In the Beginning, God…

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 7th September 2025

Genesis 1.1 – 2.4a 
John 1.1-5

There’s something about opening lines.

The first words of a story set the tone for everything that follows.
            “Call me Ishmael.”
            “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
            “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

We remember them because they are gateways — portals into another world.

And the first line of the Bible is no different.
            It opens, not with argument, or proof, or explanation, but with declaration:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

This is not a statement you can ease into.
            It’s not a gentle clearing of the throat.
It is a trumpet blast, announcing that everything
            — all that is, all that ever was, all that ever will be —
            finds its origin in the creative will and Word of God.

And it begins, not in stillness, but in chaos.

The earth is formless and void;
            darkness is over the face of the deep;
            the wind — the ruach — of God hovers over the waters.

The scene is not neat or safe.
            It is pregnant with possibility,
            waiting for the Word that will shape it.

And then God speaks. And things happen.
            Light bursts into being.
                        The waters divide.
            The land appears.
                        The sky fills with stars and the seas teem with life.
Order emerges from the chaos.

This is not the story of God snapping divine fingers
            and everything popping into place in an instant.
It’s a narrative of rhythm, of deliberate movement,
            of a creation that unfolds with care,
            a creation infused with love.

Genesis 1 unfolds like a hymn
            — a carefully structured liturgy of creation.
It has verses and refrains, repetitions and variations,
            each day following a rhythm:
“And God said… and it was so… and God saw that it was good.”

If we look closely, we see a profound symmetry.

• Days 1 to 3 are about forming
              — the creation of spaces or realms.
  Light is separated from darkness,
              waters from sky, land from sea.
  The world is being given its architecture.
• Days 4 to 6 are about filling
              — populating those realms with inhabitants.
  The sun, moon, and stars fill the light and darkness;
              fish and birds fill the sea and sky;
  animals and, finally, humans fill the land.

And then there’s Day 7 — which doesn’t fit the pattern.
            On this day, God does not create. God rests.
The Hebrew here suggests not weariness but completion.
            It’s the rest of satisfaction,
            the pause to delight in what has been made.
The Sabbath stands apart as the crown of creation
            — the moment when God’s ordering work
            is celebrated, not continued.

This seven-day structure isn’t a timetable, or a scientific chronology.
            It’s theology in motion.
The pattern tells us that the world
            is not encountered by humans as a random accident,
            but as an ordered gift.

It begins in chaos,
            but God’s Word brings rhythm, balance, and beauty.
The days stack like the movements of a symphony,
            leading to the stillness of the final chord.

And perhaps the most radical part of this opening chapter
            is that it doesn’t begin by asking us to prove God’s existence
            — it simply proclaims it.

The God of Genesis 1 is not a character in the drama of creation;
            God is the Author.
And this Author speaks creation into being
            — not with violence, not with conquest,
            but with words, with breath, with blessing.

When Genesis tells us
            that “the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters,”
the Hebrew word — ruach —
            means wind, breath, and spirit all at once.
It’s the invisible force of life itself,
            moving with purpose and possibility over the chaos.

And when God speaks,
            that Word does something no human word can do:
            it creates.
We know the power of words to bless or wound,
            to lift up or to destroy,
but in Genesis 1,
            God’s Word brings something out of nothing.

The cosmos responds to the divine voice.
            The sea gives birth to swarms of living things.
            The earth itself “brings forth” plants and animals.

There’s a mutuality here:
            creation is not a passive lump waiting to be moulded,
            but an active participant.

God’s creative speech calls the world into partnership
            — and then steps back to let it flourish.

Even before humans arrive on the scene,
            there is a relational rhythm of call and response,
            Word and world, Spirit and soil.

Now, just around the corner from here
            — about a five-minute walk from Bloomsbury —
            you can stand in front of a clay tablet in the British Museum.
It contains part of the Enuma Elish,
            the Babylonian creation story,
            written hundreds of years before Genesis.

The Enuma Elish also begins with watery chaos.
            But its account is very different.
In that story, the gods are at war.
            The younger gods kill the sea-goddess Tiamat,
                        slicing her body in two.
            One half becomes the sky, the other the earth.
The world is literally made from the corpse of a defeated deity.

And humans?
            They are fashioned from the blood of another slain god,
                        created to serve the gods as slaves
            — doing the work the divine beings would rather avoid.

This is a vision of creation born out of violence
            and sustained by exploitation.

The writers of Genesis knew this story.
            Israel spent decades in Babylonian exile;
            these myths were in the air they breathed.
But they told the beginning of the world differently.

In Genesis, there is no cosmic battle,
            no divine bloodshed, no rival gods to defeat.
The waters are not a slain monster, but a canvas.
            Creation is not an act of war, but an act of love.
Humans are not made to be slaves,
            but to share in God’s image — to steward and to bless.

This is a radically subversive retelling.
            It whispers to exiles under Babylonian rule:
Your world is not founded on violence.
            Your life is not an accident.
You were made in the image of the God who speaks peace into chaos.

And that changes everything
            about how we see the world — and each other.

The structure of Genesis 1 isn’t just beautiful;
            it is political and pastoral.
It tells us the universe is trustworthy because its source is trustworthy.
            It reminds us that love, not violence, is the ground of our being.

And then, after six days of creative work,
            the narrative slows right down.

We’ve had light and darkness, sea and sky, plants and animals
            — and now the tone shifts.
The divine voice says:

“Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…”

In the Enuma Elish,
            humanity’s purpose was to serve as unpaid labour for the gods
            — an expendable workforce.

