Preacher: Michael Foster,
Text: Genesis 1:3-31
East River Church (Batavia, OH)
Six Days
Well, good morning. My name is Michael, one of the pastors here, I'm glad to have you. We are working our way to Genesis 1 through 11 for the next couple of months. Take a break, probably 1 Thessalonians, something like that, and then hop back into the second half of Genesis. But this is our third sermon. We're in our way through, but we're making ground. So this morning, we're going to read all of Genesis 1, but we're mostly doing so for context sake. Our main focus will be on the six days of creation leading just up to before the creation of mankind. So we'll be looking at verses 3 through 25 as our main text. And then next week, we'll zoom in on the creation of mankind and the creation mandate. It's going to be a little brainy today. I'm going to use a few $20 words, or actually, man, this is Joe Biden's economy. These are $25 words, inflation, it's rough, it's hurting us all. So I'll try to stay away from overly technical language, but there is a place for it on occasion. I don't want people to get up in the pulpit and show you all the groundwork they do, but sometimes there's words that are helpful to explain big concepts. Let me stretch you a little bit. I think it'll pay off over the next few months as we study Genesis. But let's start, if you have your Bibles, I think we'll have the first, most of these verses up there, but I'm going to start in verse 1 of Genesis 1 all the way through the end of the chapter. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, in the darkness he called night. It was evening and it was morning the first day. And God said, let there be an expanse in the mist of the water and let it separate the waters from the waters. And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse heaven and it was evening and it was morning the second day. And God said, let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place and let dry land appear and it was so. God called the dry land earth in the waters that were gathered together he called seas. And God saw that it was good. And God said, let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind on the earth and it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind and God saw that it was good. And it was evening and it was morning the third day. And God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night and let them be for signs, for seasons and for days and years, let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth and it was so. God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night and the stars. God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good and it was evening and it was morning the fourth day. And God said, let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens. So God created the great sea creatures, every living creature that moves with the water swarm according to their kinds and every winged bird according to its kind and God saw that it was good. God blessed them saying be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas and let birds multiply on the earth and it was evening and it was morning the fifth day. God said, 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. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness and 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 and God blessed them. God said to them be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heaven and over every living things that moves, excuse me, over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit, you shall have them for food and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life I have given every green plant for food and it was so and God saw everything that he had made and behold, it was very good and there was evening and morning the sixth day. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray. Father God, we thank you for this record of how you made the world God. Pray that we would walk away today in a spirit of worship wanting to honor you in our life. Oh, you are the great Creator, you order all things for your purpose and you've invited us, you've even made us to be part of that greater purpose. We thank you for that and your son's name, amen. So just about every culture has what's called a creation or a cosmogonic myth. These are series of stories or fables, often fantastical that explain the origins of the universe, man, evil, culture, so forth, the origins of everything. For example, one Chinese creation myth involves Peng Gu who emerged from a cosmic egg and separates again the earth and Yang, the sky, Peng Gu holds up the sky and after his death his body becomes the natural elements of the world. Another Chinese myth involves Nua, a goddess who creates humans from yellow clay and repairs the broken heavens after a great flood. In Greek mythology, the universe begins with chaos, a primordial sort of void, and from chaos emerges Gaia, the earth, Tartarus, the underworld, and Eros, which is love. Gaia gives birth to Uranus, who becomes her consort, together they produce the titans, the cyclops, and other beings, and only down the line if you know your Greek mythology comes Zeus. According to Egyptian mythology, the world begins with none of the primordial waters of chaos from these waters at whom, which is another name for Ra, which you probably know that name, emerges as the first deity. He creates gods who create other gods who order the cosmos and create humanity to serve and maintain the cosmic order. So you'll find a lot