Creation

It’s amazing to see the impact my grandpa made on so many people’s lives, here in Victoria and in this church, over many years of faithfully serving God. We’re truly honoured, and it means a lot that you’re supporting us through this time. Thank you.

A beautiful God

Over the next few weeks we’re going through a series called Beautiful God. Our desire is to capture God’s beauty through some of the distinctive beliefs of Adventism.

Sometimes we approach doctrines with a posture of “I’m right, you’re wrong, and here’s why you need to believe what I believe.” When we do that, it’s easy to miss the beauty of God and the fact that all of these beliefs point to a God of love. So I hope that through this series you’ll see not only that these beliefs are true, but that God is beautiful. Does that make sense? It’s not just about the beliefs being true. It’s about the window they give us into God’s character.

Here are some of the topics we’ll cover, starting today with Creation. We want to see that these doctrines aren’t isolated ideas but connect to the bigger story of God. Our prayer is that you’ll see the gospel in every one of them. We don’t graduate from the gospel and move on to “harder stuff.” The gospel is woven into every belief. Ultimately we hope you’ll see that God is a God of love.

Adventist author Ty Gibson once said that Adventism really has one fundamental belief: God is love. And because God is love, therefore the Sabbath. Because God is love, therefore the sanctuary, and so on. May you see through this series that God truly is love.

Father in heaven, thank you that you are beautiful, that in every way you show so much love and affection towards your creation. Through this series, may we see the nuances of your love more deeply, and may it awaken our hearts to love you more. Be with us as we open your word. May we see you. In Jesus’ name, amen.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

— John 1:1–4

Why did God create?

The question often comes up: why did God create? Did he need slaves to help with his work? Was he lonely and in need of company? And who was God, and what was he doing, before there was any creation at all, before angels, before our earth, before life?

John says, “In the beginning was the Word.” In Greek that’s logos. To the Greek mind the logos was the universal order, there before anything existed, the unmoved mover that brought everything into being. John uses that Greek language, but it also meant something to Jewish readers. When they heard “the Word,” they thought of the oracles of God, his words in the Hebrew Bible, now fulfilled in a person.

The text clearly echoes creation. When we hear “In the beginning,” our minds go straight to Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, Genesis 1:1 opens with exactly the same words as John 1:1. John is pointing us straight back to creation.

The other Gospels begin with Jesus’ birth or the start of his earthly ministry. John goes further back, to the beginning before beginnings. He shows that Jesus existed before time and before creation.

To understand why God created, we need to understand what he was doing before he created.

How can love exist with no one to love?

1 John 4:8 and 4:16 say, “God is love.” It’s a simple statement with enormous depth, and love is expressed everywhere in Scripture. Through the prophets God shows his love in extreme ways, even asking one prophet to marry a prostitute to show his love for Israel. Very extreme! The whole law hangs on two great commandments of love: love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself. That God is love is woven into the framework of Scripture and of the universe.

God is the source and substance of agape, an other-centred, unconditional love that knows no end. I believe agape can only truly exist through God and from God. We can’t manufacture it ourselves. God changes our hearts so we can love unconditionally.

But go deeper and a question arises: how can God be the substance of other-centred love if, at the very beginning, there was no “other” to love? Before he created anything, how could he embody agape? Was his love conditional on loving someone later?

Love needs three

John 1 gives us a window into what the pre-incarnate Christ was doing before creation. Verse 1 says three things about the Word:

• He simply was.
• He was with God.
• He was God.

God has always existed, and he has always existed in community: the eternal community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a relationship of giving, receiving and deflecting love.

Ty Gibson suggests that the minimum number for true, other-centred love to exist is three. With just two, love can turn selfish: I love you and want you to love me back. Remember having a best friend at school who was everything to you? Then suddenly they started hanging out with someone else, and you got jealous. That’s a selfish kind of love. With three, you’re involved in giving, receiving and deflecting love.

