Genesis 1
June 11, 2017
The Holy Trinity A
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus~
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. It is verse one, of chapter one, of book number one, of the Holy Scriptures. It is the genesis of Genesis. It’s one Bible verse that nearly all of us have learned by heart. It tells us of the beginning of all things, and points ahead to the fulfillment of all things. Genesis 1:1 tells the whole story for us on this Holy Trinity Sunday. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
In our usual way of speaking, it’s God the Father who typically gets the credit for the work of creation. But in fact, all three
The Scriptures just don’t allow us divide up the works of God among the persons of the Godhead. And even though I love a good baseball analogy, it just doesn’t work to say that God the Father is like the starting pitcher who gets the game rolling, and that the Son is the middle reliever who clinches the game, and that the Holy Spirit is the closer who always locks up the game with a “save.” No, the truth is that all three were already on the mound in the top of the first well before the first batter stepped out of the dugout. It’s not a good analogy.
But before there was a game known as baseball, there was a creed of the Christian faith known as the Athanasian Creed. The Athanasian Creed contains no bad analogies. There’s no fluff there. Just clear, concrete, hardcore theology. You have to love the Athanasian Creed. It leaves no stone unturned, no angle unexamined, no wiggle room for any alternative gods. The Athanasian Creed takes no prisoners. It proclaims the unvarnished truth of who God is—three distinct persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—united together as one divine being—distinguishable but not divisible. In other words, you can tell them apart but you can’t pull them apart and you can’t have them apart.
In the beginning, God—the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit—created. That word, created, gets used in a very particular way in the pages of the Old Testament. Only God Himself is used as the subject of that verb, created. Abraham created nothing. Moses created nothing. David, Solomon, Elijah—bupkis, nada, zilch. You see, the word “create” in Genesis 1:1 means to create something out of nothing. Human beings can assemble, build, compose, concoct and construct, but we can’t create—at least not like God creates—something out of nothing. We need raw materials. We need ingredients. I finally planted my garden a few days ago, and come August I expect to be knee-deep in cucumbers. But without seeds and soil and sunshine and showers, there will be no cucumbers. I can’t create a cucumber. I can only facilitate God’s creative work. He alone gives the growth.
Your God creates something out of nothing. In the beginning there was nothing. Before God spoke His, “Let there be,” there was only darkness and emptiness and chaos. And from the midst of that deep darkness God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. God made something out of nothing. God created light out of total darkness. And then, three days later, God created the sun. Yes, before there was sunshine, there was light. (Ponder that!) And God kept this up for six whole days, creating something out of nothing: atmosphere, dry ground, vegetation, all creatures great and small, man and woman. And each day God saw that it was good. In fact, it was very good. And God did it all without tools, without ingredients, without raw materials of any kind. Instead, to create something out of nothing, God simply spoke His Word. He said, “Let there be,” and there was.
Do you believe that? Every Christian eventually has to come to terms with Genesis chapter one. You can either take God at His Word, OR you can hold to the words of men and women who claim that living things evolved over millions of years, quite by accident. And then there are those who try to have their cake and eat it too, saying that, yes, God created, but He used the process of evolution to accomplish it. But you have to do some very creative interpreting of Genesis chapter 1 to arrive at that conclusion. Creation either happened the way God says it happened in Genesis one, or it didn’t happen that way. It’s up to you to decide. Or, more accurately, it’s up to you to believe.
There’s not time to examine every angle of the creation-evolution debate this morning, but do pause to ponder this: Would your God—the Holy Trinity—design a plan for the evolution of life that was completely dependent upon death? Because death is an absolutely critical part of the evolutionary process. Evolution is all about the survival of the fittest, and the death of the weakest. If it’s true that God Himself initiated the process of evolution, then God Himself is the author of death, for reproduction and death must occur in order for newer and higher life forms to evolve. If God initiated evolution then your death isn’t a bad thing at all. Your death will simply make way for human beings who are better, faster, smarter, and more highly evolved than you.
Does that sound like the God you know and believe in? Does that sound like the God of the Scriptures—the Holy Trinity—who calls death “the last enemy to be destroyed” (1 Cor. 15:26)? Not at all! In fact, your God is at work mightily to save you from death. Your God sent His Son into the world as a human being, to redeem all of sinful humanity. Jesus was the only human being for whom death was part of the plan from the beginning. And by His death, St. Paul writes, “He has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel” (2 Tim. 1:10).
Jesus predicted His own death and resurrection at least three times. He said that His death and resurrection “must” happen. These were “necessary” things. Why? Why did He have to die and rise again? Why did He bear our sins and shed His blood? Why did He, the Son of God, take on our human flesh and reveal a picture of God that was more awesomely complex than anything we could ever imagine? He did it so that He could create something out of nothing . . . in you!
For you see, when Adam and Eve fell into sin and death entered the world, it meant that there was still one place where darkness reigned. It meant that there was still one place of emptiness and nothingness. That dark and lifeless place is the human heart—infected with sin. But into this dark and sin-filled space, God the Holy Trinity speaks: “Let there be light. Let there be faith. I have called you by name and you are mine.” What God did on day one of creation He did again inside your heart—removing the darkness of sin and giving the light of faith. You didn’t evolve into a child of God any more than you evolved from apes and gorillas; you were created a child of God out of nothing—through the power of God’s Word and the water of Holy Baptism. This is why we pray in Psalm 51, “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” Only He can do it. Only He can take away the sin and exchange it for the righteousness of His Son. In 2 Corinthians Paul makes the connection perfectly: “For God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has made His light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).
The danger on Holy Trinity Sunday is that all the talk about the Trinity becomes an exercise in mere theology—in abstract concepts and complex terminology. This is why our God anchors His work in the simplest substance on the face of the earth: in water and words. Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that Jesus has entrusted to us. In that water and in those words God is still creating—creating disciples, creating faith, creating something out of nothing. In you, the Holy Trinity has created something wonderful—faith that will endure to life everlasting.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.
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