So this is uh this is week two as we go through uh the first 11 chapters of the book of uh Genesis. This is God’s first revelation to people like us. And uh we began last week just looking into the origin of the universe uh the origin of our our origin story as human beings. And when we read these, we know that we’re on sacred ground. This is way too big for us to grasp. There’s four pivotal events that affect everything about our lives in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, creation of the universe, and there’s the tumbling of mankind into sin. And there’s the um judgment of the great flood and the dispersal of the nations at the Tower of Babel. So, our minds, our imaginations really do get stretched to capacity as we consider just how great our God is. is he’s the creator of all things but but then again how significant we must be in his sight for him to devise and engineer such an astounding uh beginning to our existence. So this morning we want to consider the beauty of creation that’s revealed to us in those uh significant magnificent seven days of creation in Genesis chapter 1. Along with the beauty of creation though, we want to look at the uh boundaries or the limits that God places on all that he creates so that we can become the best versions of ourselves, all that were meant to be in him. So, we’ll begin by very briefly surveying the the days of creation. There’s so much here. It’s overwhelming. We’re not going to make much of a dent in it. any of the creation days, we could probably hit pause and spend the next year just camping there and talking about the magnificence of God in creating birds alone or just spellbound or the sea creatures or the plants and the trees and the stars. You know, a couple months ago, I read an article that celebrated the 100th birthday of the acclaimed British nationalist. He’s a national treasure, David Atenboroough. He was born in 1926 and his adult life coincided with the advent of the technology of television. He was fortunate enough to devote his entire career to producing series that brought the beauty and the wonder of the natural world to the small glass screens of his viewers. So in that article, various individuals were sharing their favorite David Atenboroough moment. And one fellow recalls this. He says, “Adenboroough shows they were appointment viewing in my household. In recollection, the episodes tend to blend together. Still, one memory stands out. Settling down with my parents as an adolescent to watch the mating ritual of the leopard slug.” Now, now I searched for that 4-minute clip. This is not for the squeamish, but I searched for that 4-minute clip on YouTube to find out what the fuss was about. I was completely taken by the sheer beauty of it. You know those mating slugs? They offer one of the most glorious, beautifully cor choreographed, thoroughly romantic things you’re ever going to see. And once you see it, you’ll never unsee it. So that’s your warning. And those are just slugs. What mind gods could ever conceive of such an astonishing display of unnecessary, gratuitous beauty? I mean these are things that we consider slimy and ugly and we don’t like them but creation has so many more secrets to unveil to us if we have eyes to see should leave us just weakened and and immersed in worship. So, we left the story of creation last week with the description of the earth as formless and void with darkness over the face of the deep, the spirit of God hovering over the waters. And it was when it says in English that the world was without form and it was void. In the original Hebrew language, that phrase is expressed in two rhyming words. Tohou wabohu. Remember that. Tohou wabohou means it’s a mess. It’s a formless emptiness. Maybe a tohou wabohhu is what your yard looks like in the spring or what jazz music sounds like to your ears. It’s uh it’s chaotic. And then a hush falls over the audience and God said, “Let there be light and there was light.” God saw that the light was good. He separated the light from the darkness. Called the light day and the darkness he called night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. Now, we do need to pause here for just a moment in day one because we’re all familiar with light. We see it all the time. But this is a kind of light that you and I know nothing about. We’ve never seen it cuz the sun and the moon aren’t even created until day four. Despite their absence, this strange light suddenly illuminates the heavens. It’s the kind of light I think that’s hinted at in Psalm 104 where it says, “God clothe himself with light as with a garment.” or the kind of light that’s described at the end of the age in Revelation 21. It talks about our eternal home with God, the new Jerusalem. And as it speaks of that city, it says, “The city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it. For the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. The gates will never be shut by day, and there will be no night there.” That’s kind of light. I mean, independent of any source we know. It’s generated, sustained by God himself. Now, the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, he borrows from that imagery in Genesis 1 to help us understand what it means for us to experience salvation in Jesus Christ. Paul writes, “For God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness, made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” That means if you and I want to catch even a fleeting glimpse of that kind of light that had no sun, no moon, it was the light of the glory of God, if we’re trusting in Jesus for our salvation, we can take a little peek inside our hearts and see how it has been illuminated by God. how through this light you see the world differently. It’s you see it more completely than those who are living and walking and working and marrying and dying in darkness. There’s a very well-known quote by CS Lewis and he said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” That illumination in a Christian heart is spoken of