One of the trends in social sciences in this millennium is to have people and communities look at their lives as stories. We are called upon to see life as a journey. So, we look back to see what has happened in our personal life-stories to arrive at the places where we now are. We are asked to consider our choices and where they have led. We then look at those whose lives have intersected our own to see how we have been shaped for good or ill. We also are to look at the places where we now stand in our journey. Based on all that, we are told to set a course for the future. We often are called to look at what the “preferred future” for our story might be and to take steps in that direction.

Of course, this emphasis on “story” is not new — not at all. Indeed, the Bible itself has been put together (in my view, by God’s providence) to communicate God’s story about all creation. As an old preacher once declared, “History ultimately is His-story.” At the beginning of this new decade, we at LAC have been looking back at the “beginnings” of God’s story of the world as we started at the very beginning, the book of “beginnings,” Genesis. We have seen how God introduces himself as the one reality existing before the world as we know it came into being. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Then, in the opening pages of God’s story, we are told what we are like; i.e., people — all people — are made in God’s image. In our services, we focused on the relational aspect of this awe-filled description of human life. The image of God in us means, at least in part, that we have been created with the capacity to maintain growing and healthy relationships with God, other people, and the rest of creation. When God was done with this opening act of creation, all was very good.

Over the past two weeks, we saw what went wrong with our world and us. The first people did not want to be creatures merely made in the image of God. They insisted on being “like God” and thereby chose to disobey God’s Word to them.

But, this was not the ending of His-story. Today, we will see that this powerful God also is a God who provides, shows mercy, and offers a path to restoration. Right now, God’s story is still being written. So, we will conclude this series first by remembering the remarkable promise made in Genesis 3:15: “The serpent will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” And we will take a glance at the end of the story described in Revelation 21:5: that God will make “all things new.”

The end is so great that it’s hard to wait. We might even want to say, “Maranatha. ‘Come quickly, Lord Jesus.’”

Glory to God,

Dr. Greg Waybright
Senior Pastor