Back to the Beginning No.1 The Act of Creation - "Very Good"

We're looking at Genesis 1, verses 1 to 31. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty.

Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.

God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening, and there was morning, the first day. And God said, let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.

So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it, and it was so. God called the expanse sky, and there was evening, and there was morning, the second day. And God said, let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.

And it was so. God called the dry ground land, and the gathered waters he called seas. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, let the land produce vegetation, seed-bearing plants, and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds. And it was so. The land produced vegetation, plants bearing seed according to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds.

And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the third day. And God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons, and days, and years.

And let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth. And it was so. God made two great lights, the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night.

He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good.

And there was evening, and there was morning, the fourth day. And God said, let the water team with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky. So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teams according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.

And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water and the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth. And there was evening, and there was morning, the fifth day.

And God said, let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds, livestock, creatures that move along the ground, the wild animals, each according to its kind. And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds.

And God saw that it was good. Then God said, let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created man in his own image.

In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. God blessed them and said to them, be fruitful and increase in number.

Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and over every living creature that moves on the ground. Then God said, I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth, and every tree that has its fruit with seed in it, they will be yours for food.

And to all the beast of the earth and all the birds of the air, and all the creatures that move on the ground, everything that has the breath of life in it, I give every green plant for food. And it was so. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day. And I'd be grateful if you'd have your Bibles open at that particular reading, that majestic statement of the way God created the heavens and the earth. I was so unspiritual as to be thinking driving into the tab of a song that started off, let's start at the very beginning, the very good place to start.

Was that Julie Andrews and Sound of Music or something like that? Let's start at the very beginning. Well, yes, a very good place to start because as far as we're concerned this morning, it's the book of Genesis. It's in the opening statement.

Somebody has said, we can never know who or what we are till we know at least something of what God is. And that's the reason why I've decided in this new series when alas, I'll not be helped by my competent colleague, Tim Saunders, to come right back to the opening statements of the Bible and to lift out something of the theology that is contained within these early chapters. And don't let the word theology put you off because it would be true to say that the heart of all reasoning is theological.

The heart of all understanding stems from God. Now, Tim Saunders, you need to know about God to be able to understand yourself and the reason for this life. If God does not exist, then you have no point.

But that's why it could be well argued that the opening statement of the Bible is a summary of all that is to come. Let me approach that another way. If you understand the first verse of the Bible, then you have grasped the immensities and the profundities that follow in the pages that are yet to be.

Genesis chapter one occupies one page and it is the prologue, the preface to the 1,000 or so pages which are to follow. In the beginning, God. This statement and the successive active creation is a curtain raiser and as we go through it right now, you will see something of the wonder of God at the beginning and be quickened to realize that that very God who was active at the beginning is still active in the 20th century.

In the beginning, Professor Dawkins was not an accidental Big Bang. In the beginning was not hydrogen. In the beginning was not some amoeba, some simple form of life.

In the beginning was and is God. And this Bible that we look at is first of all, primarily, a book about God. Not about man, not about science, not about any of the several disciplines like cosmology or history or geography.

They're there. I'm not in any way arguing against that but what I am saying is that the Bible is a book about God and its first statement is pivotal to all that is to come and if you have no grasp at all of the significance of the first statement, I lovingly but critically say, you have little grasp, if any, of the reason for life. So within these verses, this first chapter of Genesis, there is what I have called the person of God and some description of him and also the purpose of God.

So under those two headings, we'll make our way through this passage. The person of God? Let's subdivide that because it seems to me that what you have to gather from what is taught just within this first verse is that God is necessary. He is necessary to an understanding of life.

In these verses, 35 references are made to the name of God himself. In the beginning, God. That puts flight immediately to the concept of atheism, the teaching there is no God.

In the beginning, God. That deals with the notion of two good gods and an evil God warring against one another. That is not what the Bible teaches.

In the beginning, God. Not polytheism, not a range of gods. In the beginning, God.

Not nihilism, which says life makes no sense at all. In the beginning, God. Not therefore materialism.

