I’m currently reading Jane Eyre. I’m about halfway through. I did not know about this story when I started reading it. I told Mindy that my initial impression was that it was an awful lot like Anne of Green Gables. To which she replied, “Mr. Rochester is no Gilbert Blythe.” I know who both those characters are, but I do not (yet) see why the two can’t be compared. I haven’t finished the story yet. I know where I’m at, but I’m not sure where the story is going.

The story the Bible tells, however, is one which anyone who has been a Christian for any serious time at all ought to be quite familiar with. As one author puts it,

Christian theology is about knowing the story, its plot, the characters, the protagonist, the villains, the struggle, and the resolution. And then—most of all—knowing the church’s place, and one’s own place, within that story, the ongoing act of the divine drama. Doing biblical theology means learning your lines, playing your part, and discovering a new way not only of viewing the world but of acting within the world.[1]

Consequently, we need to hear this story again and again. And that’s the reason for this short Lenten season sermon series called Storytellers. My hope for this series is that we can become better tellers of the biblical story and the hope it offers to the world.

Today, we start at the beginning of the story, of course. This is a part of the story that is quite well-known, but perhaps not so quite well-understood. Here at the beginning we find that God has enacted a glorious covenant with human beings, and it is the breaking of that covenant that has brought creation to the brink of catastrophe. Let’s begin the story by telling why God made the world, why God made human beings, and why sin corrupts everything.

God Created the Heavens and the Earth

The Creation Story

The story begins this way: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1). But such a beginning immediately raises so many questions: What beginning are we talking about? Who is God? How did he create? Do the next verses answer that question or do they take up some further type of creative activity? What are the heavens that God created along with the earth?

Add to these questions some questions about the book of Genesis itself: How and when was it written? Who wrote it? What was it written for? All of these are good and important questions that make the story told in Genesis 1 more complex than we thought.

For example, how many people, in reading Genesis 1:1, have found themselves mired in the quest of trying to make sense of the theological claim that there is a God who created the earth (and the heavens, whatever that is) and the scientific claim (by some) that everything came to be rather naturally without any hint of divine involvement?

We will not pursue this question any further. We touched on it a bit when we began the Genesis series. For now, let’s just stick with the story.

The Why of Creation

I take it to be self-evident that Genesis was not written to give us a play-by-play account of how everything came to be as if, had we been there with our video cameras, we would have described it in more or less the same way as Genesis 1 does. I don’t have a problem if that is indeed the case; it’s just that we should consider whether the creation story in Genesis 1 is intending to direct our attention elsewhere. And I think it is.

The salient question comes to mind when we think of what we say when we walk in on someone who is obviously engaging in some sort of task. “What are you doing?” we ask. And when we get the answer to that question, we ask, “Why?” Why are you doing that? We are asking about purpose. And once we open up that question, we are now outside the realm of science. When we talk about purpose we are no longer in the realm of science as science has defined itself.[2]

So what we need to be asking here as we walk in on God busy creating the heavens and the earth is, “Why?” Why does God make the heavens and the earth? What is his purpose? What is he up to?

The World as God’s House

When we ask that question, we find answers to questions we might not have thought about even asking at first. What is God doing, creating the universe? So much attention in our day is placed on trying to make sense (scientifically) of the six days of creation that we almost forget about day 7, the day when God rested. But for the original audience of Genesis—ancient Israel (at any point post-exodus)—the significance could not be missed. Isaiah 66:1 relates God speaking of his house as the place of his rest. To speak of God resting is to speak of creation as if it is meant to be a temple. The picture painted for us in Genesis 1, then, is about God who created the earth to be his home.

Psalm 104 is modeled on the creation account in Genesis 1, and “invites us to see the world as something he delights in, which is charged with his energy and alive with his presence.”[3] There is nothing in the creation account to even suggest to us that there is a better place for human beings to be than right here. It goes without saying that many Christians today do not tell the story this way, making the story primarily about how we go to be with God in heaven instead of the other way around.

Getting off on the wrong foot here means we may well end up telling the story in a way it is not really meant to be told. After all, the story does not only begin this way; it also ends in similar fashion. Revelation 21:3 speaks of a “loud voice from the throne” proclaiming, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” Yes! Just as God purposed “in the beginning.”

God Made Human Beings

By the time we get to the second chapter of Genesis, the story narrows from the whole earth that God created to be his temple[4] to the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden is, in temple terms, the inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies. It is here that God especially manifests his presence. It is here that he walks with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day. But who are Adam and Eve? In a temple, in the inner sanctum of the temple, we expect to find an image of the god of that temple. And that’s what we also find in the Genesis account.

