Andrew Meher: ⁓ if you have a Bible, would you open up to page one? I don't know what it is in your Bible, but Genesis chapter one. We're gonna get there in in just a moment. we are beginning. Anyone ready for a summer sermon series? I think you're probably more excited because I said summer, not because I said sermon series. It's okay, you don't have to make me feel good about it. That's fine. I I'm a wi I'm with it. But through June, July, and August, we're going to be ⁓ studying the theme of blessing through the book of Genesis. It's a theme that comes up right from the very first story of Scripture that we're gonna look at today. And I was just, and we'll get to it in a minute. I was just as ⁓ as I was reading through Genesis recently, I I found myself just struck by how God loves to still work even despite us, and in spite of us. That's good news, right? God's still working even when there is a mess. God's blessing is so effective on us, on you, that God will still move in the mess. And so what we're gonna do today is we're gonna begin that by just considering the very first time that God blesses humanity in Genesis chapter one. And we're gonna read that. It's a lengthy story. We're gonna read that whole creation account of Genesis one, which is sort of you can think of it as a preamble or an introduction to the whole Bible, Genesis chapter one. And ⁓ it'll help us set up the themes of blessing ⁓ in the midst of the messes that we will encounter throughout the rest of this summer as we as we journey through. ⁓ One other thing I want to just ask and and make mention of, and you don't need to let me know right now, but if it would be helpful, I want to know from people if it would be helpful to make spaces throughout the summer to just gather informally to study a little bit of Genesis. Because this is a a book that has a lot of questions, because there's a lot of weird stories. Because it's very, very old, and people in another culture and another time. ⁓ think about things very differently than you and I do. And so if that's something of interest, I'd love for you to just give me feedback, send me a message, catch me on a Sunday or if I see you during the week. By the way, that would be really helpful. And and we'll make plan to make some space if that's something that's helpful for our church community, especially in ⁓ the end of June and July and August, make some intentional spaces to to look at some of these texts that can be a little bit confusing sometime and make some more space for us to do that. So if that's helpful, ⁓ let us know. ⁓ but let ⁓ let's open up to Genesis chapter one. Verses one and we're gonna read all the way through chapter two, verse three. We're gonna read this whole first account. So if this is helpful, it'll be on the screen. But if you wanna just close your eyes and be submersed into this, I hope this summer, this is the other thing I wanted to say, ⁓ this summer, ⁓ to preach a little bit more devotionally, if that makes sense. ⁓ if you know me or have been here long enough, sometimes there's a lot of really interesting things and and important things I want to make sure you know about. But in the summer, I we're gonna take the f ⁓ foot off the gas pedal just a little bit. And I want you to just be sensitive to the Spirit's voice as we listen to the text and as the sermons are preached this summer. So if that means for you to close your eyes, don't worry about what slides are on the screen, I want to invite you to do that through June, July, and August. Sound good? Let's listen to the Lord's word together from Genesis chapter one. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. And then God said, Let there be light. And there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And then he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day and the darkness night. And evening passed, and morning came, marking the first day. Then God said, Let there be a space between the waters to separate the waters of the heavens and the waters of the earth. And that is what happened. God made this space to separate the waters of the earth from the waters of the heavens. God called the space sky, and evening passed and morning came, marking the second day. And then God said, Let the waters beneath the sky flow together into one place, so dry ground may appear. And that is what happened. God called the dry ground land and the waters sea. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, Let the land sprout with vegetation, every sort of seed-bearing plant, and trees that grow seed-bearing fruit. These seeds will then produce the kinds of plants and trees from which they came. And this is what happened. The land produced vegetation, all sorts of seed-bearing plants and trees with seed-bearing fruit. Their seeds produced vegetables. Plants and trees of the same kind, and God saw that it was good. And evening passed and morning came, marking the third day. Then God said, Let lights appear in the sky to separate the day from the night. Let them be signs to mark the seasons, days, and years. Let these lights in the sky shine down on earth. That is what happened. God made two great lights, the larger one to govern the day, and the smaller one to govern the night. He also made the stars. And God set these lights in the sky to light the earth, to govern the day and night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And evening passed, and morning came, marking the fourth day. Then God said, Let the waters swarm with fish and other life. Let the skies be filled with birds of every kind. And so God created great sea creatures and every living thing that scurries and swarms in the water, and every sort of bird, each producing offspring of the same kind, and God saw that it was good. And then God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply. Let the fish fill the seas and let the birds multiply on the earth. And evening passed, and morning came, marking the fifth day. And then God said, Let the earth produce every sort of animal, each producing offspring of the same kind. Livestock, small animals that scurry along the