by Jesus in John 8. He says, “I’m the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” So, if you’re following Jesus and trusting him for your salvation, you already know some of the lumens of that day one light of creation. It’s already inside you. And as God said in Genesis 1 that the light was good, he sees that the light in you is good as well. And you can be assured that he’s most pleased. Moving really quickly, day two, God created the expanse called heaven. We think of it as our sky, our atmosphere. God separated the waters above the expanse from the waters below the expanse. Psalm 104 says, “God stretches out the heavens like they’re his tent, like they’re his camping equipment.” Day three, God created the land and the seas. Partway through day three and that day we move from inert or non-living matter suddenly to make the colossal biological leap to what we know as living matter, vegetation and plants and trees. And we’ll leave it to the scientists to ponder the formidable complexity of organizing and assembling all the little amino acids and the RNA and the DNA, all the molecules necessary to even bring life to the smallest single cell organism. Hubert Yi was a professor of theor theoretical physics, University of California, Berkeley. He was an expert in what’s called information theory as it applies to biology and the origin of life and of that complexity involved in an inert form of matter transitioning into a living cell. He said this wh he said uh virtually all biochemists agree that life on Earth arose spontaneously from non-living matter. This belief is simply a matter of faith and strict reductionism is based entirely on ideology. So he’s saying that to believe that non-living matter could ever somehow spontaneously become living matter without someone manipulating that process, someone of great intelligence. He says it’s an ideology ideology. It’s a religion. It’s a matter of faith. And that virtually all the biochemists, at least the ones he knew, were reciting that same creed. For us, we read Genesis 1 and we’re very happy to give the credit for creating life to whom it belongs, to the designing hand of God. Day four, we come to the creation of the sun, the moon, and the stars. Day five, we have God causing the waters to team with living creatures and birds that fly above the expanse of the sky. We read, “And God blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters and the seas and let birds multiply on the earth.” God creates an amazing multitude of birds can do astonishing things. Arctic turns breed in the summer north of the Arctic Circle and then migrate every year the full length of the globe to reach the Antarctic ice pack. So they get two summers every year. And in their lifetime, I read, I don’t know if it’s true, I read that they do the equivalent of three round trips to the moon in the lifetime of an Antarctic turn. Penguins dive to depths of more than,300 ft and they can they can stand under water for 11 minutes. And God made these sea creatures, these blue whales. Their tongues weigh more than an elephant and their hearts are the size of a car. Their blood vessels, we could swim in them. And the giant squid and he has an even more introverted cousin, the colossal squid. They have eyes as big as footballs and they can their tentacles can stretch out 60 ft. And although they they’ve been known about for a hundred years because some have been caught in deep sea fishing nets, only about one year ago was the colossal squid ever seen in the wilds. First time it was a little baby colossal squid that was still nearly transparent. In Job 12:es 7-10, we read that these birds and these fish have something important to teach us about the origins that come from the mind and hand of God. Job asks, “But ask the beasts, they’ll teach you. The birds of the heavens, they’ll tell you. The bushes of the earth, they’ll teach you. Fish of the sea, they’ll declare it to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?” all the creatures they could give uh give testimony to the hand of the Lord having created them. So Job is just saying that God’s signature is written on every feature and every creature will ever come across in our world and we ought to pay attention every time we look at one of his creatures because it gives us a lesson on the hand of God in creation. Well, we do need to move on to day six. But just before we do, last fall there was a book uh released in in English that had already been out for a few years in its original French language. It’s entitled God, the science, the evidence, written by two French authors. Their stated purpose is to shed light on the question of the existence or the non-existence of a creator God. And their book, it’s it’s semi-technical at points, but it’s generally written for people like us who are non-speists. What’s remarkable about that book is that it became a bestseller saying selling hundreds of thousands of copies before it was ever translated into English. And it sold those books in France, a country it’s often viewed as a burnedout secular post-Christian desert of unbelief. But their book was tapping into a felt need. The authors were responding to what they perceived as a strongly secular French intellectual culture. And they were arguing that developments in cosmology and physics and biology had reopened questions about the existence of God. And judging by just the large number I’ve been reading this book. Judging by the large numbers of people who picked it up, creation still resonates with even the most secular hearts on the planet. As Job declared, let the beasts and the birds and the bushes and the fish let all of us know that the hand of the Lord has done this. Of course, it’s the sixth day, particularly part two, that holds the greatest relevance for us. Part one tells about the creation of land animals. Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds, livestock, and creeping things, and beasts of the earth according to their kinds. And it was so. Part two of the day is where it gets really interesting for us. God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. When we get to Genesis chapter 2, we’ll start that next week. will take a deeper dive into creation of man and woman and about their commission to exercise dominion over the portfolio that God has entrusted to us. How marriage and having children is a key to that calling. But today we simply want to look for a moment at verse 26 where we run into that curious phrase where a decision God’s made is communicated to a plurality or a group of some kind. God said, “Let us make man in our image after our likeness.” And then when it comes to actually creating man and woman in his image, this is something that only almighty God singular makes happen. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female he created them. Now, some have seen in that phrase, let us make man in our image after our likeness, a reference to the Trinity, to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit working together in the creation of mankind. But in the several commentaries that I’ve consulted on the book of Genesis, the consensus is that God was addressing that group of created beings we spoke of last week termed the divine council or the heavenly council. Now, I don’t want to make more more of that in the first 11 chapters of Genesis than we need to, but we don’t want to ignore it either because it’s a fairly central theme to what we’re looking at. Little flashback to last week. God told Job that at the time the universe was created, the sons of God shouted for joy. We naturally ask, who were those guys? And we looked at two significant psalms that describe this divine council of beings that are presided over by Almighty God. One is Psalm 89. Let the heavens praise your wonders, O Lord, your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones. For who in the skies can be compared to the Lord, who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord, a God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones and awesome above all who are around him. Then Psalm 82, God Elohim has taken his place in the divine counsel in the midst of the gods. Elohim, he holds judgment. So we pointed out last week these are not independent deities. They’re a hierarchy of beings created by God. They have various terms in the Old Testament. Sons of God, holy ones, angels, hosts of heaven, even elohim, the plural word for God. And the idea of a heavenly council, it may be kind of new for some, but it’s it’s uh it’s well attested in scripture. In fact, there’s one place we even eavesdrop on a council meeting of God’s heavenly beings in the book of First Kings, chapter 22. Now, just the the context briefly is there’s a there’s King Ahab. He’s an evil king of the northern kingdom of Israel. He wants the southern king, King Jehoshaphat, to join him and go up against a city that’s been taken by the Syrians. King Jehoshaphat was open to that idea, but he first wanted confirmation that it was God’s will that they join forces and attack. So to convince him, Ahab, this apostate king, he summoned about 400 of his handpicked prophets, and he asked them if they should attack the city or refrain from attacking it. These prophets all said, “Go for it. God will give it into the king’s hand.” Evidently, those were not prophets of God. They were probably prophets of the false god Baal because Jehoshaphat asked for a second opinion, preferably one from a prophet of the real god. And reluctantly Ahab said, “Well, we still have one of those around.” And he sent for the prophet Micaiah. And Ahab suspected that ma uh Micaiah would pour cold water on his plans and would would be the uh the party pooper on this. But and Micaiah at first said, “Oh, just go be victorious. The Lord will give the city into the king’s hand.” Ahab knew that Micaiah was putting him on. He said, “No, you tell me the whole truth.” And Micaiah said that what he really foresaw was the complete defeat of Israel’s enemy. And then Micaiah related the minutes of a heavenly council meeting that he prophetically witnessed. He said, “Therefore, hear the word of the Lord. I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left. And the Lord said, “Who will entice Ahab that he may go up and fall at Ramothgilead?” And one said one thing, another said another. Then a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord, saying, “I’ll entice him.” And the Lord said, “By what means?” And he said, “I’ll go out and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.” And he, meaning God, said, “You are to entice him and you shall succeed. go out and do so. And after reading those council meeting minutes, Micaiah said to the king, “Now therefore, behold, the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets, for the Lord has declared disaster for you. Sure enough, Ahab, he doesn’t listen. He tries to take the city from the Syrians. He’s killed in battle just as God had determined would take place.” So, in that heavenly council meeting, God determined that Ahab’s time was up. But the means of accomplishing Ahab’s death, that was discussed among the council. One member was assigned the task of putting a false spirit in mouths of the prophets, which he then did. So that heavenly council, it’s kind of a real thing in scripture. And back to Genesis 1, if they are the ones addressed when God says, “Let us make man in our image after our likeness,” it means we share something of God’s image with them. It’s not physical appearance. Obviously, God is spirit. It’s not a set of skills or abilities we have. That’s not what the image of God is. If we believe that that was the image of God, we’d have to conclude that an unborn child doesn’t possess the image of God or that an elderly person ravaged by Alzheimer’s has lost the image of God some way. We have to do better than that in understanding the image of God. Michael Heiser is helpful and he explains that the image of God in us is not an ability, but it’s a status that we possess. We’re God’s representatives