Created
The following articles are inspired by The Rescue Project, a series of videos explaining the fundamental Christian message by Acts XXIX. More information will be shared about this movement when we host the series in the future.
In order for you to be reading this right now, each and every one of your ancestors had to live long enough and be romantically successful enough to have kids. Just one broken link in that human chain and you aren’t here to see this. Random chance or blind fate? These options don’t seem likely to me. Zooming out from our own perspective, we can ask the basic question: “why is there something rather than nothing?” A state of nothingness seems like the default position according to the biblical story and the most recent discoveries of cosmology. Yet here we live in a universe rapidly expanding, full of billions of galaxies and trillions of stars. Here we live in a solar system perfectly suited to produce life on just one planet perfectly positioned to be neither too hot nor cold, too bright or too dark. An atmosphere of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen supports not just elementary life (amoebas and the like) but complex organisms with multiple interlocking and interacting systems that balance each other marvelously.
The Book of Genesis begins, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth.” The main protagonist from page 1 to the end is God, and he is identified off the get-go as Creator. The first creation story (Genesis 1) shows us the magnificent order and harmony of his work of creation: he creates with his word the domains (light/dark, sky/water, land/sea) and then populates them with his subjects (sun/moon & stars, birds/fish, animals/sea creatures). It is measured and orderly and beautiful, with humanity at the pinnacle of this creative act. Our first lesson: Creation is good. Yet to describe God as merely the Creator and stop there could leave us with a cold and distant portrayal of God. A clockmaker also creates in some fashion, but then sells his clock and never sees it again. This cosmic view misses the second creation story’s intimate emphasis. The narrator zooms in to see God’s creation of man: personally and carefully formed from the mud of the earth, God breathes his spirit into this first human being and gives him life. Man is earth and spirit, intentionally and lovingly brought into existence by a God who knows him so personally because he created him. Our second lesson: God the Creator is good. This means that you, yes You, are very good, despite what others may have told you or what you may believe about yourself. You were created good by a good God who desires infinitely good things for you!