Doug McMasters: I just took Micah's.
Doug McMasters: Yeah, there we go.
Doug McMasters: Excellent.
Doug McMasters: Well, welcome back to our Amago Day series.
Doug McMasters: Last week we looked at the fall and the fracturing of our mirror, of our ability to reflect God.
Doug McMasters: Tonight is going to be similar to that.
Doug McMasters: We're going to look at the echoes of Eden.
Doug McMasters: And let's let's pray together.
Doug McMasters: Father, we do pray that you'd give our attention to your word that we might receive it well, understand more about ourselves, this world, and you.
Doug McMasters: And Father, to be able to find our hope and our fulfillment in you, our living God.
Doug McMasters: And we pray this in Christ's name.
Doug McMasters: Amen.
Doug McMasters: You ever have a moment in your life where you've been pulled outside of yourself?
Doug McMasters: Uh, when you've been so filled with a sense of wonder and awe that you wish you could just live in that moment and never lose it again.
Doug McMasters: I've experienced that several times, and one of them uh was a beautiful time driving with Royal uh through Vermont.
Doug McMasters: We lived in Boston, and uh the church I was converted at was in Plattsburgh, and so we'd make our way up through the Green Mountains and driving through the Green Mountains of Vermont and into the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and just seeing a guy who sort of landed in Illinois where uh an anthill is about the biggest thing that we had in southern Illinois, and to see the mountains and uh the the just the movement of all the various shades of of the different ranges as they layered upon each other as the sun was setting.
Doug McMasters: He used to bring my heart to places of delight and song.
Doug McMasters: Oh Lord my God, when I an awesome wonder consider all the worlds thy hands have made.
Doug McMasters: And I would I wish I could have just captured that moment.
Doug McMasters: Or maybe a piece of music that you've listened to and it's just lifted you out of yourself.
Doug McMasters: Or perhaps a time at the end of a day in the quiet stillness of the evening where it just seems so calm and serene and peaceful.
Doug McMasters: You think I don't I don't want to I don't want to move from my chair here.
Doug McMasters: I just want this to stay just like this.
Doug McMasters: Well, whatever form that might take in your experiences, all of them point to something.
Doug McMasters: They make us lean in, that there is something that draws us to beauty, that draws us to transcendence, that draws us to tranquility.
unknown: C.
Doug McMasters: S.
Doug McMasters: Lewis talked about this in his book, The Weight of Glory.
Doug McMasters: He talks about the beauty, and he says something this.
Doug McMasters: He said, the books that we read or the music in which we thought the beauty was located, they'll betray us if we turn to trust in them.
Doug McMasters: It was not in the book or in the music itself, it came through the book and through the music.
Doug McMasters: These things, the beauty of the memory of our past, are the good images of what we really desire.
Doug McMasters: Did you hear what he just said?
Doug McMasters: The memory, the beauty, the memory of our own past are the good images of what we really desire.
Doug McMasters: But if they are mistaken for the thing itself, the book or the music or the mountains, in my case, we'll turn them into idols, breaking the hearts of us, the worshipper.
Doug McMasters: For they're not the thing itself.
Doug McMasters: They're only the scent of a flower that we have not found, the echo of a tune we've not heard, news from a country we've never yet visited.
Doug McMasters: Lewis wasn't trying to be poetic simply for poetry's sake.
Doug McMasters: He was trying to explain something about the ache within us that is at the same time and in the same place familiar and foreign.
Doug McMasters: In those moments, we're longing for a world we've never yet lived in.
Doug McMasters: And it's not just simply desire, and I would say it's also memory.
Doug McMasters: And that's what Lewis was saying.
Doug McMasters: It's an echo, if you will, of Eden as it was, etched into the human heart, where all of us carry that visceral memory of what we were created for and what we actually lived in at one time.
Doug McMasters: We were made for fellowship, for worship, for glory, for communion.
Doug McMasters: And even if we can't name it, we feel it.