on earth, given dominion and responsibility to oversee the earth and steward its resources and harness them for the benefit of other people and all the living creatures. God alone created us in his image to function as his administrators on earth. And he also created those strange beings in the heavens, the Elohim, to carry out his will in the unseen realm. They act as his representatives there. So in that way, we humans and those unseen nonhumans share what Heiser calls imaging status. Though the realms are different, ours is on earth, theirs is in heaven, the goal is the same, that God’s kingdom would come, his will would be done on earth just as it is in heaven. Now if we share imaging status with those heavenly beings and we also share some responsibility for administering the realm that God has given us to look after. Then the one other thing that becomes glaringly obvious as we go through Genesis that we also share with them is sufficient free will to violate the limits God has given us and to rebel against our creator. You know some of those heavenly beings stepped outside their limits. They trespassed where they shouldn’t have gone. Every one of us has done the same. None of us has stayed in our lane. Now, we may have to go into stoppage time for this last point, but our greatest weakness, the greatest temptation of mankind is to let the image of God in us go to our heads and to abuse that image, to fail to stay within the limits and the boundaries that God has drawn around us and around all his creatures. You’ll notice in the creation days a repeated phrase. First, the vegetation, seedbearing plants, and trees were called to bear fruit according to their various kinds. Then God created the sea creature and the birds according to its kind. Then God said, uh, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds, livestock and creeping things, and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. Finally, God made man in his image, male and female he created them. And he gave them responsibility to reproduce and exercise dominion within the parameters that he had laid out for them. Now, it’s impossible to read all that without realizing that staying in our lane, in the lane that God has created us to be in, operating within the limits God has set for us, exceedingly important to God and exceedingly beneficial to all of his creation. In Jeremiah 5, the prophets looking at God’s people, people like us, we’re we’re wandering beyond our moral boundaries, overstepping the limits that God has set for us. We’re getting out of bounds. And Jeremiah alludes to Genesis day 1 when he warns those people, saying, “Hear this, oh foolish and senseless people who have eyes but see not, who have ears but hear not. Do you not fear me? Declares the Lord. Don’t you tremble before me. I place the sand as the boundary for the sea, a perpetual barrier that it cannot pass. Though the waves toss, they cannot prevail. Though they roar, they cannot pass over it. But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart. They’ve turned aside and gone away. It’s like we’ve overstepped our bounds. Jeremiah is calling people who refuse to stay in their lane. He says, “You have stubborn, rebellious hearts. As a result, you’re always overstepping your boundaries.” And that generation that Jeremiah was writing to sounds very much like our own. Carl Truman in his most recent book, The Desecration of Man, notes that our world, it isn’t characterized by just a disillusioned indifference to values that are grounded in religious faith. He says, rather, it often seems to revel in an ecstatic destruction of all that once was considered sacred. So, it’s not that we just gradually move the goalpost and extend the boundaries that God has given us to live in. Rather, he says we delight in tearing the goalpost down. Truman suggests that our modern world functions like that. One example would be the permanence of marriage. Uh the standard God gives us from Genesis chapter 2. Permanent marriages today are considered pretty optional, almost old-fashioned in our current culture. In a recent interviewer interview, Rod Dreer recalls a time he was traveling through the former Soviet block of countries. He was talking to Christians and others who had stayed behind, who had resisted communism. And he says, ‘The key moment came for me on a tram in Budapest. I was traveling with my interpreter Anna, a Catholic woman then in her 30s and we were between interviews. She said, “As a Catholic, I really struggle to talk even with my Catholic friends about the things happening in my life. For example, if I tell them that my husband and I have been arguing a lot lately, they’ll cut me off and say, “Oh, you’ve got to get a divorce. You got to go back to work. You deserve to be happy.” Anna said, ‘I can’t make them understand. I love my husband. I love being married, but a happy life is not a life without friction. So, in an unbounded culture that makes personal happiness the greatest achievement, staying in the lane God has for us regarding permanence in marriage seems completely unnecessary. God’s call in our lives to be fruitful and multiply, but modern technology gives us lots of options not to comply with that. Of course, there’s the heartbreak of those who can’t have the children they desire to have. But in a recent interview with Louise Perry, she talks about the dual technologies of contraception and abortion and the effects they’ve had, particularly on young women. Now, she doesn’t identify as a Christian. She would describe herself as a liberal feminist, but she’s written extensively on how the sexual revolution of the 1960s turned out to largely promote the sexual desires of men in a way that was horrible relationally and emotionally and physically for women. the unqualified acceptance of contraception. Probably something we all take for granted. But Perry notes that when the pill first came on the market, it was available exclusively to married women as a means of spacing their births so they wouldn’t