Everything Was Good, Pt. 1

The universe stretches beyond our ability to observe and into the unknown. It is so much bigger than we can comprehend with our human minds, and the God who created it is even greater. Pastor Nick Gatzke begins a series in Genesis to reveal the God who made the universe.

Let’s turn our attention now to the text of scripture. I’m gonna ask you to grab a Bible with me to open your Bibles to Genesis chapter one. It is found on page one. And please pray with me. Lord God, you are a great and mighty God and worthy of our praise. Your majesty is displayed in all kinds of ways throughout our existence. And as we see today that it is displayed in your creation. I pray God that you would help us to have an increased sense of that majesty. That as we read Genesis chapter one and explore it together, that we can see you more fully for who you are. And that we can rightly respond to you, orienting our lives, not only to your person and to your attributes, but also to your agenda. We pray these things together in the name of our Savior Jesus. Amen.

Questions about the origins of Earth and even the origins of humanity have been of great interest to humankind throughout history. And it’s natural for us to want to know where we came from. It’s natural for us to want to know our origins because it helps us order our reality. It helps us understand our social dynamics and it helps us clarify our purpose in this life. Throughout history, there have been many different creation myths along the way and many different stories that people have put forward to try to explain who we are and who we came from. I want to highlight just a few by way of contrast. According to the ancient Babylonians, a great battle of their gods existed in which the goddess Tiamat warred against her rebelling children.

Some of you today feel like you’re warring against your rebelling children. The young god Marduk eventually conquered Tiamat and her defenders. He killed the goddess and from her eyes flowed the rivers of Tigris and Euphrates. Her corpse was then used to create the earth by this young god Marduk. The ancient Hindus believed that out of the navel of their god Vishnu sprung a beautiful lotus flower. And in the center of this flower grew the god Brahma who awaited the command of his master. And upon the command, it is time–create the earth. Brahma went to work.

And as you stop and you consider the visual for that story, this most certainly gives us a new appreciation for the term naval gazing. Much later in history, the Taoist monks propagated the creation story of P ‘an Ku. P ‘an Ku hatched from a cosmic egg. Half of the shell grew above him and that formed the sky. The other half grew below him and that formed the land. And for 18 ,000 years, P ‘an Ku grew every single day until the sky entered into its proper place and the land entered into its proper place. His body, however, could not keep up with the growth. And after all of these efforts, it fell to pieces. His limbs became the mountains, his blood the rivers, the wind was formed from his breath, and the thunder was formed from his voice. His two eyes became the sun and the moon, and the parasites on his body became humankind.

As we’ve progressed into the scientific age, there’s been many theories that have been put forward about how creation happened. There’s the theory of panspermia, which means that the life exists as a result of asteroids and planetoids moving through the universe that carry different forms of life. And as those asteroids and planetoids reach different environments in which life can grow, the ideal conditions are found and life evolves from there.

There’s theories of endosymbiosis and spontaneous generation and clay theory, which points to the idea of complex organic molecules arising gradually and pre-existing non-organic molecules until they reach enough pressure in their existence where there’s a launch mode and evolution occurs from there. The most dominant scientific theory of our day, of course, is called organic evolution or Darwinian evolution. That theorized that Earth evolved from small cells that continued to diversify over the course of three and a half billion years until we have reached our current state as humans. There’s no unified part of the theory, however, that explains what we will turn into next.

So how did we get here? Is there any purpose to it all? What do you make of the current state of the world with all of its advancements that we enjoy and all of its increasing troubles that we experience? There’s one account of creation that answers those questions and many more. It is an account that has stood the test of time and despite its continued challenges and the ongoing dialogue of how it can be reconciled with legitimate scientific discovery, it remains a place to turn. It is the account that God presents of his own work in the Bible.

Today we start a new series throughout the course of this fall called is it Beyond Repair and over the next few months we’re gonna be looking at Genesis chapters 1 through 11 together, and we’re not going to just look at creation. But we also will look at what happened what happened after that? How do we find ourselves in this place that we’re at? Why do we struggle with the things that we do? Why is life so hard sometimes? What does it mean for our relationship with God and how and where do we find hope? For our future, how did we get here to take a look? Let’s turn our attention to Genesis chapter 1 and Please follow along as I read it.

Now, as I read it, let me preface it this way. It’s a pretty lengthy chapter, so as we do sometimes when we have long sections of scripture, I wanna ask you to exercise that mental staying power. Stay with it, don’t zone out halfway through. There’s seven days of creation, we’ll read all seven. Secondly, this part of scripture in its original language is Hebrew poetry. And so you will see in it or hear in it some repetition that may be grating to your English ears. Didn’t he just say that? Why is he saying it again? It’s poetic in its nature. And so as we read, try to visualize with me. Try to see what God is doing. Try to imagine yourself there to smell, to hear, to observe the wondrous act of creation as it’s presented.

