Preached at the Mount Hope chapel service on the first day of school, September 3rd A+D 2019. Reading: Genesis 1:1-19.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
“In the beginning.” Those are fine words with which to start a new school year. Whenever there’s a beginning of anything we can think of the beginning, the beginning that God began. Without that beginning there would be no beginning of anything else, because “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Take away that beginning, and instead of sitting here with our bodies and souls, eyes, ears, and all our members, clothing and shoes, and all we have, the earth would still be formless and void, a dark and shapeless mass of water. We would not exist, and the earth would drown us if we did.
But God spoke. And when God spoke, stuff happened. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” God’s Word does what it says. God’s Word is a creative and powerful Word. His Word began the world, and it’s fitting that his Word should begin our school year as well.
God the Father was not alone in the eternity that came before the beginning. We heard, “the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” The Holy Spirit has existed from eternity with the Father. And the Son of God was there from eternity as well. He is the Word through which God created the heavens and the earth, as it says in John 1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” And John makes it clear that this Word of God is the Son of God, Jesus Christ our Lord. Thus we see that the beginning of all things teaches us about God: that we have our life from him, and that he is Triune, meaning, one God and three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Some people deny that God created the world, and indeed deny that God even exists. Some people in our very city begin their school year today with that belief: that there is no God. I’m reminded of something that the medieval theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas once wrote, quoting the Greek philosopher Aristotle: Parvus error in principio magnus est in fine. “A small error in the beginning is great in the end.” If there is no God, and if life on this earth is all there is, then the only thing children will learn in school is how to focus on earth: how they can feel good, how they can make money, and how they need to think in order to be acceptable to a godless world. “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Parvus error in principio magnus est in fine. “A small error in the beginning is great in the end.” And denying God’s existence is no small error.
So let us begin rightly. Let us begin with a right belief: “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” God created you. You did not come into existence by chance, nor by evolution, and you certainly did not come into existence by your own power. God created you, and that means your life is not your own. This is why so many people deny God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. They want to be in charge and say what goes, and if they owe their life to God, then they are dependent on him and under him.
Being dependent on God and being under God does not sit well with our sinful nature. Our sinful nature doesn’t like to submit to anyone. Every time you have to say, “Yes, Dad,” “Yes, Mom,” “Yes, Pastor Richard,” “Yes, Mrs. Hill,” “Yes, Miss Hahn,” “Yes, Mrs. Reagan,” “Yes, Miss Walters”― every time you have to say that it’s like something dies inside of you. Your sinful flesh shakes its rotten little fist and screams, “No! Don’t do it! I’m in charge! There is no God!”
But the reason it feels like something is dying every time you submit to God’s authority is because something is dying: your sinful flesh is being drowned with Christ in the baptismal font. You fight against the sinful urges to resist God and his authority, because you know, as David sings in Psalm 14, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Ps. 14:1). The man who denies God is a fool because the existence of God is so obvious, as Paul writes in Romans 1, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” And the man who denies God is also a fool because God is a good God. He’s the sort of God that you’d wish existed if he didn’t. And he does exist, and he is good to man.
Why, after all, did God the Father Almighty create heaven and earth? So he could torture us and make our lives miserable? Of course not! But he created us and sustains our lives only out of fatherly divine goodness and mercy, because he loves us, and indeed loved us before we existed. And even when we sinned against the good God who created us he did not turn against us. When we sinned, the Son of God, Jesus, came to us and became a man. He took our sins away and forgave them all by dying on the cross. And God didn’t send Jesus because we were such great people. We were sinners! But again, God’s love for us moved him: moved him to save us.
Our salvation is completely God’s doing, just as creation was completely God’s doing. The Apostle Paul makes this point in 2 Corinthians 4: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). God spoke, and stuff happened. That’s how creation came about. And that’s how salvation comes about. Jesus, the Word of God, is risen from the dead, and the Word sounds forth in the created world, saying, “I forgive you all your sins.” That Word has as much power now as he did at the beginning. Look around you: you don’t see a formless mass of water. You see light and people and all manner of created things. The Word of God did all of that. And that same Word of God continues to speak today.
So this school year we will attend to the Word of God. Certainly we will study a great many things. But the Word of God governs all, and begins our year, and speaks light into the darkness of this world. Praise and thanks be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In Christ,
Pastor Richard
