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God’s Man Plan
Genesis 1:1
This morning if I asked you to “Define God in 20 words or less” and then, I gave you 30 seconds to do it, what would you say? Does it seem unrealistic? Suppose I gave you 200,000 words and 30 years, would it be any easier? Would you come any closer to the truth?
God is the first fundamental of the universe, which is why we can’t really “define” him. While we can describe Him, we can’t define the essence of who He is. But we can say this, knowing God is the most important thing in life. If you live to be 10 or live to be 100, if you don’t know God, then it doesn’t matter what else you’ve done with your life, whether you were the President or a prisoner. If you don’t know God, you’ve missed the very reason for your own existence. If you miss knowing God, you’ve missed the central reality of the universe. Everything else is just crumbs and nibbling around the edges.
Proverbs 9:10 declares that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” If you want wisdom, know God! If you want understanding, seek the Lord!
This morning let’s begin with the very first verse of the Bible. Turn to Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Isn’t it interesting that the Bible begins with a declaration, not with a debate? It’s as if God’s Word is saying, “Either you see this or you don’t.” While apologetics has its place, the Bible never seeks to prove the existence of God. Instead it assumes the existence of God and moves on from there. If you understand Genesis 1:1, and if you believe it, you can believe everything else in the Bible. But if you stumble at Genesis 11, you’ll stumble everywhere for the whole message of the Bible hangs on the truth of this verse. Believe this, and miracles will not trouble you. Believe this, and you will not be troubled by prophecies you don’t understand. But doubt this and you’ll doubt everything else as well.
The Gospel, the Christian message, begins with creation. We can’t simply start off with John 3:16 and the gospel message. That’s like starting to read a book in the middle of the story—you don’t know the characters and you can’t make sense of the plot. We need to start with creation, where the main character of the “story” is introduced as the Creator of all, and the “plot” of human history begins to unfold. Creation tells us who we are and why we’re here. It tells us that each of our lives have ultimate meaning.
Creation is the basis for the entire Christian worldview. The Christian message must begin with creation. We’ve missed the train if just start with John 3:16 and the gospel message.We believers love to quote John 3:16, as well we should, yet we often assume far too much on the part of our hearers. We like to think that when we use the word “God,” that it means the same thing to unbelievers that it does to us.
If you’ve had many dialogues with unbelievers, then you know that’s just not the case. In our increasingly secularized culture, we can’t be sure that people have any knowledge about the God of the Bible. If they don’t know who God is, they’ll trip over the second word of John 3:16 and they won’t understand the rest of it either. John 3:16 is the second chapter in God’s plan for man. Genesis begins to unpack for us the first in God’s Man Plan. This morning if you’re taking notes, let me suggest that…1. The Gospel begins with God. Where should we begin in thinking about the gospel? To borrow a line from The Sound of Music, “let’s start at the very beginning, that’s a very good place to start.” The Gospel begins with God. Psalm 96:3 commands us to “declare His glory among the nations.” Evangelism must involve telling people about God. Many times we must explain who God is, what He’s like, and how He’s revealed himself to us.
Psalms 96:5 adds this sobering truth: “For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the Lord made the heavens.” One of the unfortunate results of the predominance of evolutionary thought in our educational system and in our entire culture is that it has hindered even us as Christians from reading Genesis 1 from the viewpoint Moses intended when he wrote it. We get bogged down trying to reconcile the creation account with modern science. When we do that, we miss why it was given to us at the very beginning of God’s revelation. We miss the perspective that God intended to give us.
John Calvin correctly point us to this worldview, as he writes, “The intention of Moses, in beginning his Book with the creation of the world, is, to render God, as it were, visible to us in His works…We know God, Who is Himself invisible, only through His works…This is the reason why the Lord, that He may invite us to the knowledge of Himself, places the fabric of heaven and earth before our eyes, rendering Himself, in a certain manner, manifest in them.” We’ll never understand God or Genesis unless we approach the creation account from the perspective of Moses’ purpose in writing. He’s showing us that the creation account points us to the Creator who alone is worthy of our worship, enjoyment, and obedience.
Moses’ purpose was that in thinking about the creation account and in observing the world around us, we’d focus on the greatness of God who brought it all into being through the word of His power.