Doug McMasters: Every ache in our culture, every fracture and longing for more in our relationships, every fullness we experience in the moments of music and beauty, every ache of futility in the work that we do, all of them express an echo of Eden.
Doug McMasters: We sense in ourselves that life is just meant to be fuller, that our relationships are meant to be richer, that our work is meant to be more satisfying, and that our worship is meant to be more natural than it is.
Doug McMasters: But instead of harmony, we find conflict, and instead of joy, we find ourselves in futility and frustration, and instead of clarity, we end up often confused.
Doug McMasters: Even our greatest advancements, our cities, our technologies, our art, our progress, they all speak a promise.
Doug McMasters: And then we need technology 2.0.
Doug McMasters: They hint at what we were made for, and yet they fall short of what we long for.
Doug McMasters: We find that somewhere we have cracked the mirror.
Doug McMasters: We have bent the violin.
Doug McMasters: We have left the masterpiece unfinished.
Doug McMasters: We think, we create, we build, but our reason is misdirected, our creativity is twisted, our communities are fractured.
Doug McMasters: What remains are echoes of Eden.
Doug McMasters: Longings for what was lost, groanings for what we hope may come.
Doug McMasters: And so this is the remarkable thing.
Doug McMasters: These echoes are not meaningless, and they're not simply groanings, they're not random.
Doug McMasters: They're God's designation within us to put us into the place of having a driving force of yearning that will lead us not to be satisfied with the things as they are, but to reach for and to hope for and to long for something different and something better.
Doug McMasters: The ache is meant to be a witness and it's meant to be an invitation to us.
Doug McMasters: Don't be satisfied with life as it is.
Doug McMasters: So tonight we're gonna listen for those echoes.
Doug McMasters: We're gonna listen for the ways that creation and conscience and beauty and even our own longings point back to that world that God made and what we lived in and forward to the world that God is restoring.
Doug McMasters: We're gonna listen for the ways that the ache itself becomes a signpost, sometimes quiet, but always persistent and very honest, telling us that our story actually did begin in beauty and that God who made us has not walked away.
Doug McMasters: So let's listen to the story clearly.
Doug McMasters: And in order to hear the echoes, we first of all have to land in the place where those echoes come from.
Doug McMasters: We have to go back to Eden itself.
Doug McMasters: And we've done this several times in our series and the Imago Day series.
Doug McMasters: We've gone to these first couple chapters of the book of Genesis and we've traced those steps.
Doug McMasters: But let's revisit it again just briefly.
Doug McMasters: And I I want, for time's sake, simply to highlight two of the many different things that we could bring out of this.
Doug McMasters: Let's go back to Eden, chapter two of Genesis.
Doug McMasters: Here in Genesis chapter two, we see that the pace of creation slows.
Doug McMasters: Chapter one, God said and it was.
Doug McMasters: God said and it was.
Doug McMasters: Day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, day six, Genesis two slows the pace down.
Doug McMasters: And we're invited to linger.
Doug McMasters: We're invited not only to just reflect on the fact of human creation, humanity's creation before God, but also to feel it.
Doug McMasters: The Lord forms a man from the dust of the ground and breathes the very breath of life into him.
Doug McMasters: And what does he do with him?
Doug McMasters: He puts him in a garden.
Doug McMasters: Not a wasteland, not a wilderness, but a place of order and beauty and abundance.
Doug McMasters: And God says to him that he has caused every tree to grow that was pleasing in appearance and good for food.
Doug McMasters: And there in the garden, beauty and utility were matched together in perfect harmony.
Doug McMasters: It was a place where nothing was in competition.
Doug McMasters: And God places the man in that garden, as it tells us in this chapter, to work it and to watch over it.
Doug McMasters: And there, in those moments, work was not a burden but a joy.
Doug McMasters: It was an expression of rulership rightly expressed, wise, attentive, and fruitful stewardship.
Doug McMasters: The world responded to humanity's touch because humanity's touch reflected the Father's care.
Doug McMasters: Within this garden, however, we're told that there's something missing.
