“Creator” — Nancy Ortberg
Genesis 1:1
Good morning! It’s fun to watch the baptism videos. I do think we perhaps might want to consider taking up a collection for Mountain View to get them a bigger pool. I was thinking Scott may have pulled his back out and now want Workman’s Comp. because of it.
At the eight o’clock service, one of the women who was baptized told her story. She said since last week, she has thought of that moment coming out of the water over 100 times. My prayer for us this morning is as we look at what does it mean to know God as our Creator…maybe not 100 times but a lot of times this week…we will think about that and live differently because of it.
We’re in a series right now called A.K.A., “Also Known As.” We’re looking at the various names of God, the myriad of metaphors the Bible uses and God uses for Himself in almost a desperate attempt for us to understand Him. In how much and in what ways will the correct understanding of this particular name of God this morning alter the way in which you and I know Him?
I want you to think for just a minute about a time in your life when you have been in nature, and you have just been utterly overwhelmed. Just think about that for a minute and hold that thought there. We’re going to come back in just a minute. This name of God as our Creator is the very first name used in Scripture of God. The fifth word into Scripture in Genesis, chapter 1, verse 1, it says, “In the beginning, God created…” Through the rest of the chapter, we have this amazing narrative of God calling into being all kinds of creation, and at the end of the chapter, actually getting His hands dirty while He creates people.
Every one of us have had times and moments in our lives where we’ve seen something in nature that stirs something in us. So here’s what I would like you to do: for the next 30 seconds, just turn to the person next to you and take about 15 seconds each and tell them what you thought about a minute ago when I asked you for that experience in your life. Take 30 seconds right now.
Alright, come on back. For most of us, that experience was long enough ago that it’s a distant memory, but it’s amazing when we talk about it, how we’re able to recall some of the emotions and the senses we were experiencing in that moment. Nature has a very powerful way of reconnecting us to God as Creator. Most of us have had experiences in nature where we have felt that staggering sense of complexity and diversity, breathtaking beauty, astonishing creativity, and added to all of that, the joy of discovery we have in that moment.
It all means something. In Psalm, chapter 19, in the first three verses of this Psalm, David writes, “The heavens declare the glory of God; even the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Every single day they pour forth speech; and at night, they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where the voice of creation is not heard.”
A few weeks ago, I went on a Sunday afternoon overnight with my son, who is now 20, up near Sea Ranch. On Monday morning coming back on Memorial Day, he found a beach where the waves looked just about right. He got out in the water to surf, and I walked along the beach on a very cloudy, cold day. I ran into a father and his two-year-old toddler.
That little girl would dig her hands into the sand and get them dirty, and then she would run at the waves and stand there and scream at them as though by her screaming, she could stop the waves. Then as they came toward her, she would turn around and run toward her father and throw her arms around him and shriek with laughter. Then she would put her hands in the sand and get them dirty and do it over and over and over again.
There is something about experiencing nature that taps into this knowledge that we have that Somebody greater than us made it all and has a purpose for it.
I grew up surf fishing with my father, and I have many memories of warm summer nights in Los Angeles where the phosphorus and algae would come in under a full moon. When we would cast our lines out into the water, it looked like the sea was on fire. I’ve been with my father in Death Valley at a sunset when the rippling sand dunes looked like the ocean, and then again in the spring when there were so many wildflowers that it defied the name of the valley.
We live not far away from Santa Cruz where every year over a hundred million monarch butterflies migrate over 4,000 miles to the eucalyptus trees right next to Arched Rock Beach. We are a stone’s throw away from Big Sur where the hawks turn circles on the thermals, and the cobalt and sapphire ocean crashes at our feet. There are birds with different architectures…red-winged black birds that have staccato flaps. There is in Napa lines of grapes that in the winter are bare, and in the spring, the wood that holds them up literally groans under the weight of the fruit they bear.
