The text for this lesson is Genesis 1–2
Key Point
- God the Father is the maker of heaven and earth. He made me and all creatures.
- Law: My sinful flesh wants to forget that God created everything and is the one who gives me all good things.
- Gospel: By His Word, God created the world and still sustains it for the benefit of all His creatures. He daily showers me with every good gift for the sake of His Son, Jesus, who has restored creation—and me—through His death and resurrection.
Context
- The ancient world was filled with creation myths. This account, revealed to Moses, presents God in a way that is unique. The triune God creates humanity freely, out of love. He does not depend on them in any way (as the gods in other creation accounts do). God gives dominion over the world to humanity (an idea unknown in other accounts). The creation account also precedes the narrative of the fall, which gives us the reason that the world is not in the state of perfection that we see described in Genesis 1−2.
Commentary
- Genesis 1− 2 provides us with an orderly account of our triune God’s creation of the universe for the sake of the man and woman whom He created in His own image. It is a carefully written historical account of what happened in the first week of the universe’s existence.
The first chapter is split among six days. Each of these begins in the evening and goes through the morning of the next day (the normal Hebrew way of reckoning a twentyfour- hour period of time). Throughout the six days of creation, God speaks, and it happens. From the very beginning, the Scriptures present God’s Word as living, active, and able to accomplish exactly what it says. In Genesis 1, God’s Word is literally the source of life.
The six days of creation are further broken down into two sets of three. On the first day, God creates light, and on the fourth day (the first of the second set of three), He creates the sun, the moon, and the stars. On the second day, God separates the waters above from the waters below. Here, the Scriptures are speaking in terms of what Moses would have seen, namely, that the blue oceans look a lot like the blue sky. This mirrors the fifth day, on which God creates the animals that live in the waters below (fish and other sea creatures) and the waters above (birds and other flying things). On the third day, God causes dry land to appear. And again, the sixth day mirrors this as God creates all the land animals.
The sixth day is also the day on which God makes man and woman in His image and according to His likeness. To be created in God’s image is to be created in a perfect relationship with Him, righteous and holy, doing His will. The New Testament identifies Jesus as “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). Thus, to be created in God’s image is to be created in Christ.
Adam and Eve were also given dominion over all of creation. Adam first exercises this dominion by naming all of the creatures that God parades before him. When a suitable companion for him is not found, God places Adam in a deep sleep and creates Eve from his own flesh. This is the divine institution of marriage: the one-flesh union of one man and one woman.
Sadly, the image of God was lost when Adam and Eve rebelled sometime shortly after their creation. Because of their dominion over the whole universe, all of creation suffers in “bondage to corruption” (Romans 8:21) as a result. Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, God has begun to restore His image in Christians, but only in heaven will it be fully restored.
