Word of Salvation – February 2025
The Eternal Creator God
Sermon by Rev John Zuidema
Scripture Readings: John 1:1-5, 14-18; Genesis 1:1;
Congregation, if I were to ask you what the most foundational verse in Scripture is to believe for your personal Christian faith what would that be for you? Now there are probably many verses we could use. For example, John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, he gave his one and only Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Or John 5:24, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment but has passed from death to life.”
Now, with the greatest respect, I put it to you that Genesis 1:1; is the foundation, the springboard for any verse that you would like to build your Christian faith on and for that matter to win people for Christ. For if you do not believe Genesis 1:1, then you have no answers to life. No answers for wars, crime, lawlessness, sickness, mental health issues and a whole lot more. It’s not that sinful mankind doesn’t recognise that we have these problems, we all do, but without God, we have no lasting answer!
The WSC asks, “What is the chief end of man?” And the answer is, “The chief end of man is that we glorify God and enjoy him forever!” Believing Genesis 1:1 is the beginning of that enjoyment.
Over the years, there has been much discussion about these words and the ones that follow in Ch 1 to 3 and even up to Chapter 11. Much of this discussion is about trying to discredit the truth of Scripture and ultimately to do away with God as Creator. But for our personal Christian faith it is vital we accept that all of Scripture is God breathed and hence that includes the first ten words!
And yet it never ceases to amaze me that people are slow to embrace Genesis 1:1. Do they not see what I see? You watch a flower grow and display all its beauty, more wonderfully dressed than Solomon in his ‘hey’ day’. You look at the stars above and just stand in awe! You see an eclipse of the moon or the Sun and are just blown away! The latest pictures of the Hubble telescope of deep space are mind boggling. I have been to fish aquariums at various places and have just been blown away by the variety of fish, all after its kind. I am just amazed at the variety of animals and little creatures that crawl, walk, or run upon the earth.
At a personal level I have seen the miracle of new birth and various healings. As Louie Armstrong made famous with his hit song, “What a wonderful world!” How can people just disregard that there is a Creator? How can they even dare to suggest that creation was all an accident which is really what the big bang theory is all about?
Thankfully, Scripture doesn’t leave us in the dark. Romans 1:18, says that God’s wrath is being revealed because man suppresses the truth of God’s existence, not because they cannot see, but because they are wicked! In fact, Romans 1:20 reminds us that mankind is without excuse, for God’s invisible qualities, his power and nature have been clearly seen from what has been made! Of course, to believe in a Creator God makes one vulnerable for then they are then accountable for all they have done, for all they are doing and for all they will ever do before a holy God. And that can be scary!
Now as Christians we certainly don’t boast about our Christian faith for, we know that our faith is a gift because of God’s mercy to us. If we are inclined to boast, let us boast in the Lord. So, with these opening comments let’s look at these ten words that seem so clear to us. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Congregation may I suggest that in our discussions with those who still do not believe, to begin where Scripture begins, to begin with God! That’s true when we see the beautiful creation, but also when a child is born, or when someone we love is sick or dying, when prayers are answered or if there are mysterious delays. Behind, around, above, and underneath is the God of Genesis 1:1. He is the Almighty One, the self-existent One, the One who gives ‘being’ or if you will life to everything else.
As Paul reminds the philosophers says in Acts 17:28; “In him we live and move and have our being!” Therefore, everything that exists or happens is ultimately for his glory and honour, even when we cannot get our minds around it. Isaiah 55:9 reminds us that God’s thoughts and ways are much higher than ours! And since he is the Creator of all he is the only one worthy to receive glory and power and honour. For His delight all things were created.
Therefore, the only thinkable relation between God and us is one of sovereign Lordship on his part and total submission on ours. We owe God every honour that there is in our power to give him. Our everlasting grief will lie in giving him anything less. Therefore, we will strive to please him in all we do. In fact, more than that, we desire to lift his name high and give Him his proper place over us.
There are number of things these ten words teach us. First, look how Scripture begins. “In the beginning God.” Before this universe began God was already there. Time and space and dimensions and matter all had a starting point, but God did not start. God never begun! Everything else of which we’ve had any experience had a beginning, but not God! Everything else can be traced back to Genesis 1:1, but not God!
The Creator never began. We cannot compare him to anything at all. Oh, I know and admit that our finite minds cannot grasp that something cannot have a beginning, yet it is true of God. God is without beginning and without end! When people ask, “If God made us who made God?” then the answer is – “nothing at all created God.” The living God has no birthday, and he has no external life-support system; he is self-sufficient.
Genesis has many family trees listed, but it doesn’t give us God’s family tree! And this is important when we consider that the Holy Spirit caused Moses to write Genesis after the Exodus. The cultures and civilisations surrounding Israel and many cultures today have ‘gods’ with lengthy family trees of other gods and goddesses who had feuds and power struggles.
Not so with our God. The Bible tells us he is eternal, without beginning or end. Before everything else there was God and God alone. John 1:1-3 puts it like this: “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.”
Our Triune God has always been, without beginning without end. We cannot say that about our universe. Our universe had a starting point. God devised it and its entire engineering was his alone. There wasn’t a session meeting or a committee offering suggestions. In the book of Job 38:4 we read, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the world?” Job was absent as were we all. God created because he chose to do it.