of the elements of Genesis 1 through 11 sprinkled throughout the various pagan creation myths. Why? Unbelieving scholars claim it's because Genesis is yet just another creation myth. They claim that Genesis is merely mythology meant to explain cultural or religious practices. It isn't actual history. Some even go so far to claim that the actual authors of Genesis, they usually say there's four or five, but not Moses, are just stealing or borrowing from other creation myths, primarily the Babylonian creation myth. One scholar referred to the opening of Genesis as a faded myth, but he's got it precisely backwards. Myth is often faded history. We see commonalities among so many creation myths, because they reference a true history that was handed down from the beginning, but was corrupted and co-opted by pagan cultures along the way. Everyone played member telephone as a kid, you whisper in someone's ear, they whisper in someone's ear, you know, and it just gets worse and worse as it goes along. So there was no man at the world's creation, because when the world was made mankind didn't exist, so the only witness to the creation of the world was God himself. We know that Adam had an intimate relationship with God, and I don't think it's a stretch that God revealed to Adam how he made the world. The history of the world then was passed on from the first man to the many generations he'd overlapped with. I think sometimes we miss this, Adam had a very long life, nine hundred and thirty years, and so did many of his children and grandchildren. Adam's lifespan overlapped with that of his great grandson, Methuselah, and he lived nine hundred sixty-nine years, the longest of any man, and Methuselah was Noah's grandfather. So Noah knew someone who knew the first man, who knew Adam. So Noah takes his story with him, of how things were made. He's on the ark, his family knows it, the ark lands, then it spreads through the world through his sons, and ultimately through the division of the nations that we read about in Genesis 10 through 11. Hence, this is how we got all these different creation myths that contain elements of true history in them. But history faded and got corrupted as it was handed down to the generations. In a sense, history became mythologized. Now, Genesis is God stripping away the corruption and the mythologies that clung to and obscured the true history of the world. In that sense, the book of Genesis purposely critiques the well-known myths of the day. It's not borrowing from them, it's scrutinizing them, it's polemical, meaning it's an attack on the corruption, it's undermining and removing them. The big example I pointed out last week is that unlike the pagan creation myths, Genesis makes it clear that God is distinct from his creation. Unlike the Egyptians or the Babylonians, Elohim, our God, made the world from nothing. The world isn't the body of a dead God or some divine eternal material that's always existed. Psalm 33 verse 8 and 9 puts it this way, "Let all the earth fear the Lord. Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him, free spoke and it came to be. He commanded and it stood firm. It's God who's eternal, not the substance that makes up the universe. God spoke all of that into existence. That's what we see in our passage. God says, "Let there be light," and there is. Light is in a God, it's not part of God. Light is something the only God makes by the word of His power. While Moses, the author of Genesis, is clearly aware of the other myths and perhaps even uses some of the imagery that people would be familiar with at that time, he's flipping them on their heads. Genesis is in a myth, it is history, it is fact. Now this first chapter is often called the prologue and it isn't written quite like the rest of Genesis. Most of Genesis is written as a fairly straightforward historical narrative. But not Genesis 1 through chapter 2 verse 3, it's not a poem, but the language has a rhythmic structure and it has the refrain, "God saw that it's good," it repeats and even builds until God sees it's very good. But the language isn't really figurative or metaphorical, but neither is it scientifically precise. Moses is using broad, sweeping, epic imagery to describe what actually happened in those first six 24-hour days. How this was related to Moses isn't laid down anywhere in Scripture, some people believe that actually it was, it made it sway all the way from Adam to Moses uncorrupted. I struggle with that theory so much was clearly revealed to Moses directly that I think it's more likely that God gave this to him, it could have been that God spoke to him or perhaps it was revealed to him by way of vision. As I read it, it reads as if Moses was right in the thick of it, watching as it happened. His language is a language of amazement. So a vision makes a lot of sense to me, hold that thought for a moment. What's step back to verse 2 as I just glazed it, glazed over it last week? It says the earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. So at this point, what will become man's dwelling place is a mass of formless, shapeless water. The deep always refers to huge amounts of water in Scripture. Ken Ham, who runs answers in Genesis, a lot of you, some of you work for them, it's very popular ministry down here. He calls the earth in this state a water blob is what he calls it. I've heard it referred to others as a water ball, swirling ball of water. It's interesting that those descriptions are as if you're describing it from outer space, looking