4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. 5 When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, 6 and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground— 7 then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. 8 And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
10 A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. 11 The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12 And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. 13 The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. 14 And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. 15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” 18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”
19 Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 20 The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. 21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
23 Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” 24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
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How many of you have ever cooked
dinner? Whether you spent two minutes
microwaving something in a plastic container or two hours preparing a gourmet
meal, you invested some time in preparing something for you to eat.
Now, how many of you, having
prepared dinner, have thrown it away without even tasting it? How many of you have made dinner just to see
if you could make something and, having completed the task, tossed it in the trash
can without ever testing to see if it was edible?
We wouldn’t do that, would we? We wouldn’t invest time and energy into
creating something just for the fun of it, then dispose of it or let it rot on
the kitchen counter.
If we wouldn’t bother creating
something for absolutely no purpose, why would God?
Why would God choose to create the
universe if there was no reason for it?
I don’t think God would create the sun, moon and stars just to prove
that he could do it, or just because he was bored. God doesn’t have any unfulfilled needs, and
he wasn’t just lonely—God had a purpose for creating the world.
Now, I’m not going to get into
questions of exactly how and when creation took place. I don’t believe that Genesis was written as a
scientific document. I don’t think the
author of Genesis had a dense set of footnotes detailing exactly when and how
specific things happened. I believe the
creation story in Genesis is a theological document, meant to examine and
explain how we got here. Whether it was
6 billion or 6 thousand years ago, I believe God created. Personally, I think the earth is really
old. I think evolution probably
happened, but I still have a lot of questions about that one. I haven’t really sought out answers for them,
because I think other matters are far more pressing, but I have questions.
So we believe that God had a
purpose in creating. The Bible includes
two creation stories. It seems to me
that this demonstrates that we’ve never had all the answers to exact questions,
but we’ve always understood how we got here—that God made us. Both creation stories place the creation of
humans at the center. In Genesis 1, it
takes place on the 6th day, with God creating humans in his own
image, different than all the other objects in creation. In Genesis 2, God makes man just after the
heavens and earth but before any of the stuff is here. In both cases, it’s probably fair to say that
man is made first as a trial run to get the kinks out, and the fairer sex is
made once the process is perfected.
So if we acknowledge that God
creates with purpose, we then must acknowledge that we, too, are made for a
purpose. We cannot look at our lives and
say they don’t matter. We can’t look at
ourselves and pretend that how we spend our time doesn’t matter. If we were made with a purpose, and I believe
that we are, then how we spend our days on earth and how we treat one another
matters to God.
Now, there is a train of belief
that has run throughout human history that says that God created the world,
created humans, and then abandoned us to our own devices. This God is often compared to a clockmaker, a
God who builds the machine and then sets it to run, then going off to spend his
time on other plans.
If this were true, then we would be
saying that creation, that humans, don’t matter to God once he has created us.
But we know that we sacrifice for
things that matter.
Have you ever dropped a small
amount of change in a very dirty environment?
I’ve dropped change before onto stadium floors that look like they were
last cleaned three years before the stadium was built. At that moment, I’ve had to decide whether I
wanted to pick up the change or not. The
question was: does that change matter
enough to me to take the chance of picking up some germ? Am I willing to sacrifice for that
change? The answer to that question is
different at different times of life. A
dime’s value to me depends on how much money I have.
We sacrifice for what we care
about. If God had created the world and
then abandoned it, we could reason that God didn’t care about creation. But if this were so, why would he send his
son to die on a cross so that we might be redeemed? Why would he sacrifice for a creation he didn’t
care about?
So God clearly still cares about
creation. So God cares about you. He created you with a purpose and still cares
about how you spend your life. So what
is the purpose for your life?
Our responsibilities are spelled
out throughout this text.
In verse 9, we are told that trees
that grow are not just good to eat but also pleasant to look upon. Beauty and rich flavor are highly valued in
God’s creation, and God clearly wants us to enjoy this world. We aren’t mean to be emotionless robots—God wants
us to enjoy beauty and the wonders of creation.
It’s meant to be a place of splendor.
In verse 15, God tells us to till
and keep the garden. He charges us to
work the land and to care for it, to be good stewards of the land which we have
been given. We are to be actively engaged,
working in some form or fashion, not lazing about letting chaos descend.
Later on, in verse 18, God says
that it is not good that man is alone.
God indicates that we aren’t created to spend our time by ourselves,
that it is not good for us to not have a community. God is calling us to band together, to live
together, to create deep bonds as we live our lives together.
All of this paints a picture of a
God who is deeply invested in creation, a God who loves the world he has
made. God clearly creates with purpose
and enjoys his creation.
The most important thing I want you
to take from this is that God has created you with a purpose in mind. God wants you to be a part of the overarching
story that is being told—a story of a sovereign God who creates a wondrous
world which is to be the backdrop in which an amazing story of love is
told. God wants your life to be actively
engaged in that story. You weren’t
created by accident. You didn’t just
wind up here as some grand experiment.
God didn’t create the world and then get bored and go off creating
something else. God is active, God is
involved, and God cares about you.
So let us live like everything we
do truly matters, because we are a very important part of something bigger, of
something grand, and our lives are meant to reflect the glory of God and spread
the Good News of a God who loves each and every one of us. Our lives are to tell the grand story of a
God who created with a purpose and sacrificed his own Son for us because he
loves us so. Let us live like that
matters more than anything else, because it does. Will the sum of our days tell that story, or
will they tell another story?
Let us pray.
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