Gen 1:1, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 
This morning, we again consider with these first words of the Bible. Lord willing, there has been some recognition within us as to the absolute importance that they hold in the work of God in our very creation. Everything that we are is totally inclusive of the truth that In the beginning God created… This is too vital a reality to just shrug off as an interesting beginning of God’s Word. Everything that follows hinges on the certainty of what God has done.
We have dealt with various aspects of this since we first began to read this chapter. This morning, we need to address a dreadfully inherent trait of our thinking that stands before God and insinuates our greatness and our abilities as a means of trying to box Him into our limited conceptions and thoughts. To put it rather bluntly and brusquely, we have the self-centered conceit and attitude to think that God needs us to do things for Him. We set aside the fact of His Omnipotence in creation and think that we are indispensible to fulfilling His plan and purpose on this earth. We have the gall to think that God is limited to just those things that serve our pleasure and our ideology of what is important to us as we walk on this soil. 
The Prophet Isaiah had to deal with this self-centered attitude toward God as we read in Isa 66:1+2. Thus says the Lord, "Heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool. Where then is a house you could build for Me? And where is a place that I may rest? "For My hand made all these things, Thus all these things came into being," declares the Lord. "But to this one I will look, To him who is humble and contrite of spirit, and who trembles at My word. 
Let me ask the question to all of us, as I have been asking myself and the Lord in preparation for this message. Are we, am I … humble and contrite of spirit… and trembling at the Word of God? Before we get so upright and full of our self-determination and self-aggrandizement, think of how we handle the Word of God in our hearts and minds. When we read this very first declaration of God, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth… how do we react and respond? It will be indicative of how we deal with the entire scope of His Word. 
Do we just accept it without thinking about or pondering what is entailed with the fact that God created? Do we merely consider it as an allegorical account of early mankind’s explanation for the way things came into being? Do we honestly believe that God created? Or is it simply something that the church has handed down through the centuries as a philosophical and dogmatic statement of custom and tradition. Is it just like so many other cultural and religious accounts of how things came into being? 
You see, the mind of man sorts and classifies information mentally in a fashion that makes sense to him. He files ideas and concepts within a framework that makes intellectual retrieval possible and logically patterned. This means that we place the greatest emphasis on those elements of data which are nearest and dearest to our understanding and acceptance. When something doesn’t fit our pattern of understanding or our recognition, we tend to set it aside as not worth our energy. We file it away as of merely trivial value.
Sadly, this is where many of us tend to put various aspects of God’s Word. Rather than deal with it before the Lord and struggle with it and seek the Holy Spirit to bring us to our knees before it, we simply shuffle it off to the corner of our mental filing system. We think that we are better suited to spend our limited energy of understanding on those things that make perfect sense to us. We are conceited enough to just disregard the Word of God as having no place in our lives except for those times when we are in the context of a Church related arena. Our self-centered sense of individuality and importance sets God’s Word into a completely separate category of things that are important for our place in the scheme of life. It fits when we want it to fit and only as long as we need it to fit. Talk about being anything but humble and contrite of spirit! 
And trembling at the Word of God, how little we do that! When His Word convicts us of our behavior and our attitude and our thinking and our conversation, we simply ignore it. We slough it off as inconsequential since it would require us to stop those things that we would rather continue to do. We measure the cost-benefit analysis of obedience in terms of what we would gain against what we think we would lose. We consider how much we would have to change in order to fulfill His Word and whether or not it is sufficient to warrant such action. Rather than trembling at the every thought of disappointing God because of our disobedience, we figure that He will eventually forgive our every indiscretion. As a result, we choose to follow our normal pattern of behavior. We have no true value for His Word. Instead, we formulate excuses and reasons for setting it aside in our lives.
Such audacity and insolence and disregard of the truth that God has lovingly set before us in His Word is utterly despicable and self-indulgent! It smacks of unqualified human conceit and defiance in the very presence of the Most Holy and Divine Creator of the heavens and the earth. That we think that we can limit God to what our minds comprehend and what we want is beyond any conception of how Omnipotent and Omniscient and Omnipresent God is. God does not need us, we need Him!      
	Acts 17:24-31, "The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; neither is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all life and breath and all things; and He made from one, every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times, and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we also are His offspring.' "Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man. "Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead." 
	Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man… This is a key realization that we need to face head on. We do tend to think of God in this manner. We fit Him into our conceptual ideology. We demand that He stays within the confines in which we mentally regard Him. We will accept His Word as long as it fits our notions and our pattern of thinking and understanding. Then, when we are faced with those truths that are beyond our comprehension, we just discard it. We do not want to face His Word that any who do not accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior will not go to heaven. Therefore we try to make God accept our frail and faulty human notion of fairness and justice. We refuse to believe in a God Who will certainly judge all mankind against the standard of His Holiness and His Righteousness. “Surely we can be a good person and not go to hell,” becomes the mantra of our absolute rejection of Jesus, the crucified and resurrected Son of God, as the only means of salvation. 
	Do we see how vile we are as we pick and choose the passages of God’s Word which serve our interests and our plans and our purposes? Are we beginning to understand how we utterly deny the very nature of God as the Creator by trying to make Him into an image of our own imagination and creative abilities? We try to see Him, not as He is, but as we want Him to be! This is a challenge that we, you and I, need to take before the Lord in our individual hearts and minds as to how we consider and treat the Lord God Almighty and His Word! This will require us to fall to our knees in utter contriteness and to cry out in abject humility to the Lord to forgive us for our arrogance and our insolence and our maliciousness. 
"But to this one I will look, To him who is humble and contrite of spirit, and who trembles at My word. Dare we pray, Dear Lord, tear down the haughtiness of my spirit and my mind. Destroy the every fiber of my defiant attitude which makes you nothing more than a matter of my imagination. Humble my soul and spirit as only You can, no matter what the cost, no matter what the means, no matter what the consequences. Work in me the contriteness of spirit that pleases You only. Please, Lord Jesus, teach me to tremble at Your Word, to honor it above all else. Lord God Almighty, as You created the heavens and the earth, create in me a heart that will serve only to bless You. Lord, I know that You do not need me, but I need You. Cause me to rejoice in what You have created and to give You the honor and the glory that You, Alone, so deserve. Amen.
Let our hearts join with the chorus of the Psalmist in consideration and recognition of the absolute supremacy of the Lord God, Our Creator. Ps 90:1+2, Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were born, Or Thou didst give birth to the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God. To have a heart that knows without any wavering of conviction that … Even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God… is the call unto which we were created. 
It is imperative that we no longer view God as under the whim and fancy of our control and our understanding. That vileness of attitude and spirit will lead to nothing but utter chaos and destruction and disappointment. God will never allow Himself to be classified as just another of man’s gods and idols. He is very adamant about this as we read in Ex 20:1-6, Then God spoke all these words, saying, "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. "You shall have no other gods before Me. "You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments. 
When we refuse to see God as the Creator, we refuse to accept the fact that He is not subject to our limited scope of philosophy and beliefs. God so far surpasses anything that we can imagine in the vastness of His nature and His knowledge and His essence. Mere mortals should quake and quiver at the every instance of God’s intervention and manifestation of His Life and Holiness and Righteousness. Our every consideration of Him should echo with the honor and the reverence and the awe of Who He is. This is something that we have lost in our corporate identity as His Church in society. There is no true veneration and respect for God! He is just there, a spiritual presence Whom we can choose to either acknowledge or not. 
However, as we are admonished by the Apostle Paul in 1 Cor 8:5+6, For even if there are so-called gods whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him. It must be emphasized over and over again to our human intellect and sensibilities … yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him… We exist for Him and we exist through Him, through Jesus Christ. He created us for His purposes alone in Jesus Christ. 
	The Apostle Paul delineates God’s plan and purpose for us in Eph 3:8-12. To me, the very least of all saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ, and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God, who created all things; in order that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places. This was in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and confident access through faith in Him. 
	It is through His Church, through His new creation in Jesus Christ, that all of creation will be shown the manifold wisdom of God the Creator. We stand forth as the testimony of what God has done in and by the giving of His only Begotten Son. We represent the truth of Christ for the very sake of the salvation of humanity for all the eternal ages to come. In Jesus Christ, the redeemed of the Lord declare the mighty work of God in the perfect deliverance and placement of humanity into the very family of God. 
This is nothing that we could ever accomplish, no matter how vigilant and imaginative we are. It is only by the Hand of God, in the death and resurrection of His Son, that we are brought into His very presence, as His Beloved. This was ever in God’s heart from before time began as He created man, to fellowship and to commune together with Himself in the willing bond of perfect and eternal love, one to the other. So be it!
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Amen.

 	
This morning’s benediction is Ps 31:1-3. In Thee, O Lord, I have taken refuge; Let me never be ashamed; In Thy righteousness deliver me. Incline Thine ear to me, rescue me quickly; Be Thou to me a rock of strength, A stronghold to save me. For Thou art my rock and my fortress; For Thy name's sake Thou wilt lead me and guide me. Amen.