down on it, seeing the entire thing. I don't think it's wrong, but again, I read these descriptions from a human level as if you were down the mix of it looking out or up as each stage of creation is accomplished by God. I see things being described from a much more terrestrial perspective using phenomenological language, which is this descriptive language that describes how things appear to the naked eye without necessarily asserting scientific facts. So they're true, but it's not getting into the details of it. For example, verse 16 describes the moon as a lesser light that rules the night. Now I've heard mockers say, "Oh, the moon doesn't generate its own light, right? See? It's not true." I mean, that is this stupid critique, right? We know it doesn't generate its own light, it reflects the sun's light, but so what? Functionally, the moon gives off light. If you're looking up the moon, you're in moon light. Now we know that sunlight, but moon light is sunlight that reflects off the moon. It is a light. It is a light that rules over the night. Also, much has been made of the word expanse or a permanent that God creates in verse 7. It reads, "And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse and from the waters that were above the expanse, and it was so." So the word expanse or permanent can mean the arc of the sky, and in many ancient cultures, it was understood to be a solid dome that encapsulated the earth. Now one of the lazy habits of modern people who discover things on the internet is then they take this idea that's present in pagan cultures and read it into a scripture. So they'll say, "Oh, they really thought that, see, this is proof that the sky is a dome." But when you look up at the sky, it appears like a dome, it really does, just as the moon appears to be a light. That doesn't mean they are in a scientific or empirical sense that the modern flat-earther movement, which is a byproduct of the loss of institutional trust. Just don't trust institutions anymore, and we used to always make these jokes like, "Oh, I heard it in a chat room," and the idea was like, "If you heard it in a chat room, it's probably not true." The problem was that a lot of our institutions, people discovered over the last several years that they've lied to us. So people have stopped trusting that, and they'll actually trust YouTubers now. I can't say too much about that. Some of you came here because you found out about our church from YouTube, so trust a few YouTubers, but they don't actually understand the language of Genesis 1. Ironically, they read Genesis 1 in a literal, modern, precise way, right? As they're looking up at the sky, the moon is a light, right? They're not saying that it generates its own light. As they look up at the sky, as God is separating the waters from the water, so the waters down here that make up the sea, and the waters up there that make the sky, as they're separating that, it looks like a dome. It doesn't mean it's actually a dome, it's a phenomenological language. Moses isn't describing the inner workings of all these things, but how they appear to us. More importantly, he's explaining their purpose in relation to us. This is where we go wrong with Genesis a lot. We allow the modern atheistic, crazy evolutionists to steal the other purposes of Genesis. Genesis does not sink with the evolutionary worldview. Common sense doesn't either, right? Life doesn't come from non-life. That doesn't happen. But that's not the purpose of Genesis. It contradicts it, and we can't let them attack it, but Genesis 1 is laying out the liturgical or doxological nature of all creation. I'll explain that in more detail in a second. But my point here is that there's ditches on both sides of the road. It's a mistake to interpret Genesis 1 as if it's a metaphorical poem, it's not. But neither is it the sort of description you'd find in a scientific textbook. It's true history told in the language of amazement for the purpose of worship. It's true history told in the language of amazement for the purpose of worship. Now, God could have made everything in a single instant, but he didn't, why? Why did he take six days? Nowadays, we argue and say those six days weren't really six days. The days were these long epochs and periods and millions and millions of years. Interestingly, Martin Luther had to debate people who believed in single-day creationism. But that was a controversy in his day, wild stuff. There are always people who are not content with the straightforward words of Scripture. Regarding the debate, Luther said, "When Moses writes that God created heaven and earth, and whatever is in them in six days, then let this period continue to have been six days and do not venture to devise any comment according to which six days were won. But if you can't understand how this could have been done in six days, then grant the Holy Spirit the honor of being more learned than you are." Right? The problem with so many of us is that we're arrogant. We are proud, and we will not submit to Scripture. We will not. We stand over Scripture as a judge. We judge Scripture. The Scripture is here to scrutinize you. God is here through his words to search your heart and call you to repentance. And one thing that Genesis 1 does is say, "Humble yourself," right? These evolutionists and their theories are constantly changing constantly. It's the word of God does not. I love it. But we aren't questioning if it was done in six days, but why it was done in six days. My answer is that God did it to