ground, and wild animals. And that is what happened. God made all sorts of wild animals. livestock and small animals, each able to produce offspring of the same kind, and God saw that it was good. Then God said, Let us make human beings in our image to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth. The small animals that scurry along the ground. So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God, he created them, male and female, he created them. Then God blessed them and said, Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea. The birds in the sky and all the animals that scurry along the ground. Then God said, Look, I have given you every seed bearing plant throughout the earth, and all the fruit trees for your food, and I have given every green plant as food for all the wild animals, the birds in the sky, the wild animals, the birds in the sky, the small animals that scurry along the ground, everything that has life. And that is what happened. Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good. An evening passed and morning came, marking the sixth day. So the creation of the heavens and the earth and everything in them was completed. On the seventh day God had finished his work of creation, so he rested from all his work, and God blessed the seventh day, and declared it holy and Because it was the day when he rested from all his work of creation. Let's pray. Lord God, as we ⁓ lift up your your word, we pray that the Spirit would speak to your people. We pray, Lord, that we would have eyes to see, and ears to hear, hearts to receive, and minds to know the wisdom, God, that you have for us from your word today. And we pray, Lord, as we enter into this summer, that we would be sensitive to your presence, to your voice, and to your leadership as you guide us. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen. ⁓ There's so much to ⁓ ponder and wonder about in Genesis, and I want you to know that what we are going to cover this morning is going to be about that much of all the questions you may have about this opening story. Because what I want to draw attention to is what happens at the beginning with humans. ⁓ my my girls have ⁓ loved the original Mary Poppins movie. They got into it a couple of years ago. Anyone like that movie? I'm talking about the original Mary Poppins with Julie Andrews, you know. They love Julie Andrews singing. We play the soundtrack in the car all the time. Since they've loved her singing, I decided recently to introduce them to the soundtrack of the Sound of Music. Ooh wow, we have some Sound of Music love in the room. And of course you've got to sing the the Do Re Me song, right? ⁓ the children, if you don't know the story, ⁓ I'm sad for you, first of all. ⁓ the children of Julie Andrew's character ⁓ that that she nannies, they don't know anything about music at all. They don't know anything about singing. So she begins to teach them by just simply singing to them, of course, and she sings these words. Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start. In order to understand things well, like music, it's important to start at the beginning. Not just to understand what happened first, but to learn and remember what is of first importance. Just like Julie Andrews' character does does in this scene in The Sound of Music, you and I must start at the very beginning to know what is fundamental to our life. And our existence on earth. We cannot understand how to live well in the world without knowing the most important things about our beginning, how it all started, what everything else is truly built upon. Now, we may look around our world today and be tempted to think that our world is built on a lot of conflict and fighting with each other. We may be tempted to look around our world and believe that it's built on greed or violence. We may be tempted to look around our world and believe that it is built on lying or chaos or exhaustion. We may believe, because of our daily routines, that our world is built on just trying to keep up and survive. It sometimes feels like that's what life is built on, does it not? Now these things are surely realities and it is happening, but is that what life is built on? Is that what your life is actually built on, what my life is built on, what humanity's life is built on? Is this what it was at the very beginning? Is this what was intended? As we look to the scriptures, we find something else threaded into the story of our daily lives, something so foundational to who we are as people, and it is that God Has blessed us. We're going to be exploring, as I mentioned, what blessing means in this first book of the Bible called Genesis. The word Genesis, by the way, literally means beginning, so it is a very good place to start, as Maria would say. It is important to remember that what we are coming to here in Genesis this summer is not everything that the scriptures say about who God is and who we are. But it will be introducing every major theme that begins to grow in Scripture later on. So it's really important for that reason. And there's two very significant themes in particular. That emerged from our text that we read this morning that will help us as we journey through Genesis. One of those themes is the word we heard, image or likeness, that humans are made in God's image or likeness. And the other word is blessing. That God blessed humanity. First, though, God said this: let us make man humanity. In our image and in our likeness. Now, this word man in some translations is the Hebrew word Adam, and it does not mean male, it simply means humanity. And so when God makes humanity, both men and women together, they are made in the image of God. That means that we in this room right now are made in the image of God. There are a couple of things about the image of God that are important for you to know. One is that in the ancient world only kings of particular kingdoms would be referred to as God's image or God's representative. To bear God's image was to be a royal representative of a particular deity on the earth. In our scriptures here in Genesis, however, we see that