God Did It, and It's Good

The following message was given in the Wheatland Parish on Sunday, January 8, 2012.  The scripture was Genesis 1:1-2:4.

Even though last Sunday was New Year’s Day, in some ways this really feels like the first Sunday of the new year.  After all, New Year’s Day is still part of “the holidays”:  the Christmas decorations were still up, we still lit the advent candles, we still were talking about the baby in the manger.  Today, though, the Christmas decorations are put away, all the company has gone home, everybody went back to work or to school.  Now we know that we really are into a new year.

           

A new year is a chance for a new start, a new beginning.  So, our first sermon series of the new year is called “In the Beginning”.  In this sermon series, we’re going to look at some of the stories from the book of Genesis.

           

It’s not going to be all the stories from the book of Genesis.  If we did that, we’d still be doing this sermon series in June.  If your favorite story from Genesis gets left out, well, maybe I’ll do a similar sermon series next year.  There’s certainly enough material there.  We’re going to start, though, with the very first chapter of the Bible, the story of creation.

           

Now, as soon as we start talking about creation, we jump into an old controversy.  Are we supposed to take the story of creation literally?  Are Christians required to believe that God created the world in exactly six days, no more and no less, and that God created everything just as it exists today?  Or, can we believe in what current scientific theories tell us?  Can we be Christians and still believe in things like evolution and the big bang theory?

           

Those of you who were here last week may remember that, when we were talking about the wise men, we talked about how they used the science of their time to figure out when and where the savior had been born.  We also talked about how God can stand up to scientific scrutiny, because good science is a search for the truth and God has no reason to fear a search for the truth.  After all, God is truth.

           

We also talked last week about how we will never come up with conclusive, one hundred percent, undeniable proof that God exists, that Jesus is the Savior, that the Holy Spirit acts in our lives, or anything else.  We can always come up with a way to doubt and to explain things away if that’s our goal. 

Well, the same thing could be said of scientific inquiry, too.  Science can never prove things with one hundred percent certainty, either.  It can come close, sometimes.  Certainly, there are things that science has proven with enough certainty that we rely on them every day of our lives, whether we realize it or not.  Still, good scientists know that nothing is ever one hundred percent certain.  Everything we learn simply raises more questions, and sometimes we think we know the truth only to find out that we don’t.  That’s why we say that science is a search for the truth:  because searching for truth is a never-ending job.

I think, though, that when we in the church get bogged down in questions about creationism and evolution and intelligent design and all that, we miss the point of why the story of creation is in the Bible in the first place.  The Bible was not written to be a science textbook.  The book of Genesis was written thousands of years ago, and it was originally written for people who had no conception of other planets or galaxies or universes or anything else.

Could God have created the world and everything in it six days?  Of course.  God is all powerful.  God can do anything God chooses to do.  God could’ve created the world and everything in it in six seconds if God had chosen to do so.

The thing is, though, that whether God created the world in six seconds or six days or six million years is not the point.  The creation story is not in the Bible to tell us specifically that God created the world in six days.  The creation story is in the Bible to tell us that God created the world.

From a religious standpoint, that’s really all we need to know.  After all, that’s a pretty awesome achievement, is it not?  Creating the sun and the moon and the stars and the planets and everything else out of nothing?  Creating plants and animals and fish and insects and humans out of nothing?  That’s a pretty big deal.  How God did that or how long it took or anything else is not the point.  The point is that God did it.  The point is that nothing would exist without God.

If God created the world and everything in it exactly as it exists now in six days, that’d be pretty awesome.  If God created the world and everything in it over thousands or millions of years using a big bang and evolution and stuff, well, that’d be pretty awesome, too.  In fact, in some ways, that’d be even more awesome.  Think of all the things God would’ve had to work out in advance to do it that way.  Just creating it as it is would’ve been easier, really.  Working out a system where things evolved and changed and grew over millions of years and eventually developed intelligence, well, that’s beyond comprehension.  That’s incredible.

Think of how long scientists have been trying to create intelligent life, and we’re not even close yet.  Here’s the other thing, if humans ever do create intelligent life, it still won’t be anywhere near as awesome as what God did, because if we ever did it, we’d be doing it by starting with the materials God gave us.  God started from scratch.  God did it with nothing.  It’s sort of like the old joke.  A scientist is talking to God and bets God that the scientist can create life without God’s help.  God asks, “How are you going to do that?”  The scientist says, “Well, I start with this dirt here…” and God says, “Hey, wait a minute.  That’s cheating.  Go create your own dirt.”

God created the dirt.  God created the chemicals.  God created the intelligence that we have that even allows us to try to understand the world.  God created it all.  It all comes from God.

                Here’s one more thing that the creation story teaches us.  This is another reason getting bogged down in debates about evolution and a big bang and stuff misses the point for us as Christians.  When we look at the creation story that way, we forget about a very important verse.  It says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”

That’s a verse that its easy for us, as Christians, to miss.  There are a lot of times when we look at the world and it does not seem very good to us.  We see wars, we see hunger, we see abuse, we see immorality, we see all sorts of things that don’t seem very good at all. 

God sees all that, too, of course.  Yet, God still says the world is very good.  I think the reason God says that is that God sees the potential for good in everyone and everything.  God knows that each one of us sins.  God sees all the times that each one of falls short of what God created us to be.  Yet, God also sees all the times when we get it right.  God sees all the times when we actually do show love to each other.  God sees all the times when we really do put others ahead of ourselves.  God sees what we are, but God also sees what we can be.

God sees something else, too.  God sees how it’s all going to end.  You know, there’s been a lot of talk about the ancient Mayans supposedly predicting that the world is going to end in 2012.  I suppose it’s possible that’s true.  After all, Jesus told us that only God knows when the end is going to come.  I guess there’s no reason we know of that it could not come in 2012, just as there was no reason we know of that it could not have come in 2011 or 2010.

When we think of the end of the world, we tend to think of it as a tragic, cataclysmic thing.  There are ways in which it probably will be.  If you’ve ever read the book of Revelation, you know there’s a lot of stuff that’s supposed to happen before the world ends. 

Here’s the thing, though.  Whenever the end of the world comes, God will create it.  Just as God created the beginning of the world, God will create the end of the world, too.  Just as God’s creation was very good in the beginning, God’s creation in the end will be very good, too.  Any time God is involved in something, it has to be very good.  No matter how much we humans may get in the way, no matter how hard we humans try to mess it up, we cannot take away from God’s goodness.  God’s creation was very good in the beginning, it is very good now, and it will be very good at the end.  God’s creation is very good because God is very good.  Anything created by a very good God has to be very good.  That includes each one of you.  It includes me, too.

People have been arguing about when and how the world was created since before I can remember.  We’ll probably still be arguing about it long after I’m gone.  From a religious standpoint, though, the first thing we need to know about creation is that whenever and however it happened, God did it.  The second thing we need to know about creation is that, because God created it, it’s good.  The third thing we need to know about creation is that, no matter how badly we humans mess up, God’s creation will always be good.  The last thing we need to know about creation is that, whenever and however it ends, that will be good, too, because everything God does is good.

                There’s nothing wrong with trying to find out more, but those are the things we need to know.  If we know those things, our faith can handle whatever science may reveal to us.