I invite you to turn in the word to two different places. One is Genesis chapter one, the other is in the New Testament to Colossians chapter one. As well, in the midst of the sermon, I'll make reference to Belgic Confession article 12, which concerns the doctrine of creation. And in your Thin Forms and Prayers book, you can find what we confess as a church and with our Federation on page 164 of the Thin Forms and Prayers book. 164. Our opening texts are both brief, but they are weighty. Hear what the word of the Lord says, Genesis 1, verses one through three. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light, and there was light. And then Colossians chapter one. Verses 15 through 17, speaking of the Lord Jesus Christ, says, he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him, all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities All things were created through him and for him, and he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Let's ask the Lord to bless our time as we consider this doctrine together. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you in the very first place that you created the world, that you saw fit to reveal your attributes, to make known your power, and in all the ways that we suppose you could have made this creation, to fill it with such wonders and then to create creatures that were capable of perceiving these wonders. How fitting it is that we should praise you and we should thank you. And we ask that you would guide us into truth this evening, preserve us from error, glorify yourself in Jesus' name, amen. Human beings have always been aware that creation is big, but modern science has only reaffirmed to us how small we are. I have not begun to wrap my head around the scale of the universe, at least as far as we know it. One description that I heard was that if you picture the earth as basically a piece of sand, and then you've got the sun like a baseball, the next closest star to us would be going from Los Angeles somewhere in Maine. The scale is beyond comprehension, and that's just the closest star. And then we know that just in our galaxy there are billions and billions of stars, and then our galaxy is separated by vastly more space than by other stars before you reach the next closest galaxy, and we seem to be in a relatively sparsely populated corner of this universe, who can fathom the vastness of what God has made? And it does seem to me that the Lord has portioned things out in his providence, that as human beings gain knowledge of all kinds, they would simultaneously be given reasons for humility. That the more we learn should make us feel smaller, not as if now we've figured it all out. Creation is vast. But now the doctrine of creation, which is our knowledge of God through creation and about creation, our knowledge, our theology of creation, is even more vast than creation itself. And that's because everything in creation, in some way or form, is teaching us about the Lord, and he is infinite. And all of creation speaks to us like a book, and it declares to us truths about him, about his wisdom, about his power, about his character, And so this is an extraordinarily vast doctrine, and this is my long-winded introduction to say I can't possibly deal with it in the way that I, or perhaps some of us wish, in one sermon. And as I prepared this week, I had to think not so much what will I say, but what are the many, many things that we simply cannot deal with. This evening, the goal will be to hew very closely to what we confess as a church. And that's both because what we confess we hold to be what the Bible teaches. That's why we use a confession. We confess because we believe our confessions reflect the word. But then there is another reason as well why we should pay close attention to what it is that we confess the Bible to teach. And that is because ever since Moses wrote the book of Genesis, and I do believe Moses wrote the book of Genesis, and we shouldn't say that with any shame. Ever since he wrote the book of Genesis, the doctrine of creation has been something of a battleground. It has always been contentious. In his own time, the world around the Israelites believed that a pantheon of gods, lesser beings, but greater than man, created different parts of the world. But then where did those gods come from? And ultimately, most belief systems would hold that what they all spring from is not a personal god, but an impersonal kind of living force, which we call pantheism. that at the very top, there isn't a personal God, that just the world kind of is God, but in a non-personal way. And that has implications, which I will not break into at this point, but among other things, it does tend to mean the breakdown of ethics. You have an impersonal being at the top, and you don't, I won't even get into it, it matters. Creation matters. And from early on, God's people had to contend against those who thought that it all came from a pantheon of gods. Now in our time, frequently we're dealing with the opposite. People who say that no god had to do with creation. And here we stand as believers in the Bible in the middle. We assert that one God created all things. But not only is creation something that there is a conflict over as far as us towards outsiders, but increasingly for the last 150 years, this has been an area of conflict within the professing church as well. Within the professing church, because