Genesis chapter one. “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 God saw that the light was good, and God 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 in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so, and God called the expanse heaven, and there was evening, and there was morning.

The second day, and God said, let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place and let dry land appear, and it was so. God called the dry land earth and the waters that were gathered together he called seas, and God saw that it was good. And God said, let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed and fruit bearing trees in which their seed, in which is their seed, each according to its kind on the earth. And it was so. 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. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and morning, the third day.

And God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for the signs, for the seasons, for the days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth. And it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on earth, to rule over the day and over the night and to separate the light from the 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 swarm with the swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens. So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves with which the waters swarm, according to their kind.

And every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them saying, be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters and the seas and let the birds multiply on the earth. And there was evening and there was morning, fifth day. And God said, let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kind, livestock and creeping things and the beasts of the earth according to their kind and it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

And then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps along the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him, male and female. He created them and God blessed them. And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heaven and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.

And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth Everything that has the breath of life. I have given every green plant for food and it was so and God saw everything that he had made and behold It was very good and there was evening and there was morning the sixth day Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had that he had done and he rested on the seventh day from all His work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.”

If there’s one overarching theme that we see in Genesis chapter one, it is this: God is a majestic creator who brings perfect order out of chaos. God is a majestic creator who brings perfect order out of chaos. As we look at chapter one, we see here even more than the creation of the world. Genesis one tells us about the creator of the world, God himself. He is the subject. He’s the main character and the world is his object. And what we see through the many facets of this creation is that he is a majestic creator and he brings perfect order out of chaos.

That is displayed in a number of ways. It’s first displayed in the act of his creation itself through his creating work. If you look with me at the beginning of the chapter, we see that God creates by his word in concert with the work of his spirit. Throughout the first chapter, we see the reality that God is simply speaking and by his voice is bringing things into their existence. Verse two tells us that the earth was formless and void. And this formlessness, this void is placed in direct contrast to a repeated phrase that is put forward throughout chapter one and that phrase is God said.

We see it in verse three and verse six and verse nine, verse 11, verse 14, 20, 24, and 26. There’s formlessness and there’s void, but God said, and it makes clear that he was completely self-generating. He was acting independently of any other in this creation. Now to create something from existing pieces or materials is impressive. I mean, when you think of the things that humans create, the most beautiful things to you, maybe it’s a form of fine art, maybe it’s a form of music, maybe it’s a form of architecture. For me, one of my favorite things to enjoy in beauty, of course, cars. There are just certain cars that seem to increase in beauty even as they get older.

Some of you are the most creative people I’ve ever met. The things that you can create when given a certain amount of material is impressive. It makes the rest of us sort of stand back and say, wow, that is amazing. And in that we see that we are reflecting God who is our creator. But there’s a difference between what we do and what he does because everything that we create has a baseline of materials that we have to use. But to create something out of nothing simply by the power of words.

This is an ability that no created being has. It only comes from one who is independent of outside influence. This type of power only comes from one that has true sovereignty to do what he wants, how he wants, and when he wants. And we see in verse two that as he is creating that the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the deep. The spirit of God was present in this act of creation. Furthermore, we learn in Colossians chapter one, verse 16, that Jesus himself is also present and active in this work of creation. So the three persons of the Trinity–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, of one eternal essence but three persons, all participating in this striking act of taking what was formless and void and designing it and constructing it and giving substance to something where there was nothing.

Another important component of God’s creating act is that he is bringing order out of chaos. I wonder how many of you feel like as you look at the world around you, you might feel like this world is spinning out of control. You might feel like we currently live in a time of chaos. I mean, the European Union is falling apart. There’s war in the Middle East still. We have one of the most contentious elections in recent history knocking on our doorstep. I know people whose marriages are falling apart, who’ve lost their jobs. And there’s a number of good things that are happening. Life is moving fast. Programs are firing up again. Life is spinning, spinning, spinning and it feels at times like chaos to us.

But what we see here is that God is actually a God of order, not a God of chaos. Now true chaos existed in the cosmos before the world began. And God’s creation displays his propensity for order. Now at this point, we could go one or two ways in our exploration. We could look at each day of creation and we could try to answer all the really hard questions that we have. Are these six literal days or do the days represent an age? Or is there a gap in the middle somewhere?

We know that microevolution exists within specific species, but what about evolution from one species to another? How does the idea of intelligent design that we see here in Genesis chapter one, how does that stand up in the current scientific arena? The questions go on and so on and so on and so on. There’s plenty that you can read on all of these subjects, and if you have questions about those things, we’d be happy to commend a number of works to you or a number of people for you to talk to, including ourselves. But there’s another way to take this or to explore it together and that is being that the Bible is God’s word, his revelation of himself, I’m choosing to take it on its own terms this morning. And what we see here is that when we take this account on its own terms, the creation account tells us just as much or even more about the creator than it does, the different nuances of how he created.

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** This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy, but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.