Our Triune God Made Them All
Sermon 1865 Genesis 1.1-2.3 June 4, 2023
Many Americans, perhaps some of us, are getting frustrated with cost-cutting measures taken by our medical care providers. No, the doctors aren’t examining two patients at a time in the same room. Parking is still free at the clinics. It’s the call centers. Confusing directions to access the system, long hold times, lack of follow-through for rescheduling appointments or getting refills on the prescriptions.
It doesn’t help when a clearly upset patient storms into the building and tries to straighten things out by dealing directly with the front office. “Oh, we don’t have access to that. You have to call the 800 number.”
The girls at the front desk weren’t responsible. They didn’t make the system. The best the powerless doctors can do is smuggle out some free samples, like a shady watch salesman opening his trench coat in a casino alley. They didn’t make the system.
God made the system. Oh, not that system. Bean counters and ruthless CEOs made that system to wring enough money out to justify their takeover costs. Don’t blame God for that. God made the system we call this universe. He is responsible for it. He can fix it. He can help.
Our Triune God Made Them All
1. A vast array.
2. A sweeping blessing.
“Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array,” Moses writes in summarizing God’s creation week.
And what a vast array it is. We admire artists with a focused point of view. A play focuses on a day, a song a moment, a poem a feeling. In Taos there is a painting consisting of four large white canvasses. Only by looking closely can you see a brightening on the horizon where the sun is trying to penetrate Agnes Martin’s overcast Alaskan gloom. But no artist can do everything.
Our Triune God can. Since this is Trinity Sunday, let’s rehearse why we believe in God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, three persons, yet one God. It is a big part of what makes a Christian Christian.
Already in the Genesis account we have hints there is more to our God than oneness like we think of oneness. The Holy Spirit is hovering over the waters at the beginning, when only God is there. When God creates mankind, he says, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.” He is not talking to the angels, for Moses immediately tells us, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The one God is an us. That’s tough to figure out.
And it doesn’t make it easier when Jesus is baptized and the Father speaks of his Son and the Holy Spirit descends in the shape of a dove. Three separate actions are taking place. The Son isn’t the Father, the Spirit isn’t the Son. And Jesus commands us to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. If there were three gods they would have names, like the names of my three children are Elyse, Matt and Andy. But God only has one name. He is one, as the Bible says, “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one.” Any adjective you use for the Father, almighty, omnipresent, omniscient, you’ve got to use for the Son and the Spirit.
Well, enough on that, though it needed to be said. Our Triune God can do it all. Our Triune God made them all in all their vast array. The first thing he did was to create the ruler, the scale, the dimensions, if you will, light. We still measure everything by the speed of light. Light years. Then comes the atmosphere. The oceans and dry ground, complete with plants. That’s Day Two and Day Three. Then the heaven in all its ordered splendor, marking seasons and days and years. One evening and one morning, a twenty-four hour period of time. Sunrise, sunset. Three hundred, sixty five and a quarter days around the sun, a year. Then the really detailed stuff, animals, fin and feathers, followed by land animals. And then human beings. And after every day there was job review. “And it was good.” God didn’t create junk. He didn’t leave room for 2.0. Everything was perfect, just the way it was. Every flower had a pollinator, every seed had a niche. The only thing there was no room for was death. To man, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” To the animals, “I give every green plant for food.” No cheetah mother had to run down a gazelle on the Serengeti, clomp down on its throat for five minutes until it suffocated and then drag its lifeless carcass to her den so her pups could stay alive. Nothing had to die. Disney, you lie. The circle, the circle of life was not part of God’s original plan. Nothing had to die. Nothing had to be eaten so life could continue. What a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful world this would be if things had stayed that way. Spend your allotted time here on a wonderful earth where everything grew on trees and then take that golden escalator ride to heaven. Good work, if you can get it.
Our Triune God made them all in all their vast array, with a sweeping blessing.
It is easy to overlook. God is speaking and things happen. There is the job review. “Good. Good. Very good.” The time references, “there was evening and there was morning, day…” You almost skip over it. Maybe it’s our sinful nature at work. A glorious God is acceptable. We can live with a powerful Creator. The sinful human nature thinks it can earn its own way with such a God, hard-nosed, but fair. Yet we overlook this one word which keeps repeating at the most significant times. “God blessed them.” Everything that is alive he blesses. He blesses the beasts and the children, the fish and the birds. He blesses mankind as he gives them the command to be fruitful and increase in number, to subdue the earth and rule over every living creature. He even blesses the seventh day, when everything has come into perfect harmony with all the other parts. Mankind is a peace with God. Mankind is one with its environment. What a sweeping blessing!
As a to-the-bone-Lutheran, I looked for that special name for God in these verses. I looked for L-O-R-D. The LORD, the Savior God who promised the Savior from sin. The Savior God who tirelessly worked to make that promise come true, the Savior God who was the promise, the Promised Savior. Jesus. Beautiful Savior. Friend of sinners.
But there is no sin in the first two chapters of Genesis. There is no need for a Promise of the Jesus to come. That will come later and how we rejoice to have the LORD who washes away all our sins and renews us day by day! Yet the goodness and love of God is already evident in Genesis 1-2. It is in his blessing. He created this world in such a way that his finger was always on the scale, tipping it to the favor of everything he had created. God was rooting for us right from the beginning. He was like a parent on the soccer sidelines. The game was always fantastic, whether your son or daughter’s team won or lost, whether they scored a goal or not, or whether that gaggle of bodies around the ball ever moved the ball one way or another on the field of play. God is on our side. He always was. Right from the beginning. He blessed us. He blessed our world. He built his blessings into our very being, that attraction to the opposite sex, that baby urge in young, married couples. He built that desire to explore and tinker, to innovate and improve. That’s why the Colorado became the biggest man-made reservoirs on the face of the earth. And a good thing, too. Twenty year droughts have brought civilizations in the Southwest to extinction. Look at Walnut Canyon and the pueblos drought did in around Flagstaff. We are still here, praying for more rain this year and swapping grass for Bermuda in our city parks.
This sweeping blessing from our Triune God touches every day. What new discovery does it hold for us? What happiness will it reveal? What purpose lies before us in the next twenty-four hours?
Our Triune God Made Them All
1. A vast array.
2. A sweeping blessing.
So, has billing been goofed up your account? Are you not getting all the sunshine you paid for? God can fix that. Go to God in prayer. He needs no call centers to handle our issues. Don’t understand the directions? Open the owner’s manual. It’s right on the shelf there, the one with B-I-B-L-E on the spine. It will explain everything to you. Nothing is out of stock, everything is priced to move and just what we need. Our Triune God has made them all.