But in Genesis, the creation of humans is not a grudging afterthought.
            It is the high point of the story.

And the radical move here is this: in the ancient Near East,
            only kings were thought to bear the “image” of a god.
            It was a royal title, a claim to divine authority.
Genesis takes that elite concept and democratises it.
            Every person — male and female, young and old, rich and poor —
            is made in the image and likeness of God.

This is a theological earthquake.
            It declares that no one is disposable.
            No one exists to be a slave.
            No one’s worth is determined by wealth, rank, or status.
The divine image is not a badge of privilege for a few
            but the birthright of all.

And with that dignity comes vocation.
            Humanity is called to “have dominion” — but not as tyrants.
The Hebrew radah can mean ruling,
            but it is framed here by God’s own creative character.
If we are made in God’s image,
            then our “dominion” must mirror God’s dominion
            — bringing order without oppression,
                        nurturing life, enabling flourishing.

In other words, Genesis gives us a job description:

• Steward the earth so that it thrives.
• Treat one another with the dignity
  you would give a fellow bearer of God’s image.
• Use power as God uses power
  — not to crush, but to create.

The church, when it remembers this calling,
            becomes a living contradiction to the empires of our day.

We bear witness to a Creator
            whose image is reflected in the face of every person
            — and whose love undergirds the whole of creation.

After six days, creation reaches its crescendo:

“On the seventh day God finished the work that had been done, and God rested…”

If we’re not careful,
            we can imagine God slumping in a cosmic armchair,
            exhausted from all the effort.

But the Hebrew word shabbat is about stopping
            — ceasing — rather than collapsing.
It is the pause of satisfaction,
            the deliberate choice to step back and delight in what has been made.

In Babylon, rest was for the gods alone
            — and humans existed precisely so the gods could have that rest,
            doing all the work for them.

But in Genesis, rest is not a divine privilege hoarded by the powerful.
            It is a gift woven into the fabric of creation itself, extended to all:
            land and livestock, neighbour and stranger.

In Israel’s later story, Sabbath becomes law
            — a regular interruption of the economic machine.
Every seventh day, no one works.
            Not you, not your servants, not even your animals.
For that one day, the world stops running on production and profit.

Sabbath, thought of in this way, is resistance.
            Resistance to the lie that our worth is measured in output.
                        Resistance to the idea that the world belongs to the strongest.
            Resistance to the grinding logic of overwork,
                        exploitation, and environmental exhaustion.

Here at Bloomsbury, in the heart of London,
            surrounded by constant motion,
Sabbath invites us into a different pace.

It calls us to trust God enough to stop
            — to make space for worship, for delight,
                        for noticing the goodness that is already here.

And it sends us back into the week with our values reordered,
            our hearts re-centred, our eyes open to the dignity of all creation.

Genesis 1, you see, isn’t just an origin story.
            It’s a declaration about the kind of world we live in,
the kind of God who made it,
            and the kind of people we are called to be.

We live in a city that, like ancient Babylon,
            often runs on the logic of competition, extraction, and exhaustion.
But Genesis insists that:

• The world is not an accident — it is the work of a God who creates out of love.
• Every person you meet carries the image of God — no exceptions.
• The pattern of creation includes rest, delight, and mutual flourishing.

That means our vocation here in Bloomsbury
            is to live this story out loud.
To organise for justice.
            To treat creation as a gift, not a commodity.
To resist every system that denies the image of God in another.

And then — Jesus.

The Gospel of John begins with a deliberate echo of Genesis:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… Through him all things were made.”

John is telling us that the creative Word
            who spoke light into darkness
            is now speaking again
                        — this time in flesh and blood.
Jesus is God’s Genesis project come to life among us.

In him we see what it means to bear the image of God perfectly:

• He orders chaos without violence, calming the storm with a word.
• He treats every person — leper, tax collector, foreigner, child —
              as an image-bearer.
• He embodies Sabbath as a gift of restoration,
              healing the sick, lifting the burdened.

A personal relationship with Jesus
            means letting that Word speak into the chaos of our own lives
                        — the fears, habits, and wounds —
            and trusting him to bring light and order and hope.

A corporate relationship with Jesus
            means learning together how to be his body in the world
            — hands and feet that bless and heal,
                        a voice that speaks truth to power,
            a heart that loves the city with the Creator’s own love.

Here at Bloomsbury,
            we’re called to be that kind of community
— a living testimony that the world is not founded on violence but on love,
            and that the love revealed in Jesus is still making all things new.

So we listen again for the Voice that spoke in the beginning.
            We listen for the Word who became flesh.
We listen for the Spirit’s breath moving over the waters of our lives.

And then we join in the song of creation
            — working for justice, keeping Sabbath,
honouring the image of God in every person,
            delighting in the goodness of God’s world.

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Prayer

Creator God,
You spoke, and light burst into the darkness;
            you breathed, and life began to grow;
            you blessed, and the world was good.

Speak again into our lives today.
            Where there is chaos, bring your peace.
            Where there is weariness, bring your rest.
Where there is injustice, bring your justice.

Jesus, Word made flesh,
            Shape us in your image.
Teach us to walk with you day by day,
            to listen for your voice,
            to rest in your love,
and to work with you for the healing of creation.

Spirit of God, breath of life,
            Hover over us, over this city, over your world.
Make us a people who live your story —
            for the glory of your name,
            and the blessing of all you have made.
Amen.