[00:00:01] Welcome to the River Church podcast. We're all about bringing the life, hope and love of Jesus to everyone around us. For more information, check out our
[email protected] so if someone wrote a story of her life, what sort of story would you want it to be?
[00:00:25] What sort of story would you want it to be? Would you want your story to mean something?
[00:00:31] I mean, we all want our lives to mean something, right?
[00:00:35] But kind of, what kind of, what kind of tale would you want it to be? Would it be like one of these? These are some of the greatest stories, apparently, according to Google, some of the greatest stories that have been written, maybe it's something like War and Peace or Divine comedies, Crime and Punishment, maybe Dick, Great Expectations, Romeo and Juliet.
[00:00:59] What sort of story would you want your life to be?
[00:01:03] Or what sort of story would you like to be in as a person?
[00:01:09] It's got to have a happy ending. Yeah. What makes a great story like this?
[00:01:16] You know, what are the components of a great story? Is it that it's an epic tale, it's a struggle, it's a sort of a battle against good and evil. Does that make an epic tale? Is it got to have romance in it? Has it got to have comedy in a story to be an epic tale or a tragedy? Or like John says, a happy ending? Maybe stories like this, they teach us something. Maybe they're about philosophy. You come away going, hey, that I've learned something through this story.
[00:01:50] Maybe it's something about human achievement. What have we achieved as a human race? What teaches us about life?
[00:01:59] Maybe my suggestion would be that the best stories are those that are true.
[00:02:05] Do you agree with that?
[00:02:07] What is the greatest story? A little cheesy segue, obviously. For me, I'm going to say the greatest story is the story of the Bible.
[00:02:18] Have I cheated? Do you know The Bible is 66 books together? It's not one book. I hear you cry.
[00:02:25] Yeah, yeah, something like that. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's lots of different authors do, you know, stretched across the whole Bible and, you know, there's lots of different stories going on. And that's true.
[00:02:39] But actually, the Bible as a whole is one story.
[00:02:44] It has a plot line from Genesis through to Revelation. There is something going on that takes us all the way through, through the Bible.
[00:02:54] And perhaps a problem with the way that we study the Bible these days or think about it, is that we've turned it into a textbook.
[00:03:04] It's something that we flick through and we choose something, we dissect it and divide it into little things.
[00:03:11] And we come to it as a book of instruction. I want to know something.
[00:03:17] So I'm going to flick through to something in the Bible to understand something about my life or about an answer to a problem that I have. But when we do that, and it is still good to do that, right? That's okay, we can do that. But when we do that, we miss the whole thing about the Bible being a whole story.
[00:03:36] It is one story from beginning to end and it is a tale of epic proportion.
[00:03:43] You know, all of these other stories, they fade into insignificance.
[00:03:48] The Bible has romance, did you know that? It has sacrificial love. It has heroes and villains. It has the wise and the foolish, riches and poverty. It has war and peace, family and society, honor and contempt, loyalty and betrayal.
[00:04:08] It's a struggle perhaps between good and evil, we might say. But ultimately this thing about the story of the Bible is it's true.
[00:04:17] It is true from beginning to end.
[00:04:22] And for us, the story of our lives, we actually play a part in this story.
[00:04:29] Did you know you are in the story?
[00:04:33] NC Wright is a great scholar who frames the bible as a six act drama.
[00:04:39] And we are now currently in Acts 5.
[00:04:43] Act 6 is yet to come. Act 5, the age of the Church and we are players on the world stage. If I want to quote Shakespeare along those lines, we are players in this drama.
[00:04:56] You are part of an epic, epic tale.
[00:05:01] And so we're going to get through and we are going to look at this whole story and do you know what? We're going to read through the whole Bible. So get your Bibles out. Jesse. No, we are going to go through the whole Bible. Okay.
[00:05:15] It is going to take us a long time.
[00:05:18] Not today.
[00:05:19] You know, we're going to split it up over many weeks.
