“The Creation of the World” Genesis 1:1—2:4a

 At my first church I spent time volunteering with the Wesley Foundation at Penn State. Every day we would have folks around to talk to students as they arrived at the free coffee house run by the foundation and then each Sunday we would have an evening worship service. While the service itself was mostly run by the students, I was privileged a few times to preach. One of those times of privilege came as part of a sermon series that I still think of today called “The Attributes of God.”

Attributes seems like such a large word, but then again God is so big that any words would use to describe him seem small in comparison. The first week of that sermon series, right after the students arrived on campus was “God is the uncreated creator”.

If we are going to tell the story of our God and how there are none that are like him, a good place to start is at the beginning. The very beginning. With the book of Genesis and the story of creation. It is here that we find out that “In the beginning God created.”

Let’s stop there at those first few words. In the beginning. God existed, brothers and sisters, before time itself. God existed before anything else even was. In other words, before God started to create all that was present was nothing. Sometimes we describe that as chaos. When nothing had order. When nothing was. And God spoke everything into creation into being from that moment in the beginning. 

I want you to let that grandness wash over you again this day as we dive into these words from Genesis 1. God spent the first few days of creation making the earth into something that would a habitat. God created land and earth. Sea and sky. Day and night. In other words before human beings or any animal of the sea, sky, or earth came to be, God made a place for them. 

God did nothing by accident. Even when everything around God seemed to be a void made only of chaos, God still took control, creating exactly what we would need even before we knew we needed it. 

God is so much bigger than anything we can even begin to imagine. Let’s put some numbers to the vastness of God’s creation that came to be with us in mind. The sun, that which warms us and brings around the light of the day, is 93 million miles away from the earth. God placed the sun exactly where it needed to be. 

Then on the fifth day, God created inhabitants for this perfect place of God’s creation, all out of God’s imagination and love. God filled the earth with all sorts of creatures, finally resulting in God creating human beings in God’s very image to be stewards over all of this beauty that God had called forth. 

Why is this story of God creation so important? Because it reminds us of the strength and majesty of our God. Sometimes, my friends, we fail to live as people who live into this call to domino and stewardship that God granted us with on the sixth day of creation. Sometimes we arrogantly start to act like we were the ones who brought creation into being, the most powerful, and when we start to think like that - we push God father and farther from the place of honor that he deserves in our lives. 

When God created he didn’t just create things - he created a whole new order. A new way of being. And then created us with a call to relationship. See, while God did speak to earth into being, it doesn’t mean that he wasn’t intimately involved. No. God wanted to know us and love us. From the biggest moments of our lives to the smallest details of our days, God wants to be involved and God wants to walk with us. 

I was speaking with a friend recently about prayer. As she was listing all of the things that she brought to God in prayer - I noted the things that seemed to be absent. The small parts of her day. That brought us into this powerful conversation about how we invite God into the little things - the things that we don’t think are worth God’s time or we think we can handle on our own. For inviting God into each and every decision we make, that is when we learn to trust into our God who is above all and in all and through all. 

What would happen if we again embraced God as the uncreated creator? What would happen if we asked God to help us grow in our fascination of all that he has done for us? What would a healthy awe and reverence for our God who is infinite and immanent? In other words there is no way to measure how big God is, yet he is in everything, even to the smallest moments of our day?

It is not lost on me that this was the first attribute that my colleague preached to hurried college students out of a fourteen-week sermon series. I think in her wisdom she knew that in the chaos of moving into dorms, starting new classes, meeting new friends, that they needed a reminder that God was with them every moment of every day. 

But that reminder is not just needed by college students at the beginning of a new semester. It is equally needed by you and me right now. We need to be reminded of God’s strength and majesty. We need God to capture the attention of our heart and call us to our knees with anything and everything in prayer. 

We are in need of people who realize that the call to discipleship is a call to putting God in the right place in their lives - not off on a shelf until they feel like something is being enough to need him. But right at the very center of every day. 

Friends, may this be your day of new beginning. A new beginning of your relationship with God. God who creates, loves, and sustains. God who brings order to the chaos of our lives and provides what we need before we even know that we need it. God who created out of nothing, but called everything that he created “very good”. Let us step boldly into this place where we declare that we do not own God, but instead we follow the God who loves us, in everything we do, every single day. Amen.