Good morning. I want to thank my family for their love and support and I want to thank all of you for your love and support, and for all the prayers and well wishes that you have shared with me. Today I begin a new year in my life and I am glad to be doing so. I am thankful for the love of God and his place in my life.
This morning I want to share with you the beginning of a new series. It is not my original completed work. The origin of this is from a mentor that I have had at various times in my life and he has probably had more influence on my understanding of God and how He works in the lives of men, more than any other teacher, pastor, or professor I have ever known. To be able to understand the truth means that we also have the ability to understand and discriminate what is not truth. What is not truth, we call heresy.
We are going to begin this morning at the beginning of the book…The holy book we often call The Bible. We are going to look at the first book called Genesis, chapter 1 – 3. If we are going to understand God and how and why He works, you can never understand Him without these first three chapters in Genesis. If you and I do not understand these first three chapters, our thinking is open to the teaching of heresy. Now there is an advantage to knowing or understanding heresy. If you know something is heretical, it enables you to know the truth. Some would say, it doesn’t matter what you believe, but how you live your life that counts. The error is that you live exactly how you believe. What you believe in your head will soon translate into the way you live your life.
Now when we read the first three chapters of Genesis we often get lost in our understanding of science. Not that science isn’t important, it's just not the subject of Gen. 1-3. The writers of Genesis knew nothing of science as an intellectual discipline. Science is built upon repetition. You throw up a ball and it comes down. You throw up a ball and it comes down. The next day we do the same with a ball, and it still comes down. An observation is made, a hypothesis is proposed, and a theory is born. Science cannot deal with a one time event. If there is no repetition, there is no pattern. If there is no pattern there is no law. Science cannot deal with one time events. So, science cannot explain a virgin birth. Science cannot explain a resurrection from the dead. That’s why God’s world was to be studied and understood, not worshipped, or revered.
Genesis 1-3 has given to us life’s answers: theological, philosophically and religiously; but not scientific or naturalistic. The deity and sovereignty of God aren't as clearly illustrated anywhere else as in creation. We learn in Genesis…. That in the beginning there was GOD and NOTHING else existed before God. Then there was God plus something else. “Let us make man in our own image.” This does not make the nature of God necessarily individualistic, but it is social. In the Muslim concept of God and the Jewish concept of God, is that he was simply one. Scripture says that God is love, that his very nature is love. But if He were the only one who existed, whom did he love? Is love even possible with a singular individual in existence? No, for love to exist, one needs to love another.
In Genesis 1, we read that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. This is different from every other cultures’ account of creation. In Babylonian creation, “In the beginning, two Gods were.” Why? In the natural world you must have a male and a female. For the Babylonians it was Apsu and Tiamut. In the beginning…All creation stories begin with at least two individuals. The Hebrew God was the only God who was an individual because He was above nature.
I was staying in a hotel one evening years ago and it was not a particularly nice hotel, but the price was right and it was time to brush my teeth and call it a day. As I got ready to brush my teeth I noticed a cockroach in the tub. He was trying to climb the sides of the tub to escape. Every time he would get About ½ way out, he would lose his footing and go sliding back to the center of the tub. By the time I finished my teeth and my meds I looked over to see if he had made it. He hadn’t, and worse than that, he was on his back wiggling his feet like crazy and I realized there is no way he is getting out of that tub unless someone or something bigger than him helps him. I was just sort of talking to the Lord and I said that roach is a lot like me. I can’t ever get out of my problems if You don’t help me. You see we all need someone bigger than we are to get us out of our troubles. And that is true for all humankind. We can’t make it on our own. Most of us think we can, but that is not reality. Humans were created to live in relationship with God and with one another.
Initially God made Adam and Adam had some characteristics that were similar to God but not an equal with God. And Adam was lonesome for someone who was like him. Why, because he was created for relationships. So God put him to sleep and God took a rib from Adam, and Adam woke up and met a girl named Eve, and from their DNA mankind was born . And Adam and Eve lived in relationship with God. Until one day when Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s instruction, and everything changed. Never before had anything or anyone acted in a manner contrary to God until this day. On this day all of nature changed. The future of mankind changed. Nothing was or would ever be the same. Your life changed that day. My life was changed that day. From that day forward life on earth has never been as it was before sin entered the world. And though God has opened the door for all of man’s issues, man will not accept God’s plan. So man continues by his own efforts to find a way to move back into a relationship with God. Unfortunately, it is not man’s plan that brings us to God. It is only God’s plan that brings us back to him. Have you taken time to look over what God did to bring you back home?
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The link to this past Sunday's sermon is below
https://www.facebook.com/FriendsCommunityChurchOrlando/videos/1240978256543205