Sermon for Suites by the Lake – February 21, 2009
“From Creation to Adoption”
We’ve just heard a few snippets of the creation story from the book of Genesis. I’ve titled this message “From Creation to Adoption” because in a short period of time, I hope that we will journey through the story of God’s people, from the first moments of our creation to our adoption by God.
Last month we looked at some of the story of God found in the gospel of John. We looked at how Christ, who was in the beginning with God and who was the one who created all things…we looked at how Jesus Christ came to ‘His own’…meaning he came to us on this planet, and how He was rejected by us because we didn’t recognize Him for who He was.
And so He suffered and died on the cross, really as both the ultimate expression of God’s love for us but also specifically to make a way…a way for humans to return home…to God. His suffering on the cross was in our place, and believing this is the way to eternal life.
Now, I love Jazz. Mom and Dad raised us on Jazz. Miles Davis was one of the all-time great jazz musicians. When I was studying jazz at Humber College, I learned that Miles Davis would talk to students about “The Art of the Kak”. That was, how to make something great and unexpected out of a mistake.
He did that because, for whatever reason, Davis would often start an improvised musical phrase on the wrong note, and then he would have to find a way to make that note seem like he meant it by dressing up the rest of the melody around that note or that mistake.
Now the first thing I notice when recounting the story of creation is that, unlike with Miles Davis, rest his soul, there’s no sense of accident or randomness about it. There’s no sense in which God ever said ‘Ooops!” when making anything that He made in the creation story. There is a sense of God’s pleasure over creation.
Did you notice that after each Act of Creation, God said that it was good! That’s a picture of God rejoicing over what He has made, taking a personal sense of pleasure in the goodness of creation. So rather than any sense of accident, there is a clear sense of intent.
God intended to create everything that He created…including…notably, humanity. Human existence is not a blip or unexpected or an accident of evolution. It is with intent that we are here. And not only that.
Everything God made, He made for a purpose. He made light, water, sky, land, vegetation, animals, and finally people. A
And all of these created wonders were created with some relationship to each other.
That’s perhaps easy to see. There’s a mutual interdependence between these elements of creation, and that actually seems to be part of their purpose. WE, and everything around us, are made for relationship.
And we see also, both in the expressions of God’s pleasure in His creation, in his: “And it was good”, and in the relationship recorded in that second account of creation…we see a sense of connectedness, a sense of wanting to be with the humanity He created.
We see, even this early on in Scripture, signs of love between a Creator and His creation.
So in the creation story we see that all that God created including humanity, including, to bring it home…YOU, God created intentionally, purposefully and out of and with love.
Now the story that immediately follows the creation story…this story of our origins as a species, is another narrative that’s actually pretty dramatic. I’m going to quickly summarize the story because it’s rather lengthy.
After they are created, the first man and the first woman enjoy uncomplicated and unbroken fellowship with God.
God is as a father to them, and they enjoy their freedom and each other in the security of being in good relationship with God.
Now Satan shows up snakely and immediately twists something that God says. God had told these first humans that the world was their oyster and they had free reign to dance and play.
There was just one warning. “Watch out for the fruit of this one tree. Believe me, it’s bad news”.
Now what Satan, in the guise of a serpent, says is: "Did God really say, ’You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?"
To make a long story short this begins a line of questioning and manipulation and obfuscation which leads to the first man and the first woman choosing…an alternate existence to the one God had, in love, intended for them.
The Bible says that this first, great brokenness, this broken relationship between God and humanity was the groundwork for all other broken relationships.
Remember, everything God made, He made for a purpose, and all the wonders He made were created with some relationship to each other. So at a really profound level, brokenness entered the human experience.
Its manifestations for people were and are everywhere…war, strife, poverty, alienation, you name it. EVEN creation, we are told, was broken.
That can be hard to understand, unless we see that the creation story was the story of the Hebrews, and for the Hebrews, everything is an integrated whole. From the younger Greek philosophy we get the idea that the mind and the heart and the body can be treated as separate things.
This led to some good things like the exploration of human physiology that’s given us modern medicine.