God is referred to by name 35 times in the opening section of Genesis 1:1-2:3. Clearly, He is the primary subject; creation is merely His handiwork, here to tell us about Him. As Paul states, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). Thus, we can enjoy creation as a marvelous source of revelation, compatible with and expounded upon by the more specific revelation of the written Word. The Bible is both our guide and teacher, through Scripture the Lord not only points out things to us which would otherwise escape our notice, but He almost compels us to notice them; as if He had assisted our blurred vision with eye glasses. If the mute instruction of creation, the heaven and the earth were sufficient, the teaching of Moses would have been overkill.
Genesis reveals God as effortlessly creating with a mere command: “And God said, ‘Let there be…” God is sovereign over and separate from creation, because He made it by His word. In The Message Eugene Peterson introduces the book of Genesis by saying: “First, God. God is the subject of life. God is foundational for living. If we don’t have a sense of the primacy of God, we will never get it right, get life right, get our lives right. Not God at the margins; not God as an option; not God on the weekends. God at center and circumference; God first and last; God, God, God.” Peterson is hammering home the point, “First, God.” The Gospel begins with God.2. Our greatest need is that we would know God. Why did God create human beings? What’s the reason God put us on this planet? Sometimes we may feel like the man who said, “I’ve got a clock that tells me when to get up, but some days I need one to tell me why.” It’s not surprising that Genesis, the book of origins, tells us early on why God created people.
Modern man suffers from an identity crisis. Science tells us that we descended from the apes by sheer chance. Maybe you’ve heard about the gorilla in a zoo holding a Bible in one hand and a book about evolution in the other. He was looking confused, so someone asked, “What are you doing?” The gorilla answered, “Well, I’m trying to decide if I’m my brother’s keeper or my keeper’s brother.”
If you believe that interpretation of history, it will drastically affect the way you think and live. It cuts you off from a relationship with an all-wise, all-powerful Creator who made you in His image. It robs you of any significant meaning in life. It destroys any basis for hope for the future. If human beings are the product of random chance, the bottom line is, “Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Cor. 15:32). But that view fails to explain why we are distinctly different from the apes and other animals. It has no basis for explaining the fact, as Cicero puts it, there is “no nation so barbarous, no people so savage, that they have not a deep-seated conviction that there is a God.”
God created us to relate to Him. The Creation account brings out this theme in several ways. One is the frequent use of God’s name, Yahweh Elohim (“LORD God”). It’s used 20 times in Genesis 2 and 3, yet it’s used only one other time in the entire Pentateuch (Ex. 9:30), and less than 10 times in all the other books of the Old Testament. It’s obviously deliberate on the part of Moses to show that Yahweh, who created man and placed him in Eden, who punished him for his disobedience but also gave him a promise of victory over the serpent, was Elohim, the same God, who created the heavens and the earth.
Elohim comes from a word meaning “to fear,” and signifies “the highest Being to be feared.” In this intensive sense Elohim depicts the one true God as the infinitely great and exalted One, Who created the heavens and the earth, and Who preserves and governs every creature.
The other name, Yahweh, is God’s personal name as the covenant God of Israel. It’s the name by which God revealed Himself to Moses at the burning bush (Ex. 3:13-16). It comes from the Hebrew verb “to be,” so that God tells Moses His name is, “I am who I am.” It means that God is the self-existent, self-determining one, the absolute Being of all beings. It includes both the absolute independence of God in His historical movements and the absolute constancy of God, or the fact that in everything, in both words and deeds, He is essentially in harmony with Himself, remaining always consistent. Since Yahweh is God’s personal name, it also points to Him as the God of our salvation.
Moses, in linking these two names, is telling Israel that their God, the God of the covenant, who led them out of Egypt, is the same Creator God who made man and desires to bless all who obey Him. The God of creation is thus also the God of history and salvation, and known by His people.
Another way Moses brings out the truth that we were created to relate to God is by showing the personal attention and deliberate care God used in forming first Adam, then Eve. The picture in Genesis 2:7 is that of a potter taking the clay and carefully molding it into a living being. While this term is also used of other animals, it’s used in a special sense here of man, directly receiving face-to-face the breath of God. This is not just air, but God’s vital, life-giving breath. Life didn’t happen by some accidental spark of lightning striking some primordial pond, starting a random process that, by sheer chance, some billions of years later, resulted in man. We were carefully designed by an incredibly intelligent God.