The Image of God

Adam and Eve, and all other human beings, the Genesis story says, were created by God. We get hung up on how he did it, but once again the biblical story is concerned with a question that science is not designed to answer: not how we came to exist but why. What was God’s purpose in making us? The important point is that God made human beings in his image, and after his likeness. We were made by God to be like him. We are not him, of course, and the distance between human beings and God is an impossible chasm to bridge; but we are nevertheless intended by God to be like him, similar though not congruent.

Now Christians, for the better part of two millennia, have thought of the image of God has having to do with “the mental and spiritual qualities” that humans share with God.[5] Once again, we can get stuck on the what rather than the why. What the image of God is—that’s a tricky question. But why God made us in his image—well, the text answers that question directly. “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, so that they might have dominion.”[6] Is God yielding his rule of his creation to human beings? Not at all. This is a temple scene, and the whole point of the image is to represent the character and attributes of the god who lives in the temple.[7] So, human beings are meant to reflect into the world the reality of the God in whose image they were made.

Work to Be Done

Here I want to stress something in the biblical story that is often missed. Many people have the idea that God made a perfect world, placed human beings in it, and warned them not to mess it all up.[8] Let’s think of it differently. God made a good world—that is what God says repeatedly in the creation account—and placed human beings in it to bring it forward to its intended goal.[9] In other words, when we get to the end of the creation story in Genesis 1-2, we are not at the end. There is work yet to be done.

Think again of Day 7, that day in which God rested.

Most of us think of rest as disengagement from the cares, worries and tasks of life. What comes to mind is sleeping in or taking an afternoon nap. But in the ancient world rest is what results when a crisis has been resolved or when stability has been achieved, when things have “settled down.” Consequently normal routines can be established and enjoyed. For deity this means that the normal operations of the cosmos can be undertaken. This is more a matter of engagement without obstacles rather than disengagement without responsibilities.[10]

So, God tells Adam and Eve to get busy. He put them “in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” Now that God’s house is finished it’s time to move in and begin normal operations. It’s time for the work of the divine administration to be carried out—the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven.

The reason why God made us in his image is so that in our various vocations, using our God-given abilities, we might do the work that God wants done in his world. God gives to us the responsibility and privilege of taking his creation somewhere. Do you see your vocation—whatever you give your energies and efforts to this week—do you see it that way? The “Preacher” in Ecclesiastes might say, “All is vanity” and lament, “What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” (Eccl 1:2-3), but that’s not how your work and your life is meant to be. And because Jesus has been raised from the dead, we are supposed to know “that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Cor 15:58).

How Work Is Worship

Ponder for a moment what the psalmist is saying in verse 23. This is a psalm of celebration, praising God for creation. When the sun rises, “Man goes out to his work and to his labor until the evening.” It’s not supposed to be a drudgery but a delight. After all, we read in verses 14-15, God made stuff like “plants for man to cultivate,” to “bring forth food from the earth.” There’s something delightful about a delicious meal, isn’t there? When someone has taken the stuff God made and cultivated in such a way that delights the tastebuds? God made a world in which human beings can make “wine to gladden the heart of man.” That’s in the Bible friends! “Oil to make his face shine”—nothing wrong with a little skin care and cosmetic treatment. “And bread to strengthen man’s heart.” Bread has to be made, doesn’t it? This psalm celebrates God by way of human involvement in God’s world. That’s the way God designed it. My mechanic, Todd, called me to say he was able to fix my car quite inexpensively when I was sure it was going to be an expensive repair. When he told me the good news, I shouted out in relief, “Praise the Lord!” Not missing a beat, Todd said, “Well he helped but I’m the one who fixed it!” Right on, Todd.

Bread and wine are mentioned here, and just think of it: the elements of the Lord’s Supper do not get to us without human involvement. To be made in the image of God means to be in relationship with God, co-laborers with him in his world. This relationship with God is covenantal. It’s what makes work—ordinary, everyday work—an act of worship.

To be made in the image of God means that the way the world is meant to work is when human beings are rightly related to God and to each other and are wisely stewarding earth’s resources.[11] It’s all a covenantal relationship, and the proper execution of the covenant depends upon the same kind of things that are demanded by any other covenantal relationship: faithfulness, loyalty, obedience, trust.[12]

Why Sin Corrupts Everything

Now I think we are in a better position to understand why sin is a big deal in the Bible, why sin corrupts the world, corrupts everything.