But it’s led to some distortions as well. WE have a fragmented notion of reality. That’s why we’ve treated the earth…God’s creation…badly. We feel an essential disconnect from the ground we live upon, so we struggle to care about caring about it.
But to the Hebrew mind, classically, ALL THINGS are inter-related both in their creation and in the brokenness they experience. Thus we have the Apostle Paul, trained in the worldview of the Jews, who writes this:
“Rom 8:19 Creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time”.
Now that’s perhaps unexpected. But again we see that creation itself is broken…subject to frustration, in bondage to decay, groaning. Waiting. Waiting for what?
Verse 19 gives the answer. Creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. Hmm?!?
Waiting for the sons of God to be revealed. Waiting for the children of God to be revealed. So there’s a type of yearning that we have, that we sometimes recognize, for relationship with God that’s reflected in the creation, the world that God created and that we call home.
Verse 23 of the same chapter says this: We ourselves…groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our ADOPTION as God’s children.
Now to make sense of this we can look again at a passage that we touched on last month from John chapter 1. Speaking about Jesus, and our response to Him, John says: John 1:12 Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.
So we have the one passage that opens our eyes to the idea that creation is waiting for the children of God to be revealed.
Another that says our own yearning is complete once we’re received back from our broken relationship with God, and yet another that proclaims that there is a way for us to become those children of …God’s own possession.
The first man and the first woman rejected God…they chose a path other than the one they were made for…and you know, they suffered for it. Deeply. EVERYTHING, we’re told, suffered for it. That’s the fruit of rejection. The opposite response of course is acceptance, being open to receive. And that is what our eyes can be opened to, if we allow it.
“…To all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God”. And we become the children of God, part of the family of God by being adopted, received, welcomed. Enfolded.
So this, in a sense, closes the loop. Our deep rejection of God in the creation story is not the end of the story. God has made a way for us to come home, and that way is Jesus, who is, as John says, “full of grace and truth”.
So we’ve come full circle from creation to adoption. And we’re left with a sizable question. Hopefully that question isn’t: “When will this preacher quit yakin’? ”. The question is, how do feel about God adopting you?
There’s a story I heard about children in a playground who are taunting a young boy who they’ve discovered was adopted. They’re mocking him for being adopted.
After enduring this for a while the young boy says to the crowd around him: “Hey. Your parents got stuck with you. Mine CHOSE me…so there!” Adoption in a very real sense means being preferred, being chosen out of a lineup, so to speak. Nothing remotely accidental about it!
And this is the notion we’re considering. God wants to restore all that is broken in us and in His relationship with us. He extends a hand to us, quite literally, in sending Jesus Christ to us.
And He asks us to respond to His extended hand by offering our own hands…our own selves; our lives, really…to Him.
We may feel, as life progresses, that we have, in a way, lost ourselves. We’ve lost track of who we are and why we matter. God says something to us that’s really, truly very encouraging.
He’s here today by His Spirit to say to you and to me…“Truly, truly…You matter to me. Your life has GREAT value, because I made you. I formed you and I sustain your life, and I want you to be with me where I am. Come to me”.
You know, Jesus says in Matthew 11: 28 "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." That’s another passage of great importance. Perhaps we can look at that next time.
Suffice it to say, for now, that God extends an invitation to us today to a refreshed and renewed relationship; a new beginning.
Ands as we consider these things…our own neediness and brokenness, the hurt we carry inside…as we consider these things, may we also consider the gift that God offers us; a gift meant to fulfill all that is lacking in our lives, a gift meant to give us hope and confidence in the future. That gift is Jesus His Son. Given for me, and given for you.
Let’s pray.
Creator God, loving God, Redeemer, Savior, Friend. Thank you for insights from Your Word into our created-ness, into our brokenness and Your intention to reclaim our lives, to give us a profound sense of purpose as we learn of Your loving care of us. Thank you that You adopt us when we say “yes” to all you have done for us in Christ Jesus. Thank You for Your great love, that love of which we sing with joyful hearts. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