For the Lord as spirit came before the earth as matter. In the beginning, God. And therefore astrology becomes a useless occupation to follow.

There is no such thing as fatalism because right at the very beginning, there is God who has all power, the necessity of God. I move forward. The originality of God.

What do I mean by that? Well, if you were to read in John's gospel, it tells you in the first verse there, in the beginning was the word. And going on, all things were made by him and without him was nothing made that was made. God is original.

You can't get behind God. There is no one like God. God is utterly unique.

He is a necessity. He is original. And the knowledge of God is not one that the Bible endeavors to prove by some logical flow of argument.

There was a lady in the Old Testament whose husband was called fool. Some other ladies might well have thought that that would be a description of the person that they have lived with. Nabal, who was the husband of Nabal.

The husband of a great woman in the Old Testament. The fool has said in his heart, there is no God. Twice the Psalmist makes that declaration in terms of the atheist who tells you that he does not believe that there is such a person as a divine being.

The Bible says that in your guts, you know. It's intuitive. It's there in every man, every woman.

You may deny it. You may say that you don't believe it. But in your heart of hearts, when the chips are down and you are facing the awful abyss of death, you will find your atheism a very difficult thing to cling on to.

The heavens declare the glory of God. The flowers dictate that God is. My mentor, Lloyd-Jones, would say that the human eye, and here he would use the words in inverted commas, so to speak, is proof for the existence of God.

That delicate organism that gives you sight. To try to suggest that that came about by some fluke evolutionary process, even granted millions of years, is utterly ridiculous. The originality of God.

When I consider the heavens, the stars, the moon, which your hand has made, says David, echoing his creatureliness, I wonder that such a being as you has anything to do with a person so insignificant as I am. You go to the desert of Turkana, which is encroaching from the Sudan into the northern reaches of Kenya. Stand there in a moonlit night and look out to a landscape made yellow by the moon.

Hear the noise of the animals. Hear the noise of the insects. Look up into the starry sky and tell yourself that this happened by chance.

And you butcher your intellect. The originality of God. In the beginning, God.

You can't get behind him because there is no behind to get to. He is God, the eternity of God. Think away if you can.

Let's try a little experiment. This is not an easy subject to broach this morning, but I have an unusually competent congregation and I'm not being patronizing. Think away your own life for a moment.

Think away your own thought. Think away England. Think away Europe.

Think away all the land mass. Now think away the oceans. Think away the fish.

Think away the sun, the moon, the planets. The Milky Way. Think out of existence this universe.

Think out of existence the universes behind this universe. There's nothing in time or space. But there is God.

Timeless, spaceless, single, lonely, yet sublimely three. Thou art grandly always only God in unity, lone in grandeur, lone in glory. Who shall tell thy wondrous story? Awful trinity.

No age can heap its outward thought on thee. Dear God, thou art thyself, thine own eternity. Existing, self-fulfilled.

No need for anything or anyone else is God. Eternal, from everlasting to everlasting. From vanishing point to vanishing point.

God, whole, entire, fulfilled. That is who the Bible refers to when it says in the beginning, God. The necessity of God, the originality of God, the eternity of God, the plurality of God.

Plurality, yes. And here I get technical, but not so technical you can't understand me. If you were to give a plural to the word fox, you put ES on foxes.

If you were to give a plural to the word boy, you put S on boys. If in the Hebrew language you make a singular into a plural, then using our language to illustrate, you put IM on. So El becomes Elohim.

In the beginning, Elohim created the heavens and the earth. Do you remember Margaret Thatcher? Do you remember when Mrs. Thatcher became a grandmother? We are pleased. And the press ripped her apart for daring to use a plural to describe herself.

Only the majesty, the queen, can do that. Here is God linking his name as a plural to singular verbs. Tucked into this account, God created the heavens and the earth, is this concept of the bi-unity, of the tri-unity of God.

God eternally existent, but God never lonely in the sense of the poem which I read out to you, though the poetry and the theology on the whole are good. When our Lord Jesus comes into the world, he takes that plurality that's embedded in the Hebrew term for God, and he makes it plain. Show us the Father, Jesus.

