Sermon: Distinction & Adornment (Genesis 1:1-19)

Distinction & Adornment Sunday, September 13th, 2026 Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost Christ Covenant Church – Centralia, WA Genesis 1:1–19 Prayer O Lord our Lord, How excellent is thy name in all the earth! Who hast set thy glory above the heavens. As we hear Your word preached now, we ask that You would teach us in the secret place of the heart, please pierce, divide, discern our spirit and our soul, so that we may be adorned with the beautiful light of Jesus. We ask for Your Holy Spirit now, in Jesus’ name, Amen. Introduction Well this is our third sermon in our series entitled The Builder of All Things is God. And thus far we have established that Jesus Christ is the Creator and the Redeemer of the world. Jesus is the author and finisher of our faith, and it is His handiwork that is manifest in Creation and Redemption. Jesus is the focal point, the center and consummation of human history, and as Paul says in Colossians 1:16-19, For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell. So the glory of Jesus, as He reveals to us the Triune God, is what all creation and redemption is ordered towards. And yet as marvelous as these twin works of creation and redemption are, what is more marvelous still, is that Jesus invites us to participate with Him in His work. Jesus calls to himself disciples, so that they can be taught, catechized, trained up, and sent out to gather in a harvest of souls for the Master’s use. Jesus says to his disciples in Matthew 9:37-38, The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest. So if Christ Covenant Church is the Master’s House, God’s Holy Sanctuary, then what is the field we are to labor in? It is Centralia, Chehalis, Olympia, Lewis and Thurston County, or wherever it is that you may find yourself. The whole world is God’s field, today is the day of salvation, and it is our privilege to go out and gather in sheaves for our master to sort through. It says in Psalm 24, The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; The world, and they that dwell therein.And so now is the time for people to repent and to believe, because it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment (Hebrews 9:27). So this is the work we are called to as God’s instruments, as God’s people, as God’s witnesses. We are to testify to the perfect life of Jesus, his atoning death, and justifying resurrection. We speak outwardly and God works inwardly. We point to the cross and empty tomb, and God makes effectual in people’s hearts the reality of those events. This is the most exciting vocation (the heavenly calling) that all the saints are called to. You are to bear witness to Jesus through living a holy life, and by demonstrating a faith that works by love. This is how God builds up, multiplies, and beautifies the church. We are His House. Now last Sunday we began to survey this Creation account in Genesis 1. And remember that whenever you read or hear these opening chapters of Scripture,you are receiving directly from God what He wants you to know about your origin, your heritage, and your place in the world. The Bible is the memory that God wants you to have. Of all the possible stories, images, and memories you may retain, Scripture is the inspired memory, the inspired history, that God wants you to store up and treasure to meditate upon. This is in part because your mind and your memory needs to be purified. Your mind must be purged, cleansed, and made holy for God to dwell there. Paul says in Romans 12:2, And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. So when God’s Word, God’s Story, becomes your memory and meditation, your soul will start to reflect more and more the image of the Trinity in whose likeness you were made. We are told in Genesis 1:27, And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And last week we said that sin shattered that image, but Christ is now picking up the pieces, Jesus is remaking us, reforging us, into something beautiful, as stained-glass windows of the saints and their heroic deeds which shine in God’s Holy Sanctuary. You are a living and breathing icon of the Trinity, though we are all very much still works in progress. But what will forward and accelerate that progress, is you learning how to become an imitator of God as His dearly beloved son or daughter. That is what we are doing in this series as we look at how God builds things. Recall the main principle we are drawing upon: In the Bible, buildings represent people, and people are God’s special building. So if you are called to imitate, and reflect, and cooperate with God in how He builds up the church, there is much we can learn here from the very first work of the Divine Artist, and that is what Genesis 1 and 2 presents for us. Outline of the Sermon So this morning I want to highlight just three of the patterns that are embedded here in Genesis 1, and then explore in depth this week and next, one pattern in particular, which is that of God Dividing and Adorning His Creation. What are some of the patterns you will find in Genesis 1:1-2:3? 