Just think for a moment about the remarkable complexity of the human body. Physically, we’re the result of two sets of 23 chromosomes which unite at conception. A single human chromosome contains twenty billion bits of information, which corresponds to about 500 million words, or two million pages. At 500 pages per book, this means that just one human chromosome is equal to about 4,000 volumes of information. We each have 46 chromosomes, or 184,000 volumes of 500 pages each! Just our chromosomes make each one of us a major public library.
But God, in creating us, created so much more than just our physical bodies. Made of dust, man is related to the other animals (2:19). Made in the image of God though, receiving life from God, man has personality and rational and moral capacities which distinguish him from every other creature and fit him for communion with God. That man was made from dust and not gold dust, powder of pearl, or diamond dust, as Matthew Henry observes, forbids pride. That he was made by God in His image reminds us of our higher purpose, lost in the fall, but regained through Jesus Christ. We need to keep both in balance. As J. Vernon McGee notes, “We’re made of dust, and dust that gets stuck on itself is called mud.”
God created us to relate to Him as He has revealed Himself to us. But since the fall, we are alienated from God and unable to know Him in and of ourselves. So God sent His Son Jesus, who is the God-Man or God in human flesh, to pay the penalty for our sin, to reconcile us to Himself, and to reveal God to us. Friend, if you don’t have a personal relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ, you just can’t understand who you are or why you exist. But through Christ, you can!
We are designed to know God and we need to know him. Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells us that God has put eternity in the hearts of men. This brings us face to face with the famous statement that there is a “God-shaped vacuum” inside each person. God made us to know him. He designed us so that we would want to know Him. And then He guaranteed we wouldn’t be happy unless He himself fills the void within. Man by nature is incurably religious. There’s something in him that drives him to seek ultimate meaning outside himself so that he turns to God or worship idols or false gods. That “something” inside him is put there by God. Augustine gave us this oft-quoted prayer: “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.”
So we restlessly search for God (though we don’t always know that’s what we are doing). Our problem is that we feel a distance from God. It’s like being around someone who seems to dress and act much nicer than we do. When we come into the presence of such a person, we instinctively check our hands to see if there’s dirt under our fingernails. Multiply that by infinity and that’s our problem with God. We want to know Him but we can’t come close because His character makes us feel dirty by comparison.
So we concoct Two Solutions for our problem with God—Solution #1: That God should lower his standards. We hope against hope that He’ll stop insisting on perfection, that maybe He’ll “grade on the curve” and let us into Heaven even though we aren’t perfect like He is. But if He lowered His standards, He’d cease to be God. This solution won’t work at all. Solution #2: We compare ourselves to others just like us so we don’t look so bad. And it’s true, we may be relatively better or worse than our next-door neighbors, but that doesn’t bring us any closer to knowing God. God is too good for us and we are not good enough for Him.3. God’s desire though is that we would know Him. All of Scripture testifies that God wants us to know Him. In a sense that’s the theme of the Bible—how God created us, how we rebelled against Him, and how God set about rescuing people who had turned against Him. God sent prophets, priests, and messengers of various sorts. He sent messages that people could read. But we (the human race) didn’t want anything to do with God. We ignored His message and sometimes killed His messengers. Then He sent His Son, the ultimate expression of His love…and we killed Him too. But in His death God made a way for anyone and everyone to be forgiven.
Let’s go back to the very beginning of the story for a moment. When God first created the world, He also created Adam and Eve and made them “in His image” and “after His likeness.” These simple phrases are filled with meaning for us. We were made in God’s image, which means there is something in us that corresponds to who God is. You and I were made with the ability to know God personally.
Animals don’t pray, but we pray. Why? Because there’s a “God-consciousness” inside every heart. It’s that “God-consciousness” that makes us want to know God and makes us eager to find out why we were put on planet earth. But there’s another part of the story. Ever since Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, that image of God within each of us has been marred by sin.
Picture a white sheet of paper with the words GOD’S IMAGE in huge letters. Before Adam and Eve sinned, that paper was clean and smooth. But now for all of us that paper is crumpled, dirty and torn, though it’s never completely destroyed. Despite all our failures we still want to know God, we still want to find meaning in life, but now we don’t know where to look. To use a very modern phrase, we’re left with a kind of “Father Hunger.” That’s a phrase used to describe children growing up in a family without a strong and compassionate father figure. He may be absent or he may have abandoned his family. Children growing up in a home like that desperately want a father and sometimes they’ll look for someone (or something) to fill that void. On a much larger scale that’s the story of all humanity. We were made to know God and we want to know Him, but sin has created a gap so that we are left with a deep “Father hunger” that won’t seem to go away.4. We are looking for love in all the wrong places. When he was an old man, German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who did much to shape modern liberal theology, was sitting alone on a bench in a city park. A policeman, thinking he was a vagrant, came over and shook him and asked, “Who are you?” and Schleiermacher replied sadly, “I wish I knew.”