And Jesus says to the disciples, how have I been with you so long? Do you haven't known me? And in John's gospel, he predicts the coming of the Holy Spirit and his departure, the Lord Jesus' departure. But then he says, but we will come to you, this God, this self-sufficient, this unity, existing eternally, complete, satisfied, and yet, and yet within the person of God, we discover there is a purpose, for God has a plan beyond himself. God will speak out from this, from the eternity that was, and you discover this in the third verse of this chapter, and God said, let there be light, and there was light.

In the beginning is the goodness of God. You see it in all of his attributes. He is good in what he is, and don't you see he is good in what he does? And when he decides to do something, he does it to perfection, because that is his character.

Why? Why? Why does God create? There is no answer given to that question in scripture. How? How does God create? The answer is by his word, and if that seems to be difficult, think it through, and it is not impossible to comprehend that words compel actions. If I, for example, was to say to you, please turn to hymn 231, the majority of you would do so.

My word has excited a reaction. If you're a good parent, and you've got obedient kids, tell them to do something, and they will do it. Words have force, even within a human context, but this is not a human context.

This is the eternally existing God, complete in himself, at peace with himself, but he speaks, and he speaks out these words, let there be light, and there was light, and until God spoke, nothing existed. In the way that you and I, no existence. In other words, coming back to my opening sally, my opening argument, outside of God, you have no meaning.

Outside of God, you have no existence. Therefore, you see how important it is that we Christians, far from blushing about what Genesis says, we are to glory in it. Here is an explanation.

It satisfies you, not only intellectually, even though it leaves some questions unanswered, as will always be the case, because your mind is finite, but it satisfies you emotionally. There is an intuitive element in receiving knowledge, and you know within your guts that this is right, that this makes sense in the deepest wells of your personality, to use a more eloquent description, you are aware that there is out there someone greater than you, and that you have a purpose because of him, and so the Bible speaks about this God, and his purpose, and his personal involvement in this world. God said, let there be light, and there was light.

God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. But when you take the earlier verse, the second verse, you find reference made to the spirit of God. Here is the beginning of creation, and the spirit of God, we are told, was hovering over the waters.

I preached an address over at Enfield a couple of, three weeks ago, where I used material that I had employed at Lansing Tabernacle, and had used at the tab 15 years or so ago, it was an address on the eagle. You find reference to the eagle in the first five books of the Bible, several references, and in Deuteronomy, the idea is of the eagle, the divine eagle, hovering over the nest, making things uncomfortable for the little eaglets, so that she coaxes them into flight. But she has a concern for the young eaglets, who clumsily flap their wings, and instead of taking off, spiral downwards.

What does mother eagle do? She hovers over, she'll spread her wings under them. If necessary, she'll even catch them. She will coax them.

Her eyes will always be upon her young. So the Bible teaches about creation. He's not removed, he's like the eagle.

He creates, and he watches each successive stage, for this is his creation, and he is bound up inexorably to his creation. That is why it should be proclaimed across the city of London, not just in the stock exchange, the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof, and Christian people who do not protest. When God's earth is polluted by man's greed, by man's foolishness, I say we are falling foul of our responsibilities to our creator, who in successive stages brought this world into being, and is always personally involved with her, even after the fall.

His personal involvement, his orderly method. The earth was formless, an empty verse too. Darkness was over the surface of the deep.

That's a most interesting verse. There are older theologians who believe that actually that verse might even refer to a previous creation, where things went damnably wrong, and some of the references to Lucifer, and the fall of Lucifer, and something of the longevity of this earth might well have as its explanation this concept of a previous creation going into chaos and darkness. Be that as it may, an interesting theory.

The point is this. Here in the second verse, you have chaos, disorderliness. From the third verse to the end of the chapter, you have successive activities on the part of God bringing cosmos out of chaos.

Orderliness out of disorderliness. You see, our God is always orderly in his method. Isaiah 45, 18 says that God does not leave the world formless and empty.

