose and meaning in the context of that very loving, creating community of God's very self.

The psalmist in Psalm 33 writes this By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host.

See, we live in a creation that is not the result of a power struggle.

We live in a creation where we can be liberated to love and love our Lord and be loved by God, and then love and serve one another in the same.

So God creates.

We see that in Genesis chapter 1.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

Day one through three, we see him separating that creation that he's spoken to being.

And now day four through six, he fills that creation with wonderful things.

We pick it up at verse 26, Genesis 1, verse 26.

Genesis 1:26

God, notice singular God, God is one.

God said, He's having an inner dialogue with his own self, let us, plural, make man, that is Adam, human, humankind, in our image, after our likeness, and let them, that Adam, which is now plural, 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.

And here we have this summary statement, this wonderful poetic statement.

God created man, humankind, in his own image.

In the image of God, he created him.

Male and female, he created them.

And the narrative goes on to say that he blessed them and he invited them to join him in his creative activity by cultivating and flourishing in creation and causing creation to flourish.

And whereas God has called everything that preceded this good, God now concludes, this creation, these human beings, male and female, they're not just good, they are very good.

In Hebrew, it literally says, they are good, good.

They are very good.

And God is delighted in a particular and special way by these creatures he's created in his image.

So what does it mean to bear God's image?

It means to be a representative.

It means to show forth his likeness, to be a kind of representative of who he is.

I think the people of Israel, when they were reading this for the first time, would have had some ideas of what it means to bear a divine image.

I think they would have thought of number one, a monarch or a king, because it was always said of, well it was it was almost always said of ancient Near Eastern kings that in some way they bore the likeness of the divinity that they served and who they ruled under, whose power they ruled under.

So it was understood, okay, well, royalty in some ways reflects the life of the divine, because obviously gods are always trying to, you know, vie for power and control and influence, and because the king sits at the top of the hill, so to speak, then they represent God's likeness in that way.

But notice our Genesis text says that all human beings bear God's image.

All human beings are invited into the royal task of exercising godly dominion, of reigning and ruling with God, of partnering with God and cultivating creation and seeing it flourish.

We are invited into that royal uh uh agency of cultivating creation as partners with God.

Not that we're doing 50% of the work and God's doing 50% of the work by no means, but God wants to empower us for the tasks that we have at hand, the ways God is calling us to serve, the way God is calling us to serve the well-being of the world.

God wants to see it flourish and he wants to use us to that end.

Notice too that image bearers are not just created, are there well, they're created male and female.

There's a sense of shared unity.

We are all of us human and all of us share in that dignity and worth and value and respect and sacredness of what it means to bear God's likeness.

And yet there's distinction too between male and female.

There's something about relating to the other that represents something of who God is as he relates to the other in his own very tripersonal self.

God is created us to share this gift of community, of unity with one another.

And the marriage union reflects this divine love that spills over into creation.

But whether or not we're married doesn't matter.

When we enter into relationship, when we enter into community, we are experiencing something of what it's like within God's own very loving, eternal, personal self.

The Father who loves the Son, who loves the Father in the personal unity of the Holy Spirit.

See, God is delighted by diversity.

He's delighted to invite us into the sacred gift of community.

He's delighted that all human beings bear his image and share this life of love with one another, this value, this dignity, this sacredness.

From conception till natural death, we bear God's secret image, pardon me, sacred image to the world.

And friends, this is what brings us to the tragedy of these last couple of weeks, where we have seen image bearers like George Floyd and Ahmad Aubrey and Briona Taylor and so many others who've been victims of such horrendous injustice and prejudice.

These are image bearers in whom God is delighted, and yet we see the result of sin and prejudice and oppression.

These are beings who, these are people God has created in his image in whom he delights, and he calls us all to share that value and dignity and worth and sacredness in and with one another.

See, friends, we were created in the image of God.

We were created to participate in the very divine life and love of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

But we have been marred by sin, haven't we?

Genesis chapter 3 witnesses to our first parents who chose to reject God and determine what is good and evil for themselves.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

And so Paul concludes in 1 Corinthians 15 that in Adam all die.

We have been born into a state of separation and death and sin.

Spiritually, yes, physically, yes.

But this is not the way that God has created things to be.

This fallen state, corporately, individually, and inclined to sin.

So God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, commits himself to a restor a plan of restoration, restoring his fallen creation.

The word that spoke creation into being now enters into his very own creation.

The word became flesh, incarnated himself in the person of Jesus Christ.

And now the word, God the Son, takes on our fallen, broken, sinful humanity into himself, subjects himself to the power and dominion of sin, and through the cross breaks this power and puts it to death, so that we who participate with Christ in a death like his may too be united in a resurrection like his.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are committed to a restoring and renewing and redeeming work, and that is the resurrection of Christ.

As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive, is what Paul writes.

And the Holy Spirit who hovered over the waters of creation is now the power of the resurrection himself, and is now the power of the resurrection who indwells us regenerate believers, is what Paul wrote writes in Romans chapter 8.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

And so now we who by grace share in this very Trinitarian life and love and salvation are invited to share that with one another and with all creation.

Paul concludes this section with a Trinitarian grace.

He says, The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

That's our reading in 2 Corinthians today.

But let's notice what Paul says right before that.

He says, Finally, brothers and sisters, rejoice, aim for restoration, comfort one another, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you.

Greet one another with a holy kiss.

See, friends, this is all characteristic of who God is for all eternity.

A loving, personal community of rejoicing, of restoration, of comfort, of agreement, of peace, of love.

And we're invited to share this with God and share this with one another and with all creation.

See, just as God's love spills over in the act of creation, so too our love, as we're invited into the grace of his community, spills over into the creation that God has placed us in.

Friends, would New Song be a place that is representative of God's triune love and invitation and grace.

So, friends, we can rest in the fact that God is sovereign, that he has a purpose for all creation, that he has redeemed it through his word and will come in gain and glory to renew it.

God has created you in his image, and you are a source of great delight to him.

By God's grace, we can strive to celebrate, honor, and protect human life created in God's image.

By grace, we can practice a life of Trinitarian love and community.

And friends, that's messy stuff.

And when we mess up, we have to go to one another and we have to ask for forgiveness, don't we?

So we can be restored and we can be renewed in this very community that God invites us into.

The triunity of God is the secret of his beauty.

And it's this secret that God is inviting us into today.

And so we pray in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, give us grace, Lord, to enter into this secret, wonderful beauty that is yours that we see in creation, your purposeful creation.

You've created us image bearers to represent your life and love to one another and to all creation.

Give us grace, Lord, to enter into that even now.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.