A (0:00)

We should never lose sight of the fact that everything God has created, he is created for his own glory. But his own glory is never adversative to his children's good. And he has done this also for our good.

B (0:23)

There is so much to unpack when it comes to Genesis Chapter one, much more than the days of creation. God made all things for his glory, and as you'll hear today, he also made all things for our pleasure. This is the Friday edition of Renewing youg Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and it's great to have you with us. This has been such an enriching week for me as we've walked through these early messages from Dr. Ferguson's brand new series, Theology for All. I trust you have been helped as well, and I hope you've already requested access to to all 36 messages. If you haven't, there's still time. Simply request access when you give a donation before midnight tonight@renewingyourmind.org but be quick as only hours remain. Well, let's go now to Genesis 1 to consider God the Creator.

A (1:20)

We are continuing these introductory studies to Christian doctrine with a reflection today on God the Lord as Creator. We looked previously at this title that God gives to himself in Exodus chapter 3 when he speaks to Moses and says, when the people ask you what My name is, tell them I am has sent you. And we might think for a moment that it is strange for us first of all to think about God as Lord, revealing himself to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus chapter 3, and then go back to speak to God, the Lord as Creator? That might seem at first sight to be the wrong way around. Don't we speak first of all about God as Creator, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, and then move on to Exodus 3 to speak about him as the Lord? But there's more than one reason why this is a legitimate way for us to think. The first is that God did not become the Lord at the burning bush. He already was the Lord. And he was that same Lord at creation because he was that same Lord eternally. So I am precedes creation. And not only that, but there's a very interesting thing that we find when we read through the Scriptures from the beginning and perhaps a puzzle when we come to Exodus chapter 3. God says to Moses, by My name, Yahweh by My name I am. I was not revealed to Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob. And it looks as though he's saying to Moses, Moses. This is the first time anyone has ever had disclosed to them my personal name. Just as we saw when we were talking about the Trinity, that it's only when Jesus is about to ascend, that for the first time in history, in a sense, we learn how to pronounce God's name properly. Never before in the history of redemption had God been called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yes, little indications that this was so. But here, for the first time, as I suggested earlier on, we have God's Christian name. And what we have here in Exodus chapter three seems to be God's Exodus name, his redeeming name. But this is not actually the first time that the Lord Yahweh is used in the Scriptures. It's used way back in Genesis chapter 2. In Genesis chapter 12, when we are introduced to Abraham, the first thing that we are told is it was the Lord. L, O, R, D block, capital letters in our modern English translations, indicating this is Yahweh speaking. So how do we solve this conundrum that God says to Moses, this is the first time anyone has ever known me as Yahweh. And yet earlier on in Genesis, it's very clear that Yahweh is active, Yahweh is speaking, Yahweh is working. Yahweh is making covenants with his people. Well, I suppose the simplest way to try and understand it is to use a kind of analogy. So I might say in 1914, when World War I broke out, President Reagan was 3 years old. We understand that he wasn't then president, but he was one and the same person who became president. He wasn't known as President Reagan, but he was the same person who was President Reagan. Now, that's a poor analogy, but it is an analogy to the fact that there is no point in time, no point in eternity, where God is not the great I am. And there are some reasons for us to grasp this, that it's only in the light of the Exodus that Moses writes Genesis. I wonder if that's ever crossed your mind. Moses did not write Genesis before the Exodus, but after the experience of the Exodus. And so, in a sense, what Moses understands is that it's encountering God as the Redeemer, that he comes better to understand that God is also the Creator. And that carries some very important lessons for us. It underscores for us there is only one God and Lord. And that was important in the ancient world where people believed there were different gods who did different things. The same God who brought creation into being is one and the same God who brought redemption into being. And what's so significant about that is this, that if it's God the Redeemer who brought creation into being and God the Creator who brought redemption into being, then what at the end of the day redemption is going to mean is restoration to what God originally intended us to be in our creation. And it's not possible, I think, to overemphasize that today, that redemption is the restoration of humanity. Think about that in terms, for example, of modern day humanism. What the Bible teaches us is that modern day humanism is on the high road to confusion because it's lost sight of what makes us truly human. It's God who makes us truly human. It's God the Creator who makes us truly human. And it's also a very significant indication of how the Bible