This sermon is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison sermon archive, part of the “Genesis 1-6” series, and was preached at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sewickley, PA, during a worship service on Sunday, January 1, 1978.

Father, you don’t have a right to speak except by your word. You would ask Father to say according to the word, and that you judge our word. Truly, Lord, if we speak not according to your word, we ask that that word might not have blessing. But we ask as well, Father, to speak according to your word. that that word might have its place in our hearts, in our minds, that we might not forget to do the same.

In his first novel, Look Forward, Angel, A stone, a leaf, an unfound door, a stone, a leaf, a door, and all the forgotten faces. Naked and alone, he came into exile. In her dark womb, we did not know our mother’s face. from the prison of her flesh, having come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prisoned then? he is not a stranger and alone. O waste of loss! In the hot mazes lost, among bright stars in this most weary, unbright cinder, lost, remembering speechlessly we speak the great forgotten language, The lost ringed end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an untownful word. Where? Where?”

Now, it’s not what he said, possibly. And if we had said something similar, it certainly wouldn’t have said it in such a melodramatic way. But nonetheless, it sort of conveys what we’ve all felt at one time or another. And you have to realize something about what was written here. This didn’t come from Anthony Hemingway, drinking and eating with a bureaucrat’s generation. It came from the head of a man living in and writing about America. It was written in 1929.

And America in 29, it seems, was very depressing to Thomas Wolfe for more than just economic reasons. Wolfe seems to be talking about a lost existence, a lost hope. Only faith is recollected here from the prison of his birth. this most weary, unbright cinder, as he called it. It seems that Woolf was preoccupied with place, location. And to him, something had happened to the land of the free and the home of the brave. But interestingly enough, Genesis 2 verse 4 and following is about place, location. Make you remember what we’ve already said about the opening chapter of Genesis.

We said it was about time. That’s where the stress was. You know how it started out in the beginning, a phrase speaking about time. Time is emphasized, or if you’re sophisticated, you might call it history. And the more I study the opening chapters of Genesis, the more I am amused by those who tell us that Genesis 1 is poetry and not history. Well, if it is poetry, it’s poetry about history. Time is emphasized. History, if you will. The emphasis continues through the succession of the day. One, two, three, through seven. It all counts. That is meaning.

And if the theme is time, The grand weapon in Genesis 1 is God’s relationship to time. Now, you should know that the God that you worship is sovereign over time. He is the Lord of the ages. Time does not rule God. Exactly is this God, sovereign over time, that can take the three, four, and ten years of fallen sinful death and turn that into eternity.

Amen. But you should know also that God is sovereign in you. You see, our God is such that He did not create from a thought, but from within the same time known to you and me. Me. The great God. The great, awesome, and powerful God subjected Himself to the very days of the week that you experience.

And in that week He teaches you by His grace which is even evident here in the first chapter of Genesis, how to spend your time? Forming, filling, resting. If you’re concerned about the wasting of your time, or the waste state of your life? The answer is not a seminar course. The answer isn’t a book recently published on time efficiency. The answer is God, as revealed in prayer. What did God do to us? And what can I do?

Another remarkable fact about this opening chapter’s Genesis is that you must realize that before you were called upon for one moment’s time to forge and to build the rest, God had already done it and shown you how in the doing of what we say. Man, then, doesn’t appear on the scene of the world without instruction as to how to live. His model is God. For how has God, in subjecting Himself to the conditions of this world, lived? So should we. Not only does He know our brain, as Paul, one of the great philosophers, But infinitely, this God knows the frame and substance of the reality, the minutiae of the life that we experience.

And the New Testament tells us that now in Jesus Christ, this God, even those out of sin will believe. Why God doesn’t He compel us in His love, having loved us so first? My love for him is even stranger. Don’t you love him too? Now let’s move on to chapter two.

You’ve already said that Genesis 2, in all of these thousand places, locations, is a shift of emphasis. And you should understand that this shift is not a contradiction, as many of us believe. For we have been told that, really, Genesis has two amounts of predation. Both arising from separate traditions, each contradictory to the other. That’s not true.

The perspective is nearly the same. In Genesis 1, it’s as if we were looking through the small end of a telescope, and the vastness of creation was opening up before us, bounded by history and time. What did Genesis do? It’s as if we turn the telescope around and we’re looking to the war again, and everything becomes concentrated now. Very compact. The detail begins to arise. The boundary here is not time but place.

Well, again, we’re interested more in geography now than history. We are looking at a garden, four feet deep, in a province called Eden. In the garden’s midst are two trees, a tree of life, a tree of knowledge. A river flows from Eden through the garden, yet divides into four tributaries. Phaishon about Babylon, Geom around Uri, Tigris east of Assyria and Ukraine. And then there’s the mention of the valuable natural resources beyond the boundaries of the garden itself.

This environment is no product of chance any more than man. It certainly is no product of chance either. This environment is the result of God’s active love and neutrality and common expression today. He was not just there, He was here. First, the earth as a whole, and then particularly the sky.

