Foundation of Creation: A Meditation on Genesis 1-2

While unbelief has been present in every generation, our time is marked as one of particular falling away. We haven't reached the point of degradation that marked Noah's day, or the heights of pagan Rome, but we are an age that reflects a fundamental disbelief in God. While Noah’s age before the Flood was marked by disbelief in the true God, and Rome’s age was marked by any number of false gods, our age is a growing and active rejection of any god at all.  Different from ages past, our time and place is marked by rising secular humanism that often rejects God—any god—out of hand, or creates a weak and useless god in our own likeness. As other ages began their fall into unbelief by rejecting some or all of God’s Word, our age's fall into unbelief began with a rejection of Genesis 1-2.

‎And what, fundamentally, do the early chapters of Genesis teach? God declares through Moses that the universe's beginning is God; that man's beginning is God; that man's image is from God; and that the order God established throughout creation and for every creature, reflects God. Creatures deviating from God, rebelling of their own free will against Him and His order, are the source and beginning of evil, destruction, and death. God, out of love, desiring all people and all creation to be saved, promises to rescue His creation from the hell they have chosen. All of this is fulfilled millennia later, in the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ.  What begins good at Creation, then falls into death, is restored in Jesus Christ through His Vicarious Atonement.

Our age, however, has rejected Genesis, and with it, all the teaching of Scripture, including the doctrine of Justification by grace through faith in Christ alone.  Preferring the vain and ignorant speculations of Darwin, a resurgent atheistic naturalism has infected the whole of western culture, and corrupted many churches into replacing God’s Word with the infinitely lesser words of wicked men. God as the good Creator, is replaced by blind evolutionary chance; God's good and stable order is replaced by the amoral brutality of tooth and claw, and each creature’s personal will to power; God’s beautiful and invaluable image in man is replaced with meaningless animal lust and pleasure;‎ God as the font of all good and man with the devil as the source of all evil, is replaced by an individual subjective relativism that can’t claim to know anything; God's Holy Gospel of redemption in Jesus Christ for everyone who will repent and believe, is replaced by social programs of self improvement and psychiatric medication.  The bedrock upon which all of western culture has been built, from the principles of human rights to the principles of good government, from the protection of families to the protection of the earth itself, have been blasted asunder by the insanity of evolutionary unbelief.  When all that remains in a society is animals with a will to power seeking their own passions, the devil will have perfected his totalitarian domination of hell on earth.  His work has always been to flee, corrupt, or extinguish the light that God spoke into this universe, as he was in fact a murderer from the beginning.  The devil is always at war with the Word of God, and always ultimately the one behind the world’s rejection of the Word Made Flesh, Jesus Christ—who he knows is the only hope for the world.

And what have we inherited, by teaching our children that they are self centered animals of chance, with nothing greater to aspire to than personal satisfaction before they die? We have children murdering children in the very schools where they were taught that they are merely animals with no good or evil.  We have rampant use of drugs among all ages, as the despair and depravity of a soulless humanity unhinges their minds.  We have politicians without scruples, who will do and say anything to gain or retain power.  We parents murdering their children, inside and outside the womb, for their own convenience or financial comfort.  We have rampant sexual abuse of adults and children, in the places they should be most safe—rape, molestation, pedophilia, fornication and adultery celebrated and imbibed through a million web portals every day, and acted out in our schools and communities with alarming regularity.  We have successfully dehumanized an entire generation, separated them from God by unbelief in His Word, ripped away from them both His Law and His Gospel, and as a result we are inheriting the whirlwind.  This horrific, hellish landscape is the one we built on the back of the Sexual Revolution, giving free reign to the voices of Secular Humanism and Atheism to destroy our country, our culture, our families, and our children.  We took God’s Word out of our age, and gave the devil our pulpits, lecture halls, court rooms, government, and schools.  We were given the choice between life and death, and we chose death—we should not be surprised by the sight of our bloated and decaying corpse, rotting in the desert sun.

But the continuing call to the dwindling, emaciated, eviscerated Church, is the same call that goes out to our decaying world as a whole:  it is the call to repent of unbelief, and return in faith to the Word of God. Through faith and repentance, God has promised to exchange our depravity, our despair, and our devolution, for grace, mercy, forgiveness, and life. He will take our selfish and demonic delusions, and replace them with salvation won by Jesus through His Cross.  He who spoke life and light into the universe, is able to speak life and light again into our dead and dying world.  His promise of grace is for all who will hear and believe, and His Word goes out to the entire world, seeking and saving the lost. 

Our Triune God who created and redeemed us, speaks to us by His Word, to draw us back to Himself in His Son. In Him is life and light to enliven and enlighten our death and darkness. He is our only hope, and the only hope for the whole world. He has defeated the tyrant that holds us under his boot, dragging us into the hell prepared for him and his evil angels.  Jesus has come to save you, to heal you, and raise you up from the dead lies that bind you.  Hear His Word; let go of your unbelief; believe, and live. Amen.