will unfold, what it means to be sanctified. People have all kinds of ideas of sanctification means. In its essence, sanctification means that we are actually now being made truly human. That's a very important principle for us, I think, to grasp in the church, isn't it? We have people in the church who have all kinds of ideas of what sanctification means, and sometimes they're very metallic ideas of what sanctification means. But when someone is sanctified, one of the things that we notice about them is an increase in a beautiful and attractive humanity. Now, we could have learned that, of course, from the Gospels and the Epistles, because this is what is true of Jesus. Jesus is the perfect man. But it also helps us to understand that the whole process of redemption from beginning to end is a process in which God is restoring us to what we were created to be by his redemption and then transforming us to what we were originally destined to be. And all this, in a sense, is already embedded in the opening chapter of the Bible. It's a chapter about God as Creator. Now, if I were to ask you what is the single most important thing about Genesis Chapter one? I suspect there would be many Christians today who would say the really important thing about Genesis Chapter one is the length of the days of creation. But if you think back to Moses, it's very doubtful, isn't it, that that was a question that troubled Moses. And I think it's demonstrable that it wasn't the big issue for Moses. Now, that may be an important question, it may be a difficult question. But what I want to emphasize is it's not the message of Genesis Chapter one. And I want us to think just for a moment then, about what is the message of Genesis Chapter one. I want to suggest that that message is sevenfold. First of all, Genesis chapter one indicates to us in a preliminary way that creation is the work of God the Trinity. We hinted at this in a previous study. God the Father speaks the word. God the Spirit hovers over the original mass of creation and brings order and light and fullness into that creation. So when we think about the created order, much more I think, than we usually do, we need to reflect on the fact that this is the. The amazing work of God, the Trinity. The old Latin theologians used to have an expression to describe the work of the Trinity. Opera ad extra. The works outside of the Trinity. Opera ad extra, trinitatis indivisa sunt. They are indivisible in everything God does. He always does it in a trinitarian way. And we need to remember that when we think about creation and we see it in Genesis Chapter one. Second thing that we need to note about creation is it's a work of amazing divine power. The theologians have another Latin phrase, because they wrote in Latin, many of them. They loved little Latin phrases. And theologians always have, haven't they? Creatio ex nihilo, or sometimes creatio ex in nihilum. Creation out of nothing and creation into nothing. And this is the most extraordinary indication of divine power. Sometimes exegetes of Genesis 1 have brought this out, by the way in which Genesis speaks about the creation of these great lights for the day and for the night and how God made them. And in the older translations, there is a little addendum to those words. And also the stars, as though the creation of the stars were almost like a. Let me add just another little detail to my creation. And when, as we do now, we are able to explore the vastness of the universe. What amazing power to bring this into creation. Actually, what an amazing power this would be if there had already been something that God created our cosmos out of. But what is the greatest demonstration of divine power is that he created it out of nothing. I sometimes wonder what would happen if the scientists in their exploration, some of them, by no means all, but some of them, I think, determined to show that there is no Creator. What would it be like if they got to the Omega point of all things and were able to look over. I don't think it's actually possible, it's not a coherent idea, but they were able to look over to what happened before or what was before. And they said there was nothing there. There was absolutely nothing there. You Christians, don't you understand? There was nothing there. And the Newest Christian who had read Genesis chapter one, I think could say, have you not been listening to me? I have been trying to tell you that God created the world out of nothing and into nothing. So of course there was nothing there. Now, we would be fooling ourselves if we thought that we could grasp what this means. We know absolutely nothing that is created out of nothing. And so this is an amazing, an amazing indication of divine power. But not only divine power. In the third place, the creation is a work of divine genius, isn't it? If you just think about the variety in any area of creation, the solar variety in the solar system, the human variety, the animal variety, the God who created the rabbit created the giraffe and the hippopotamus and the elephant, the God who created the little goldfish created the whale. What an imagination. God must have to be able to speak our world into being and to demonstrate this beautiful genius by the sheer variety of all things. It is an amazing thing, isn't it, how God creates things out of the dust of the earth. He creates animals, he creates human beings in Genesis out of the dust of the earth. And when we think about that variety, we are surely lost in wonder, love and praise. There is a fourth element in creation and it emerges in Genesis 1. It unfolds in the rest of the Bible, and in