There is not far from us on the 280…and since I’m from L.A., it is the 280…there are lots of deer that come right down to the sides. I was driving north on the 280 a couple of weeks ago and saw right up by Edgewood Preserve a mountain lion running across the field. Note to self…do not hike in Edgewood for a while…at least not without your pocket knife. Sometimes here in the summer we can see at night the Milky Way and the falling stars and Venus rising up next to the moon. Near Half Moon Bay there are tide pools where neon orange starfish lay right next to purple sea anemone.
I have been in an airplane when a pilot woke us up at night to look out the left side of the plane to see the Northern Lights that were like gossamer green ribbons shaking in the night. Muir Woods has ferns and rhododendron and breathtaking redwoods and banana slugs, which I do think were a freak of nature and a mistake perhaps. Lindsay may tell you more about them when she closes.
There are so many things in our world that if we pause to take the time, will not only take our breath away and move us, but cause us to be reconnected with something inside us that is drawn to the God who created them. Paul says this in Acts, chapter 17, verse 24 and verse 27, “The God who made the world and everything in it is Lord of heaven and earth… God did this so that men would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.”
There’s something about creation that reminds us not only of the greatness and the creativity of God, but it reminds us that He is near…this God who made the world. Even David Hume, who was considered the father of modern skeptics, wrote that the whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent Author.
Part of the reason for the Genesis narrative where the writer tells us about the creation of the world by the hand of God is to tell us much more about the why than actually the how. The narrative is designed to present an alternate to the worldviews that were common at that time, many of which still have threads into some of the alternate worldviews we experience now.
Genesis tells us man is more than just a material being; he has a spiritual dimension. The Genesis narrative works against the Eastern religions of that day that were based on a kind of pantheism. They saw the physical world as an illusion. They taught that we could overcome that illusion by living in a way that transcended it and ignored it. In Luke, chapter 24, the resurrected Jesus in His body that looked very similar to the one He walked the earth in, eats a fish to show us that the material world is good, and it is not an illusion.
Genesis’s narrative is also crafted to fight against legalism, which found its way into some of the Greek and Roman religions of Jesus’ day and certainly has distorted some of our own Christianity. It says the physical world is not good, that it’s bad and the body is bad and only the soul is good. It teaches us that every time we experience a pleasure, we ought to have a corresponding amount of guilt to go along with it to balance it out. Self-denial and restrictions are the way to experience God, and the will of God, to be centered, has to be miserable and make you hurt. The refrain in Genesis says what God created is good. It’s good. It’s good.
The Genesis narrative also argues against the kind of secularism that was prevalent in that day and shows itself in our day in sort of a post-modern, post-Christian view of the world. It says the physical world is really an accident. You and I are nothing more than the result of blind forces that came together. The problem with that worldview is that without the context of purpose and design, there is utterly no way to determine good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice. There is something inside of us that rises up against that and says, “No.”
Finally the Genesis narrative was designed to overcome the current paganism worldview that was prevalent in that day, that in our day takes the form of the New Age religions. It says that really the physical world is so marvelous, it should be worshiped. They take the spirit they see in the mountains and the water and the trees, and they make an idol of those things. Paul refers to this kind of approach in Romans, chapter 1, where he says certain people gave up the truth of God and exchanged it for a lie and began to worship and serve the things that were created rather than the God behind them.
The paganism in this approach to religion, unfortunately, leaves us worshiping idols that will eventually break our hearts…relationships, jobs, even beauty. Creation is set so we will see the God behind it. That’s where the purpose and meaning comes in to understanding what does it mean to know God as Creator.
There is according to Genesis an intentional design with purpose and meaning, that when we experience it causes stirrings in us…longings and aches…that connects us to the realization that we have a desire to be reunited with something in the universe from which we have been cut off. This Christian worldview says it is God who created this world and all the goodness that is in it. He is so committed to that creation that not only did He get His hands dirty creating us, but He left the intimacy of the Trinity and came down to this earth as Jesus. As we learned last week, He lives in the word redeemer to save us.
So with our time left this morning, what I’d love to do is look at three postures or three perspectives or three ways we should live if we really understand the name of God as Creator. Then when we’re done with those three, I have a video I want us to watch together with music as an experience to help us really understand what it means to know God as Creator. I’m going to spend a little bit more time on the first posture than I am the second and third, so don’t get worried about the time when I go a little bit longer on the first one.