That brings me to my second point. The word ‘created’ is used only when producing something new. It occurs only three times in Genesis 1, referring to the primary act of creation (1:1), the creation of conscious life (1:21), and the creation of man (1:27). God himself is the one creating; he is both the subject and the author of all that follows. He is responsible for everything, both seen and unseen.
The word ‘create’ is never used of an action of men. Man cannot create; this is an incommunicable attribute of God for only God alone can create out of nothing. Out of nothing comes nothing, but when God acts in the beginning, addressing this nothingness, the heavens and the earth are born. Nor is the word ‘create’ ever used with any reference to the materials used. We are never told that God created with such and such materials. It is as if the materials were irrelevant. When man ‘creates’, he is always restricted by the medium in which he works, be it stone or bronze or paint or words.
There were some scientists who thought they no longer needed God. They came to him and challenged him by saying, “God, we no longer need you for we can do everything you can do, including the creation of people and giving them eternal life, obviously through the means of cloning.”
Well said God, let’s start with nothing and make something. The scientists gladly agreed and bent down to pick up some dirt to begin their project, when God stopped them and said, “Hey that’s my dirt” you get your own!” There was nothing at all before Genesis chapter one verse one except God and only God can create out of nothing.
Now let me put up the view of the anti-creationist! Is it credible in any shape or form? Well, let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. “In the beginning was chance plus a speck.” Isn’t that their creed? An anti-creationist cannot imagine nothingness. According to them there was just this speck in the beginning, and then one day it exploded in a big bang and that made the universe.
And in that speck was Alexandra the Great, and Mozart, and Einstein, and Hitler, and Leonardo da Vinci, and Shakespeare, and Jesus and ha, even John Zuidema! In that speck was love and patience and forgiveness and hatred, war, terrorism, lawlessness, suicides, physical and mental sicknesses, cancer and the list is endless. Now we may chuckle at such foolishness, but today many in this land are worshipping that speck and by so doing are robbing God of his glory!
The Bible says that in the beginning there was no speck and every speck there now is was made by God. There is not a single thing in the entire universe that can pipe up and claim, “I at least was not made by God.” In the beginning, God created the heavens. Consider the Milky Way, our galaxy. Nobody knows how many stars or suns there are in the Milky Way; estimates range from sixty billion to perhaps four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. The Hubble telescope has so far detected 80 billion other galaxies in the universe.
In the beginning, God created the earth. The Earth has been described as the “the most beautiful planet.” Saturn may have its rings, Jupiter may be 318 times bigger than planet earth, and yet it is not Saturn or Jupiter but the earth that is the focus of God’s attention. And God’s word, Genesis 1:1 to be precise tells us, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, all for his glory!”
And that’s my third point – all for God’s glory! Sadly, many people in this world do not acknowledge God as creator [Richard Dawkins and others]. They reason that we came from nowhere and we are going nowhere. They see no purpose in living or life and rob God of his glory!
The Bible says something different. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth! And he made human beings in his image, the pinnacle of His creation for He desired to have fellowship with us! And even when we, through Adam and Eve foolishly threw it away, our Creator God continued to love. John 1v14 says it so well, the Creator, coming in the person of His Son, full of truth and grace, comes and lives amongst sinners.
He comes and dies for them so that believing, they may be saved from God’s wrath for their sin. He rises victoriously from the dead so that they can worship and glorify the triune God. Man’s greatest delight is when they can do that!
Congregation, when Genesis 1:1 is your starting point then you have a very different outlook on life. Then life has meaning and purpose for we are bound for glory to worship and glorify our saviour God. Then we know that the lives of men and women count in the sight of God their Creator and Judge and therefore they should count for us.
That’s why we also feed the hungry, look after the poor, visit the prisoner, the sick and orphaned so that they may worship and glorify our God. We bring the good news of God our Creator and Saviour to our loved ones and neighbours and to the ends of the town and beyond and to all who wish to hear! I say in all our ‘religious talk’ let’s begin with the first ten words of the Bible! For in those ten words is the reason for our existence and that is to glorify God.
Our primary purpose, or our chief end isn’t to pray more, or to show more compassion or to feed more hungry people or do more missions. I’m not saying these things shouldn’t be done or that they are unimportant, not at all. However, these things, important as they are, are all temporary! Our eternal purpose is to glorify our Creator God who created us and saved us in Christ.
Revelation 5:14ff records that thousand upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand are worshipping and glorifying God. In fact, all Scripture has the emphasis. That people may know God and glorify him. That’s why he saves people!
These first ten words with which the Bible begins are the beginning of our belief and the end of atheism; Genesis 1:1 denies the polytheism of Hinduism; and refutes pantheism, the idea that everything is part of God. Genesis 1:1 tells us that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth! He is the living God, and He is God and God alone! Let us worship and adore him; let us make it our chief end to glorify him and enjoy him for ever.
If we came from God, we look forward to going back to Him. And that is possible because of his great love to us in Christ. He gave his life so that we can be re-created into his image and believing have eternal life. Praise God! Amen.