[00:05:23] But what we want to do is to trace these plot lines of the Bible. So to look at the major stories.
[00:05:29] Many of you will know all the major stories of Abraham and Noah and Moses and the Israelites and through to the church age and the Gospels. Many of you will know these stories. But we want to take these stories and show how they're part of one plot line.
[00:05:46] See what they speak to us individually, but how they contribute to what the big story is, how they contribute to the twists and turns all the way through those unexpected moments of the whole story.
[00:06:02] And this is to help you, as you read through the Bible, as you open up a Bible in some random passage in Joel or Obadiah or wherever you open to in the middle of Deuteronomy and all the things about the temple that you connect it to, what's going on in the big story.
[00:06:21] I don't know. How many times have you opened the Bible and looked through a passage and thought, I've got no idea how this relates to the rest of the Bible. Right. We do that all the time. And so we want to do that as a whole church and go through that. But actually, this, I think, you know, all of these other stories, right? I'm sure if I asked you what was a story that you really loved, you'd probably have an answer for me.
[00:06:50] Do you know a story that you really. You read a book and you really loved it, whether it's Jane Austen or it's the Matrix, Right. You really love a story and you love what's being told in that. And really, the Bible as this story, it's a story that we should fall in love with, right?
[00:07:09] It's a story that we should love.
[00:07:12] The Bible is. It's given to us, perhaps I might stretch a phrase a little bit.
[00:07:19] I'm not sure if I should. It's right to me to call the Bible, but it's perhaps a love letter from God to humanity.
[00:07:27] Have you ever thought it in those ways that God is expressing his love, not just in the actions that he's done, but in the words that he's written to us.
[00:07:36] And it's something to want to, you know, grapple with. So we're going to do that. And as we learn to love the story, we get to learn to love the author, the person who's written it all for us. Amen. Amen. Good. Okay, I'm there. You're there with me. That's great. Okay, so this morning we're going to start.
[00:07:57] Where are we going to start?
[00:07:59] At the beginning, because it's a very good place to start. Thank you very much. My wife, who's watched the Sound of Music many, many times.
[00:08:10] So we are going to start at the beginning. So we are going to read some of Genesis 1 this morning.
[00:08:17] If you don't know where it is, it's right at the start, after the content, an introduction. So if you've got your Bibles, I'm going to put some of it. We're not going to read the whole lot. We're going to read some of it. I'll put it up on the screen. But if you have your Bibles, it's great to follow along.
[00:08:31] And what's important, actually, just before we do it, is to note that the story has A beginning, right? It has a start.
[00:08:43] I don't know if you know this, but the term the Big Bang. Have you heard of the Big Bang? It was a phrase coined by a physicist, Fred Hoyle, in 1980. 49. I've got it written. Google was right. And he was making fun of people who believed there was a beginning.
[00:09:00] Because he was a physicist from a long line of philosophers who thought that the universe always was and always will be, do you know, a steady state. It was always like that.
[00:09:13] It was something that some of the ancient Greeks and many people believed in, that the universe was just always is.
[00:09:20] We can't hope to think about anything else. But the Bible says it has a beginning, it has a start.
[00:09:29] And it's really important to remember it has a start.
[00:09:34] Because this is a problem for people who don't have any thoughts of religion at all. If they're atheists, they don't think about God in any way. Because if it has a beginning, and that's the general consensus of science, isn't it? There was a Big Bang, there was a start.
[00:09:53] Then it says to us, well, who started it?
[00:09:57] Who caused the Big Bang?
[00:10:00] Did it just magically occur of its own? But that doesn't make sense. It's got to have a beginning. And that means that there has to be something, someone outside of our universe.
[00:10:14] There has to be something that exists outside and is not constrained by, by our universe. And that's critical to the storyline of the Bible and understanding who God is and humanity is.
[00:10:27] So let's read some of Genesis 1.
