In Genesis 13, Abram finds himself at a place called the Negev between Bethel and Ai. He had been there months before, at a time when he was full of faith; when God had promised him blessings and he was worshiping and walking with God. But just as Abraham was walking by faith, headed to the Negev in Genesis 12, suffering came into his life.  There wasn’t blessing pouring over Abram as God had promised; there a famine instead.  And rather than continuing to walk by faith, Abram took matters into his own hands and tried to get out of his suffering by sinful means by going down to Egypt. After his failure of faith, God leads Abram out of Egypt right back to the place where he failed, not to rub in his failure but to continue him back on his journey of faith. In Genesis 13, Abram arrives in the Negev once again. This time the test of faith will not be from sin or suffering; the test of faith will be success. Abundance can be just as spiritually derailing as adversity. But Genesis 13 shows us that God is faithful to his promises, even in times of of our sin, our suffering, and our success.

Join us this Sunday as we continue to go through Genesis, contrasting Abraham in Genesis 12:10-20 with Jesus in Matthew 4 (ft. Colin Campbell, Member at Elevate Hope Centennial).

Genesis 12:1-9 is the pivotal story in the Bible, of a man named Abram and his call to leave everything he knew and go to a land that wasn’t his home in order to be a blessing to all people.  Abraham is mentioned over 300 times in Scripture in 27 books of the Old and New Testament, almost every time highlighting his faith. He is revered by three major world religions, and written about extensively by both religious and secular scholars and philosophers. Who was this man of faith, Abraham?  As we begin to look at the life of Abraham this morning we don’t find a cleaned up missionary biography, but a man whose faith was just like ours. A man whose overall trajectory of his life was one of unwavering faith, but whose day to day faith was sometimes solid and sometimes shaky. A man like us who passes some of life’s most grueling tests of faith, ones that I don’t know if I would pass, but also fails miserably on others. But through it all, a man who trusted God with everything he had and who drank deeply of the grace of a faithful, covenant keeping God. We first meet Abraham when his name was Abram in Genesis 11.

Genesis 8:20-9:17

Genesis 8:20-9:17

Genesis 8:20-9:17

The judgement of God against the world is a sobering thing. We don’t like to talk about judgement in our world today because we don’t see it done well by anyone. But is judgement always a bad thing? The Bible says that we are not to be judgmental and condemning toward one another because we can rarely if ever do that from a true place of righteousness and humility. But the Bible always upholds God’s judgement of human wickedness and evil in our world as a great comfort and joy to God’s people. We can take comfort in the flood of Noah, even in its destruction, because it’s ok to rejoice when evil is destroyed. But we always rejoice and take comfort in God’s judgment with humility as we realize the grace of God in forgiving our own evil as His judgment was poured out on Jesus at the cross instead of us. And we pray the same for others as well. How do we learn to rejoice at God’s judgment while not becoming judgmental ourselves? Let's look at our Scripture this morning.

Noah’s ark is one of those unlikely parts of Scripture that has become almost universally popular as a children’s story in Western culture. It most likely began in the early 19th century when toymakers began making toys that focused on the boat and the animals rather than on the rest of the story; it’s an easier sell to make a nursery themed with smiling hippos rather than themed with drowning millions. The truth is, Noah’s ark does make a great children’s story, not because it’s just a story about a floating menagerie of animal life but because it’s a story of a God worthy of saving faith. A story of mankind sinking into a depravity so grave that a grieving and gracious Father had to undo almost all of creation in an attempt to wash us clean and let us live. Noah’s ark is a children’s story not because it features animals, but because it features a covenant keeping, merciful and loving Father. That makes it a story not just for little children but for all of God’s children. And like all good stories, it opens with a seemingly unsolvable problem.

A legacy is the enduring impact of a your life, your long term impact from your short time in this world. Every one leaves a legacy with their life. The question is what kind of legacy will it be? The Bible says that our legacy shapes our lineage. Those who come after us, both family and the world around us, are affected by our life that has gone before. Genesis 4 and 5 are about two paths, two legacies: Cain’s and Seth's. With the death of Abel it seemed like Cain’s legacy would inevitably be our legacy. But it is Cain’s killing of Abel that drove Adam and Eve to have another son, the son from whom the Savior will come. Humanity will be saved through this new birth, just as we will saved through our new birth in one from his line, through new birth in Christ. Unlike Cain who names his city after his own son, Eve wants a different legacy; she names her son in relation to faith and God’s goodness. His promise to save us out of our sin in Genesis 3:15 still stands. Cain’s legacy was eventually washed away by the flood, but Seth’s legacy lasts for eternity.

