Creation / Happy Beginnings

All right. Well, hey, good morning again. Thank you. I appreciate that. I think what you’re going to find about me is when I say good morning from the front and when I ask questions, I’m really looking for an answer. So, hey, this is a safe place for us to use our voices. This is a good spot for us to be able to just, yeah, say good morning and greet each other. So let’s try that again. Good morning. Thanks, Rick. Appreciate that.

Well, yeah, like I said, if we haven’t met yet, my name is Jeremy Simmons. Really excited to be here. Becca and I, we’ve been married for eight years, parents for three, which means we don’t think that we’ve got all the answers. And to be honest, I’m just a man. I hope that nobody places too much belief in us to be God’s silver bullet for anything. That’s not that’s not who we are. But what we are is a couple of people that love Jesus a lot. And we’re excited to love Him with y’all and excited to see what God is up to here, because here’s the thing. God is deeply and seriously up to some incredible things at Sauldam Baptist Church and in this community. Even from our short conversations with the search team and with some of y’all and with some other folks from the area, it’s it’s evident. God is doing some really cool things here and in this area and we want to be part of it.

Honestly, as we were praying through this opportunity and having more and more conversation, it was one of those like, man, why would we not go do this? Because it’s just so clear God is priming y’all and has been for a long time. 1841. That’s serious. As we’ve been talking with people from our former church and just explaining the move, you know, we continue to say, like, there’s a legacy of the gospel at work in this community. We want to be part of it. So we’re excited to be here. We have a family picture that we’ll put up on the screen. This is kind of who we are and give our kids a couple of weeks to learn your names and all the hellos, all the good mornings and stuff like that. The easiest way into Annie’s heart is with some of those treats back in the bowl. Just don’t tell Becca I said that. So, yeah.

What we believe, what Becca and I believe, is that God is inviting each of us and our church into something big. His big story for us. He’s been doing that with people for all time. So we’re going to spend the month of November studying God’s big story. The story of Scripture. What you hold in your hands. If you don’t have a copy, there’s some copies in the pew, and that’s for you. If you don’t have a copy at home, that’s our gift to you. This story has four main parts to it. It begins with creation. And then the next page, there’s the fall. Jesus comes and He initiates redemption for us. And then at the very end, your last couple of chapters, talks about recreation. Or if you’re going to use story language, there’s a different way to think about it. You could think about it as happy beginnings. The terrible lie. Our hero has come. And let’s begin again.

Because here’s the thing. The Bible is one big story made up of little stories that fit into that motif or that pattern. And that story also, it captures our lives. Who of us can’t identify with or resonate with a happy beginning? It goes wrong. A hero steps in to provide what you need and you begin again. Who can’t identify with that? And here’s the thing. That story, this Bible, answers a core question that every person in the world is asking. Every person you interact with is asking this question. Why on earth am I here on the earth? Why am I here? What’s my life for? What can I live for? You’re asking that question. Your neighbor is asking that question. People in that mosque are asking that question. Why on earth am I on the earth? So I figured it would be smart for us to take a month just to think about that. Why are we here? The Bible answers that for us. And it begins with the book of Genesis. Genesis is the first book of your Bible. It literally means beginnings. Chapters 1 and 2 are this authoritative explanation of creation. But it’s not exhaustive. Okay? It’s authoritative, but it’s not exhaustive. Chapters 1 and 2 don’t handle everything there is to know about the universe. But they introduce us to the one that does. They introduce us to the creator by giving two perspectives on the same event. Creation. Chapter 1, if we were just to read it straight through, would be like a bird’s eye view poem. There’s these stanzas and there’s a refrain. There’s a cadence to it. You can start to count on it. Honestly, you kind of lose your attention because it’s just so repetitive and rhythmic. Chapter 2 is this up close and personal narrative where the author zooms in on one aspect of creation itself.

The book of Genesis is our foundation, or it should be, of what we understand everything to be. Who is man? Who is God? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with this world? Why is there traffic on 526? This book answers all those questions. Not because it provides every detail, but because it speaks authoritatively to the dynamics of this universe. This book was written by Moses. It’s the first of five books that he wrote that’s called the book of Moses that the Jewish people would call the Torah. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Numbers and Deuteronomy, sorry.