the royal attribute of being God's image is given to all humanity, both male and female, in stark contrast with the rest of the cultures around the Hebrew people. Our text is saying something very radical about the God given dignity of every woman and man, but also about our status as all together. Being God's royal representatives on the earth. The other thing that's significant about being God's image is that it is not something that you have more of or less of. It isn't something you carry to a certain degree or that you can lose. When reflecting on what the image of God might be exactly, Old Testament scholar Victor Hamilton says this. Innumerable definitions have been suggested for what the image of God is: conscience, the soul, original righteousness, reason, the capacity for fellowship with God through prayer, posture, etc. But he says this: any approach that focuses on one aspect of humanity, be that physical or spiritual or intellectual, to the neglect of the rest is doomed to failure, he says. He says our text is simply saying that to be human is to bear the image of God. This understanding emphasizes humanity as a unity, he writes. No part of humanity, no function of humanity is subordinated to some other higher part or activity. Let me just summarize what Hamilton says here. It is not in doing something specific that you and I bear God's image. But simply because you exist, you bear God's image. Just turn to the person next to you real quick and say, you bear God's image. Turn to the person on the other side's side and say, You bear God's image. Now, that is particularly powerful and significant as we think about the messes and the complicated situations of our lives. Here's the reality. You could be medically incapacitated in a coma, in a vegetative state, in a hospital, and you could still be in no way lacking the fullness of being made in the image of God. You can be disobeying God, running far away from the life God has called you to, and you are still fully and completely bearing the image of God. You may not be functioning in your calling very well in some of these instances, but you do not have less of the image of God because of something that you do or that you do not do. God is the originator of this imaging that humans do. Our ability to be the image of God is not something that's dependent on us in any way, shape, or form. It is entirely and completely possible only because God is God is. Being God's image is a complete and utter gift, and this is what we call grace. You and I received God's grace simply by being brought into existence in the world. God's royal representatives alongside all humanity is just who you are because you breathe. That's it, period. You've done absolutely nothing, and you are completely and fully God's image bearer. Whatever hardship, whatever struggle, whatever challenge or conflict faces you today, receive this morning God's grace, the gift of being made in God's image. Whatever hardships we go through, if you're running from God, if you're avoiding the life that God has called you to, if there are things you don't want to face that are going on, you get to still receive God's grace. You get to still receive the gift of being made in the image of God. Now let's take this realization of being made in the image of God as a received grace, and now let us just consider how God is making this image bearing happen as you go about your life. Are you with me so far? God is naming humanity, as we've already said, as his collective representatives in the world. God has made us responsible for all of creation. That's your job. That's my job. While we are always God's image, whether we act in accordance with our created purpose or not, it is still an open question as to whether we're going to fulfill the potential that God has in our lives. Does that make sense to you? The reality is we do have a responsibility connected to being the image of God. The text says that we rule over creation. This is what God created humanity to do. We are to be compassionate caretakers of the world God has made. Does that seem like an overwhelming job to any of you? Little bit? Are you a compassionate caretaker of the things that you're responsible for in your life? The work you're responsible for. The relationships you're responsible to the children you may have that you're responsible to raise. The homes you live in, whether you rent it or you own it. What about responsibilities to your neighbours as Jesus teaches us? What about our responsibilities to serve the world the world? Do you go about your day as a compassionate caretaker or as an impatient overlord? This is difficult to do well, isn't it? You can think through my morning already. How many times was I a compassionate caretaker or an impatient overlord? This is often, I think, the cause of a lot of our problems in life, is not being able to do that very well, don't you think? We sometimes shirk our work responsibilities, we we harbor unforgiveness towards others, we isolate ourselves or do not tend to the material responsibilities we have, we do not consider other people to be our neighbors. It's difficult to live out our humanity together as the image of God, to be compassionate caretakers. To help us bear this responsibility, though, God does something that I think is quite profound, and it's the main theme that's going to be following us through the book of Genesis over this summer. This is what actually enables you and I to walk out what God has created for us through God's power and strength. And it is this: it is that you are blessed. It is that you and I have been blessed by God. God blesses humanity. I want to just draw your attention to how significant it is that God blesses humanity right from the beginning. God uses this word. Bless, it's the word barak in Hebrew, and it's a very significant as as it'll continue to get expanded upon throughout the biblical story. But here in Genesis, we start to see blessing and its basic meaning. God, the giver of life, blesses in two particular ways. God says, Be fruitful and multiply. God blesses his image bearers to continue to