If you cut yourself off from the historical truths revealed in Genesis 2, that you are a being created by God to relate to Him, then you do not know who you really are. So what’s our human tendency? What do we do? Like that Country Western song says, “we look for love in all the wrong places.”
Remember the “Bridge Illustration” was made famous by the Navigators. It’s a simple way to explain the gospel using nothing but a pen and a paper. You begin by drawing a cliff on one side, labeling it “God.” Then, on the other side you draw a cliff and label it “Us.” The huge gap in between is caused by our own sin. As we stand on our side something in us tells us we belong on the other side, with the God who made us. So we set out to build a bridge across the great chasm. At this point you draw lines representing various attempts to find God. One might be labeled money, or education, or sex, or pleasure, or power, or success, or approval, relationships, one might even be labeled religion. You can make as many bridges as you want, as long as none of the bridges reach the other side. Each one ends somewhere in the middle, illustrating the fact you can never find God by starting where you are. No matter which road you take, you fall into the great chasm and end up being broken on the jagged rocks of reality.
Jeremiah has a vivid word picture to describe the futility of trying to get back to God on our own terms: “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water” (2:13). Imagine people filling barrels of water, not noticing they’re cracked so that no matter how much water you pour in the top, it gushes out the sides and always end up empty. That’s what we mean by searching in all the wrong places. Nothing in this world can satisfy our longing because nothing in this world can lead us back to God. The answer we need must come from outside this world.
Three thousand years ago King Solomon went on a search to find the meaning of life. He recorded his findings in a book called Ecclesiastes. In the first two chapters he tells about his grand experiment. He built buildings, planted vast gardens, tried the party scene and checked out intoxicating stimulants. He gathered books and amassed a vast store of human knowledge. Anything he wanted, he got for himself. Nothing was held back. He tried anything and everything in his search for meaning. And he reported his finding in three terse words: “I hated life” (2:17). When nothing satisfies, when you’ve truly tried it all, when you can say with calm assurance, “Been there, done that” and you still feel the emptiness within, what do you do then? Solomon’s conclusion could stand as an epitaph for every generation.
Here’s our problem. We were made by God to know God. There’s a “God-shaped vacuum” inside each person that causes us to seek after the One who made us. Since we can’t find Him on our own, we end up searching in all the wrong places and still that eternal longing is not fulfilled. Try as we might, we just can’t find God on our own.5. God alone has the solution – He has made Himself known. In the end we are left with this great truth. We can never know God unless He reveals Himself to us. Try as we might we always end up in the darkness, seeking a God we know is there but can’t seem to find. But God has not left us to live in darkness forever. He has revealed Himself in three primary ways.
In creation—Everyone sees this. In the human conscience—Everyone has this. In His written Word to us—Not everyone knows this.
What about the Lord Jesus Christ? Isn’t He a revelation of God? Yes, Jesus is God incarnate, that is He’s God clothed with human flesh. When Jesus walked on the earth, He was the God-man, fully God and fully man at the same time. Jesus is the supreme revelation of God. He’s like the light that shines out from the sun. To see the light is to see the sun itself.
The Bible says a great deal about who God is and how He’s revealed Himself. Here are five facts about God each us needs to know:
#1 He is the Sovereign Lord. God is the purest, simplest, most basic being in the universe. He’s a personal God, not an impersonal force. Because He’s infinite, He’s not subject to loss, corruption or decay. Because He’s eternal, He always was, always is, and always will be. He is present everywhere in the universe through all time and space. He’s the “unmoved mover,” the source of all that is, the power behind all other power. His character is unchanging, therefore entirely dependable. What He says, He will do. Because He has the only truly “free will” in the universe, He does whatever he pleases.
God is holy, which means He is utterly pure, free from all evil, totally without blame or error. Holiness is what makes God God. He never lowers His standards, never compromises, and cuts no deals. All that He does is right and just. There’s no falsehood in Him or from Him. He makes the rules and no one can object. He Himself is the final standard of right and wrong. Therefore, everything He says about you and me is true.