And I want to read this quote for us. The opening section of Genesis introduces us to the creator. He is the main character of the book, even all scripture. The creation account is theocentric, not creature-centered. Its purpose is to glorify the creator by magnifying Him through the majesty of the created order. This book is about God. That’s what the Bible is about. When it says theocentric, that means that the center, the very innermost part of the Bible, the main portion and part of the Bible is God Himself. It’s not us. Which means we can’t just put ourselves into every story of the Old and the New Testament saying, what am I supposed to get from this? What specific detail from this story should rule my life? The Bible’s about God. It’s the story of God loving a people for Himself. Or as Sally Lloyd-Jones, who wrote one of mine and Becca’s favorite books, says, every story whispers Jesus’ name.

So this morning we’re going to start. We’re going to look at this. And I want to say, obviously Genesis and creation may feel distant for us, but if you were to read these pages, you would quickly see that Adam, Eve, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rachel, Jacob, Esau, Noah, everyone in this book dealt with the same stuff we deal with today. They dealt with fear of unknown and the promise of a new day. They dealt with sibling rivalry and losing loved ones. They dealt with joys of miraculous childbirth and hope within deep pain. So why on earth am I on the earth? The Bible’s got an answer for that. And our main point for this morning, if you take one thing away from this, as you’re talking over lunch today, what I want you to talk about is this. God made everything for His glory and gave us a sacred purpose.

So how about this? I’m going to pray for us and we’re going to jump into the text. Jesus, thank you for today. Lord, I love you. I don’t love you as deeply as I should, but I love you. Lord, I am desperately dependent on You to speak through these words this morning. God, it’s one thing for me to give my opinion on what Your word says. It’s a totally different thing for You to speak. And I’m asking for You to speak. God, please do that. Lord, I pray that we would walk away from here this morning loving You more than we came in today. Lord, we do love You. And it’s in Your name that we pray. Amen.

Well, how about this? Genesis 1, verses 1 through 5 are going to be on the screen. And I want to do something. I want us to read these verses together, okay? It might be a little awkward for the first few seconds. Then we’re all going to be talking and reading and it won’t be awkward, okay? So let’s do this on 3, 2, 1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, let there be light, and there was light. 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. There was an evening, and there was a morning, one day.

That’s beautiful. Immediately, The book of Genesis jumps at us and presents this authoritative, proactive, active God. It says, very beginning, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. From the moment the Bible says, go, we see that there is a God who is pre-existent and utterly powerful, dependent on nothing to create. The old Latin phrase, He created ex nihilo. He created out of nothing. Unlike all these other creation stories that are out there that Beck and I interacted with on the mission fields where gods would have to use some sort of raw material to do something, that’s not God of the Bible. He exists outside of time. He doesn’t need anybody to start Him. He creates, and He does it with full authority. And the first matter He creates is formless and empty, as verse 2 says.

Formless and empty is some odd words in the Hebrew. It literally means without purpose or life. It’s odd. It kind of makes me think about a ball of Play-Doh that Annie is playing with at the table. This ball of Play-Doh that God has, there’s no direction to it. There’s no purpose to it. There’s no real life inside of it yet. But God creates this, and ultimately it’s a bit chaotic. But what we see is that the God of the universe is always bringing order and life out of chaos. So He looks at that formless and empty earth, and His Spirit is hovering over the surface of the waters. The Spirit of God is right there. We see from the first page of the Bible the Trinity at work. Trinity already. God, the Holy Spirit, is right there up close and personal hovering over the water. I’m not going to pretend to be able to explain what that means. But there’s God up close and personal with His creation, and He looks at this formless and empty creation, and He says, let there be light. And there was light.

God creates with His voice. He just speaks into the unknown and into the inorganic, and He just says, let there be light. And there’s light. He doesn’t take anything. He doesn’t have to muster the energy, and He’s not wiped out on the couch afterwards. He just says, let there be light. And you read on later in Genesis 1, and He’s not making sun and stars. He’s just making light. Whatever light is, He just says, let there be some of it. And there’s a lot of it. He makes light. He doesn’t need to fashion anything. There’s no chaos within Himself, but God just speaks, and He calls the light day. He calls the darkness night. There was an evening, and there was a morning one day.

So why would this God of the universe not have the authority to name what He makes, right? He looks at this light that He’s created. He’s made day, and He’s made night, and He says, you know what, I’ll call that day, and I’ll call that night. It’s interesting, who’s God talking to? He’s, I guess, talking to Himself, which is normal, and God just, He’s just there. He’s the boss. He’s the ruler. It’s His world, after all, and Genesis 1 says that God does this six times. There’s six days of God taking the formless and empty world and giving it purpose and life.