create life so we can be responsible for all of creation together. This is why Christians, by the way, think children are important. Not because children are the future, to quote a famous song. It's not because they are cute, believe it or not. Children are first and foremost important because they are a direct result of God blessing us to create life. It's because God has said something, not because we have some ⁓ deep entrenched thing that we love about kids or don't love about kids. But even more, creating life creates new human relationships for us, right? So we can compassionately care for each other in new ways. And God sees this as a good blessing and a function of being his image bearers. There is a practice in my generation, if you're a millennial, ⁓ that that happens often, maybe you've heard of it, and it's this practice of people my age cutting off their parents. Because they they just have perceived their parents to be too toxic, they're too much, they're overloaded. And it's a really sad practice that has resulted and is a result of us not recognizing this first blessing that God gives us to be fruitful and multiply. This is not about just creating more life, but it's about an abundance and an increase of relational connections. We're supposed to create life, foster healthy relationships, and continue to flourish together in community, not to be all separate from each other. God further blesses after this their ability to subdue the earth or to rule the earth. And this is a reference literally to tilling and working the soil like a farmer. Now, this is particularly interesting considering the ancient world view. ⁓ In ancient Mesopotamia and the region around where the biblical story ⁓ originates, ⁓ there is this ⁓ Babylonian tale called the Enuma Elish. And in that story, which was kind of how people understood humanity to be related to and how people thought about humanity, ⁓ there was a great conflict in the world, and and the gods who were on the losing side of the conflict were all forced to work and farm the earth. They had to till the soil. And they didn't like doing that because they were gods and they thought it was beneath them. And so they complained to the high God, and the high God created humans, not as the image of God, mind you, but created them to be slaves to do the work for the gods and for the kings who would carry the image of God. In this account of humanity, you and I are an afterthought. We're not important. We're not significant to the deities or the gods. We're not really mattering much at all to this created world. We're sort of an accident of much more powerful forces that we can't explain. Yet that is not the case in our scriptures, is it? Humanity isn't created as an afterthought as we read through the entirety of day after day of creation. This entire creation culminates in the creation of what? Humans. Humanity is created with purpose as the image of God and blessed to receive the gift of creating more life and to work. So this is it in a nutshell. Blessing, the blessing of being human here in Genesis 1, is actually about having community and working together. That's the blessing. That is the God empowered ability that we have been given from the very beginning. Now we often think of being blessed as something we receive like financial comfort or security. Anyone do the like remember hashtag blessed. Right? We we think about ⁓ blessing is being able to put our feet up and we don't have to work that hard. But God shows us that what blessing really is, is not about something that we ⁓ just receive where we don't have to do anything. Blessing is intimately tied together with being human, with being the image of God, of actually doing something with others in the world. To bless, writes Derek Kinder, is to bestow not only a gift, but a function. Being blessed is not only what we get, it's what we do. Your function in the world is to just be blessed by God. Your function in the world is to live out of God's blessing. But hear me, it's it's God's blessing upon us that enables all this to happen. It is not something that we can do apart from God. It is God initiated and God sustained. God's blessing is so powerful that it is the driving force behind all of human existence and activity to this very day. God didn't just bless humanity then. God is blessing humanity right now. I get that's kinda hard to wrap your mind around. But that is what's happening. It might seem very odd because we look at the world around us and we might be like, is God really blessing this right now? Doesn't look like a lot of blessing. But that's where recognizing the significance of God's blessing becomes even more powerful. We see that God blesses humanity as we read to represent him, but guess what's going to happen on the very next page of the Bible? Humans will reject God, distort their blessing as image bearers, and they will not only bear God's blessings, but they will also bear the curses of rejecting God. Now we're gonna have a big mess in our hands. We will see this play out throughout all of Genesis as we go through this story this summer, as we do in the world today. Adam and Eve's two children, Cain and Abel, you know that story? They'll seek God's favor through their sacrifices. They want God's blessing. Abel's sacrifice is going to be received. Cain's is going to be rejected. Cain is jealous with his brother, and he murders him. Evil, murder, and theft fill the story and fill the whole earth from that point. Eventually the evil will get so bad that the earth is going to be wiped out. And God hopes to get rid of humanity entirely because humanity has some done something so corrupt. But God, this is so true to God's nature. Often these stories of God wanting to wipe out humanity are sort of there to get us to lean into the text and realize this isn't actually in God's character and nature. Because what happens? God finds Noah and his family and continues the blessing. They will receive his blessing after the flood, but things will continue to go horribly wrong for generation after generation. You know, the Tower of Babel. Empires will