"It's All Good" by Bob Breed
Myers Park Presbyterian Church
June 19, 2011
Dr. Bob Breed
It's All Good
Genesis 1:1-2:3
The Bible is not a science book…
The Bible is not a history book…
The Bible is a theology book, a book about God…
Genesis doesn’t present us with a scientific account of creation it gives us a priestly account. It shows us who God is – a god who rules over nature, blessing, consecrating, and separating the holy from the unholy. It shows us God as our creator, the one to whom we owe everything beginning with our very existence… Recognizing God as the creator of all things not only validates our lives but also the value of every rock, every plant, every river and every living creature.
The creation story in the first chapter of Genesis begins with chaos and ends with rest. It shows how God creates order out of disorder…
The first chapter of Genesis is filled with repetition “God said…Let there be… and it was so…and God made…and God saw that it was good…and there was evening and there was morning.
Notice also that Genesis one contains a lot of numbers… We can relate to numbers. We use numbers every day. When I was a kid all I had to remember was my address and my phone number. Now you have to know your home phone, business phone, cell phone, zip code in five and nine number versions, credit card numbers, PIN numbers and passwords… Numbers were also significant in the ancient world... Three different realms are populated on three parallel days. The first life is vegetation… then animals and finally humanity. The number seven represents completeness. Not only are there seven days, but there are seven repetitions of the phrase “and God saw that it was good.” The seventh day is set apart as a holy day and a day of rest. God is mentioned exactly 35 times in this story and the passage about the seventh day is written in exactly 35 Hebrew words.
Notice that these events are not described in scientific terms. The day and the night happen because God declares them into existence. There is no mention of the rotation of the earth because at this point the sun and the moon haven’t been created…
Humanity is the crowning achievement of God’s creation. God says, “Let us make human-kind in our image.”Human beings alone out of all creation are designated as created in this image. The human beings are also given “dominion” over the rest of creation; God gives the creation for human use, and humans are to use their dominion as those who are created in the image of the creator…
You don’t have to take sides in the global warming debate to understand, that as people of faith, we have a responsibility to take care of the earth…and yet we continue to pollute our air, poison our water and contaminate our food.
Did you know that out in the Pacific Ocean somewhere between Hawaii and Japan is this massive floating accumulation of garbage known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”?
- The size of this field of Trash is 2 times the size of Texas.
- It is said 1/5th of the junk trapped in the “garbage patch” comes from ship dumping and the rest of the trash comes from human land trash.
- Environmental researchers believe 90% of the trash in the ocean dump is from plastic, which is not bio-degradable.
- Some environmentalists say there is 3.5 million tons of waste in the Pacific Garbage Patch.
We live in a world where the top 20 percent of the population consumes 86% of the goods... As people of faith we should be taking the lead when it comes to being good stewards of our environment...
What is one thing you can do? (swim meet)
Finally, God finishes creating and God rests. This is a divine rest not a human rest… Our text tells us that God “Hallowed” the seventh day. It is a day that is to be holy, set apart, different from all the other days…
God proclaims creation “good”, “it’s all good”…
Now you might be saying to yourself, wait a minute, if creation is so good then what about all the natural disasters? (wild-fires in Arizona, tornadoes in Alabama, Missouri and North Carolina, flooding along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, the earth quake and tsunami in Japan.
If humanity is supposed to be good there are plenty of bad people in the world. Scandals surround politicians, coaches and athletes are caught cheating. Terrorism, war, crime, the list goes on and on...
The Bible lists many behaviors we are supposed to avoid. Just for a day, try to keep all of the Ten Commandments. Just for a day, try to follow Paul’s advice to avoid gossip. Just for a day, love your spouse the same way Christ loves the church. Kids, young people, just for a day honor your parents. Just for an hour, try to follow the Great Commandment. What’s so good about humanity? The creation story tells us that we are made in the image of God. What does that mean? It means we are set apart from the rest of creation. We are given the ability to create and to reason. Most of all we are given the capacity to love with God’s love. We are to be godlike in our actions, in the way we think about each other and in the ways we treat each other. No, we’ll never be perfect. Only Jesus was perfect. But when Jesus said, “Come, follow me it did mean that we are supposed to strive to be Christ-like…
What do we learn from the creation story? We learn that our God is the creator of the universe. It doesn’t tell us how it was created it tells us who created it. God created all things and God created them good. We’re the ones who came along and messed things up. God created goodness and order out of chaos but when given the choice we turned our back on God’s goodness and chose to return to chaos.
God’s creation is still good… (nature, babies)
We have to do a better job of taking care of it.
God is good…
God’s goodness and love dwells in us… We’re not perfect but God can work in us and God can use us to fulfill his purposes. God can let his love flow through us...
In the end, our faith will allow us to look at the world, and our own lives and say with our creator God, it’s good, it’s all good.
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