1. First there is The Seven-Day Pattern of work and rest. God created the world in 6 days and rested on the 7th. And that reality becomes the basis for what we now call the week. We observe from this seven-day pattern that God is the Lord of time, the Lord of the calendar, the Lord of numbers, the Lord of mathematics, God’s work is orderly, numerical, and He likes to count things. All this we find in Genesis 1. God especially likes this pattern of six days of work, followed by 1 day of rest. He also builds into each day a rhythm of light and darkness, and this helps define the boundaries of when most people can work (assuming they don’t have artificial light), and when most people should sleep. Jesus says in John 9:4-5 after he works a miracle of healing a blind man on the sabbath, I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. So Jesus picks up on this rhythm of work and rest, light and darkness, day and night, and he uses it teach us about who He is (the light of the world), and what He has come to do for blind sinners (namely, heal them from the effects of sin and death). Another observation we could make about this seven-day pattern, is that whereas modern people usually talk about trying to find the right “work/life balance.” The Bible teaches a work/rest balance. According to Genesis 1-2, work is good, God works, and man was created to work six days and rest on the seventh. And that is the ideal work/rest balance. So work is not opposed to life, or at least should not be. Work is what we live to do on six days, and then we rest from that work on the seventh day. In Exodus 20, when God gives the Ten Commandments, He grounds the logic of the 4th commandment, Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy, in this seven-day pattern of Creation. He says in Exodus 20:11, For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. So part of your work of imitating God, is to observe this pattern of six days of good, honest, beautiful labor, followed by 1 day of rest for corporate worship. If we studied this topic in greater depth as Scripture develops, we would also see that all our work is to be ordered towards offering it up to God on the seventh day. We see this reflected in the Mosaic law with regular tithes, offerings, and sacrifices on the sabbath day. It is also punctuated at various worship festivals (First fruits in Spring, Pentecost at the end of spring, Feast of Booths in Autumn). The entire Hebrew calendar was structured around offering worship to God, according to His provision of food from the earth at certain harvest times, and also God’s works of redemption as at Passover, and the Feast of Purim. So the point of work, is not merely to feed our mouths and clothe our bodies, and keep a roof over our heads, it is ultimately for the joy of contemplating God’s goodness, working with what He has given us, so that we can offer it back to Him more beautiful and glorified than before. Moreover, the Lord’s Day, the Christian Sabbath, is a miniature judgment day. It is practice for the day of final judgment. Every Sunday, we come into worship, and God examines our works from the last week, and He either approves of them, or disapproves of them. He either accepts them or rejects them, depending on the heart and spirit from which our works were done. Recall what Hebrews 11 says about the difference between Cain’s offering and Abel’s offering. Both men offered a sacrifice to God from the works of their hands, and it says in Hebrews 11:4, By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet speaketh. So every Lord’s Day is a judgment day for the Christian. And you are to examine the works of your hands lest you offer to God strange fire, or a vain sacrifice, or come under the condemnation of Matthew 15:8 where Jesus says, These people draw near to Me with their mouth, And honor Me with their lips, But their heart is far from Me. Just as God judged His own work of Creation, calling it good, and then very good, so also God shall judge you. For as it says in Ecclesiastes 12:14, For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil. And this leads us to a second pattern we find in Genesis 1, and that is this pattern of God… 2. Creating, Judging, and then Naming what he made. God creates something by the Word of His power, he then looks at it and renders some judgment, and then he names it. For example, consider the work of the first day in Genesis 1:3-5, And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. [Creation] And God saw the light, that it was good, [Judgment] and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night [Naming]. And the evening and the morning were the first day. Over and over again, God creates, judges, and then names what he made. And in Genesis 2 we see that this pattern is given for Adam to do as God’s image and representative. It says in Genesis 2:18-20, And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. So the order of Creation is that God names Adam (Gen. 5:2), and then Adam names the animals. And this is part of what it means it be made in the image of God. We are meant to make things, judge them, and name them. Whereas only God can create out of nothing, mankind can still make new things from the pre-existing materials God has given us. And indeed, God wants us to do this. He wants humanity to go out and cultivate the whole world, to overcome the thorns and the thistles, and to turn creation into a Garden City. This is the fundamental task of Genesis 1:28, which sin has only made more difficult. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. We learn much more about this task in Genesis 2. So God created trees so that we could build furniture. God created iron, bronze, silver, and gold in the mountains, so we could build tools, and then with those tools make jewelry, musical instruments, airplanes and computers. We mix things together, put them in fire, and re-arrange what God created, and then we look at what we have made, judge it, and name it. We are doing this all the time as image bearers of God, even unconsciously so. For example, a woman goes to her garden, she picks some tomatoes, onions, garlic, jalapenos, and some herbs. She separates them with a knife on her cutting board, she mixes them together, adds some salt, and then tastes to see whether what she has made is good, or bad, mild or spicy. And if what she makes is very good, she might write down that recipe and name it, “Mama’s Best Garden Salsa.” You were made in God’s image to cultivate, steward, beautify and exercise dominion over some small sphere of creation. And when done for the glory of God, when done from a thankful heart, God delights in, accepts, and blesses your work. And so as Christians we want to become more conscious and aware of bringing our ways into greater conformity to God’s ways. That’s what Scripture helps us do. It gives us all these Divine Patterns to imitate. It tells us what God likes and dislikes. We look out at Creation and see that God paints with a wide pallet of colors. He likes blue, He likes green, He likes dotting the fields with wildflowers. God is neither a minimalist, nor a hoarder. He likes symmetry, harmony, and a unified diversity. He wants everything we make and do to have an intelligible order behind it. If God has so finely tuned the universe, with its seasons, and rhythms, and all for His glory, then we have work to do conform to that order. Scripture tells us that because of sin, our tastes and judgments, our likes and dislikes, are often out of step with what God says is good. And so we want to be growing as a church in our knowledge of what pleases God, so that we can love what God loves and hate what God hates. Moreover, because God created the world and everything in it, that meansthere is a real and objective standard to beauty, goodness, order, proportion, and all the rest. And so are we learning to notice and see God’s artistry and wisdom, and reflect that in our own little sphere? 3. Now the third pattern I want to highlight, and which we will explore in greater detail next week, is God’s work of Dividing and Adorning His Creation. Of dividing we see that on Days 1-4, God makes a separation, a distinction between two things. On Day 1, God divides/separates light from darkness. On Day 2, God divides/separates, the waters below from the waters above. He sets a firmament in between them called Heaven. On Day 3, God gathers up the waters below so that dry land can appear, and He thereby distinguishesthe Seas from the Land. And then He adorns that land by clothing it with grass, vegetation and fruit trees. On Day 4, God starts to adorn the firmament with chandeliers of light, and he does this by placing the Sun, Moon, and Stars in the heaven. It says in Genesis 1:14, And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years. And so now God is using these ornaments of light to divide time into days, seasons, and years. We should also note here that if Sun, Moon, and Stars  were not created until Day 4, then some other light was shining on Days 1-3 to divide the light from the darkness, and to distinguish day from night. What was that light? John 1 tells us it was Jesus, according to His divinity. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not… He was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world (John 1:1-5, 9). So the Sun is not the ultimate source of light for the earth, Jesus is. And we are told in Revelation 21-22, that in the New Heavens and New Earth there is no need for the light of the sun anymore because Jesus lives there. It says in Revelation 21:23-25, And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it. And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there. And in Revelation 22:3-5 it says, And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads. And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever. Conclusion The work of Creation in Genesis 1 is what Jesus transforms and glorifies by His death and resurrection. In between Genesis 1 and Revelation 22, is our Fall into sin, our descent into darkness, and the story of how God takes evil and works it for good. This is the gospel story. This is the greatest of all Divine Patterns. That the Creator God would come down to us, that He suffered and died in our humanity, and that because of His voluntary humiliation, He was raised up to glory above the heavens. Jesus did this all of this to raise you from the dead, to raise you up to glory, to separate you from all that is evil and dark, and to adorn you with light as a garment. For as it says Ephesians 2:6-7, He hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus. And so may God seal up this word in your heart, together with His kindness, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.