The first posture the Bible teaches and Tim Keller writes about so beautifully that we should have in our lives if we understand God as Creator is that of wonder. You and I ought to be living lives heavily steeped in wonder. So often, Christians have made the mistake of making the gospel seem grim in a way as though the burden of the entire world is on our shoulders. Jesus kept saying to the people, “My yoke is light.”
In Isaiah, chapter 29, God says, “You have turned following Me into a religion based on rules, and what I need to do is to re-astound you with wonder upon wonder.” It is so easy in our legalism to bend back over to making our following God just a set of rules instead of a breathtaking reality of this kind of wonder.
Some of you in this room are old enough to remember when we used to have only black-and-white televisions. You remember the day it went to color. On Sunday night the wonderful world of Disney, when Tinkerbell…yeah…when she would do her magic wand. It would be three shades of gray; all of sudden went to Technicolor. It is going from living life in black and white to Technicolor this understanding of God as Creator and the wonder in which we are supposed to live.
I have a good friend of mine who has an eight-year-old son. Last year, he drove his eight-year-old son for his birthday to the Grand Canyon. Now driving to the Grand Canyon is very different than driving to the Tetons, where as you get closer, you see even more clearly what it is you are going to visit. When you drive to the Grand Canyon, you don’t see anything until you get there.
They arrived in the parking lot on one of the rims right before sunrise. My friend said to his eight-year-old son, “Do you trust me?” Eight-year-old kid, “Of course, I trust you, dad. That’s kind of a weird question.” So he held his son’s hand, and he walked him right up to the edge of the rim. Mom obviously was at home not knowing any of this was going on. He told his son to stay there and keep his eyes closed until he told him. Then he waited until the sun came up. Right at that moment when the streaks of light came across the top of the Canyon, he said to his son, “Open your eyes.”
He said for the next 30 seconds, his son shook his head from side to side. His mouth just hung open. Then he looked up at his father with tears in his eyes, and he repeated over and over again, “I had no idea. I had no idea.” I want to ask all of us in this room, when has following God…when is the last time it has evoked in you that sense of “I had no idea.”
In Genesis, chapter 1, at the end in verse 31, it says, “God saw everything that He had made…,” then this time He didn’t say it was good. He had said that multiple times before. He said it was very good.
Jesus’ first miracle in John, chapter 2, is turning 150 gallons of water into wine, a miracle some would say was an unworthy use of His power, but apparently the Master of Creation did not think so. He raised the party to new levels. I’m not talking about overindulging in wine, but I am saying the first miracle was about the enjoyment of what God had created. What happens to us when live in that kind of wonder with God is a couple of really good things.
The first thing it may cause you, if even for just a moment in the course of a day, to relax…to cease from striving. To allow God and His creation to remind you that you can be released from your need to be important and impressive. God knows in the Silicon Valley, we could all use a reminder of that. In Colossians, chapter 1, that John read last week as we looked at the name of God as Redeemer, let’s read the whole section of those three verses 15 through 17.
It says, “He [Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created: things in heaven and on the earth… He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” This Jesus was a gift to us because God is invisible for us to be able to see Him. He is part of the creative force of God who made the world in which we can see God. In Jesus, the whole universe you see is held together.
So as important, as impressive, as you might be at work, you can relax. The world is not on your shoulders. It is not even your job to completely change the world, but to rest in the fact that God is Creator.
Something else it allows us to do when we live in this kind of wonder, it allows us to free ourselves up to be creative beings. We were made in the image of God, and every time in our work, in our hobbies, in our relationships that we do things that are creative, that inspire people, that show new possibilities, that re-infuse hope or delight somebody else, we are reflecting the nature of God.
In Genesis, chapter 1, the Hebrew word for create is bara. It is only used in the Old Testament for when God creates. When people create, there is another Hebrew word used that is a lesser word that reflects the idea of us in our creativity reflecting God in creation. So the wonder of God in creation allows us to enjoy it, to relax, and to create, and be the kind of people God intended us to be.
