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.
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.