[00:10:33] In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And.
[00:10:48] And God said, let there be light. And there was light.
[00:10:51] God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.
[00:10:56] God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.
[00:11:01] And there was evening, and there was morning the first day.
[00:11:05] And God said, let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.
[00:11:11] This is confusing. Stay with me. So God made the vaults and separated the water under the vaults from the water above the vault. And it was so. And he called the vault sky. And there was evening and there was morning the second day. Now, let me just say that the language here, the Hebrew language, is really difficult to understand. It's kind of somewhat poetic in it.
[00:11:37] And so grappling with one word and translating it into English really is a very hard thing. Okay, so you kind of have to wrestle and sometimes. So in this, in this translation it said the God called the vault sky. In another, they translated it heavens, because there's a meaning there somewhere. We will get to it, but you kind of have to stick with it and see it within the context.
[00:12:01] And so the story goes on here, just to summarize a few more verses. And God creates dry grounds, and he creates plants and trees on the third day. On the fourth day, he creates the sun and stars and moon. And on the fifth day he creates birds and, and fish.
[00:12:20] And then the sixth day, he creates land animals and humanity. And I'm going to pick it up in verse 26. 26, where it says God.
[00:12:35] No, I've gone one too far, haven't we? There we go. It says, then God said, let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and, and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.
[00:12:54] So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God created them. Male and female. He created them. God blessed them and said to them, be fruitful and increase in number. Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.
[00:13:15] And it says, then on the seventh day, God rests from it, where it says, so God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
[00:13:30] Now, great. Okay, so for the next seven hours, I'm going to go through a detailed explanation.
[00:13:37] There's so much written about Genesis 1, I think Genesis 1 to 3.
[00:13:42] There's so many books written about Genesis 1 to 3, they could fill a whole library.
[00:13:48] So I possibly can't do it any justice this morning, but what I want to pull out is just things that maybe highlight how the story starts and where there's the trajectory of the sort of big narrative and just things about God's creation and then humanity. Okay, so yeah, hopefully you'll stay with me.
[00:14:12] What does this passage say about gods?
[00:14:15] It says that God is in charge.
[00:14:18] Right? It says that God is king. It says that he is the all powerful king. Right.
[00:14:28] He has power over all of creation.
[00:14:31] He is able to create and destroy anything in creation.
[00:14:36] Right. Whether it's things on the earth or above the earth.
[00:14:42] It says that he created the stars and the heavens and the sun and the moon. I don't know if you ever tried to look up the size of the planets or the expanse of the universe. Whenever I've seen things on YouTube or stuff it's like it blows my mind. It's like the distance between here and the moon seems forever. Right? Millions of miles. But from here to the next to the end of the solar system, it's just like impossible. We can't even begin to imagine it. But God did all of that.
[00:15:12] And like we have a problem.
[00:15:14] I don't know.
[00:15:16] Building a house or building buildings. Doesn't it? And God did all of this. He is the all powerful king. His power is just inexpressible compared to what we have.
[00:15:30] And he's the only king.
[00:15:32] There was no one else involved.
[00:15:35] He says in the beginning God, God said we didn't contribute. There wasn't a spiritual being that contributed to God creating the universe. He's the only one. There is no one. As we were singing before. It's great. They picked some great songs. She didn't know what I was talking about. But they great songs. We didn't take part. No one took part. It was God by himself. We didn't assist him. No one assisted him. It was by God alone.
[00:16:06] And that we see that God is a good king.
[00:16:10] What he creates is good.
[00:16:13] It's an expression of who God is. He created stuff that is good because he is good. And it was an expression of his free will.
[00:16:22] Like no one compelled God to create.
[00:16:25] No one said, you have to do this. He didn't have to. He wasn't made to.
[00:16:32] It wasn't like God was sad or unfulfilled before creation.
[00:16:38] He was perfectly fulfilled. He is God. He is good in all his ways. And he created it out of his goodness.