One theologian puts it, his thought has shaped it to the least cell and atom. He is in his world in the sense of brooding over it. You see, this is not just a statement in terms of Genesis 1. It's a principle that you find throughout the whole of the Old Testament and on into the New.

Take it in the political sense. When was Israel in a terrible state? Well, when she had no government. The end book of the last chapter, the last verse of the book of Judges, what do you find? Every man does what is right in his own eyes.

It's disorderly. Here is our beloved Lord. He's had thousands of people following him.

They need to be fed. What does he do? He sits them down in companies of 100, and he gets his disciples to feed them. Orderliness.

When the tabernacle is made, which was the prefigurement of the temple, a plan is given, and it's done to order. Even the capitals, that is the chapters, the columns of the temple, when it is built, even at the top, when nobody could see them. The lily work is perfectly engraved.

Why? Because this is God's house, and God has a plan. There's some of you who think I'm neurotic about keeping this place reasonably clean and tidy. You look at the Old Testament, if you want my justification for my iniquity, I'm neurosis.

It's right to think and to act in an orderly fashion because this is a creative principle. This is what you find embedded in the saga of Genesis 1. His orderly method. He divides the light from the darkness.

The darkness is part of what is good. It's not abolished. It's subordinated.

There's evening. There's morning. Here you find, as you read through this lavish poetry come history, this depiction of God in action, this eternally existing God who speaks into being, our world, and you find that orderliness pervades the whole.

The earth is empowered to bring forth what is proper to it, verse 11. Literally translated, the Hebrew is, let the earth vegetate vegetation. Let the herb seeding seed, the fruit tree making fruit.

God binds all his creatures together in a common interdependence. This is symmetry. This is beauty.

This is the mind of an architect. This is the mind of a genius, but that's what you expect. It's the mind of God.

His personal involvement. His orderly method. The sun and moon on the fourth day.

They speak as signs for God. They divide the seasons. They're not to control fate.

This is a common judgment on the 20th century of our country, the United Kingdom, and I'm a patriotic person. Take the mail. Take the express.

Take the popular newspapers. What do you find? One page given up to astrology every day, virtually. Not so? Do you find an equal amount of room given for some explanation, some exposition of the word of God? And the answer is no.

And here at the very beginning, God is saying that the sun and the moon and the planets, they're there for his glory, and their positioning helps to govern the climate in our world and bring about our seasons. His personal involvement. His orderly method.

His sequential approval. Everything that he does in each stage, he says it's good. Look at the 10th verse.

And God saw that it was good. Look at the 12th verse. After vegetation has come about, and God saw that it was good.

And so you go on, verse 18, verse 21, verse 25. Whatever God does, he does well, and he delights in his will. I got fairly rough handling on one critique of my recent book.

I'm quite happy to take criticism, but criticism that's rational, please. And the criticism seemed to imply that I put too much emphasis on the realm of nature. I defended nature too much.

Well, I mean, this is clear craziness. Of course one defends nature inasmuch as behind nature is God. And the interference at a radical level with nature disturbs the very principles that God has built into his world.

And that's why we have our ecological problem. So no, I don't apologize for advocating that biblical principles that govern creation are here for all time. And if you deny or break those principles, nature has a way of kicking back on you and creating these disturbances.

And one of the reasons why the desert is encroaching onto agricultural land in East Africa is because of the way that we pollute our environment. This cannot be argued against. Therefore, to criticize someone who says that behind nature are the principles of God and they need to continually be applied is utter absurdity.

In the beginning, God, here are principles by which God created his world, principles which we isolate and are to live to and fashion our tenancy of this world on. God says, it's good, good. Job, you're not feeling very well today, Job.

All right, let me lift you out of your depression. No, put down your book of Freud. Don't read your psychiatrist.

Come to me, Job. Let me take you a tour. And he does.

God takes him a tour of the world. He shows him the waters cascading down the waterfalls. He shows him the mighty oceans.

He takes him to the whales. He takes him to the animals. He takes him to the vegetation.