teach us about His nature and His expectations for us. It was for our benefit. First, there's a noticeable pattern in the days of creation, which emphasizes the role that mankind will play in God's plan for the world. So on days one through three, God creates realms or kingdoms. And then days of four through six, God creates rulers or governors for those realms. So day one, God created light, separating light from darkness, calling the light day in the darkness night. How does He do that without the suns and stars? I don't know. I'm not sure, right? I don't know how TVs work. I have no clue, right? But He did it. Light was there as a separating that happened. So that's what happens on day one, so one, two, three, and then it starts a repeating cycle. Then on day four, in verse 16 through 18 it reads, "And God made two great lights, their greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth to rule over the day and over the night and to separate the light from the darkness." So He creates light and day and night, and then He creates a greater light and a lesser light to rule each of them. Day two, God created the sky, separating the waters from the waters below. This corresponds to day five, right? In verse 20, "And God said, 'Let the waters swarm, a swarm's a living creature, creatures, and let the birds fly above the heavens or above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.' It doesn't use the exact language of ruling, but the concept is very much there, right? The birds rule the sky, the fish rule the sea. Then on day three, God gathered the waters below the sky to form seas, allowing dry land to appear. And then He created the vegetation, including plants and trees. So that corresponds to day six. On day six, God created all the land and animals to rule the dry land and to fill it. Then He created mankind, whose main realm is the land, but who is also given charge over everything. So in verse 28, it reads, "And God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on earth.'" So you have this ruling, day one with the sun and the moon, day two then corresponds with the birds and the fish, day three with the land animals and ultimately man. So God is preparing the entire world for man, and in the way He does it, He's also saying, 'You're going to rule over this.' So God determined to create the world in six days so that it would emphasize that we were created to be kings. The idea that the earth is made to be ruled by human kings or at least a human supreme king is an idea that develops and is ultimately fulfilled in the person of Jesus. We were made to be rulers over everything. The sun and the moon rule over the sky, the fish rule over the sea. We rule over creation. So Adam was a vice-region, meaning he was the steward of the greater king. God rules over everything. So you have day one through six emphasizing these different rulers, and then you have day seven where you find God resting over everything that he created. God is the ultimate ruler. He is the king of kings. There's also a flow of authority and natural order being established here. But overall, mankind over creation is God's representatives and the creation over their particular realms. So God, mankind, and then the creation, we'll see this in a couple of weeks, the fall is exact flipping of it. So who tempts Eve? Well, the devil, but in what form? In the form of a snake? Isn't Eve supposed to be over to the creation, over snakes? So the snake tempts Eve who then tempts her husband and then mankind rebels against God. So God has this created order that gets flipped in the fall. Now, the second reason God takes six days is to model for us not only our role as kings or rulers, but also the nature of the work we'll be doing. Again, at the beginning of day one, there's this chaotic sea and the spirit of God is hovering over it, the pictures of a mother bird brooding over her eggs or her chicks. The spirit of God was hovering over the waters. The spirit was actively and patiently involved in the forming of the world. We know that God is the God of order and not a confusion. It says so in 1 Corinthians 1433 in Scripture, order means that everything is in its correct place and that every place is in its correct rank. This characteristic of God's evident in this first chapter, the world again described as waste and void or John Calvin, he puts it as rude and unpolished or rather a shapeless chaos. So God's purpose in this initial state is to bring order modeling humanity's role as God's representatives as we'll see in exercising dominion and maintaining and expanding God's order. As God was careful and intentional in the ordering of the world, mankind is expected to give the same attention to maintaining that order and submission of God. He's actually giving them an example that goes even deeper. The process of forming the world into something very good involves two key actions dividing and then filling. God makes this very clear day by day. So God fills the world with light, dividing the light from the darkness, thus establishing the fundamental realms of night and day. He separates the water from the waters, creating two additional realms, sea and sky. He divides the waters from the land forming another realm, the habitable earth. He fills the earth with vegetation categorized by kind. He populates the sky with luminaries classified by magnitude, greater or lesser. He fills the seas and skies with swarms of creature again organized by kind. He fills the earth with beasts also categorized by