Days 1 through 3, if you were to read Genesis 1, are all about God forming habitations. He makes day and night. He makes the sky and the water and the earth. He makes these places, days 1 through 3. Then days 4 through 6, He’s filling habitations. He puts birds in the sky. He puts fish in the sea. He puts deer in the woods, and He puts animals on the plains. That’s what God is doing. But on day 6, it slows down, and we’ll get to that in a second. Each time God ends the day, He says, it is good. It is good. Good. Six times God says, this is good. What I have made. Behold, it is good. That’s what God makes. This final product of creation is far better than we could ever even imagine.

Isaiah chapter 6 verse 3 says that the earth is full of God’s glory. Psalm 19:1 says that creation sings God’s glory. Romans 1:20 says that creation reveals God’s glory. God created everything. Why? He created it for His glory. That’s why He created it. There was no one else to share in it. There was no one else to benefit from it. There were no other people to give it to yet. But God creates everything just to magnify Himself. John Piper says it this way. Nothing, Nothing in the universe exists for its own sake. Everything from the bottom of the oceans to the top of the mountains, from the smallest particle to the biggest star, from the most boring school subject to the most fascinating science, from the ugliest cockroach to the most beautiful human, from the greatest saint to the most wicked genocidal dictator. Everything that exists exists to make the greatness of Christ more fully known, including you and the person that you have the hardest time liking.

This world was made for God’s glory. Make no mistake, make no bones about it. This world was not made. It was not made purely to satisfy a need of God’s. It was not made purely just to do things for God. It was made just to sing and show God’s greatness. This is the world that we live in. Obviously, this is God’s country here, right? Even more so, amen. Even more so, this is God’s universe. Every blade of grass, every tree, every sparrow, every fish, every building is meant for God’s glory. Which is why next week when we talk about the fall, every sin seems so much more heinous. But we’re not talking about that yet. Right now, everything’s good. Everything there was and is and in between was made for God’s own greatness and majesty.

Into that world, on day six, God does something very good. God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.” So God created man in His own image. He created him in the image of God. He created them male and female. God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.”

God also said, “Look, I have given you every seed-bearing plant on the surface of the entire earth, and every tree whose fruit contains seed. This will be food for you. For all the wildlife of the earth, for every bird of the sky, and for every creature that crawls on the earth, everything having the breath of life in it, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw all that He had made, and it was very good indeed. Evening came, and then morning, the sixth day.

So God, in this poem of creation, screeches to a halt as God does something different. He creates people. And He doesn’t just speak to create them. He talks to Himself. Again, verse 26, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.” People, you and I, we are the only thing in all of creation that God reflected on internally before He made. Light, He said, “Let there be light.” Fish, He said, “Let there be fish.” Earth, mountains, trees, sky, He said, “Let there be,” and it was. But when it comes to people, He said, “Let us make them like us.”

The majesty of the Rockies, the incredible particularity of atoms, the beautiful myriad colors of wildflowers, those things are pretty and they glorify God, but they do not capture God’s essence the way people do, which means you’re never interacting with just a mere person. You are interacting with a representative of the God of the universe. That bank teller, that person at the restaurant, that spouse, they represent God. It’s never just a normal, mere person.

And God has made us in His image, which means at least a few things. It at least means that we embody His characteristics. There’s some aspects of God that we can’t possess. God is omniscient, which means He knows everything. I don’t have that for sure. Ask Becca. I don’t have that. God is all powerful. He’s omnipotent. We don’t have that. God is omnipresent. He’s everywhere. We don’t got that. But God does have grace and we can show grace. God does have patience and we can grow in patience.

We embody these characteristics of God, which means when God says, “Let us make them in our image,” He’s not talking two arms and two legs. He’s talking how people are. Not necessarily what they look like, but how they interact with each other. It also means that we, as God’s image, represent Him to this world. We are the embodiment of God, which sounds weird. In all of creation, the most God-like thing there is, is us. That’s not my idea. That’s just what Moses says. And it’s kind of weird when you say it out loud, right?

But that’s what God’s made us for. He’s made us to look like Him. In a sense, we’re all supposed to have our daddy’s eyes. We’re all supposed to act like Him as we represent Him. And that also means that people have a unique relationship with God that anything else doesn’t have. And that’s what makes humans different and special. That is what means, that’s what drives this fight to defend the unborn. That’s what ought to fuel our desire to end genocides and homicides is because when we act against a person, we’re acting against the God of the universe that they represent. But that also means that we can enjoy a relationship with God that nothing else can enjoy.