[00:16:46] And we see, like I said, he is the sovereign king because of all of these things, because of who he is. He is the sovereign king. He is the one in charge. He rules over. He's not bound by anything in the universe. It's not like we can say God, you can't do that because of the laws of physics or the law of whatever we decide. God, you can't do that. You're restricted by that.
[00:17:14] No. God is outside of it and controls it all from the outside. He decides what he can do.
[00:17:23] Creation does God's bidding. Not the other way around.
[00:17:26] Right? Amen. Amen. So that is God. That's some of the things. I'm sure there's loads more things that we can find out and talk about God in there. But that's God. He is the creator king.
[00:17:39] And yet when we Move to creation.
[00:17:43] What do we find?
[00:17:44] We find that the universe is a creation of many kingdoms.
[00:17:53] Let me just say a diversion.
[00:17:56] Genesis 1 is not. The Bible is not a scientific textbook.
[00:18:01] I'm sure you've heard this before. And a common problem that we see in the clash of the worlds and science versus the Bible is that people say the Bible can't be true because that's not how it happened. Right. They say how. That's not how creation happens, but.
[00:18:20] And the belief is that, you know, that people are people before science came along, before all of these things, that people were uneducated, and so they had to have religion to explain the world. Yeah. Have you heard this story before? You know, people had to have religion to explain how the weather happened and how all of these things happened. And then science came along and it explained it. And now we don't need religion in some way.
[00:18:48] And so therefore, hey, the Bible is untrue in all of these things.
[00:18:53] But the Bible's not a scientific textbook.
[00:18:57] Its function is not to explain how exactly creation happened, but it's there to explain us why it happened, who created it, why was it created, why are we here?
[00:19:12] And if the Bible is a letter from God to us, it's a letter explaining from our maker what we are made to do and to how we relate to it. So we shouldn't expect the Bible to tell us how gravity works or how come there are only eight planets in our solar system, apologies to Pluto, or how big the universe is. Neither should we expect it to tell us the order in which bacteria and viruses and insects and sea monsters and dinosaurs and humans were created.
[00:19:44] The answers aren't there.
[00:19:46] Okay, but what do we see?
[00:19:49] Well, we see that how creation is made, God gives it reasons for existence and describes these different parts of it. And Genesis 1 is written in this particular format. You might have seen this before in sort of two parallel sort of streams.
[00:20:08] So maybe that's a bit small. I don't know if you can. Can you see that up the back?
[00:20:13] Yes. Good. Great. Okay, so we have these creation of kingdoms or domains, and then God creates life to fill the kingdoms. And we have to use the word life as a little bit of a metaphor in the first one, because in day one creates God creates lights or this, you know, the expanse of the universe, should we say. And then in day four, he creates stars, sun and moon to rule and to govern the light.
[00:20:42] Okay, we get day two, we get the sea and the sky. And then God creates life to fill, multiply these kingdoms and Then we have, on day three we have land. And on day six, he creates animals and people to fill this kingdom, this land with life.
[00:21:06] And life is given the sort of continuation of God's work, right? So God creates these kingdoms, he gives life into these kingdoms. And the life is told to be fruitful and multiply.
[00:21:26] The life is to co create almost with God, to continue God's work of creation, to fill these kingdoms with life. God's reflection of his glory and who he is. So in one sense we get to day seven, the work is complete.
[00:21:46] God's work is perhaps complete. His active work is complete in that sense.
[00:21:52] And then he commissions life to keep continuing in it.
[00:21:58] And creation, what we see is creation is good.
[00:22:02] God says, this is good, this is good. And then on day seven he says, or day six, he says, it's very good.
[00:22:09] I finished, I can look back and see it. And creation is very good.
[00:22:15] That means God is pleased with what he's done.
[00:22:20] And God doesn't make mistakes.
[00:22:24] God doesn't make mistakes. The design and purpose of what he's created is good.