often it comes down to questions about how do we interpret the Bible? Do we take it at face value? Can we trust what it says? And these have implications. Sometimes what it means is that individuals determine that they will go further than the confessions and draw a kind of confession within the confessions. And anybody whose view doesn't line up with their own individual view, they will regard as heterodox, as being outside of the acceptable parameters. And that's a caution that I will lay before you this evening. When we consider that we are a confessional church, I know not everybody in this room right now is a member of the URCNA, is a member of this particular church, but I speak predominantly to the congregation here who are members. When we confess to be members, we have made an agreement to extend a certain charity about which things we believe can be known with great confidence by all Christians. That's part of the purpose of a confession, to maintain unity and maintain charity, even as we respect that there is a variety of opinions on certain issues. And so what I hope to do tonight is to look at the scriptures and to lay before you first as a main heading, first heading, what is it that we confess is essential regarding our doctrine of creation? And then secondly, what is the range of views that we can regard as acceptable, permissible within our confessional tradition? So let's look with me, if you have at your hand there Belgian Confession Article 12, as we consider what is it that we confess about creation? Belgian Confession Article 12 begins with these words, we believe that the Father created heaven and earth and all other creatures from nothing when it seemed good to him by his word, that is to say, by his Son. Above everything else, We believe that one God created all things and there is nothing that was made that was not made by that one God. And while that is perhaps the most vanilla statement you'll ever hear among Christians, it is a radical claim to the world outside. We believe that God created all things. And when he does that, he does that moreover as a triune act. It's not that the Father made the world The Son redeems sinners, the Holy Spirit sanctifies. There are emphases in the work of the different persons of the Trinity, but every act of God is an act of one God, and they work together in what they do. When you look in Genesis chapter 1, there's already a hint of this when it says, let us make man in our image, and scholars have debated to the nth degree about, is it talking about The Trinity? Is that the voice of the Trinity? Or is the Lord speaking, the royal we, let us make man in our image? Is it a reference to the angels who are kind of bystanders there? I'll tell you, I do think it's Trinitarian. I do believe that it's a shadow from the very beginning that becomes more and more clear. The more you read the Old Testament, you discover this is not uncommon in the Old Testament. There are lots and lots of places where God's people under the Old Covenant were well aware that God seems to be a multi-personal, single-essence being. And then it becomes much more clear under the New Covenant and in the New Testament. Colossians 1, verse 15, again, makes it very clear, Christ's role in this, for By the Son, all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him. Jesus is very God of very God. He's not just some teacher who showed up on the world scene, but our creator had come among us and was walking among the creatures. And then in Genesis, again in chapter one, verse two, we find the Holy Spirit, it says, was hovering over the face of the waters. And we have a sense that God the Spirit is brooding, and it's an image that draws on the imagery of a bird brooding and bringing life or protecting, but we have the imagery of the Holy Spirit present as well. Many more passages could be brought forward, but this is to say that creation, what we confess in the very first place, is a triune act of God. Now, when did God create? It's kind of a paradoxical question because we believe that time is essentially bound up with finitude, with being a created thing. Time is the measurement of change and of relation to space. And God does not change and he's not extended in space as though he were made of stuff other than just God. So God doesn't dwell in time as we think of time. God just is. And that doesn't mean he's frozen either. He transcends our comprehension, our ability to wrap our minds around his being. But he doesn't, in that sense, sit around for a million years and then, you know, on the millionth anniversary of nothingness, he says, now's the time to make. I'm going to create now. So when did he create? Notice the language of our confession is very modest. when it seemed good to him. But even that, I would draw out to you, is not chronological language. It's logical language. What is the point that it's making when we confess when it seemed good to him? What we're confessing is that God did not have to create. That's the point of that statement. God did not have to make the world. If he was in some way obligated to make the world, like he couldn't be complete without the world, that would again lead to pantheism, that the universe is a necessary component of God's being. It has as much claim on eternity as God's own self. God, in freedom, chose to create the world, not because he needed to. This is one of the wonders of the Trinity, as we have