And this place here was not a position, a location of exile for God. God did not find Himself or discover Himself despairingly a stranger or an alien being here. Neither was this a hostile environment for Him. The world was not at war with its Maker.

The God of all power displayed in Genesis 1 is revealed now to be the covenant God is with, of His people, in innocent fellowship with His creation. He is the Lord God, not merely Elohim but Yahweh. who overcomes the great distance between Creator and creation by a voluntary condescension on his part, which he envisages to express by way of a covenant. The Lord appears in the world. You heard me. In the creation, the Lord appeared.

He walks the earth in the cool of the day. He stoops. He gathers the dust. He forms it. He forms it according to the most that arises out of the visible originality, and then when he embraces the form that is made as if breathing it with the holy fist and breathes out life’s breath, man A living soul awakes through the embrace of his God. A child, no, a son. A son in the strong, comforting grasp of his Father. Here in Adam is a beloved son resting upon the breast of his father God.

And from that position, from that place, he now observes and watches his father God plant a garden, no more than a garden. Watching him build a home. the Father and the Son, a habitation, a place to dwell, a place to dwell here, heaven, after an eternal dwelling of God in heaven. Place here on earth makes sense only in relationship to that. And all places here, if they are places, reflect that place. If they have any existence, That place in heaven is the location to which the Father shall bring His Son, and His Son comes again. Notice the parallel between the places.

Notice it in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 1 through 3. There’s a tree of life in heaven, and it has its counterparts in the Garden of Eden. There’s a river, a river whose waters are the waters of life in heaven, the waters of which make glad the city of our God. And that river is answered by the river that flows from Eden.

This place, then, the garden home of the Father from Heaven, and this son of the Father in earth, points beyond itself to a whole yet to come. The earth we house even here, the beginning of the creation, is not a final destination for man. He is on his way somewhere else. But the Lord God is a King, and the heavens are His throne, and the earth is His footstool. And here we have revealed to us the dominion in this place, in the garden.

It’s a kingdom that’s brought about in which father and son meet. It’s a kingdom in which the king rules, in which he establishes his prince to stand in his stead, a prince to keep and to cultivate the garden. And that prince from that dominion must look out beyond the boundaries of the garden itself and see the riches of the earth, and utilize his God-given talents to bring those gifts to expression and to bring glory to God.

This prince here in the garden is no flaw unto himself. He is the vassal of the great king and is subjected to every command of the king. And that king is expressing his command in this way, thou shalt not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat of it, you will die. more than a house, more than a kingdom.

This garden is a sanctuary in which God meets man, and man, face to face with his God, speaks directly to him of his God’s greatness. gives him praise, and moralizes him, and consults him, offering this a consecration to him, a joyful adoration. And as is true of the Bodhi, the cave and the sanctuary point none to the self. So if you see the threat of God when he says that they are prohibited in their disobedience, it speaks of a severing from more than merely a term of pleasantness somewhere beneath. It speaks of a severing from the eternal delights and joys of heaven.

Maybe today we can hear a lot about getting ourselves back to the garden. In some way, you see, there is a fallacious faith abroad in America that all we need is our better clothes and garments. But don’t you see these are no answer? Even if we could get ourselves back to the garden as a paradise, what good would it do us if we were only to lose it again? We don’t need another paradise here.

What we need is a home that will be impossible to lose and for which we can never be lost. What we need is the fatherly grace that will not end, that will always be there for his children. And what we need is a kingdom whose light and righteousness shine forth forever, a righteousness that will not fade, a righteousness that will not even be disgraced by our freedom. We need a sanctuary, a sanctuary wherein we again can come face-to-face with God through the living way of Jesus Christ, and there, in Christ, with Him, stand in the presence of our God and declare with all sincerity just what we think of our God.

Such things we will never see unless we are in Jesus Christ. Do you know that where Jesus Christ is trusted, where Jesus Christ is obeyed, in that place, even now, Those eternal things already begin to appear. So many more than just merely possible have not seen such things. The serpent’s touch in the garden now becomes the serpent’s bite. His venom is bitterness against tolerance and the God he is. His venom is blindness, not just in imperative sin, But sin, which I keep telling you, is the cause of blindness because of sin, or the cause of blindness.

In the Father’s house, there is healing. And marvelously, the father has sent out an elder brother into the foreign country to look for the lost child and the lost son. He has laid the skin of the lost son upon the elder brother. And by the way of the older brother, Sons and daughters of the Lord. What you look up and see and understand, what you come to know.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Your Name. the Bible of your compassion to the complete Lord living in the place where we live. And, Father, it is by Your power that that place shall be stirred and even transformed. And, dear Father, in the place where we live, You are calling to us and pointing to us for the eventual destination of all those who are called by Him. The life at the end of the journey will look like our final destination, our home, in the presence of Him in this day. Living for those things which are eternal. We pray this in Jesus’ name.

The sermon text provided above is derived from the sermon audio recording making use of generative tools. It has not been manually edited. While transcription tools have a high degree of accuracy, the output may include generative textual, punctuation, and/or formatting errors.