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One of Gutzin
Borglum’s great works as a sculptor, in addition to Mount Rushmore, is a
bust of Lincoln which is kept in the U.S. Capitol. He cut the figure from
a large block of stone in his studio.
One day, when the
face of Lincoln was just starting to be recognizable from the block of
stone, a young girl was visiting the studio with her parents. She looked
at the half-done face of Lincoln, her eyes registering wonder and
astonishment. She stared for a moment, then turned to the sculptor and
asked if it were Lincoln. He said yes, and then she asked, “How did you
know he was in there?”
There never has
been a sculptor like our heavenly Father, who chipped away at nothingness
until the universe emerged. But how did he know that you and I were in
there? That, my friends, is what makes God God.
It
gets back to the famous story of Michelangelo, who was annoyed by critics
of his work. One day when an unwanted visitor to his studio asked how
Michelangelo was able to carve an angel from a stone, he brusquely
replied, “I just cut away anything that doesn’t look like an angel
until I’m finished.”
God, I am
convinced, is still chipping away at his creation, including you and me,
cutting away anything that doesn’t look like the perfection he had in
mind, and he isn’t finished yet.
A couple years
ago a man named Fred Hoyle passed away. His death was little noted; just a
paragraph or two in the obituaries.
But Hoyle
deserved a better sendoff than he received. Hoyle is the scientist who
coined the term “The Big Bang” to describe the origin of the universe.
He translated the words of the Bible “Let there be light” into a
theory that suggests that 14 billion years ago, give or take a billion,
all that we know of as the universe came springing into life in one
super-heated explosion of unimaginable intensity. So amazing was this
shockwave that its effects are still going on today.
Scientists now
believe that the universe will keep expanding and expanding, all based on
this initial burst of energy, until the power is too diffuse, too thin, to
continue to sustain life. Suns will start to wink out, the universe will
get colder and colder and gradually life as we know it will simply cease
to exist.
Now I
wouldn’t lose sleep over this if I were you, because this is predicted
for about a trillion years in the future. But it does indicate that the
seeds of the universe’s end could have been sewn in its beginnings, and
it suggests that creation is a process that is continuous, always
changing.
People still
argue about the creationist view of the universe in contrast to the
scientific view as if these were totally irreconcilable, always at war
with each other. I don’t think that’s true at all. Scientists can live
comfortably with the view that God set the universe in motion—in fact,
the universe is such a beautiful, orderly place, that many scientists
conclude that only a master builder could have organized such a wonderful
world—everything in balance. And people of faith can live with the idea
that what God set in motion is powered by scientific truth.
The French
mathematician LeCompte de Nouy explained it this way: he calculated the
time needed for a single molecule in the world to come together out of
pure chance as 10 to the 263rd power—in other words, billions of years. But he didn’t rule
out the possibility altogether. “Let us admit that no matter how small
the chance, one molecule could be created by such astronomical odds of
chance. However,” he said, “one molecule is of no use. Hundreds of
millions of identical ones are necessary. Thus we either admit the
miracle, or doubt the absolute truth of science.”
The answer can be
a little bit of both—a miracle, and good science. The author of Genesis,
and an astronomer looking up at the heavens, are studying the same wonder
from two perspectives. Genesis does not ask “How was the universe
created,” but rather, “Who created it?” It doesn’t ask, “What
was the process,” but rather, what was the purpose. In those terms they
tried to express the truth of a poet instead of the truth of a scientist.
They wanted to state what was to them all-important: “In the beginning,
God.”
From a faith
perspective, that may be all that we really need to know about who’s in
charge. “In the beginning, God.” I love astronomy, perhaps because
it’s one of the few sciences I was ever good at. I love looking up at
the stars and wondering what’s up there. I love looking at the photos
that the Hubble telescope has taken of deep space. Probably some of you
know that the light from the stars is actually old light—that even at
the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, it takes light years to
reach us from the closest neighboring star.
Even the light
from our own sun takes eight minutes to reach us, but the nearest star is
so far away that if that star were to blow up tonight, we wouldn’t know
about it until 2007.
But the point is
that the bigger and better telescope we build, the older the light we can
see. Some say that if we could only build a big enough telescope, we could
see all the way back to the Big Bang dawn of time itself. Some scientists
say that the only way they could ever believe in God is if they could
reach out that way and touch God at the very moment of creation itself,
and they add that their inability to see God proves that he doesn’t
exist. Scientists more in touch with their soul admit that there are some
scientific truths that are held without hard proof.
But it doesn’t
matter what they think, because even we, God’s own people, know that
when we say “In the beginning, God” is a matter of faith alone.
But what an
important, essential point of faith. Contained in that little
statement, “In the beginning, God,” is a keystone of our whole order
of being: namely, God has something to do with everything. When we say God
created the heavens and the earth, that’s a particularly Jewish way of
saying God created the highest high and the lowest low, so he must have
made everything in between, too. God created everything, so there is
rhythm and order and predictability in the universe. We are safe, because
this vast, all-powerful God has things under control.
“In the
Beginning, God…” expresses the Genesis author’s belief that there
must be a divine basis for all life, a divine plan for all life. Does the
universe have meaning? The Bible is sure than it does, and sure that the
meaning is a heavenly one. Since the universe began with divine
providence, all existence can be viewed not as tragedy, but with trust.
“This is my father’s world.”
The Hebrew writer
of Genesis knew that the sun, the moon, the harvest, all of nature
belonged not to hostile demigods, but to the one true God who makes
himself known in the heart and soul of man.