considered the Trinity in the past weeks leading up to this. One of the things that marks out Christianity as distinct from other belief, other false belief systems, where God is not viewed as Trinitarian, is we believe that relationship is intrinsic to the divine nature. From eternity, the father delights himself in the love of the son and the spirit, and vice versa. The spirit and the son together rejoice with the father. They didn't need to make creatures so that they could have friends or that they could show off. But God, in his due time, decided to glorify his son and to be overflowing towards us in his kindness to make all things. Why did God create? Ultimately, The goal, according to Romans chapter 11, is his own glorification of his name. The glorification of his name. Now, his name here represents the entirety of who God is. All of God's attributes. I'm definitely not representing just the sound of his name. But who God is. Romans 11, verse 36, from him and through him, representing his providence, from him, through him, and to him are all things. to him be the glory forever. If this were said of a creature, that'd be the height of narcissism, of being turned on ourselves selfishly. But what could God do that would be better, more loving, more good, more generous, than sharing God? God could not do anything more gloriously good than share God. And so for God to create and bring glory to God's self simply means making more and more and more of what is best and best and best more and more known to us. That's not narcissistic, that's generous. If you hold in truth what the church has said forever, that God is that in which nothing greater can be conceived, then it would be the height of wickedness for God to say, I will reveal something other than myself when I create. If he chooses to create, What he must do is reveal himself because there's nothing better and because he's good. But he didn't have to. That's the point. He didn't have to create the world. Now, how did God create? In the first place, we want to be clear from our confessions, but what are they based on? They're based on scripture. that God did not merely call things into being from nothing and then set it all aside and watch what happened and leave it to chance. He didn't merely call matter and energy into being and then step aside. You see Genesis 1 verse 2. Earth was without form and void. God, for purposes known to him when he first creates, doesn't instantly, at least as I read the text, bring all things into their proper form. But he brings them by measures out of being not in its proper shape, that's what's meant by form, without form, and then void means not having all of the creatures that would populate the world, the trees and the plants and the creatures that describes us crawling on the ground, and then the people. The world was without form and void. But then he doesn't simply leave it to itself, add time and see what happens. Rather, the whole of the Genesis text and elsewhere makes clear that God, by intentional purpose and design, forms things as he desires. Belgian Confession, Article 12, look at me there again. He has given all creatures their being, form, and appearance. and their various functions for serving their creator. And so we confess that it's not left to chance where the Lord says, I wonder what creatures will appear. But there's purpose in all that exists. Belgian Confession Article 13, if you look a little bit further down, says, we believe that this good God, after he created all things, did not abandon them to chance or fortune. but leads and governs them according to his holy will. By the way, the Belgian Confession is written in 1561. That was not, in its time, a reaction to Darwinian evolutionary theory. This is something Christians just have believed. He doesn't leave it to chance. There's intentionality, there's design. And where were they drawing that from? How is divine intentionality represented in the text in many different ways? We see the Lord separating the elements of the atmosphere from the sea. Then we see him gathering land, creating distinct categories of living creatures. Look with me at Genesis 1 verse 12. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. Now I confess to you, I don't know what is meant for sure when it says the earth brought forth vegetation. And when you read the earth brought forth plants, I think most of us just picture them springing out of the ground. The Lord speaks, and then they start growing up. But then you go a little bit further in the text, and it says, and the earth brought forth the living creatures, the animals, and so forth. In his book, The Chronicles of Narnia, in the first one, C.S. Lewis tried to represent this in a sense Do with it what you will. As Aslan's speaking and then the earth starts to shake and there's mounds and the animals come fully formed straight out of the ground. Is that what is meant when it says that the earth brought forth? I don't know. What is clear in the text is that it's intentional, that God has a purpose for each different kind, that they reproduce according to their kinds, that he's distinguished among things in order that each would reflect in different ways his wisdom, his power, his will, that they'd work together, that there'd be ecosystems. It's not left a chance. What that means, at minimum, is that confessionally, our church, our body of churches, and our tradition rejects, rejects naturalistic evolution, rejects the idea that God has simply chosen to see what happens with things. 