Go back to the beginning
James opened this Sunday fresh from a chapel with the Miami Marlins and the LA Dodgers — game 166 of a long season. Some of those teams are about to play on. Some are about to go home. All of them are tired. The sport they loved as boys has become a job, more burden than blessing. So he had them do one thing. Remember why they started. Remember being a little boy, parents cheering, realizing this was a game you were good at and you could help the team win.
Something happens when you go back to where it all began. You see the present more clearly.
He said the same is true in marriage. He and Heidi speak to hundreds of couples at Weekend to Remember, and lesson one, before the weekend even kicks off, is a question. Why did you get married in the first place? Go back to the beginning, and the beginning sustains the relationship going forward.
That is why we are in Genesis. A new series. Foundations. We start where Scripture starts. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
God eternal, or matter eternal
Genesis 1:1 does not argue. It announces. Time, God, action, space, matter — all of it laid out in the first few words. It is not a court case to make a scientific argument for God's existence. It is a cathedral built for his glory.
And it hands you a choice. Either God is eternal, or matter is eternal. Pick matter, and the old question comes right back. Where did God come from? He came from something that preexisted him. Matter. But then how does matter account for a world of order and not chaos, a life that longs for meaning, a heart that knows right from wrong and experiences love?
James was blunt about it. That takes more faith than he has. I do not have enough faith to be an atheist. None of us were there at the beginning, so all of us are people of faith when we consider where the universe came from. He chooses to believe the words of Scripture — that there is a God, and he spoke everything into existence out of nothing. Ex nihilo. Not only the creator, but the sustainer of all things.
And science is not the enemy here. Science depends on the laws of nature, the order of a rational God. It does not conflict with him. It comes into focus once you see him as the founder and sustainer. Some of the greatest scientists in history saw exactly that.
It hit me like a Mack truck
Then James pointed at verse 2, and admitted he had read past it for years. This week it hit him like a Mack truck.
Before there was any order — before anything was made — there was darkness, and a void, and the Spirit of God hovering over the waters. Hovering. Doing what? Preparing to work. Preparing to burst into the dark with light and life.
He turned that straight on the room. Wherever you are — a relationship that looks like it is coming to an end, a career you cannot see the next step in, a season with no shape to it yet — hear this. God is hovering. His Spirit is at work. Before anything begins, he is already there, and he already has a plan.
Once the Spirit moves, things happen. Six days of creation. On the seventh, rest.
We work because God works, and we rest because he's in control
People have tried to improve on that week. During the French Revolution they swapped it for ten days — cleaner math, no strange accounting with the months. It fell apart. People got sick. The economy struggled. When Napoleon took power he quietly changed it back. The seven-day week did not come from convenience. It came from the first pages of Scripture. We work because God works, and we rest because he is in control.
And after each day, God said the same thing. It is good. Very good.
So we do not worship creation. Genesis will not even name the sun and the moon — just a greater light and a lesser light, because the point was never the thing made. The point is the Maker. But we do not neglect it either. What God called good, we are called to steward, in a fallen world, for his glory. We are not polishing the brass on a sinking ship. This life has immense dignity, value, and purpose, because God has a work for us and intends to work through us.
James was honest about where he stands. He does not run a filter over the text — not a feminist filter, not a prosperity filter, not the American dream filter. He reads it for what it says. Six days. A seventh of rest. A real Adam, the man Jesus points back to, the forefather Paul sets against Christ the second Adam. Ideas have consequences. This is not a Sunday school story for children. It changes everything.
The same hands
Then he took us from creation to the cross.
The same hands that put the stars in the sky are the same hands that hung on that cross. The same God who said, let there be light, is the God who said, I am the light of the world. Creation was pointing to Christ the whole time. Over two hundred times, Scripture looks back to this chapter and forward to him — from creation to Christ to the cross.
After the Dodgers chapel, a player pulled James aside. You said it is good to remember why we started. Fine. But why? Why did God make any of it? Why us?
Here is what he told him. We were created by a good and loving God to bring him glory. You will never find it in helping the Dodgers win a World Series, in providing for your family, in endless humanitarian projects — good things, all of them, but not the ultimate thing. He did not need us. He made us because he loves us. And your purpose is not something you achieve. It is received.
That is the invitation. Not do more, try harder, earn it. Come to him. Let him bear the weight of your sin — the only one who can — and begin to die to self and live for him. This morning that gets pictured in water, as men and women are buried with Christ and raised in newness of life.
So here is the question James left in the room. Will you trust God's Word for what it says? And will you stop trying to find your identity in what you have made, and receive it instead from the One who made you?
It all begins with God. So does everything after.