If you have siblings or have raised siblings, you know there are plenty of opportunities for sibling rivalry. From the very moment there were siblings in the human race, there was sibling rivalry. But the story of Cain and Abel is not about sibling rivalry; it’s ultimately about man’s rivalry with God, which goes back before siblings to the first man and woman. All of what God said would happen as a result of the Fall of mankind in Genesis 3 is now playing out in this first family’s life. But it is Cain’s anger with God that he takes out on his brother Abel. From the opening verse, Genesis 4 is bittersweet. We don’t know how much time has passed since Adam and Eve were driven out of God’s presence. But even as all of the effects of sin that God said would happen are beginning to happen, we see His promised blessings coming to pass as well.

There is nothing worse than waiting for a diagnosis. You see signs and symptoms of sickness, but you don’t know why. And if you don’t know why, you don’t know if there is a cure. It consumes all of your thoughts and your prayers. When the diagnosis finally comes, even if the news is not good the diagnosis itself brings feelings of resolve and clarity, a way forward. Because worse than any bad diagnosis is the answer, “We don’t actually know what is wrong.” When we talk about the message of the Bible, we often frame it as good news and bad news. The good news is that God loves us and wants to restore us to relationship with Him; and the bad news is our passage this morning, Genesis 3. What happened to us in Genesis 3 is the worst moment in our history. But the diagnosis it gives is clarifying for any member of the human race who reads it. We can look at our thoughts and actions, look around at the state of things in the world, and know exactly what is wrong and exactly the only way to be cured: that God alone can heal and undo what is killing us and making us sick. Even in our diagnosis, we get a glimmer of the hope of the healing and restoration that God will bring to save us.

What an amazing Creator who thought up the idea of a men and women. Two similar and complementary beings, tailor-made to work together but also completely different. The last part of Genesis 2 shows how God remedied, in the most creative and beautiful way, something in creation that was not yet good: that man was alone in the world. I believe we need Genesis 2 today maybe more than ever. We need to value the differences between men and women. We need to celebrate the goodness of woman and the goodness of man. And we need to uphold and value the institution of Christian marriage. In Genesis 2, God shows us the goodness of His design of us, specifically as men and women.

The launch of the Artemis 2 mission has re-ignited in our national consciousness the wonder of our planet and of the human race. The four astronauts on board Artemis who returned to earth on Friday travelled farther from earth than any human being before them. Seeing the earth we live on from that distance does something to your perspective. In 1968, the first humans to orbit the moon in Apollo 8 immediately quoted Genesis 1 to the world. From their far away perspective, they could clearly see the beauty and order in our Earth that spoke of a Creator. Almost 60 years later, Victor Glover the pilot of the Artemis 2 was asked to say something to the world about Earth on Easter morning. He said, “We are so far from Earth and looking at the beauty of creation. I read the Bible and I read all the amazing things that were done for us who were created. We have this amazing thing, this spaceship called Earth, that was created to give us a place to live in the universe. You think what we are doing is special, but you are special. In all the nothingness of the universe, we have this place where we get to exist together." That was the perspective 230,000 miles from earth. The ironic beauty of Glover’s long distance perspective was that meanwhile on that blue spaceship called Earth, war was raging, people were suffering, people were dying. Those two different perspectives on the morning celebrating Easter when everything changed for the human race makes us ask the question, “What do we do with the world God made? How should we see it?” It’s easy to wax hopeful in wonder when you are hundreds of thousands of miles away. But what about when we are living down here? After Genesis 3, and until Revelation 21, our world is now a world of wonder, goodness and beauty mixed with chaos, death and evil. Like the astronauts’ perspective, Genesis 1 allowed us pull way back and look in wonder at the creation of Earth as a whole. And this morning, Genesis 2 will zoom in on earth on Day 6, to a close up of when human life was born. Genesis 2 helps us begin to answer the questions: “What happened to that wonderful world that God made?” and, “How do you love something beautiful and wonderful that has been ruined and not yet fully redeemed?” The answer is what Glover told the nation in an earlier interview: ”We all need Jesus, whether on Earth or circling the moon.” Let’s look at Genesis 2 this morning.