Some people view
man as just a highly developed animal, and they have a lot of scientific
research to back them up in that notion. We humans share 98 percent of our
genes with chimps. Only over the last 60,000 years or so did about .1
percent of those genes develop so that we can have first spoken and then
written language. We can still see the development of the human body in
the parts that we still carry around but longer need, such as a tail bone
to support a tail, an appendix to store food from the days when we ate
only plants, and wisdom teeth to crush bones.
But if you
believe that man is just an animal, it stands to reason that you think of
other people as animals, too. Those we like we view as pets. If they love
us and are faithful to us, we take into our homes and treat as we would a
cuddly dog or cat. Those we don’t like we treat as pests, like a swarm
of flies. We try to eliminate them, or at least protect ourselves from
them.
And those we can
manipulate we treat as beasts of burden—how much use can I derive from
this person at the least cost to myself. Lots of people look at human
beings as just a smarter group of animals.
Genesis is such
an important book of the Bible because it explains, it insists, that man
is not a mere machine, man is not an animal, man is even more than an
animal that knows it’s going to die. People can love. People can accept
love. And what’s most important of all, a little bit of God is part of
every human being, even the ones we cannot see, the addicts in doorways,
the convicts in prison, the dying in hospitals, the elderly in rest homes.
Genesis insists that the universe and all those who reside in it are holy,
because it all was touched by God.
If we men and
women can only believe that the universe was created by a God of power and
love, then we can move and act in that universe with courage. The evil in
this world is not some relentless fate that is going to win in the end; it
is a contradiction of the will of the creator, and thus can be redeemed.
This is my father’s world, and though the wrong seems oft so strong, God
is the ruler yet. You see, without faith that a powerful and loving God
lies behind creation, the world makes less sense than a jigsaw puzzle. The
pieces of a jigsaw puzzle may seem bewildering, but you know that someone
intelligent created it, and someone intelligent can solve it.
But a universe
with no divine creator can never make sense, because it was not designed
to make sense. It keeps coming back to a universe that somehow evolved out
of chaos into order.
An atheistic
scientist will forever be frustrated because he knows from his own
observations that the nature of chaos is not to fall into order, but to
fall into more chaos. If man is an accident, then he has no real
relationship to the universe, which is vastly larger and more powerful
than himself, and whether the universe sustains or crushes him is merely a
further accident. Such a man always lives in fear.
Have you ever
gone walking in a cemetery, and started to read the tombstones? Each
person’s life is marked with a year of birth, and a year of death. In
the middle comes a dash, but what an incredible jumble of life with all
its joy and sorrow is packed onto that dash. So it is with creation. In
the beginning is God. In the end, there will be God. In the middle is
packed onto that dash the whole history of man as he tried to be like God.
And to that our creator father says, “Relax a little will you? It’s
all under control I gave you the world and everything in it, and said
Enjoy. This is my gift to my beloved people. This is proof of my love for
you.”
Since this is the
last of my sermon series on Genesis, there are several points to ponder
about God the Father that I want to leave you with today. The first is, We
belong to God and no one else. Our Father made us for himself, to love and
be loved. He turned to each aspect of his creation, the sun and stars, the
earth and all the animals on it, and loved them, but it wasn’t enough.
He needed to make us.
Since God is
love, he made us capable of giving and receiving love. No one is fulfilled
until he or she has someone else to love. He made us in his image so that
we could have fellowship with him.
Second, because
we are made by God, we need connection to him. People yearn for God,
sometimes without even knowing who it is they yearn for. Instinctively, we
pray, especially when we’re in trouble. We want to be connected to
someone bigger than ourselves. Apart from God, we’re unhappy, and always
will be. We’re out of joint. We’re hollow inside. We’re incomplete.
We feel like orphans. This was perfectly expressed 1,500 years ago by St.
Augustine, who wrote that “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts
are restless until they rest in thee.”
If God has made
us it follows logically that he knows when we are broken and how to fix
us. Years ago when the Model T was the car driven by most of America, a
Model T sat broken down along the side of the road. The driver was unable
to figure out how to get it going again.
After awhile,
another driver came by and asked if he could help. The first man said the
problem was in the motor, and they started to tinker under the hood and
soon got the motor running. The owner was amazed and asked the stranger
how he knew what to do on a Model T. The man replied, “I am the one who
built it. My name is Henry Ford.”
The way that God
chooses to fix us is through the work of his son Jesus Christ, and the
action of his spirit, a spirit that is just as restless, eager to make
perfection, as it was when it moved across the void before creation began.
Paul tells us in
his letter to the Colossians that Christ was one with his father before
anything was created, and through Christ all things have their proper
place in God’s order. We rebel against God’s order, breaking our love
connection to the Father, but Christ made things right for all time by his
death on the cross, so that we would once again love God and be loved.
Finally, Christ
sends us out into the world to reach those who are still disconnected to
the order, telling us to preach good news to those who are in darkness,
“There is hope.”
Christ sends the
spirit with us so that our efforts will not tire, we will continually try
to reach out to others, and moreover, we will try to be better tomorrow
than we were today.
We are still
being recreated; God is still chipping away at our imperfections. Will God
ever be finished with us? No, he is never finished, because he never gives
up on us. We may slip and backslide, but God does not lose patience with
us, and to that we can all say, “Thank God.”
And when life on
earth is ended, the Bible tells us that he will make a new heaven and a
new earth, where we will finally become what he had in mind for us all
along—a likeness of him. And then creation will finally be at an end.
The beginning was God. The end will be God. In the middle, life. Praise
God for all life. Amen
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