God’s Book records how God’s creation began.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” (Gen. 1:1).
God wants you to know what and how creation began. Since you weren’t there, He tells you.
This beginning story reveals His activity then and also now. God reveals His heart by what He does.
Some pointers about which we can take great delight:
God gives Himself His own stamp of approval of how He made everything. “And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good,” (Gen. 31). Therefore, you and I rejoice how God made and continues to make His creation, even us. My 5’ 7” frame as well as His packaging of Golter—aptitude, brain design, personality—is His marvelous creation. The same is for you.
God goes after Adam and Eve in the Garden (Genesis 3:1 f.), sending Jesus to preach to them. Jesus pronounced a curse upon the Devil but blessing and forgiveness to His first couple. God’s first and ongoing inclination is to
rescue and forgive sinners
. The same is for you.
From this first history God tells us how death and sin came about. Death is His punishment for sin upon sinners (Genesis 2:17; cf. Rom. 6:23). Death is
not natural
but God’s ongoing consequence and judgment for rebellion against Him. God however preaches
right away
judgment upon the Devil and blessing upon Adam and Eve. All payment for sin was already secured in the Offspring of the woman, as preached by God (Genesis 3:15). Now you know why you die but also why you will live forever.
Creation’s beginning shows God’s chosen paradigm for marriage, between one man and one woman. He co-works with a husband and wife and produces children. This is God’s ongoing creation pattern of populating the earth. God asserts His goodness to and through a man and a woman to children. God loves children, the more the better. Parents bring children to the Baptismal Font and God baptizes them into His life, a marvelous cooperative work. Through parents God feeds children both in body and soul, with meat and vegetables and with God’s Word. This is the pattern.
God’s original pattern is heterosexual love within proper marital boundaries; only this design by God produces children and is God-pleasing. As intense, sincere and powerful as homosexual love may be, it cannot produce children. God didn’t set it up that way. Any deviance from God’s pattern is rebellion against the Creator and, “suppress(es) the truth,” (Romans 1:18).
God created humans as sexual beings, male and female; this is very good. His original pattern for human sexuality remains the final word and ongoing critique for all practice after Creation.
“Pastor, what’s your opinion of same-sex marriage and homosexuals?”
“Pastor, what is God’s first and ongoing opinion of me? I’m such a sinner.”
“Pastor, didn’t the world just come about by itself, perhaps by a big bang?”
“These are excellent questions, thank you! Let’s go back to Creation, to what God says.”
#Beginning of the World.
Pastor Golter is Trinity Lutheran's Senior Pastor