[00:22:31] It doesn't say that God rested on the seventh day and looked back and he thought, I'm not really sure about that.
[00:22:38] Maybe I could have done that slightly differently. Who wishes there wasn't wasps about, especially on a Sunday afternoon.
[00:22:48] And maybe we could get into theologies of the fall and the flood and things like that later.
[00:22:54] But at least at the start that God looks and he says that is good, that is perfect.
[00:23:01] Who's looking forward to the day of restoration when a new heavens come down and a new earth is made and we can look on every part of life around and say, this is, is good, just like God's, we will get to there one day.
[00:23:18] And so it's good. Not how, how is it good? Not just in what we see about, do you know, a sunset across an African Sahara or the mountains, snow top mountains of the Alps or the Himalayas, or you know, just you look out on the wonder of creation and the birds and the beasts and the.
[00:23:40] See, I just, I mean, you know, I'm sure everyone in this room has watched a program narrated by David Attenborough, right? He's been doing it for so many years and when you ever, you listen to him, he's got such a passion for the natural world.
[00:23:58] And this is, this is God's work.
[00:24:00] This is God's work, but it's not just reflecting God in his creativity, but it's reflecting in who he is. So the creation and intention of the Kingdoms and the kings that rule these places, that reflects God and it is good.
[00:24:20] So what about humanity?
[00:24:23] Well, people are created last.
[00:24:27] It says, let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule.
[00:24:35] Do you know we are created as images. It's a strange word.
[00:24:39] It gets interpreted in many ways, but in the likeness of God, something like God.
[00:24:47] And there's many different ways it's been interpreted.
[00:24:50] And you know, some of the writers of the Bible pick this up in many different ways across maybe through psalms into the New Testament, loads of different ways, ways reflecting on it. But the likeness here of us representing God, like God, is in the way that we should rule.
[00:25:10] We've been commissioned as humanity to rule. Ruling is not part of who we are, but of what have we been enabled to do by being like God.
[00:25:21] We've been imbued with some gifting, some ability to rule and govern in the way that we should care for, nurture, cultivate the earth, the animals, the fish, the birds all around us. We've been commissioned to be fruitful, multiply, and to look after this world.
[00:25:46] And it also says that we are made. The likeness of God is in humanity, in male and female, men and women.
[00:25:57] And it speaks there. Well, I mean, we could talk lots about this, but it speaks there both of equality and differentiation.
[00:26:06] Do you know the function of human beings as rulers? And to carry out this notion of being fruitful and to multiply is a joint role between men and women.
[00:26:20] It's not like the world could be just full of men or full of women, right? We need one another. Okay, I don't need to spell it out in a biological lesson there.
[00:26:31] We need one another, but in more ways than that. Do you know? In so many different ways.
[00:26:37] But also he calls out male and female in a way that he doesn't call out about the other animals.
[00:26:46] Differentiation says man is not the same as woman and woman is not the same as man. We can't exchange one for the other. We are both people, not animals.
[00:26:56] And so we have a joint combined role together.
[00:27:01] But it says that we have specialization.
[00:27:04] There are things different, not just biology, but more than that.
[00:27:11] And it points to our role there in governing, but also in fulfilling the commission to be fruitful and multiply. And so humanity rules as interdependent people, right? We need to rely on one another. There is not one person in charge. We are together, given the corporate notion of ruling together, but we are also not only interdependent one another. We are dependent upon God.
[00:27:43] Do you know there's no suggestion that God says, I'm finished.
[00:27:49] There you go, it's all yours. I'm off.
[00:27:52] That's not what day seven is all about, right? He rests from his work, but he calls us to be. We are still dependent upon Him. He is the sovereign king.
[00:28:03] I noticed this as well.
[00:28:05] It's funny that the earth is given as a kingdom for people to rule, humanity to rule, but not the heavens, right? Not the skies. I don't know what this says about interplanetary travel in the future.