#2 He created all things. God designed everything that is. He initiated creation and personally brought all things into being. The universe didn’t happen by chance, accident, or the random collision of cells. God spoke and the universe came into being. He is therefore the source of all things—living and non-living. All things were made by Him and all things exist at this moment by His powerful word. This means that He personally created you, that you were put on this earth for a reason, and the highest purpose of your life is to know the God who made you.
#3 He made you in His image. You were made to know God. Something in each of us yearns to know the God who created us. That yearning may be hidden deep within or perhaps you can feel it inside you at this moment, perhaps you’ve tried to cover it up or to satisfy your longings with the things of this world. But it doesn’t work. You were made with desires that nothing in this world can satisfy. Only God can fill the hole in your heart.
#4 He knows all about you. Theologians call this omniscience, which simply means that God knows everything—the past, the present, and the future. He’s never caught by surprise by anything that happens anywhere in the universe. Nothing is hidden from Him. That includes your secret thoughts, your dreams, and unfulfilled desires. He knows your words before you speak them and thoughts before you think them. He knows where you were last night and who you were with. He knows the whole story of your life—the good, the not-so-good, and the downright ugly, those secret things that no one else knows about. He knows them all and He knows them completely.
#5 He cares about you. The Bible tells us that “God is love.” He is perfect, infinite love. His love is undeserved. Please, never, ever think that you “deserve” God’s love. There is nothing lovely in you apart from God’s grace. And this is the miracle…God loves the unlovely. He even loves His enemies. He proved it by sending His Son to the earth. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
Conclusion: If that’s who God is and we need to know Him. If you live to be 10 or 100, if you amass great wealth and power, if you have much success and a happy life, if your family is healthy and if your marriage is blessed, all of it will be for nothing if you do not know God. If you have everything I’ve mentioned and yet do not know God, you’ve missed the purpose for your own existence and have wasted your years on the earth. The other things are good in themselves, but they cannot compare with the surpassing value of knowing God.
To miss knowing this God is to miss the central truth of the universe. It’s like visiting Niagara Falls and seeing everything but Niagara Falls. It’s like traveling to Yellowstone and seeing everything but Old Faithful. It’s like going to Paris and seeing everything but the Eiffel Tower. Knowing the God who made you is the most important thing in life. It gives meaning and purpose to everything else. If you don’t know God, you’ll waste all your days in the pursuit of things that cannot satisfy. And what will you do when you die? That’s not an idle question. Sooner or later we will all face death. What will you do then?
That question became very personal for the youth group at Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas on September 15, 1999. Shortly after 7:00 p.m., over 300 teenagers had gathered in the sanctuary for a youth rally celebrating “See You at the Pole,” which had happened earlier that day in schools across America. While the students and their leaders were singing, Larry Gene Ashbrook entered the sanctuary. Dressed in black, he slowly, methodically opened fire, spewing vile language as he shot first one person, then another. Then he paused, calmly reloaded, and began to shoot again. Through the screams, shouts, smoke and bloodshed, 19-year old Jeremiah Nietz decided he’d seen enough. He wasn’t going to stand by and watch his friends be murdered one by one. Facing the gunman he said, “Sir, you don’t need to do that.” Ashbrook replied with a foul comment. “I know what you need,” said Jeremiah Nietz. “You need Jesus Christ in your life.” At that moment the shooter pointed his gun directly at the young man standing only a few feet away. “Shoot me if you want to. I know where I’m going when I die. What about you?”
Something in those words seemed to pierce the twisted, evil heart of Larry Gene Ashbrook. He slowly sat down, uttered another swear word, then put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Out of that awful story comes one shining truth. It’s only by knowing God that we can have the certainty that gave a 19-year-old boy the courage to look death in the eye. And the only way to know God is through His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Let’s wrap this up with John 3:17, a verse often overlooked because it comes after the most famous verse in the Bible, but its message is right on target: “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.”
Here’s the ultimate good news. Jesus came to save you, not to condemn you. Through Him you can be saved, your life can be transformed, you can know God personally, and you can have absolute assurance that you will go to heaven when you die. Your life can have real purpose and meaning. Today maybe you realize that you need to know God and you want to know God but you’re not quite sure what to do next. Tell Him. Tell Him that you want to know Him and ask Him to reveal Himself to you. Scripture promises, “Come near to God and He will come near to you” (James 4:8). Friend, won’t you come to God today? Won’t you accept His Son as your Savior this morning?