enslave others, imagine themselves to be gods. They'll enforce their enslaved population to build a tower that reaches to heaven. God will still, even in the midst of all that, choose humanity and bless Abraham and Sarah to be a blessing to all of the peoples of the world. Abraham and Sarah will conspire, though, after they receive this blessing, and they'll try and force God's blessing on their own terms, by forcing one of their servants named Hagar to have sex with Abraham to produce an heir. This isn't going well. But what does God do? God allows both Hagar's child by force And Sarah's child by promise to be blessed. Isaac, the promised offspring of Abraham and Sarah, asks for God's blessing. He and his wife Rebekah have two sons, Jacob and Esau, and they'll end up in this messy conflict over that blessing. And each of the parents are gonna choose one of the siblings, and there's this huge family rivalry between them. It's an absolute mess. But through Isaac, God blesses both Jacob and Esau. Jacob has 12 sons from two different wives, and it's all rife with more conflict with each other. There's favoritism again with the children and with the wives. The second youngest son, Joseph, ends up being the clear favorite. This is the the Joseph Joseph of the coat of many colors. And again, you're gonna see all this generational favoritism play out. The mess keeps getting deeper. This young son Joseph gets sold into slavery by his jealous older brothers. They make it look like he was killed by a wild animal, and they lie to their father about it. Joseph is then enslaved by powerful Egyptians. He escapes a forced sexual assault. He's framed for it as if it was his fault. He's imprisoned for it like it was all his fault. Again, it's a huge mess. But God's blessing is still working. God puts Joseph in charge of all of Egypt to save his own family from famine. Joseph's insight and wisdom not only save his own family, but through him, many nations are blessed because they can get food during the famine. We could go on and on beyond the book of Genesis at that point, throughout the history of Israel in the Old Testament. Mess after mess after. After mess was made, and yet still God did not waver in his commitment to Israel and to humanity as a whole. All of this culminated in God becoming human in Jesus. This is the ultimate solution of God's initial blessing for humanity. And that blessing that was received in Genesis that culminates in Jesus is to be taken seriously. It is meant to shape us to live in such a way that takes being made in God's image as a grace to be lived out. We are blessed in such a way that we are to be responsible to each other and to the world we live in. Now I want to be clear: blessing does not mean that God approves of all the things that we do. Just like the account of Genesis I gave you, the messes are still terribly messy. Sin still plagues our world. But God is so committed. To humanity and the blessing that God has given us is continued to be lived out. Even though there is a mess and another mess and another mess and more mess after that, God never wavers. Let me say the good news this morning very plainly. God never has had a plan B. Only plan A. God has demonstrated his commitment to humanity by continuing to bless in the middle of the mess. Because God's work is stronger than our sin and stronger than our mess, God's blessing ultimately will always overcome sin and brokenness and evil. Because you and I are blessed, we can trust that God will move in the mess. All of this is to say that the God who made you in his image. The God who blessed you with being a part of the human family to work together with compassionate care. This God is fully committed to your life. You just turn to the person next to you and say, God is fully committed to your life. The question is, are you? That is the question. Are you fully committed to your life? If we can trust that God is that committed to us, even in our mistakes and in our messes, how might that change how we live out our identity as being made in God's image and living under God's blessing? If we knew That God was more committed to our lives than we're committed to our own lives. What might we do differently to receive God's blessing? Would we perhaps invite God into the messes of life? Into the complicated layers of responsibility, conflict, sin, uncertainty, pain, brokenness? Would we perhaps be better able to receive this all as as grace that we could never earn? You cannot stop God's blessing that He has put on your life and the life of every human being. The question is, will you take that seriously this summer? So this leads me to two final questions, and these are the questions that I would love for you to join me in reflecting on throughout this summer. And you may find that you're reflecting on these this summer in prayer, ⁓ in in your life groups. You may reflect on these in conversation with others, in scripture reading. We're going to just send out something tomorrow with with every text that we'll be using throughout the summer. If you want to use that to read through it. However you go about reflecting, I'd love for you to reflect on these two questions. And they're this if God is really that committed to your life, number one, what mess would you invite God to move in this summer? If God's really that committed to your life, what mess would you invite God to move through this summer? And the second question is: This: How is God calling you to live out the blessing of being fully human? As we take time to consider these questions this summer. I want you to recognize that this is all done because God has already blessed. You don't have to do anything to earn the blessing. You don't have to do anything to make the blessing happen. God has already blessed humanity. And in Jesus, we see the one who has found perfect favor with God the Father. And as we join our lives to Jesus, we begin to see what it looks out like to live out the blessing in its fullness. And so will you join me in inviting God to let his blessing work in the midst of the mess this summer? Would you stand with me?