2002, our Synod gathered in Escondido and dealt with the issue of creation. If you'd like to study this issue more, it'd be fine to pick up a book on the subject, but you could also go to our urcna.org website and go to the minutes of Senate 2002 and read what they say. As a federation, we have categorically rejected evolution, and you have to wrestle with that. That doesn't mean, on the other hand, that we can explain everything or that we deny, for instance, that there is adaptation. We do perceive that in various habitats, God has ordained providentially that creatures can change, and they do change. But we have held that God leaves nothing to chance. Also, the fact that we believe that there is adaptation means when we read the story of Noah and the ark, Noah doesn't have to load onto the ark every conceivable breed of dog, for instance. He doesn't have to bring the German shepherd and the dachshund, so on and so forth, the Labradoodle, if they had those then. He can simply bring a dog, and that there will be change within time among the kinds. Moreover, we affirm the historicity of Adam. Adam is not a myth, nor is he devolved from some preexisting living thing. Whatever the narrative seems to indicate, it indicates that God, by particular distinctive purpose, takes inert dead matter, that's all big fancy language for mud, And of that makes the first human being who bears his image. Did God have to do it that way? I don't think that he was limited in any shape or form. And yet God chooses to. Among other things, we have confessed that that points to our humility. It's a reminder of the Lord's power and the fact that we are drawn out of nothing by his grace. But we have confessed Adam to be historical. One of the places or several of the places that you can look for why we do that, for instance, the genealogies that you find both in Moses' writing and in the New Testament in the Gospel of Luke, the genealogies go back, tracing lineage of Jesus, and they end up at Adam. And there's no magic place where you can say, now this is the part where it became fictional or mythical. They just go back and back and back and back until they hit Adam. Likewise, when Jesus and Paul both talk about Adam, they treat him as a historical figure. When they talk about his marriage, it's a paradigm for all marriage. When they talk about the effects of sin and the imputation of sin, one of the dangers here is that if you begin to treat Adam like a myth, you begin to treat the imputation of Christ's righteousness as a hypothetical as well. These are connected. The crediting of Christ's righteousness as our federal head is very much connected to the history of Adam being our first federal head. So these truths we hold as confessional. Now, what is the range regarding views that we will recognize as within bounds? And this brings us to our second main division. Let's consider what is the range that does exist, and I don't just say can, but does exist within our federation. Or to put this a different way, What are matters about which believers can hold sincere, different opinions, and that we don't jump to saying, well, that person is sub-reformed, or that person is a heretic. Let's again define what is heresy. Heresy is a teaching that contradicts a central, essential truth of the Bible. Heresy is a teaching that contradicts a central, essential truth of the Bible, which means there are lots of things that you can be wrong about that are not heretical. Everything is not either heresy or gospel truth. There are things about which believers have legitimate differences, and clearly, everybody's not right, that we can be wrong about and still work together and regard one another as a respectable or a committed believer. Foremost is those things which we have not drawn confessional boundaries within our federation about would be the exact age of the cosmos. I wanna be clear, when I say cosmos, That is our way as Christians of saying both the physical universe and the invisible realm wherein angels dwell. Cosmos is the whole shebang. It's all things that God has made. So the exact age of the cosmos as well as the age of the earth and the specific length of the creation days that we find in Genesis chapter one. Now, some have held very firmly to a young Earth, a young cosmos, and to a literal reading of 24-hour days. By the way, there are hybrids of all of these. You'll find people who hold an old Earth, or an old cosmos, but a young Earth, or they hold to literal 24-hour days, but they are ambiguous on the exact age of the Earth. There are a range of views here. But for instance, as far as young Earth and literal 24-hour days, You have Ambrose of Milan. Ambrose of Milan lives in the 300s, and he is Augustine's mentor. The great Augustine, Ambrose is the mentor, and in his commentary on Genesis, he simply writes, the length of one day is 24 hours in extent. So that's not a new thing, to be very clear about that. Likewise, Calvin and Luther both take a plain reading of the days in Genesis. And to have Calvin and Luther on your side, in most cases I'd say, is pretty good. Now, why do they do that? Again, it does seem that there's no marker in the text. Most people would not read it and say there's a clear indication in the text that these are symbolic days, so why would we presume that a day is a