Genesis chapter one and verse one. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. What is Genesis chapter one about? If you were to gather together, let's say 100 Bible literate folks and ask them, hey, what is the first chapter of the Bible about? I would suspect, what, 95, 96, 97, 98 of them, somewhere in that range, would say creation. That's what the first chapter of the Bible is about. It is the creation story. That's how we know Genesis chapter one. And yes, of course it's the creation story. That would be a very good answer to the question of what the first chapter of the Bible is about. However, as we begin our consideration of this book and our entrance into Genesis here in chapter one, the focus of this first sermon, is that there is a fact and a reality about Genesis 1 so obvious that we miss it so very often. That Genesis 1 is not most fundamentally about the creation of the universe. It is most fundamentally about the God who is doing the creating. Yes, of course, God wonderfully unfolds for us in this chapter, the creation of the universe. But most fundamentally, this chapter is about the God who is the creator. For example, there are 31 verses in Genesis 1, and God is mentioned by name no less than 32 times in those 31 verses. The beginning of the Bible is a revelation from God about how the universe came into existence. But something even yet deeper is being said. And that is that to truly understand the creation in which we live and of which we are a part, we must understand its creator. Yes, this chapter reveals to us how the universe came into being, but its most important feature at the heart of Everything that this chapter has for us is a revelation about the character of the God who has, by the word of his power, brought all things into existence. Now, remember that Moses is the author of Genesis. We'll talk a little more about the significance of that later in the sermon, and it will come up throughout this sermon series here and there. But for now, remember with me that in Moses' day, everyone believed that the world was created by divine power. If you were to ask the question, well, is there something radical and revolutionary about what Genesis 1 unfolds? In Moses' day, that feature was not the assertion that the world was created by divine power, because that was a commonly held belief. The radical and revolutionary aspect of Genesis 1 is the character and the nature of the God who is doing the creating. And as we begin the book of Genesis, I want to submit to you that this is still the case. 3,500 years later, from the point at which God inspired Moses to write this book. The radical and revolutionary aspect of this chapter is still the revelation of the character and the nature and the being of this glorious creator, God. with all of our modern confusion about origins, with all of modern America's great spiritual confusion in our own day and age. One day we're talking about almighty science, and then the next day we're going to the astrologist and giving thanks to Mother Earth. On the one hand, claiming to be materialistic atheists, but then on the other hand, passionately yelling about karma when someone cuts us off on the freeway. The answer to our spiritual confusion has not changed these three and a half thousand years from when this book was first gifted to humanity by the inspiration of the Spirit. What is the answer? in every generation and in every age to the swirling confusion about who we are and why we're here and what's the purpose and meaning of it all. It's not just in knowing the details that God reveals to us about how he created the universe. It's about most fundamentally knowing him, And if you think to yourself, well, believing in God, what's the big deal? I do that already. Then you haven't yet listened to the power of the words that are recorded for us right here at the very beginning of the Bible. It is no small thing, it is no easy thing to believe in this God. It is no small thing to understand the character of the one who is revealed to us from the very first words of his self-revelation, who purposes that we would not just know something about his works, but through his works to know him. This is our great need, not only as a society, but also as the church as well. Because, brothers and sisters, we do not confess Christianity as some regional parochial religion bound by certain geography or certain language or certain ethnicity. We confess Christianity as the worship of the one true and living God, the maker of heaven and earth. Christianity is not about what God adds to our existence to make life better for us. True religion is about the God who is the source of our existence. the one in whom we live and move and have our being. And that's the heart of the power of the Bible's creation narrative. Not that it answers the questions that we demand it to answer. Not that it serves for us to simply twist it and bend it to say what we want it to say and prove what we want it to prove. but that it brings us before the face of the living God, the God who created us, the God before whom we will give an account, that in this book and through it, through this chapter in which, yes, he unfolds the manner in which he created all things, but that it is him speaking to us, revealing his character, and calling us along with the whole universe to worship Him and to praise Him and to serve Him. Now we're looking ever so briefly this morning, just at the first verse of Genesis 1. And to begin seeing all of this, as we begin thinking together about Genesis 1, hear from the very first verse, we're going to simply walk through this verse together now and look at each important segment here of these powerful words that God purposed would be the very first words that we would encounter upon opening the Holy Scriptures. And so we begin, in the beginning, God. Now for us, in our experience as human beings, in time and in history, when we talk about the beginning of something, what comes before the beginning? Well, nothing, right? That's what makes it the beginning. There's