C.S. Lewis talks about this when we enjoy the wonder of creation. All of that enjoyment spontaneously should overflow into gratitude or praise. That gratitude and praise is almost like our inner spiritual health being made audible. It doesn’t just merely express our gratitude; it actually completes the enjoyment of it. I hope many times this week you have that experience and get reminded of the name of God as Creator.
A second kind of posture we should take because we are aware of the fact God is Creator is that of protector, almost a bodyguard kind of stance that we really are rebuilders of this earth. God created it, but pollution and other things that concern the environment ought to be important to us because of what Paul writes about in Romans, chapter 1, where he says, “What may be known about God is plain to people because since the creation of the world, all of the invisible qualities of God, His eternal power and His divine nature, have been clearly seen being understood from creation.”
What is true is there are many people in our lives who we know and love, in our family or friends, and there are people all around the world who their first step in a journey back toward God may not be in a church. But it may be those moments like you and I have had in creation. So Christians ought to be strong protectors of clean water, unpolluted oceans, and protected park preservation to keep this world intact enough that people can see the glory of the Creator.
The third posture we should take is that of a fighter. Tim Keller says Christianity, with all its talk about being a loving religion, is also a fighting religion. It is very clear there are two forces at work in this world. One is a very good force of God that created this amazing world, and one is sin that has caused it to go wrong. God insists very loudly that we be part of putting it right.
In Isaiah, chapter 59, verses 15 and 16, it says, “God looked and saw that there was no justice, that that was displeasing to Him, and that in addition to be displeased, He was absolutely appalled there was no one to intervene.” That which is broken needs mending.
I have a friend who lives in Chicago. His name is Lance, and he and a couple of other very successful businessmen recently went on a trip with Orphan Network down to Nicaragua, which is the poorest Spanish-speaking country in the world. They went with the leader of Orphan Network, who works with street orphans into one of the dumps on the outskirts of Managua.
Lance told me, “Nancy, it was like seeing what I imagined the gates of hell would be like.” Hundreds of millions of pounds of trash in 90-degree weather where the steam was rising off them, and children scurrying all over trying to find something to eat or something to sell. Lance said, “We came across a door that looked like it had been discarded, but the guy who runs the Orphan Network opened the door, and they walked in in the midst of all this refuse into a little tiny room that Orphan Network had bought.
There were about 40 or 50 little children 18 months to 6 years old being taught by a 23-year-old young woman who was a Christ follower, who has given her life to these children because she feels like she needs to fight for justice in a place where there is none.
Lance said she knew that every one of the men coming to visit that day were men of great resources. Lance asked her, “What can we do to help?” Her immediate response was, “You can pray.” Me, I would have asked for money first, prayer second. He said they all gave generously, but he was so overwhelmed by her fighting for those children and her request for prayer before money that he actually had to walk out of the room. He said, “I just held my face in the handkerchief meant to keep the smell away and sobbed.”
Christianity is a fighting religion, and my hope and prayer for us as a church and as a community is over the next months and years we figure out how to make something as wonderful as Compassion Weekend less of a one-time event and more of a lifestyle. How we look at our neighbors around us in Menlo and East Palo Alto, up in San Mateo and Mountain View, and in the world. How do we as Christians understand we ought to outstrip everybody else in the world in the way we tackle cancer and poverty and pollution and injustice. We are…because God is the Creator…we are fighters.
Every moment when you experience creation, you are reminded we live in a magnificent world. Not just for the sake of it being magnificent, but that magnificence reflects who God is. May we live deeply in that goodness this week, and may it change the way we live. May it change the way we see others. May it change the way we know God.
Let’s pray: God for Your staggering creativity, for the beauty that takes our breath away, for the moments that make us ache for the world set right, we pray we would see You. Instead of a god who is far away and distant and angry, that we would see You as close and personal and amazing, creating goodness just because You can’t help Yourself. May we get to know that part of You in ways we have not yet. Thank you for Your creation, for Your Son, and for wanting to be close. In Christ’s name, Amen.
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