a sense it is still unfolding in our history. And that is the sheer vastness of God's understanding what he has embedded in creation. If you think of what we are discovering today technologically, everything we discover today technologically is the way in which we can employ or discover what God originally embedded in creation. And we know we're only at the beginning, we know there is so much more. But we will never create out of nothing. At the end of the day, we are always engineers. We are employing in whatever sphere what God has invested in creation. If you think of these little objects without which we are frightened now to go anywhere, the powers, the powers that enable these little machines to operate, they're all embedded in the original created order. Perhaps if Adam and Eve hadn't fallen, we would have discovered them more rapidly. But we do discover them. And like everything else, it's a reminder to us every time we use anything that is a quote's invention of modern technology. Need to remind ourselves it's not a creation of modern technology. It's an engineering of the powers that God has invested in creation. Fifthly, we should never lose sight of the fact that everything God has created, he is created for his own glory. We spoke about the Mutual relationships of the Trinity in a previous study. That's a wonderful way for us to think about creation, to think about the Father bringing this wonderful world into being for the pleasure of His Son and for the joy of His Spirit and Christ, the word of God being the instrument of creation, in order that creation might be for His Father's pleasure. And the Holy Spirit hovering over the waters and beginning to bring this orderliness out of the darkness and the lack of order in the original stuff of creation, and doing it as a kind of love present for the Father and for the Son. So that not only in our redemption, but in the whole act of creation, we understand that God does all things for his own glory, but his own glory is never adversative to his children's good. And he has done this also for our good. There's a sixth thing that we should notice, and many of the best Reformed theologians, I think, have understood this very well, that there is a special grace in creation. We Christians tend to think of the word grace as related to sin. So people might define God's grace as his demerited kindness to sinners. But God didn't become gracious. Only when man fell did He. God didn't change and become gracious. His response to the future tragedy of the fall was the determination to be savingly gracious. But the God who became savingly gracious to us was always gracious. We must not think that God before creation was any less gracious. We must not think that the God who made Adam and Eve was. Was less gracious when he created them than when he redeemed them. He was always gracious. He was always kind. He was always generous. It wouldn't surprise me that some of us, even when we were young children, lay in bed after our parents had put the light out and hoped we were sleeping. And in some childish form or another, we asked ourselves the question, why am I here? Why is anything here? And here is the fundamental answer. Because the God we have is a gracious God. And then seventhly, what we need to see in Genesis chapter one is it's going somewhere. So if I were to ask you, where is Genesis 1 going? What is the apex? What is the telos? What is the goal of all of these creating acts of God? And it is very clear when you read Genesis chapter one, that the goal is ourselves. The goal is the creation of man and woman as the image of God. And even when you read through the passage, there is a rhythm in the passage, isn't there? And then suddenly that rhythm is changed. I wonder if you've ever noticed that the rhythm is dramatically changed. And the creation of man and woman is put, as it were, into a different kind of order from the creation of all other things. Because what he has had in view from the beginning, what he had in view in the darkness, what the Spirit had in view as he hovered over the waters, was that we would be created. And there are many indications that this is where God has been going. But not only are there indications that this is where God was going from the beginning, but you remember that refrain that runs through Genesis, God said it was so, and it was good. God said it was so and it was good. God said it was so and it was good. And then only when he has, as it were, arrived at his original goal do we read it was very good. And this is really one of the most amazing things about creation, that God has made all things for his own glory, but he's also made all things for our pleasure. And one of the reasons why it's helpful to notice that Moses is writing Genesis 1 and what follows from the perspective of the Exodus is that the context of the Exodus is a country and a people and a world. Whereas Paul says, having rejected the worship of the Creator, we have started worshiping creatures. And so isn't it so significant in the Exodus narrative that there is judgment after judgment after judgment after judgment on the objects of worship in Egypt, not least the God of the river Nile? And Moses, as he experiences the redemption of God is looking back on the original creation of God and seeing how in the world in which he lives, men and women had, as Paul says in Romans chapter one, exchanged the glory of God and started worshipping the creature and the creation. And at the end of the day, that's where everyone who isn't a Christian is, isn't it? And that's why the redemption of God is such a marvelous act of the Creator's mercy.