have a child every year because that would be too hard on them physically. And she says, ‘ Maybe that’s my concrete proposal that you should use contraception within marriage rather than as a means of seeming to have consequencefree sex. I think though that women in particular should behave as if contraception doesn’t exist. If you would not have sex with this man if you weren’t using contraception, then you should not have sex with him at all. I mean, in choosing the man, not the moment. If this man wouldn’t make a potentially good father to your children, you shouldn’t have a sexual relationship with him. I would absolutely say that to my sons as well, she says. So, she’s really arguing for staying within very God-given limits when it comes to sex. Uh limits that are assumed in those early chapters of the book of Genesis. You know, that business of being fruitful and multiplying rapidly on the decline in many, many parts of our world. Couples just aren’t reproducing at replacement level. And nations, particularly nations of South Korea and China and Japan, unless there’s some dramatic turnaround in fertility rates, in 50 or 100 years, they’ll commit demographic suicide. Our western world, including Canada, we’re still below replacement level in terms of fertility. And particularly in cultures that feel they can only afford to pull pour all their resources into one child. Those populations continue to take a nose dive. God’s call to reproduce broadly. If it’s ignored, it’ll be at our own peril. So marriage, sex, gender, having children, technology allows us to blur those boundaries, to choose our own lanes in ways that previous generations just wouldn’t have thought to do. Now this what I’m saying it’s not a controversial statement. What I’m saying next shouldn’t be viewed as provocative. It’s just a historical observation. But if all of us living today in our generation had a time shift and we were all living a 100 years ago, then the vast majority of everyone, including all those who identify as LGBTQ, would be in heterosexual marriages and having children because that was the lane that everyone followed. And they followed it without much thought. It was a lane of sexuality and marriage much more in line with the limits God gives us in Genesis than anything we see happening today. Genesis 1, male and female, he created them. Multiply, have children, reproduce. Another boundary that’s really being disregarded in our world. The reformed theologian Abraham Kyper once wrote, “Modernism, which denies and abolishes every difference, cannot rest until it’s made woman man, and man woman, and putting every distinction on a common level, kills life by placing it under the ban of uniformity.” Now, what’s remark about that isn’t so much about what Kyper said, but when he said it. He spoke those words in 1898, clearly recognizing even then what the acid of modernity would do in erasing the boundaries and the limits of God in our world. So, along with the original fallen couple, Adam and Eve, we’re all trespassors. We’re all boundary breakers when it comes to living out God’s image, happily staying in the lane that he has created for us to be in. What’s the fate of all of us who break boundaries? The Bible says death, judgment is our lot. God’s law says that trespassors will be prosecuted and we’ve all been caught. Miraculously, Jesus, the son of God, voluntarily accepted the boundaries of coming to earth on a rescue mission to save us. Philippians 2 says that he emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. What a comedown from going from heaven to being born in the likeness of men. In human form, he humbled himself by become becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. So, we casually cast aside God’s limits and boundaries. Every time we do, it defaces the image of God in us. Jesus left heaven to embrace human limitations so that the image of God could be renewed and restored in us by his sacrifice on the cross. dying in our place. When we put our faith and trust in him for salvation, Jesus says we’re born again and he will forgive us all of our trespasses. And then out of gratitude and obedience, we can get back into God’s lane for our lives. And the Holy Spirit, he’s like that, well, probably shouldn’t talk about the Holy Spirit like this, but he’s like the driver assistance system. You know, your car’s drifting out of its lane and it tells you to go back. The Holy Spirit is the person who’s meant to do that in our lives. The late uh missionary theologian Elizabeth Elliott used to tell her students that clams glorify God better than you do. And her students would think, “Uh, what do you mean by that? How’s that possible?” And she’d say, “The reason they’re glorifying God is that they’re being exactly what God meant them to be. A clam is being exactly what God meant it to be, a clam.” And then she’d look at her students and say, “But are you being a woman? Are you being a man? Are you being the human being that God made you to be? Creation, you know, nature is so beautiful. It’s just as God means it to be. It reflects his goodness. We fallen human beings. We’re probably the most unnatural part of God’s creation. But we’re being restored by Jesus so we can become all we’re meant to be. and we can grow in our status as God’s imagebearers to exercise the kind of good dominion that brings blessing to our fellow image bearsers, brings blessing to all the creatures on earth that God has given us to look after. So, let’s just take a moment and pray about some of these thoughts. And you might want to begin by just praising God for the beauty of creation that he’s given you to enjoy. and then thank him for the responsibility he’s given you to bear his image and pray that you’ll really represent him well. Pray for the wisdom and the humility to live comfortably within the limits and boundaries God has placed over your life. These are big prayers. So, just take a moment or a few moments and I’ll close us off after uh you spend some personal time with God.