That’s why the Trinity, the heavenly trio, is so beautiful. It shows that God could be the source and substance of agape even before creation. That’s who he has always been.

His first role was Creator. He took on other roles later, Redeemer and Saviour, because we messed things up. But at his core God is Creator. And once we see that he has always existed in this community of love, it makes sense that he created.

Overflowing love

“Through him all things were made.” So why did God create? Not because he needed love. Not because he was lonely. Not because he needed slaves. He created because he was overflowing with love. As the source and substance of love, always existing in a community of love, he overflowed in creation.

Patriarchs and Prophets puts it beautifully: “Every manifestation of creative power is an expression of infinite love.”

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 the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

— Genesis 1:26

Eden, the first sanctuary

The God who is an eternal community of love created a sanctuary so that we could live within the agape love of the Father, Son and Spirit.

The layout of Eden carries temple imagery. Picture a circle with the tree of life at its centre. That’s very like Israel’s camp, with the Most Holy Place at the centre. Imagine Moses’ first readers thinking, “This is like our sanctuary, a bigger and better version.” The sanctuary is about God dwelling among his people, and God created Eden so we could live in the reality of his love.

He built a beautiful ecosystem as a sanctuary for human life. Look at the pattern: the first three days are forming days, and the last three are filling days.

• Day 1 he creates day and night. Day 4 he fills them with the sun, moon and stars.
• Day 2 he creates the waters and the sky. Day 5 he fills them with sea creatures and birds.
• Day 3 he creates the land. Day 6 he fills it with animals and humanity, and calls it all very good.

Then on the seventh day he creates a sanctuary in time and fills it with his presence. Humanity walks with him in the garden. God delights in what he has made, and there’s no separation between God and people. Humanity lives in a beautiful harmony of love within the eternal community of the Trinity.

Clothed in light

“In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.” Jesus was the light at the very beginning. Genesis 1:2 says darkness was over the surface of the deep, then light broke through. The light of Jesus broke into the darkness and brought order out of the dark waters. That light at the beginning was Jesus, the very light and life of God.

That light shone through Adam and Eve. “Adam” means human, and “Eve” means life, so together they represent human life. They were clothed in God’s light. They had nothing to hide and no shame, walking in the garden wearing the light of God.

Then they gave it away. They chose knowledge over intimacy and power over connection, and sin entered the world. With the Fall they cut themselves off from God relationally and chose to live apart from him. That’s what sin is: separation from God.

The presence that had made them feel so loved, warm and secure became something they feared. When they heard God’s voice in the garden, they hid. The voice that had brought them so much affection now scared them. They realised they were naked. The light that had covered them and kept them safe was gone.

Clothed in skin

So what does God do? He sacrifices an animal, the first sacrifice ever, and uses its skin to cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness.

Here’s something fascinating. In Hebrew the words for light and skin sound almost the same. They’re near-homophones. It’s as if Moses is hinting that a greater covering has been replaced by a lesser one. The covering of light has become a covering of skin.

But I want to suggest that God never intended humanity to stay covered in animal skins. That’s why God put on skin himself. Later in John 1 we read, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). God took on skin so that we could be covered in his light again.

That’s what we see on the cross. God’s light shines through the darkness again, and he accomplishes the work of re-creation because he took on skin. The Creator God who made everything in the beginning has also done the work of re-creation.

Creation isn’t just a theme in Genesis 1. It runs through the whole story of Scripture. God is always in the business of creating, whether that’s creating the world or re-creating our hearts so we can look like him, love like him and be free from sin.

A new creation now

Creation isn’t just a theory. It can be your lived reality:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

— 2 Corinthians 5:17

You don’t have to keep living in the old, Adam-like humanity. You can step into the new creation now. You don’t have to wait for heaven, because sin no longer has to control your life. The same light that brought life out of darkness, the light that shone through the darkness of the cross, can bring light into the darkness of your life. It can shine through you and cover you.