no before the beginning because it is that point in time when something wasn't and then when something was. You know, the beginning marks the point at which there was no story, and now there is a story. Simple enough, right? Except, what does this verse reveal to us? It reveals to us that in this beginning, there is something before the beginning. And that something is God. that yes, the universe as we know it has a beginning. There is a wasn't and then a was. But it reveals to us that it is not so with God. That before time began to exist, we can't even speak about it without using the language of time, but for God, the language fails us. Before this beginning, God was. God has no beginning. In the very first verse of the Bible, we are immediately confronted with a God whose infinite being and existence shatters any notion we may have had of fully or comprehensively understanding him. How can we, as finite and time-bound creatures, fully comprehend the one who is outside of time? Who exists with a perfection and a fullness that we cannot fully take in. And yet also, a God who lovingly condescends to make himself known to us, you see. He reveals himself as beyond our comprehension, and yet he reveals himself as coming to us graciously and in love that we might know him. Even exhaust the depths of his being and wisdom. In the beginning, God. And now in the beginning, God created. We add this one word so rich and pregnant with meaning, created. In the Hebrew, bara. And I promise not to be quoting too much of the Hebrew. I only bring it up now because it is a wonderfully unique word in the Hebrew Bible. You can search through the Hebrew Bible and you know what you won't find? You won't find human beings bara-ing. if you will, you won't even find angels doing it. It's a verb of action that God has claimed for himself. It's exclusively in the Hebrew Bible used for God and his activity. And it's used to describe many different works of God, but always and in every occasion, emphasizing his uniqueness, his singularity, his sovereignty over that which he creates. And it's in this word, among other things, that the idea of what we call creation ex nihilo comes from. If you've heard that phrase before, ex nihilo is simply the Latin that means out of nothing, creation out of nothing. That's what it means for God to bara, It's a creative activity unique to God. And you'll sometimes hear people comparing human creativity to God's creativity. That we create because we are made in the image of the God who is the creator. And there is absolutely something to that. Important things that we are to carefully consider with wonder and with thankfulness. We do create as human beings because we are made in the image of the creator. However, the comparison can be overemphasized, such that it almost brings human creative activity up to some equality with God's creative activity. Or maybe it's just a scale, you know, where God's creative activity is up here, just kind of down a couple notches. We create as human beings, we do not bara. In other words, how do we create? We create by manipulating already existing media. We take things from within the creation and we rearrange them and we form them and we shape them according to the creative faculty that we have as divine image bearers. We do not bara, we do not create things out of nothing. That belongs to God alone. If you look through, if you survey the many and the various ancient cosmologies, and a cosmology is just a theory about the origin of the universe, many of those ancient theories You have a deity figure who creates by simply manipulating or rearranging preexistence stuff, preexistent matter. You know, the stuff of creation has always been there and then one god or multiple gods will come and act upon it and bring about the world as we now know it. In other words, how do The false gods of the nations create. They create in the likeness of the ones who have forged them in their own sinful imaginations. They are made like man, simply manipulating preexistent material. But not so the true and living God, not so the maker of heaven and earth. Our God does not play with primordial Play-Doh. He doesn't just shape a preexistent matter, an eternal universe into what we now see. He creates out of nothing. And it is this beautiful and extraordinary reality that the Bible returns to again and again to meditate on with wonder and with thanksgiving and with joy. Isaiah chapter 45. I am the Lord, and there is no other. Besides me, there is no God. I equip you, though you do not know me, that people may know from the rising of the sun and from the west that there is none beside me. I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form light and barra darkness. I form light and create darkness. I make well-being and create calamity. I am the Lord. who does all these things. Yes, one verb, but a rich and a powerful one that establishes the Lord as the Lord, who alone creates out of nothing, as a display to the works of his hands of his absolute sovereignty and his surpassing glory. In the beginning, God created, and now, And finally, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now we read this final phrase, the heavens and the earth, and we immediately think, oh, well, Moses is talking about the stuff up there and the stuff down here. It's not completely wrong, per se, but this is a literary device that is the equivalent to saying everything. That's the purpose of this last phrase here. In the beginning, God created everything. God created the universe in its vast totality. In other words, And this is actually quite, this is just as profound and revolutionary as every single other part of this verse, because what is it saying? It's saying to us, there are only two categories of existence. There is God, who exists eternally, of himself, independent of any need, And then there's the universe that God created out of nothing of his good pleasure to display his glory. That takes us back to the book of Isaiah. We'll be returning to Isaiah with a certain amount of frequency when we're in Genesis chapter one because of how Frequently, Isaiah marvels at the power of the truths of God as creator, how powerful they are for the church. Isaiah chapter 44 and verse 24. Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, who formed you from the womb, I am the Lord who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." One verse, brothers and sisters and friends, one verse, and yet a utterly revolutionary unfolding and presentation of the glory of the Creator God to us. Now, remember again, the author of these words, Moses. When did Moses live? The kids know this because we started the book of Exodus together this morning in Sunday school. When did Moses live and therefore when were these words penned? Well, it was after the Exodus, when the book of Genesis was written. after that great salvation event of the Old Testament when God, with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, took his people out of bondage to slavery in Egypt, and brought them through the Red Sea, and sustained them through the wilderness, and at last brought the descendants of Abraham to the land that was promised to them. in the covenant of grace. In other words, the creation account comes to the people of God and is given to the church and through the holy scriptures to the world in the context of redemption. And that's important for us. That yes, Genesis chapter one is God's revelation of how he made the heavens and the earth, but it is written in the interest of and for the purpose of redemption. And we'll see this throughout the opening chapters of Genesis. The doctrine of origins, how we came to be, where this universe came from, what it's for, the doctrine of origins is a necessary prologue to the doctrine of salvation. Now, why is that the case? Well, if we need, if we have sinned, if we have lost fellowship with God, if we need to be reconciled to God, we must know who He is. We must know to whom we must go in order to seek forgiveness and reconciliation. And it is, again, His character that is the primary focus of Genesis 1, that we might know Him truly, that we might go to Him, the one true and living God, and to be reconciled to Him through the provision of salvation that He has given in Christ His Son. The doctrine of origins is necessary because in it, He displays Himself before us. He reveals who He is, the maker of heaven and earth, the one and only Creator God who alone is to be worshiped, who alone is to command the deepest trust and devotion of the human heart. And you may be asking yourself at this point, well, here's the table that we are about to come to that we might commune with our Savior. How do we get from creation to communion? If we're not careful, right, they can seem like two things very, perhaps widely divergent from one another. We're about to sit at the table of our Lord. What can we bring with us from this passage and from this sermon to this table that he has set for us in the wilderness? Well, brothers and sisters, again, to use the words of Isaiah, Your maker is your husband. The Lord of hosts is his name. The Holy One of Israel is your redeemer. The God of the whole earth he is called. And as we will come to examine this afternoon, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. God is the great reality. We do not exist by our own power. We are not necessary. We could exist, we could not exist. But not so God. He alone is the eternally existent one. No beginning, no end. And yes, this is beyond our ability to fully understand, but he has come to us, you see. He has so loved the world that in the presence of the eternal Son, He has come to us that we might know Him even yet more fully and intimately. That yes, we do not understand according to our finite boundaries what it means to have no beginning or no end, but He comes to us in love to reveal Himself And even those aspects of him, brothers and sisters, that we cannot fully comprehend are still meant for our comfort and our strength spiritually in this life. Do you ever struggle with the love of God? Do you ever wonder, does he really love me? Or maybe he loved me and he stopped loving me. Just a quote. that calls upon God's eternal nature to help us understand his love for us. The best proof that he will never cease to love us lies in that he never began. Now, let that one sit for a while. The best proof that he will never cease to love us lies in that he never began. Do you know that about God's love for you? There was never a time when He did not love you. Are you trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ? Is He your hope and your Savior? There has never been a time that God did not love you. Just as He had no beginning, so His love for you had no beginning. And just as He has no end, His love for you has no end. And what is the greatest display of his love for us in time and in history? This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. In other words, Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, we bring all of this with us to the table. every blessed word in all of its power and its glory. For our maker is our husband. Let's pray together. Gracious heavenly Father, as we have only ever so briefly started looking into the beauty of Genesis chapter one, we pray for your blessing. And we pray, Father, that in our consideration of this chapter and all those to follow, in meditation on the creation story, may we, above all else, come to know you more deeply. May these verses bring us before the face of the living God that we might worship you, and love you and serve you as you have made us to do, and as you have redeemed us to do, through Christ your Son and through the power of the Holy Spirit. Bless us now, Father, that we might know you, the one true God, and our Lord Jesus Christ, whom you sent. We praise you, Father, for your glory. We praise you, one true and living God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for you have created all things, and by your will and good pleasure we exist. We pray these things for Christ's sake and for his glory.