Doug McMasters: Even at these days of goodness, God declares that it's not good for man to be alone.
Doug McMasters: Now that sentence ought to stop us cold.
Doug McMasters: How not good?
Doug McMasters: Wait a second.
Doug McMasters: There's no sin, there's no fall, there's no degradation, there's no death.
Doug McMasters: Not good?
Doug McMasters: What's not good?
Doug McMasters: Well, in chapter one, God says, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's good.
Doug McMasters: Man being by himself?
Doug McMasters: Not good.
Doug McMasters: Not because the man was deficient in anything, but that the image of God was designed to be reflected in community of male and female.
Doug McMasters: Together displaying God's character, together displaying his ways, together reflecting and fulfilling his purposes.
Doug McMasters: You see, before the fall, companionship wasn't a remedy for loneliness as it is often yearned for in our day.
Doug McMasters: It was the completion of design.
Doug McMasters: Adam wasn't pining here, he wasn't wandering the garden feeling incomplete.
Doug McMasters: If I could only find a spouse, he was fulfilling his calling.
Doug McMasters: He was naming the animals, he was working the soil, he was walking with God.
Doug McMasters: But in all of that goodness, something was unfinished.
Doug McMasters: And so the man alone could not reflect the relational nature of the God who made him.
Doug McMasters: And so man could not image God as a solo portrait in the garden.
Doug McMasters: It needed to be a shared likeness.
Doug McMasters: And so God forms the woman, not from the dust, but from Adam's own side.
Doug McMasters: And doesn't just gather her from the dirt or simply put her together in the same way that he put Adam together.
Doug McMasters: It says that he shaped her with the word that in the Hebrew would speak of artistry and artisanship.
Doug McMasters: The language is intimate and intentional.
Doug McMasters: Eve is not taken from Adam's head to rule over him, nor taken from his feet to be trampled on by him, but taken from his side, close to his heart, equal in dignity, and sharing the same breath of life.
Doug McMasters: And when Adam sees her, he speaks poetry into the world for the very first time.
Doug McMasters: He looks at her and says, Wow, this is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.
Doug McMasters: She shall be called woman because she was taken from man.
Doug McMasters: The world that was already beautiful had in Adam's eyes just become even more beautiful.
Doug McMasters: The harmony of creation is now richer, fuller, and complete now that there's male and female in the image of God.
Doug McMasters: This is the first human community, the first covenant bond, the first picture of unity and diversity.
Doug McMasters: It's the image of God refracted through two lives intertwined together in perfect communion.
Doug McMasters: Together, they would think and discern and cultivate and protect and expand and multiply and worship.
Doug McMasters: Together, they would embody the relational fullness of the God who existed eternity, Father, Son, and Spirit, in eternal love and harmony.
Doug McMasters: Now notice what Genesis says about that.
Doug McMasters: The man and his wife were both naked and they were not ashamed.
Doug McMasters: This is not a statement about clothing or the lack of clothing necessarily.
Doug McMasters: It's a statement about the absence of fear, about the absence of hiding, of the absence of self-protection.
Doug McMasters: It is the world as it was meant to be, where you could be fully known and fully safe, where you could be fully seen and still fully loved.
Doug McMasters: This was companionship before the fall.
Doug McMasters: Mutual delight without any distortion, shared purpose without any competition, vulnerability without fear or shame, unity without any eraser of the person's identity, a difference without division.
Doug McMasters: This is the world we remember.
Doug McMasters: This is the relationship our souls ache to have.
Doug McMasters: This is the echo that reverberates through all of our longings for intimacy and every desire for friendship and every grief over a fractured relationship.
Doug McMasters: We're not imagining something that's never existed.
Doug McMasters: We're remembering something we were made for.
Doug McMasters: And that's why the echoes in the world today strike us so deeply.
Doug McMasters: We know, and we know instinctively, we know intuitively, we know deeply that this life is not how it was meant to be.
Doug McMasters: We understand it.