[00:28:21] Maybe that's something that we could wrestle with another day. Right? Okay, but it's interesting. But again, that's that other, the symbolic, the metaphor there is that the sky above, maybe not the space there, but it is the heavens.
[00:28:36] And the heavens is not a place where we as humanity rule. God rules in the heavens. He is still part. And we are supposed to be dependent upon him all through our lives.
[00:28:51] So three things. God is sovereign, creation is good, and humanity is here as image of God to rule under him.
[00:29:02] And perhaps one of the things that really sort of comes out of this, a notion that we will see all the way through the Bible is the notion of the kingdom of God.
[00:29:14] Creation is the kingdom of God, not just a little part of it, but all of is God's kingdom.
[00:29:24] And we will see next week how humanity usurps God's authority and tries to take back, tries to take authority and kingship rule away from God.
[00:29:37] We try to wrestle it away from him. And we see this all the way through the Bible, all the way through the Old Testament. How this wrestle of God's kingdom goes through mankind and into the New, the New Testament as well.
[00:29:54] And as people try and wrestle authority away from God, they then come away from God's blessing.
[00:30:03] You know, under God's rule we have God's blessing. That's the blessing that was given us in the star. And then as we try to wrestle that away, independent of God, we miss out. We come away from his blessing.
[00:30:17] And indeed what we see is that, you know, that results in humanity being excluded from God's kingdom.
[00:30:25] Firstly in part, we see from the exit from the Garden of Eden. And actually in the end, finally and completely.
[00:30:36] But thankfully that story doesn't finish there, does it?
[00:30:40] It's not just the story of being excluded from God's kingdom, it's the story of grace. It's the kingdom of grace, isn't it? God's kingdom is the kingdom of grace. And he decides to take upon himself the reconciliation of rebellious mankind to himself to Say I will still bless mankind even though we can behave as naughty children, that he wants to still bless us and bring us up and raise for himself a true kingdom, a kingdom of priests, a kingdom of kings who rule well with grace and compassion over one another and the earth.
[00:31:23] And that's the story. That's the story that we see through the Gospels.
[00:31:28] And that's the story as Jesus arrives and he brings that kingdom, inaugurates it in a sense, and we are there as people in it.
[00:31:38] So the question is, as the band would like to come back up, the question is, are we going to acknowledge the king?
[00:31:48] Are we going to acknowledge the King and acknowledge his purposes for us, that we have been maids to reflect him in the whole of creation that is before us, all of it, to take on board the huge responsibility to act on behalf of our king?
[00:32:15] That's what Genesis 1 just calls out to us.
[00:32:19] Will you do it? Will we step forward and reflect him? Let's stand in worship.
[00:32:31] Let me pray and then we worship. Lord, we want to thank you for this creation.
[00:32:37] We thank you for the life that you have given us, lord, that Genesis 1 tells us that we are not some accident.
[00:32:50] We are not an accident of random cells or molecules bumping into each other and life was accidentally created. We have been created by a glorious, infinite, all powerful, good, loving, compassionate creator who created us out of an overflow of your love and your goodness. Lord, we want to thank you for the life that that you have given us, that you have invited us in to represent you upon this earth, Lord, to exist out of your goodness and love, to behave, Lord, to co create with you, to bring children into this world and raise them up in the knowledge of you.
[00:33:40] Lord, we thank you that our lives have purpose and meaning. They are part of your epic tale from beginning to end. We are written into Lord, your book.
[00:33:52] And we pray, Lord, that through Jesus you would accept us into that book of life, Lord, so that our lives will not just end and finish upon this earth when we die, but we will be raised again into the new creation, into new life, Lord, as heaven comes down to earth and we get to rule and reign as true sons and daughters, as kings and queens, Lord, to rule and govern as one people over the new earth. Lord, we praise you and worship you, Lord, for such a marvelous king that you are.
[00:34:32] Amen. Amen. Let's worship God. It.