significantly different length than what we're used to? And then there are many other reasons as well for why they take it at that. Also, the genealogies, as far as a young Earth goes, The genealogy in Genesis chapter five includes ages of people, and many people have tried to do the math, and they arrive at 5,500 years, somewhere around there, going back to Adam. Again, that doesn't answer the question, how old is the rock that Adam is standing on? But as far as dating, when does Adam come from? A plain reading of the genealogy seems to indicate something like that. Others, however, within our tradition have been less certain. less certain about the specific age of the cosmos, the age of the earth, the length of the creation days. These are people, as I quote them, who have stood within our tradition, and to the best of my knowledge, I'm choosing some of the most vanilla characters, people who are respected, we're not considered as outliers. One from further back, who we would not call reformed, per se, because he so precedes the Reformation, but Augustine. Remember I said Ambrose was Augustine's mentor, and Ambrose took it as literal 24-hour days? Augustine held a totally different view. Augustine looked out at the world, and he recognized that ecosystems tend, or seem, obviously, to be mutually dependent. You have creatures that need sunlight and couldn't live an hour without sunlight. You have all this interdependence of things. And he didn't even know about gravity and so if the sun was created on a certain day after the earth is already there, what does that do to the earth? The Lord who raised Jesus Christ from the dead can introduce objects at will and all the physics will just work. None of that should be a hangup for us. But Augustine looked at the ecosystem issue and he looked at certain connections that he saw theologically and literarily in the text. For instance, he noticed that the first day seems connected to the fourth day, and the second day seems connected to the fifth day, and the third day seems connected to the sixth day, where the first three days draw up realms that things exist in, and then the fourth through the sixth day describe things that exist in those realms. And Augustine sees this connection, and then at the kind of the top of all that he sees is the Sabbath, and he says, you know what, if I had to guess, and he was not dogmatic about this, but he said, if I had to guess, the way that the days are described isn't a chronological order until man is on the scene. From man forward, clearly it's taking it from that, but Augustine says, no, the way that the days are, what they're doing is helping us understand the relationship of things in creation to God and to man. Augustine's view is that all things were created instantaneously. That's not the view most people hold, correct? And so sometimes we feel like we're torn between all of one view, all of another, and we aren't familiar with how diverse within church history views have actually been. Augustine thought that God just spoke and whoom, It's all there, but the function of the days was to help us understand the relationship of things because no human being could ever understand how he created things from nothing anyway. And that's Augustine's view. Gerhardus Vos, who lived in the late 1900s, early 20th century, a widely regarded Reformed theologian, he argued for literal days. However, he concludes, must someone who holds that the days are long time periods be regarded as a heretic? No. Not in the sense the question is not an essential one. It would only become so if it provided the occasion for granting priority and principle over the word of God to the so-called results of science. So it only becomes a problem when we are saying that science must dictate to scripture what scripture means, but there are legitimate reasons as people wrestle with the text to arrive at different conclusions. Similarly, J. Gresham Machen, one of the 20th century's best defenders of theological conservatism, he writes, it is certainly not necessary to think that the six days spoken of in the first chapter of the Bible are intended to be six days of 24 hours each. Not necessary to think that. Now, why aren't they sure? And there are a lot of reasons, and I, again, I can only write one sermon for one evening, though we are always tempted to do more than that. So I want to be careful about how far we go into this. Why aren't they sure? Is it just because they feel the pressures of the secular world and of evolutionary theory bearing down on them and now they want to capitulate? No. Many of these arguments go back more than a thousand years before the idea of evolutionary theory glimmered in Darwin's eye. It's much older. For instance, the term day. Well, a day means a day. And sheep means sheep, but just because Christ is the lamb of God does not mean that you can find mutton in some part of his body. We interpret the Bible not in a wooden literal way, but according to his proper category. And certain words can be used in a whole variety of ways. In scripture, the Hebrew term day, yom, is used indefinitely many times. Not unlike I might say, well, back in my day, and I'm not referring to a particular day, of 24 hours in duration, back in my day. And Hebrew, like English, does the same thing. For instance, look with me at Genesis chapter two, verse four. After we've just read that God forms the earth in the span of