kind and then he separates man from the earth and then divides woman from the man. By the end of this process, the creation transitions from being chaotic and unpolished to a state of pristine order and beauty. God declares it to be very good. That's the refrain that happens over and over again. That must be the thing you take away from it. Like if you want to pass a class in school, anytime a teacher, a professor, keep saying something over and over again, write that down and memorize it. That's how I graduated NKU in no knowledge college. That's going to be on the test. Very good. It's going to be on the test. It's him signaling that everything is now in its rightful place. This ordering process communicates the foundational principle and here's one of those $20 words or $25, sorry, of tell us. This is a word that means the end goal or intended purpose of each thing. God's actions are purposeful. The divisions and feelings in creation have meaning because they align with the purpose God designed them for. They're very good. Not in the moral sense. They are good, but because they fulfill their intended purposes perfectly. So God's ordering transcends mere physical arrangement. It also includes spiritual purposes. Each created thing participates in this ultimate purpose, which is to serve and glorify God. They do so differently according to their unique design. The overarching purpose is not uniform or exactly the same, rather it includes distinct purposes for each element of creation, right? Others have one purpose. We have another. The divisions between things are essential to how God directs everything towards glorifying Him. Without distinction, creation would revert to a state of chaos. We hate distinctions these days. That's that one-ism, that's that flattening out, right now we found out that dudes can box in the Olympics and punch a girl on the face and she's like, "I'm out of here. I didn't sign up the box a man," right? They say that guy's not a man, but he's a Muslim and he never wears a, what do they call their little head things, but I don't know if you guys saw that this week. I couldn't not see it, but we reject natural divisions. Just as the football team's diverse positions are crucial to winning the game where engines distinct parts are essential for generating powers, creation's variety in order are vital for fulfilling its ultimate goal of glorifying God. So two points on this. All creation shares, participates in, and reflects one ultimate tell-off, one ultimate purpose to serve and bring glory to God. Colossians 1 16 through 18 says, "All things have been created through Him and for Him so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything." In the same way, Romans 11 36 says, "For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things to Him be glory forever a man." It's all fits together for His glory. Second point, each created thing participates differently in this ultimate purpose, according to its unique place in design in God's created order, or if you prefer God's hierarchy. We don't like hierarchy today. We want a flat world where everyone's equal, of course no one's equal. We know that. It's just a little myth that we have to go along with, but in Scripture we see design, hierarchy, rank, structure, order. In other words, this great purpose is not etched uniformly into everything that God made, regardless of its shape. It's not forced upon each thing in the same way as if each were the same. It's not imposed in a way that flattens or blurs or downplays or removes the distinction between them. Rather, the overarching purpose is why those distinctions exist in the first place. The divisions between things are how God orders them all towards the ultimate goal of glorifying Him. Creation, without distinctions, is a world that's waste and void. It's formless and empty, chaotic and futile. Creation is not and should not be a homogeneous mass. It can only glorify God when everything is in its place, not when all things are mushed together. A world without contours and distinction is a bland, featureless monotony. It's the dirty brown you get when you mix all the colors together when you're doing water color paintings. It's noise. It's not music. It's a five-course meal blended into a soup. It's a genderless monstrosity that's neither male nor female. It's paganism that eradicates the creation/creature distinction and reduces all existence down to in the words Dr. Peter Jones we talked about last week, one ism, where all belongs to one material, one divine essence, a little spark in you where we are part of God. Now, this is what I like to call endrogyny, it's a form of endrogyny. Endrogyny is where male and female is made interchangeable. It's the blurring as we see it nowadays where men can be women and women can be men. Endrogyny's chaos. And nothing good thrives in the land of confusion. Endrogyny is ultimately a heresy if you follow it through because it denies the full humanity of Christ. Endrogyny's are always instructive. Endrogyny is rebellion against the rule of God and rebellion always leads to death and hell. God's world is full of color, diversity, and order. Everything he made has a purpose and a place and the fruitfulness of life erupts when creation lives in concert with God's design. Hierarchy is an oppression. God made the world to have structure, its liberation from a prison of chaos, its reconciliation with the king of creation, its freedom to be what he made you to be, it is abundant life. God created the world in six