So God does a few things. He first says, “they will rule,” which is wild to think. Mankind is meant to bear authority over the earth. What? God, who was preexistent and created everything out of nothing, who spoke into darkness and said, “let there be light,” who named the day day and named the night night. He said, “they will rule this place,” which is wild to think whenever you look at our ability to rule our own lives, right? Who of us is able to get up with the alarm clock the first time, every time, right? And God says, “yeah, I’m going to put you in charge of the entire world.” It doesn’t make sense. We get the good end of the deal there, but it’s fascinating to think God in His magnificence and in His glory shares authority with us.

So He says they will rule. And then He says, or then the text says that God blessed people. This Hebrew word blessing there is like invoking divine favor, resulting in benefits. The only better way I know how to say that is God’s default setting toward you is two thumbs up, which means God’s going to continue to come to you time after time and want to bless you because His heart is set on your good. He loves you deeply and dearly and far more deeply and dearly than we’ll ever understand, which explains why even though we mess up and we stumble and we continue to fail Him, He continues to move toward us and bless us because He wants to bless us because He’s kind to us and He loves us. Out of the entire universe of things that He made for His glory, He looks at humans and says, “they’re special and I’m setting my heart on them,” which once again is why we ought to be passionate about things like Operation Christmas Child, because it’s a way for us to share God’s heart with people that we wouldn’t be able to interact with otherwise. It’s the reason that we ought to want to be engaged in things that our church is doing because we together get to embody God’s characteristics and get to enjoy His blessings. Church is meant to be so much more than most people think it is because people are so much more than they think they are.

So God says they’ll rule, He blesses them, then He says be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Man, woman, they go together. God made these two genders, which I believe better represent the mosaic of God’s goodness than one would alone. And God gives them the task of procreating and filling the earth. Sin comes in, like we’ve been saying, and that task to fill the earth transitions, not just from bearing children, but also to making disciples and filling the world with God’s image bearers. And at the end of all this, God saw everything He had made and it was very good.

Imagine being there. Imagine being in a world not tainted with the badness that we deal with every day. Imagine a world with no flus, fatigues. Imagine a world with no caskets. Imagine a world with no debt. Imagine a world where everything you touched turned to gold. That’s closer to what we are supposed to be living in than this today. Which is not to say that where we live is bad. Satan cannot make what God made good to be bad. But where we live is distorted. Read about that next week.

Chapter 2, it says that God looks at these people. In verse 16, or verse 15. He looks at them, He takes them, and He placed them in the Garden of Eden to work it and to watch over it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree of the garden. But you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For on the day You eat from it, you will certainly die. Obviously, there we live in a world, or at least we’re intended to live in a world of complete freedom within boundaries. Even before sin entered the world, there were limits and boundaries to our activity as people, which I think is fascinating. Because the world wants to tell people these days that to be fully human is to be as free in yourself as you could ever imagine being. So you imagine and enact whatever sort of freedom you could do for yourself. I am free from restraint in this area, so I’m going to change who I am. Or I am free from the responsibility to take care of these people, so I’m going to do whatever in the world I want to do. But that’s not even how we were created to live. We were created to live with freedom within boundaries. We were created to live with freedom within the world.

That was formless and empty, they were supposed to take the garden and make it even more beautiful as it gained purpose and life. That was their task. And God provides food for them. He says you can eat from any tree in this garden. But it’s like God also provided a test for them. One tree I don’t want you to eat from. And I’m sitting here in 2023 and I’m wondering, God, why did you put that tree there? Why give them the test at all? Then I think about my kids. Think about how the love that they proactively show me is so much sweeter than the obedience I demand from them. Now think about God. However long it was that Adam and Eve kept these rules, how proud He must have been of Adam and Eve, saying like, man, that’s my kids. It’s following my heart. One day it does go sour. But for a while it was really good. For a while God’s image and mankind’s purpose were deeply connected. For a while Adam and Eve were just enjoying the luxurious paradise garden that God planted them inside of.