seven days, we have no idea how long it existed prior to the formation, because, for instance, Boving thinks verses one and two of Genesis chapter one, are not included in the week of creation. So we don't know how long it was without form and void. So we have the seven days of creation, we come to Genesis chapter two, verse four, and we read, these are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. So what is it? Did he create it in seven days, there were 24 hours each, or did he create it in one day, that is 24 hours? to which most theologians would respond, you're not getting it. You're not understanding the flexibility of language and probably what the authors are trying to achieve and probably the authors were not trying to answer every question a 21st century person might have about the means by which God made the world. It simply stated the primary focus is that God created it. He didn't leave it to chance. It's not a pantheon of gods and that there's order and purpose in the relations of all things that he made. You can find, similarly, if you wish to jot this down and see this in other places, as far as the indefinite use of the term day, Genesis 5, verse 1, 2 Samuel 21, verse 12, 2 Samuel 21, verse 12, Isaiah 11, verse 16, and you can compare the frequent expression in the Old Testament and some places in the New, the day of the Lord, which refers to judgment. but we find it used frequently for spans of time, not simply one time. So that means that we are not sure. I want to be clear, my point is not to say that you cannot be, that you can't hold a strong conviction, or that you should not search out the subject. There is a greater majority view in the URC, and there is a minority view on these issues. And generally, we are wise to heed, to start at, well, with people with whom we agree on everything else, where have they fallen as far as the majority goes? But it's more the attitude with which we hold our views on non-confessional matters. Take just two more quotations. These are people firmly within our tradition. And these are two of the most stalwart defenders of biblical inerrancy in the last hundred years. The first was an Old Testament scholar, E.J. Young. Some of you have read works by E.J. Young. He clearly believes that the Bible's the word of God, that Genesis is true, and yet he writes regarding the length of the creation days. That is a question which is difficult to answer. Indications are not lacking that they may have been longer than the days we now know, but the scripture itself does not speak as clearly as one might like. Lastly, the man who drafted the original Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which is probably the current definitive statement on what we believe about how reliable is the Bible, and that's R.C. Sproul. R.C. Sproul said this, when people ask me how old the earth is, I tell them I don't know, because I don't. On the other hand, you might. And great men can be mistaken. Our confidence is not in any one particular theologian. We don't link ourselves up to mere man and then draw a battle line and say, where he goes, I go. We go where the scripture goes. But God has not seen fit to give the same degree of clarity about every doctrine or every question about doctrine in the Bible. So then what do we do? What do we do with this? I want to, with the last few minutes remaining, just connect this to how we live in Jesus Christ. In the first place, Every moment of our lives by God's help ought to be in some sense given up to praising the Lord. I can't put my hands on this pulpit and have it support me if the Lord did not have genius and power to create electromagnetism that in some sense forms a field that prevents the atoms of my hands, which somehow know they are my atoms, from falling through the atoms of this pulpit. If you look at atoms on a much closer scale, they're mostly made up of space. And yet I don't fall through things because the Lord has created magnetism. I say that and I still don't even know what it means. Really. People who know more about things know enough to make me feel very small. But that means, then, I have all the more reason to praise the Lord for the wonders of this world, that we perceive so many wavelengths of light. And he didn't have to do that. And that he weds them, not just to abstract objects out there, but even to people, and that we can behold, say, a grandchild's eyes and the color that they are, and perceive expressions on their faces, and know that another person is thinking and interacting with me. Great are the wonders God has made. And so we at all times to be people of praise, who thank Him, that we don't walk through the world and take it for granted. It should every day, if God would help us, every day is in a sense like day six, first day of Adam's walking. We should be amazed. Secondly, we ought to rejoice for the grace that we have received in Christ, that we get to be a part of it forever. As sinners, we disinherited ourselves. We don't have a right to touch God's nice, good things. We have soiled, through sin, every good thing that we've ever touched by putting our mixed motives, our selfishness upon it, turning it to corruption. Romans chapter one, the Lord indicts humanity, and he says, this is the sin of the world, that they honored the creation more than the creator, and they were not grateful. But in Jesus Christ, we are brought back in freely, graciously, God