days showing that there is an order in hierarchy to the world. It teaches us that the world is a world full of God-ordained differences. A modern man is eradicating differences. Modern man wants everything to be flat, egalitarian. There's a difference between being equal, in essence, in the same. Man and women, we are equal in essence before God, we have equal access to God. Trust me. Man and women are very different in how we think, I saw in Emily how guys motivate themselves when they're running. I don't know if you guys, hopefully this is not just me. I might announce that I have mental issues, but when I used to run a lot, guys will think like, if I don't get to that stop sign before that car gets to me, my whole family dies. You motivate yourself thinking, if I had to outrun or fight a bear, these sort of things run through guys that we want to protect, provide, it's very competitive. Trust women, do you ladies think about that stuff? Didn't think so. Okay. We're different, and it's good. It's good. You just have to embrace it. World is made of God-ordained differences. Each of these days is going down, right? Putting things in their place and their proper realms and saying it's all good, this pristine, created order, the importance of this is impossible to whoever estimate. To give an analogy, sharing in the common goal of winning a football game does not eliminate the distinction between the players. Rather, it's why the team is divided into those positions in the first place. A team with 11 quarterbacks is not a very good team. By the same token, sharing in the common goal of producing power does not eliminate the distinctions between the parts of an engine. Rather, this common purpose is why the engine has parts at all. If you were to melt down everything into an undifferentiated hunk of metal, it would no longer produce power. It would not be a very good engine. This is also true of bodies. See this in 1 Corinthians 12, both literally and symbolically. A man with a head only and no torso or limbs is hardly a very good man. An army with everyone in command is an army with everyone in confusion and a house with many heads cannot stand. Vertical divisions are not only as fitting as horizontal ones but also as necessary and indispensable. It is good that all creatures are subordinated but need their creator and it's also good that some created things are subordinated beneath others. That's part of the problem with... Do you remember like save the whales? Did that work out? I don't know. That was like a thing in the 80s. Are they okay? And then there was of course the hole in the ozone which I'm still here but maybe all my problems is from what has been pouring through there. We always have like, now it's climate change. It was global warming but that didn't really play out. We're supposed to be underwater right now, right? We're supposed to be swimming. But that didn't play out so it's climate change, which is like another word for weather I think. So anyway, there's this push in modern culture to make man subservient to the creation, right? To put whales above us, to put dogs above us, to put the world above us. But the world is supposed to be below us. We're supposed to be stewards of creation, right? We're supposed to take good care of it but we are above whales and we are... I have no problem with eating my rules. I never eat things that don't have faces. That's my rule in life, right? It's okay to eat animals, vegetarians. I think that's funny. It was way funnier than it played here but it was all right. But it's good that these things are subordinated underneath us. It's God's design. So in summary, Genesis 1 shows the beauty and perfection of God's order and our place in it. That's the whole point of this chapter. Everything's where it should be. It's very good. It's perfect. We are meant to be kings who labored for the glory of God and the good of each other. We're supposed to carry on that ordering. We'll see like the animals don't have names who gets the name them. We do. We're continuing that work and that's what we surrendered in the fall. We surrendered access with God, complete unmitigated, access with God. We had this perfect purpose where we knew our place. I mean, isn't so much of life just trying to figure out your place? Where do I belong? What am I supposed to be doing? We surrendered that in the fall and that is what's restored to us in the gospel. It begins that way. Adam rebelled against his king and now we, as we bow our knee to King Jesus, things start to fall in place again. We start to understand the purpose of all things. All things were made for God's glory in six days. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word. Oh, it's so amazing. Creation is amazing. As we look at it, we think of it as sheer power and immensity and size and yet you are greater than all of it and you are our Creator and you're not just our Creator, but through the blood of Jesus, you've become our Father. We've been reconciled to you. We're now a royal priesthood of believers who serve you. We're a people bringing your kingdom forward by preaching the gospel, by being salt and light, by being a city on the hill. Oh, we thank you for this, God. God, we pray for our world that you would lead our culture, our society and repentance that so happily and willingly worships the creation instead of the Creator. God deliver them from that lie and bring them to the truth of your Son. We ask this name of Jesus. Amen. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]