He takes him to the flowers. And Job says, I know what you're getting at, God. My little problem is really quite insignificant compared with this.

Hey, Job, don't you know that I've got the whole thing in control? You see, you have the same problem as I do. You don't think that God is a trinity. You think that God is a quartet.

He needs your input. He doesn't. He is God.

And when he says the earth is good, he means it's good, and he rejoices in the earth. He watches a whale as it frolics. He takes delight in the creatures that he has made.

And God does not only just pronounce each of the five stages of creation good, but eventually he comes to his piece de resistance, man. And he makes man on the same day as he makes the animals. To one extent, animals are half man's context.

The breath of life that goes through man goes through the animals. They have bodies, they have feelings, they have blood, they have nerves. But there is an infinite distinction between man and the animals.

And we read here that God says, let us make man. This is the self-communing of God. You see, previously he said, let the earth bring forth.

Let the earth do this. Let the earth do the other. But when he comes to his peak, he says, let us make man in our own image, in our own likeness.

And image and likeness are together in the Hebrew. There is no conjunction whatsoever. The image of God, the likeness of God, there will be that in man which bespeaks God.

And when God looks down on his creation, he says not just it's good, he says it's very good. I've gone to the top. This is the masterpiece.

Everything is in place. The framework, it's wonderful. God who existed eternally through his creative word has brought into being that which was not.

And he has engaged in self-examination. Good, good, good, good, good, very good. And that is the beginning of the human race.

You cannot, I say, understand it outside of those contexts. And one of the reasons why the world is in the state that it is in today is because man does not recognize the creativity of God and the tenancy agreement by which man occupies this world. God did not make man the owner.

God gave to man certain things in which he was to engage. Here is Adam, this perfection of God's creative handiwork. There is that of God in him.

He has ability to reason, so he becomes a botanist. He is a zoologist. Here you are, Adam, here is a garden.

Categorize the animals. Can you imagine the enormous nature of that assignment? I mean, we have university departments that are split into several factors to be able to cope with what God gives Adam to do. Adam is no mere robot.

Adam is a man who to some degree resembles God and has ability, not a creative ability in the essential sense, but he has an ability to reason, to categorize, to make decisions. Here is this man born in the image of God, so precious to God that at the cool of the day, God comes down and he converses with this man, and they are at one. But alas, the image was to be broken, but not obliterated.

The image will only be repaired when a second Adam will come to undo the damage inflicted by the first Adam. But I anticipate the story. Here is God in all his grandeur, in all his splendor, and the seventh day comes.

And what does he do? He rests. The rest of inactivity, no. The rest of achievement.

He's done what he set out to do. And when his son, centuries later, hangs on the cross, is raised for the sins of the world, having died for them, raised to show that sins have been forgiven, he ascends eventually back into heaven. And what does he do? He sits down.

He rests at the right hand of God, not the rest of inactivity, but the rest of achievement. Let's start at the very beginning. It's a very good place to start.

When you begin here with the A, B, C, you begin to grasp something of the measure of the power and the ability of this God. He could have been, throughout eternity, ever fulfilled. But the divine will was to speak forth the creative word.

And as a result, you have your existence. What happened to that world? What went wrong? And how God starts to piece it back together, we look at next Sunday, as well as touching on this evening. But let's bow our heads right now in the presence of this holy and majestic creator.

Almighty God, our heavenly father, we have sinned against you, against your world, and against our fellow men, in thought and word and deed, through negligence, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault. We are truly sorry. Sorry for the demise of many species of plants.

Sorry for the demise of many species of animals. Sorry for the death of many human beings, as a result of their hunger and our inability to meet their need. Sorry for the pollution of your world.

We are truly sorry. And repent of all our sins, for the sake of your son, Jesus Christ, who died for us. Lord God, forgive us the damage we did in the past, and grant that with intelligent service and renewed devotion, we may now live for you a new way of life, bringing glory to your name, bringing relief to humankind, and endeavoring to repair some of the damage that we have done at an ecological level.

Amen. And I'll see you in the next one.