Trinity Sunday, 2009
Text: Genesis 1:1-2:3
The Rev. Jerry Kistler
St. Stephen’s Reformed
Episcopal Church
“The Triune Work of Creation”
“In the beginning God…” Those aren’t just the opening words of Scripture; they are the absolute starting point for any true knowledge of the universe and our place in it.
“In the beginning God…”
It means that from the very first moment that time began God had already
been there for an eternity. Get your mind wrapped around that! It means that
all things have their beginning in
God, whether visible or invisible. The universe exists because of Him. He
exists only because of Himself. In other words, He is self-existent. All things are by Him, the Scripture says, and therefore, logically, all things
are for Him, as well (Heb.
It means, therefore, that unless God is your starting point, you can’t have any true knowledge or understanding of anything that exists, including yourself.
Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. Scientists date the universe as being around 14 billion years old, give or take a few of billion years. Part of the way they arrive at that date is by calculating the time it must have taken for light to have traveled from stars that are billions of light-years away to the point that we can now see them with very powerful telescopes here on earth. Distance divided by Rate equals Time, right? You remember that from freshman math. So let’s say a star is a billion light-years away. And of course light travels as a constant speed. So it had to take a billion years for the light to get to us, right? Well, maybe. The assumption is that star was formed, then the light had to travel the distance, until it finally reached earth. Well, what if God created the source, the light, and the object together in one moment. In other words, what if God created it as a complete system from the beginning? Well then those calculations would be completely off, because it wouldn’t have taken any time for the light to travel between the star and the earth; it would have been created instantaneously as already shining on the earth. And that’s what Genesis chapter one seems to indicate. It indicates that God created a mature universe. And why not? He created a mature man, didn’t He? When God went to make Adam, He didn’t start by creating an embryo, and then bring it along until it was a fetus, and then through the stages of infancy, childhood, the teen years, until finally he became an adult. No, God created Adam as an adult man.
You know, I’ve heard some people ask the question, “Did Adam have a belly button?” Well, probably, yes. Not because he had a mother, but because that’s what fully developed, adult human beings have. They have belly buttons. And God created Adam to be a fully developed adult man. But, let’s say you were able to unearth the frozen remains of Adam (Okay, good, now were really dealing with reality!). But let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that you were able to find Adam’s body, and you noticed that he had a belly button. Well, you might conclude from that observation that he had once been a teen, and before that a child, and an infant before that, and that he was once carried in the womb of his mother. But you’d be wrong, wouldn’t you? Your calculations would be all off, unless you took into account God’s revelation of how he made man.
Well, this is sort of my point about the universe. If you don’t start with God – if you leave God out of the equation - and you don’t start by trusting His Word that He created a mature universe, you could never come to a true knowledge of the age of the universe.
Well, that’s just one illustration. But it does illustrate that great truth we receive from the book of Proverbs: that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7). God is the starting point. And so without faith in God there can be no true knowledge of the world.
But now this is Trinity Sunday. So why are we reading from the Book of Genesis? Maybe you thought the Trinity is only revealed in the New Testament. And you’d be partly right; it’s only in the New Testament that God is fully revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But even as far back as Genesis chapter one we begin to see that the one God is more than simply one. We begin to see that within the oneness of God there is also a plural-ness - a plurality of relations. God is revealed as an “Us” - a “We” - not simply an “I.”
Remember from our reading how God spoke when He began to
create
But now, with the help of the New Testament, we can see how each of the three Persons of the Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – were involved in the work of creation, and how each of them had their own distinct role in the forming of the universe.
In 1 Corinthians chapter 8, St. Paul, in the context of trying to get the Corinthian Christians to stop participating in the feasts given in honor of the various pagan gods of the city, writes: “For even if there re so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth… yet for us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for Him” (1 Cor. 8:5-6). So according to this verse, and many others in the New Testament, the Father is the source of all created things. All things are from the Father. This is why we confess in the creed that we believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” Although each Person of the divine Trinity is involved in creation, God the Father is more specifically spoken of in the role of the Creator, because it is He, the Scripture says, “of whom are all things.”
But then the verse continues, “and [there is] one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things.” Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, the Second Person of the Trinity, is revealed more specifically as the one through whom all things were created. Or, in other words, as the active agent of the Father. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made…. And the Word became flesh” ( John 1:1, 3, 14).
So if you can conceive of it this way: what we see in Genesis chapter One is that God the Father is the Speaker, Who speaks all things into existence: “Let there be light,” and so on. God the Son is the Word spoken, through whom all things come into being. He is the activating agent of the Father.
But what of the Holy Spirit? What role does He have in the work of creation? Well in the second verse of Holy Scripture we’re already introduced to the Holy Spirit. It says that “the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:2). That word “hovering” is the same verb used in Deuteronomy 32 to describe an eagle hovering over its young. It’s the Spirit – the ruach in Hebrew, the Breath, or the Wind – who gives life to all things. We confess in the creed that He is “the Lord and Giver of Life.” He is the animating Power of God, who brings all things to life. And so when the creation of man is more fully described in Genesis chapter 2, we hear that God breathed the breath of life into the man, and he became a living spirit (Gen. 2:7).
So again, if you can hear it: God the Father is the Speaker,
from whom all things are spoken into
existence. God the Son is the Word spoken, through
whom all things come into being. And God the Holy Spirit is the Breath of
God, in whom, says
So that’s how we see all three Persons of the Divine Trinity
as work in bringing about the creation of the world.
But the Trinity is also revealed even in the way God creates man in His own image. God created us in His image not just in who we are as bare individuals, but in who we are in relationship to others – particularly in our family relationships. “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Because God is a plurality of relations – an “Us” – when He made man in His image, He made man not just as a “him,” but as a “them.” Do you follow me?
We were designed to be in relationship to others, because we were designed after the image of God – after the Divine Prototype. God created man and woman to be in the closest relationship possible between two human beings – to be one flesh – in order to image the unity the exists between the Persons of the Godhead. As the Son is from the Father, so the woman was taken from the man. And as the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, so the child comes forth from the man and the woman. Do you see? In our family relationships, we image the Triune God. And this is why the redefinitions of marriage and the family that we’re seeing in our culture are so destructive to the very essence of who we are as made in the image of God.
Now this doesn’t mean that if you’re single, or if you’ve never had children, you’re not made in the image of God. We were all created in the capacity to be in those relationships, and that’s part of what it means to bear God’s image.
“In the beginning God…” God was from the beginning, and He is the beginning of all of our knowledge and understanding of the world, and of our ourselves. From the very beginning we see the Triune God at work speaking the universe into being. “By the Word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all the host of them by the Breath of His mouth” (Ps. 33:6). And we see ourselves as the pinnacle of God’s creation, because we, of all the creatures in the world, uniquely bear His image in the relationships of love He gave us the capacity to enjoy.
Praise be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.
Amen.