desired to bring people into that new creation and to settle them in a form that will be even greater than what we've known. Colossians chapter one, the passage that we opened with, where it speaks of Christ as the one who created all things, there's a context to it. Note the context in Colossians one, verses 12 through 14, give thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He qualified you. to be a part of that inheritance. And I don't know exactly what it's gonna be like. I absolutely believe with the church in all ages on the light of 1 Corinthians 15 and other passages, it will be tangible and real, but in some sense, perhaps super tangible, better than anything we've dreamed of or desired. Christ in his resurrection form eats fish. He's not a ghost. And yet at the same time, he seems to have powers that we don't have yet. What wonders are ahead of us and we have them only through the grace of the Lord and every day, we look forward to that. We don't simply look forward to the next paycheck or to the next opportunity to go see, I would love to see certain places in the world, wouldn't you? And the reality is we probably never will. Most of us will probably never see most of the places we want to see. Yes, you will, or better places if they aren't still here. We're thinking like people who die and vanish if we don't feel, yeah, I will see Tahiti. And if Tahiti is gone, then something better than Tahiti will be there. We won't lose out on anything. To feel that joy, if one of you came up to me and you told me, yeah, tomorrow I'm going to Hawaii, and I'd be like, what's wrong with you? You're going to Hawaii soon. But on the scale of all things, is it really that far away? Why are we not more full of joy? Creation should lead us to joy. Third, don't give ground on biblical doctrine. These things that we confess, there is so much pressure to say that it was not God who made the world, or, probably more commonly, to treat God and the world as though they are basically the same thing. People think they're not pantheists, they basically are pantheists, probably in the culture, when they stand up with their Oscar and they thank God, they are probably not referencing a personal being to whom they pray, they're just thinking, thank the universe for bringing good things my way. And that's all around us, but we believe a triune God has made all things with intentionality. Don't give ground on historical Adam. Pretty soon you'll give ground on historical Jesus as well. They stand and fall together. Finally, I exhort you to exercise humility and charity on non-confessional matters. I didn't say don't exercise discretion. Frankly, I have opinions of my own, and I think the other opinion is wrong. And they think I'm wrong. And so who wins? When it comes to confessionalism, we choose to work together on things that are not as clear and which are not of the essence of the gospel. One of the dangers is that churches basically begin having multiple fronts within the congregation and we regard everyone who doesn't hold our view as outside the camp. I would exhort those of you, I know there are some here who hold an analogical view of the creation days. If you don't know what that means, don't bother right now. You hold an analogical view of the creation days. You are agnostic about the age of the world. I exhort you, I admonish you. Do not presume that your brothers and sisters in Christ who hold to young earth and literal 24-day creation are somehow more ignorant than you, less sophisticated than you. They are probably more mature if that's the attitude with which you hold that. Likewise, if you hold to a young earth and a literal 24-hour creation view, regarding the days, don't presume that others who do not are necessarily less committed to the scriptures. We have to go by the whole of the confessions, not this one particular issue. Perhaps they have less knowledge than you on a matter. Instead, I urge you, strive towards unity, strive towards charity as we struggle, as we seek, and maybe in time it will become so clear it will become confessional as well. We could only hope for the Lord to grant us such unity. or we can do more, we can pray. Let's do that now. Heavenly Father, we thank you for having placed us in this gorgeous world, even in its fallen state, Lord. Daily, you give us reasons to be overwhelmed with your knowledge and your power, the exquisite order that you've placed such that planets revolve in their orbit century after century, the stability of things, the incredible variegation of the light at sunrise and sunset, the way that you've placed within our very bodies all these other organisms that help us digest, and you've given them a kind of world within our world. Lord, you have done so many things we don't yet know about and we'll spend forever learning your genius, your power. We thank you for having entered the world when it was in its lowest state, when we had made a wreck of things, for having donned not any nature but our very nature, the very ones who brought the wrecking ball against your creation. We thank you for having laid claim to it. Though you are eternal, yet with respect to the inheritance, you are the firstborn, as Colossians 1 says. We thank you for having adopted us so that we might have the opportunity to share it with you as well. Glorify yourself in our enjoyment of this creation. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.