Sunday Morning Podcast Dec 30, 2018. Bro. Dave Goble.
TEXT: GENESIS 1:1-5
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
HEBREWS 11:1-3
1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
2 For by it the elders obtained a good report.
3 Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
Beginning and ending. The year past, and what is to come, things that have been, and are not again, and things that we hope will be. With God to start fresh, to start with something, …out of nothing. And how we can translate that into our personal experience. For God desires each one of us to have a personal knowledge of Salvation, to know Him as our personal Savior. That doesn’t happen unless He creates something new, our own soul, out of our nothing. God is the only one able to perform that. The problem comes when we think we are something (self important), and not the nothing we are before we have God in our heart. It’s a good thing when we can see ourselves as we are, as God sees us, and not to go on to things and places of our own choosing. To begin instead from a place of God’s own choosing, is to see our nothingness without Him. [Romans 4:17, God makes alive the dead. He makes them not as they were. He makes them new.] Romans 6:1,2,4 1 “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? 2 “God forbid. How shall we that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? 4 Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. How does a person walk in newness of life, if they were dead? Death is the absence of existence. We all were dead. We are buried with Him in baptism, but God raises us up out of sin, to sin no more when we forsake them, to now live in newness of life. We can’t bring our sins with us, to be raised to newness of life. Something out of nothing! Our nothingness, was the chaos, or emptiness, because of sin’s spiritual death.
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Genesis 2:7 Something, out of nothing. Man was not yet alive (something), when yet mere matter (nothing). But then God breathed into man a living soul. The same also followed for the creation of woman. Something, out of nothing. The “matter” of dust, was not yet “enough” to be something. God Himself, and His breath, was needed to make man something. People that are self willed to choose for themselves without God’s direction, then keep themselves separate from Him (to be nothing). Unless they afterwards choose for God to make them anew. Self and sin brings death to all souls, from which there is no escape, unless they choose for God to deliver and recreate them with the newness of spiritual life. Something, out of nothing. Never has someone of their own accord come back to life after their profound certain death. Lazarus came back to life after 4 days, but only after Christ spoke the words for him to arise out of death. Beyond the mere universe to have newness of life. Something, out of nothing. God is beyond the universe of this physical existence.
Acts 9:1-20, Saul (later renamed Paul), had been one “dead in the nothingness of his sins,” a powerful persecutor of the Christians, was here “arrested” by Jesus from the light of heaven, on the road to Damascus. Here, he became also transformed from sin, to newness of life in Christ. To preach the gospel so others also would be made “something, out of nothing.” From the nothing of sin’s death, to something of the newness of life in Christ. Psalms 51:10 “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.” The psalmist prayed for God for his life to start over, “create in me a clean heart.” We’re not supposed to die out to our sins, then find ourselves to still have sin. Psalms 51:7 “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.”; the new heart is not then meant to go on in sin again. Nothing God does, keeps us to stay in the oldness and nothingness of sin. The spirit and soul is not made from anything from this universe. For those elements are only “the stuff” there, and is of mere matter. What God gives, comes from something not before created. God, not our human parents, gives us a soul. So all souls truly belong to Him. Ezekiel 18:4 “Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.” No souls are made from matter, but God creates a soul which transcends the universe. Something, out of nothing. Something from the holiness of God. The soul is created at the point of their physical human conception. This soul is beyond the DNA from our parents. It is beyond matter,….a gift of God. “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.” There will be a judgement that transcends this world. Hope only exists in spite of it, when a soul chooses the something of life, found only in God’s Salvation from sin. Made possible, because of Jesus’s sacrifice for all. To give us a holy life.
Something, From Nothing….