To be covered in the light of Jesus means three things:

• You are justified: freed from the penalty of sin. God doesn’t see you as a sinner anymore, because the love and light of Jesus cover you. You’re his child.
• You are sanctified: freed from the power of sin. Sin no longer reigns over you, because God’s power is greater than your sin.
• You will be glorified: one day freed from the presence of sin, when God makes the earth new and removes sin entirely.

Penalty, power and presence. That’s what God, our Creator, is in the business of doing.

Spots of Time

As I mentioned at the start, and wrote in the bulletin, my grandpa passed away earlier this week. It’s been a tough time for my family, but we shared some really special moments with him towards the end.

It was just a normal Monday. We didn’t see it coming, though with his condition we sort of knew where things were heading. One thing we’d decided to do was make a little book for him. He recorded voice memos telling his story, we transcribed them with the help of AI, and I helped him shape them into a book he could look back on and feel proud of.

That Monday I spent an hour or two with him finishing it. At the end he said, “You know, Jeremy, I’m happy with that. That’s good enough. That’s enough.” It’s crazy: almost as soon as we finished, he began to decline and went into palliative care. We quickly printed the book, and he was able to see it.

He wanted to call it Spots of Time: A Life in Faith Told from the Past and the Present. Those are his hands on the cover. The team at Advent Care were wonderful and wrote a paragraph summarising his life.

I’d love to read you a chapter, because it fits so well with what I’ve been saying about light and darkness. Grandpa suffered a lot towards the end and was in and out of hospital. About his last hospital stay, he wrote:

I became unresponsive for about 20 hours, for reasons unknown to me and the medical staff. I had an experience where I had a dream of God and the holy angels giving me the assurance of salvation. During the vision, as it became clear to me, indeed Christ was speaking to me. I was always of the idea that we could achieve what we wanted to do. But the Holy Spirit, through this dream, explained to me that we need to be baptised with the Holy Spirit daily.

In the dream, which I came to realise the full meaning of over a period of months, I noticed that darkness represented evil and light represented good. I saw a group of men covered in darkness, and then I saw a group of people covered in light. In the dream I was shown that if I choose to be on the Lord’s side, we need not fear the future. It gave me the assurance of salvation, because brightness, or light, overcomes evil.

In this dream I struggled to get out of bed while I was in the hospital bed, but indeed I couldn’t. I saw that God was speaking to me, telling me that in him we can have the assurance of salvation, and that the great controversy theme is vivid because we must resist the devil and keep on staying true on the Lord’s side. Eventually God saves us, not because we are worthy, but because we choose to be on the Lord’s side.

In my struggle through this experience, I saw the victorious side: victorious angels leading a group of people who chose to be on the Lord’s side. It’s a bit like the story of Joshua, who told the people, “Choose you this day whom you will serve… but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

The dream was a little blurry at first, but over a period of months it became clearer to me that it was from God. As I think back, I can only point to God speaking to me. Suddenly, after about 20 hours, I came to again and became responsive. At that time my heart was full of joy. Indeed, I can trust the Lord, and I can have the assurance of salvation.

The light the darkness cannot overcome

Creation is the light of Jesus pushing back all darkness. It’s God saying his beauty is greater than the ugliness of this world. It’s God saying he will have the final say.

We prayed that you’d see creation not as an isolated doctrine or advanced theology you graduate into, but as the story of the gospel: that God is love, that he has overflowed with love from the beginning of time, and that he wants to cover you with his light again. Creation happened because of his love, and re-creation happens because of his love. Jesus went to the cross to re-create your life, and he has begun the work of re-creating this world.

One day there will be no more suffering and no more pain, because the God who created will have done the work of creation again. This is the God we serve: a God of love whose light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5).

If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation. The old has gone, and the new has come. If you haven’t accepted Jesus yet, this is your moment: accept that his light is greater than the power of your darkness, and know that he is truly greater.

Please stand and sing with us.