The Immorality of Failed Vocation

What is the big deal about sin? If we are working from the premise that sin is a big deal because we humans have corrupted God’s perfect world, then in that story God can come off looking naïve for entrusting his masterpiece to human hands, and human beings come off looking like an unfortunate blight on God’s otherwise perfect world. The emphasis in such a telling of the story is on human morality and whether or not humans could be coaxed into doing the wrong thing, which of course, they could be, and, in fact, would be.

But the tree of the knowledge of good and evil there in the midst of the Garden of Eden is clearly symbolic. To eat from that tree signifies “choosing or determining for oneself what is right and wrong independently of God.”[13] There is surely a moral element to this, no doubt. But the emphasis instead is on the human vocation, whether or not humans would make wise or foolish decisions with the covenant rulership they’ve been given by God.

Sin, therefore, is not merely a moral issue; it is a vocational issue. It has to do with human beings not doing or at least not wisely doing what they were called to do. This may not sound like a big distinction, but it is. Because when we talk about salvation, the solution to sin, it makes a big difference if you think of salvation in merely moral terms (I did something wrong, God is angry with me, even justifiably angry, and then something is done to resolve that anger), or if salvation refers to the restoration of human beings to their proper covenantal vocation. Because we’ve thought of the whole arrangement for so long only in moral terms, the question of salvation usually is assumed to be a question of whether or not God will “let me in to heaven when I die.” Such a retelling is not whole-sale wrong, but in light of what we’ve seen so far, it is clearly not the primary way to tell the story.

Sin and the Loss of Glory

The problem with sin cannot be reduced to the failure to keep God’s rules and therefore deserving of God’s punishment. And yet, such a reduction continues to hold a lot of weight in many people’s minds. The often-repeated question, “Is such and such a sin?” is usually asked with the understanding that so long as we do not cross over the line then God cannot be angry with us.

But the problem with sin, according to one well-known verse, is that sin causes us to “fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). The verb translated fall short means to lack; its use here with “the glory of God” fits with what we’ve been saying. Psalm 8 can speak of human beings created in a special way by God, indeed “crowned with glory and honor” (Psa 8:5). To sin is to come up short of the glory of God, referring not to what sin is (the failure to give God the glory he is due) but what sin does. Sin causes us to become less than human, to be declining from “the ‘image of God’ in which human beings were first made.”[14]

Our failure to be in a right relationship with God, with each other, and with the creation he gave us to steward—that is what sin is. And the effect it has on us and on the rest of creation is nothing less than catastrophic.

Salvation and Future Hope

What, then, is our hope? What is “salvation,” in biblical terms? It necessarily must involve not just the restoration of a right relationship with God but also those other two dimensions. It means to have the image of God fully restored in us, to be fully and truly human. And the result of such a salvation would be, in Old Testament terms, the earth “filled with the glory of the LORD” (Num 14:21; Hab 2:14).

Isaiah saw the LORD high and lifted up, and the angelic host proclaiming that “the whole earth is full of his glory.” That vision is as much a prophecy as it is the pronouncement of reality. For that vision to be realized, there must be this kind of salvation, the redemption of humanity and the restoration of our dignity as creatures made in his image.

That, brothers and sisters, is what the rest of the Bible is all about. That is the good news, the gospel of salvation, that we need to become better acquainted with so that we can be better storytellers of the good news of Jesus Christ.

_____

[1] N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2019), 881.

[2] John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 126.

[3] Derek Kidner, Psalms 73–150: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 16, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (InterVarsity Press, 1975), 402.

[4] Actually, I take it that “earth” in Genesis 1 is mostly about the land, a metaphor for the Promised Land, and not about the entire planet Earth. This is not to deny that God made the whole planet but simply that that is not the focus of Genesis 1.

[5] Peter John Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants, Second Edition (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 220.

[6] For this as the correct translation of Genesis 1:26, see Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 223.

[7] Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 226.

[8] Many reformed theologians will refer to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as being on a “probationary period” within a “covenant of works.” “Eden was a trial,” says Michael Horton (The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011], 387). But such a “covenant of works,” and its presumed probationary period, are debated, even among reformed theologians. Such language can inadvertently communicate this unhelpful perception that God tells human beings not to mess up his perfect world, though it is not what reformed theology actually teaches; Horton can also say that the original “creation—including humanity—is in an important sense unfinished” (The Christian Faith, 379).

[9] Horton, The Christian Faith, 380-81.

[10] Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, 71-72.

[11] Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 236.

[12] Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 230.

[13] Gentry and Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant, 254.

[14] Douglas J. Moo, The Letter to the Romans, 2^nd ed., The New International Commentary on the New Testament, ed. Joel B. Green et al. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2018), 247.