One of the things that stirs up a sense of pride in a young child is when someone looks at them and says, “You look just like your mother!” or “You are the spitting image of your old man.” The Bible says that we were made in God’s image, minus the spitting part; that in some way when He counseled in Himself to create something different than the rest of Creation, “God created mankind in His own image.” Men and women are meant in some way to bear the very image of the One whose idea they were; to bear the image of God. Last week we saw two things that being made in the image of God means: that we have a unique design (a unique frame around us that draws out the beauty of what God has made in each one of us) and that we have value (how could God not take care of those He made in His own image? And how could we not do the same in caring for other human beings?). Today we will look at another aspect of what it means to be made in God’s image that we see in the third part of the blessing that God pronounces over the male and female He just made: God made us in His image so that we can subdue the earth that He made and so that we can rule over all other life that He made. God rules and reigns over all Creation and He wants to share that authority and responsibility with us in some way; that is exactly how the original readers would have read that verse. When we moderns tend to think of humanity being made in the image of God, we often think of ontological categories, categories of being; what are we like and what were were made to BE? But the Ancient Near Eastern cultures thought of the image of God more in terms of “What are we made to DO?” Join us this morning for our final sermon in Genesis 1.

When we look at the world around us, and sometimes at our fellow human beings, we think, “What is that? Is this how humanity was really supposed to look?” Or maybe you look at yourself and wonder, “Who am I? Am I who I am actually supposed to be?” In Genesis 1:26-28 we can actually ask the Creator and Author, whose idea human beings were, “Tell me about what you have made. Those three verses help us to see ourselves rightly; not as blobs or monsters, but what we are actually supposed to be as beings made in God’s image. An understanding of Genesis 1:26-28 is foundational for rest of Bible. Let’s look at what these foundational verses have to say for us specifically this morning.

The diversity of life on our planet is astounding; from the diversity of life in the sea and in the air to the diversity of land creatures as well. Each creature helps do its part to put the glory of God on display and sets the stage for our delight in our Creator. For the first four days of Creation, our good and loving Creator sets up a world where living things can thrive and where the crown of His creation, humanity, can live and thrive in His plan and purpose. Now on Day 5, He begins to fill His world with those living creatures, and on Day 5 we see two firsts. The first “First” is that God creates what the Hebrew calls “Nephesh” or a living soul; something with life in it. Vegetation is technically alive, but it isn’t animated by the breath of life like a creature is; this is new, this is divine CPR.  Placing the spark of a heartbeat and the spark of desire and the breath of life into creatures of dust. That word for life is used for all creatures, whether in the water, in the air, on the land or for a human being. We can look at the living creatures around us and we are made of the same stuff. We are animated by the life and breath of our Creator, and that makes us want to treat our fellow creatures with value, be they animal or human. So in one way we have a lot in common with all living creatures. But in a greater and more significant way, we are not at all the same. As G.K. Chesterton said, “Camels are endowed with the finest camel hair brushes and yet they do not paint.” Why? God makes all living creatures on Days 5 and 6, but the crucial difference is that only humanity is made in His image, after His likeness. And as a result, every human being, unlike the animals, has a craving not ultimately for earthly things but a craving for God. The animals relate to God as Creator; human beings relate to God as Creator and Father. Animals are satisfied with basic desires; we were made to only be fully satisfied in God. And when we give our life only to pursuing the basest desires of our flesh as the animals do, we give up our unique place in Creation to glorify God and we take our place as just another animal. These first creature God makes tells us a lot about His plans and purposes for our world.

Colorado has some great rock formations: Horsetooth Rock, Castle Rock, Kissing Camels, Two Faced Rock. When you look at them from a distance and a certain angle, they look like someone carved out a horse’s tooth, a camelor two faces. But when you finally reach the rock at the end of your hike, you realize that upon closer examination it looks nothing like those things. And really it’s just wind, erosion and your mind connecting the dots that gave it the appearance of a shape. But imagine that you are a hiker who has no idea about American history or landmarks, or maybe a teenager who only hangs out in the basement and didn’t pay attention in history class, and you were hiking in South Dakota and came across Mt. Rushmore with its carved faces of four Presidents. Just from observing them from afar, and not even exploring the tunnels and staircases within, you would have to conclude that they were made by an intelligent designer. So what do we conclude when we look at a human being? Can we say that the design is only apparent and that even upon closer examination a human being is nothing more than something formed by accident? We will be talking about human life on day 6, but even looking at the seemingly ordinary parts of our world that our text shows us this morning—a firmament that regulates sunlight and climate, the balance of the ratio of water to land, plants and fruit bearing trees able to sustain generation upon generation of life, and heavenly bodies to regulate gravity, light, tides and time—all those things intricately working together for one purpose: so that life can flourish here where it cannot flourish anywhere else. Could it all just be here by chance? Or is there a Designer behind it all? Maybe you aren't sure about that yet. But if you are a follower of Christ, you believe that there is a Designer and you know who that Designer is. But the danger is that we don’t let His Design inform any other area of our life. Design seems like it only relates to Creation but design deeply points us to Christ as well; it creates in us a hope and a glory that far outweighs anything this life can throw at us.