God, you see, He is unique in all reality because He alone is Creator. But He invites us to participate in His work. It makes me think about on Saturday mornings whenever we have pancakes and bacon and Annie helps me make pancakes. If you could imagine a three-year-old helping make pancakes, you could understand a little bit about the climactic, chaotic mess that becomes our kitchen. And I think to myself, or at least Becca reminds me, Jeremy, it’s better for her to be involved and to make a mess than for you to not allow her to be involved in it, be clean. It’s just a mess. We can clean up messes. And I think about how God invites us in to participate in His work. There’s not a single thing that God asks us to do that He couldn’t do better Himself. But He lets us do them. He lets me preach to y’all this morning. He lets us share the gospel with people in a mosque. He lets us sing in a choir. He lets us tell others about Him. He lets us serve people because it actually is better when we participate with Him.

This sacred purpose that God created us for as His image bears, it blows my mind. When you think about the fact that He creates life out of nothing, but says, hey, people, I want you to multiply and fill it. He names what He makes, and He says, hey, Adam, I want you to name all the animals. He plants a garden and says, mankind, I’m going to put y’all in the garden, and y’all are going to cultivate it to make it better than I even made it here. He is the King and says, they will rule this place for me. God intended for us to spread His image throughout the world, starting from that garden. This is the connection for you this morning. God intended for us to spread His image starting from the garden.

I want you to think about an image as I’m starting to wrap up our time this morning. An image carries the essence of the real thing itself. You open your wallet, and you’ve got a $5, a $20, a $100 bill in there. That little piece of paper doesn’t actually represent $5, $20, or $100 of value in itself. It represents value backed by something else somewhere else, right? It’s just a piece of paper that we exchange. We say, okay, yeah, I got that. Yeah, $5? Yeah, I’ll take that. The dollar bill is an image of something with value. So something made In the image of another wouldn’t mean that the created thing can do everything the original can, but that the original accomplishes its purpose through the image. Instead of exchanging bars of gold, we exchange dollar bills. That’s how this world works. We exchange images for another. The bill itself doesn’t have value. The value is what backs the bill.

So we are images of God. When you think about that for a second, we carry the essence of God with us. The embodiment of His characteristics, the representation of who He is, that is your purpose as His image. Ancient kings like Pharaoh in Egypt were said to be images of local gods that put them into power. Kings and rulers of all time would spread their likeness throughout their kingdom to show that they were the kings there.

So for us to be made in God’s image means that the true God of the universe has placed us in authority over this world. We carry the essence of God Himself. God accomplishes His plans through us. We advance His presence through our own work. We have the royal honor of being God’s representatives and rulers in this world. That’s God’s purpose for your life.

I’m not going to stand up here and tell you you need to take a certain job or retire in a certain community or you need to start doing a certain thing. God’s purpose for your life is so much bigger than any of those decisions. God’s purpose for your life is that you would carry His image into the world wherever you go. God’s purpose for your life is so much bigger than any of those decisions. God has said, “Carry my image there. Help them see me there.”

So why on earth are you on the earth? It’s because your sacred purpose is to spread God’s rule over the entire world starting in the garden He’s placed you in. That is your purpose. And this is the happy beginning of the Bible, God’s big story. It’s a world full of promise and a people filled with glorious potential and a cause worth living for. But it goes. We’ll talk about that next week. Next week we’ll see why all this feels too good to be true.

But for now, let’s imagine that your neck of the woods is the Garden of Eden. Your office, your grocery store, your restaurant, your bank. That is the Garden of Eden. And God has planted you there to spread God’s rule in that place. What should be different about it because you’re there?

Let’s take it broader because we’re a church. Let’s say Greater West Ashley is Sauldam Baptist Church’s Garden of Eden. And God has planted our church here for 200 years. And He has planted us here to spread His rule and His kingdom throughout this entire area. How would that change how we treat the people coming into Poplar Grove and Homecoming and all the development?

Let’s take it even broader. Imagine the entire Lowcountry. How would Beaufort, Edisto, Walterboro, Charleston, on up to Moncks Corner, even up to Georgetown, how would they be changed? Because we take responsibility to cultivate them for God’s glory. Like I said at the very beginning, God is at work in this church. We deeply believe that. We’re just excited to be part of it with you.

How about this? I’m going to pray for us. We’re just going to consider together what in the world would it look like for our little garden to be blessed because we’re here. Pray with me.

Jesus, I’ve said a lot of things. God, I hope they’re true things. Lord, I’m begging that You would get a hold of us and that You would change our little gardens. Lord, that You would help us to believe that You really do want to work through us. Father, I pray for the people of Sauldam Baptist Church and I pray for our guests this morning. And I’m asking, Lord, that You would get a hold of us and use us for something this week. Lord, we love You.