Doug McMasters: And our souls are reaching back to that world that God made, and we're longing forward for it one day to come back.
Doug McMasters: The world as it was.
Doug McMasters: But let's talk about these echoes because we need to speak about the world as it is.
Doug McMasters: And now we go from Genesis chapter 2 to Genesis chapter 4.
Doug McMasters: We turn just a just a page or two in our Bible, and the contrast is jarring.
Doug McMasters: The harmony of Eden still ringing in our ears.
Doug McMasters: And the first sound we hear outside the garden is dissonance.
Doug McMasters: The first family after Eden becomes the first reminder that the world has changed, and boy has it.
Doug McMasters: But Genesis 4 opens up with hope, doesn't it?
Doug McMasters: Eve gives birth to a son.
Doug McMasters: I've had a male child with the Lord's help.
Doug McMasters: What is that?
Doug McMasters: Gratitude?
Doug McMasters: Yes?
Doug McMasters: Even more, I think.
Doug McMasters: Expectation.
Doug McMasters: There's this faint hope that perhaps the promise of Genesis 3.15 is going to unfold quickly.
Doug McMasters: But the story doesn't move to restoration.
Doug McMasters: It moves to rivalry.
Doug McMasters: Cain and Abel, children of Adam and Eve, grow and bring their offerings to the Lord.
Doug McMasters: Abel's is accepted, and Cain's is not.
Doug McMasters: Scripture doesn't tell us everything we'd like to know about that situation, but it tells us everything we need to know about it.
Doug McMasters: Abel's offering reflects a heart aligned with God.
Doug McMasters: Cain's doesn't.
Doug McMasters: His heart is not aligned with God.
Doug McMasters: And instead of repentance, Cain turns inward.
Doug McMasters: Instead of humility, he turns toward envy, and instead of worship, he becomes violent.
Doug McMasters: And the Lord warns him sin is crouching at your door, and you must rule over it.
Doug McMasters: And there is a moment of mercy, a moment to invite him away from himself, a moment to remember Eden.
Doug McMasters: But he doesn't.
Doug McMasters: He rises up and kills his brother.
Doug McMasters: And here we see the first echo of Eden.
Doug McMasters: The relational breakdown.
Doug McMasters: In Eden, relationships marked by unity and joy and mutual delight, and outside of it, suspicion, rivalry, and competition, and bloodshed.
Doug McMasters: Brotherhood giving away to violence.
Doug McMasters: Worship becoming the very spot in which alienation grows.
Doug McMasters: Cain's envy isn't just a personal failure, and it's not just a family problem either.
Doug McMasters: It's symptomatic of a deeper fracture within all of us.
Doug McMasters: Because there's still that longing for fellowship there.
Doug McMasters: But the capacity to be able to live in that fellowship is broken.
Doug McMasters: We long for a connection, but we only find ourselves constantly going back to conflict.
Doug McMasters: We reach for harmony, find ourselves face to face with hostility.
Doug McMasters: We desire unity, but we end up creating division.
Doug McMasters: We feel it in our relationships strained marriages, fractured families, broken friendships, communities marked by mistrust, nation against nation.
Doug McMasters: Our souls remember a world.
Doug McMasters: When it wasn't like that.
Doug McMasters: When it was actually joyful to be together.
Doug McMasters: This is our story.
Doug McMasters: There's another echo of Eden.
Doug McMasters: In Genesis 4 to 11, and I just want to give you the span of those things.
Doug McMasters: You can look a little more deeply into chapter 4.
Doug McMasters: But humanity multiplies, the ache multiplies with it.
Doug McMasters: The fracture that begins with one family doesn't remain a private sorrow.
Doug McMasters: It becomes a public reality.
Doug McMasters: And what we see next in Scripture is very surprising, but also deeply revealing here.
Doug McMasters: The world outside of Eden is not fallen.
Doug McMasters: It doesn't stall there, though.
Doug McMasters: It grows, it organizes, it creates.
Doug McMasters: And as we go through Genesis 4 to 11, we see a world in motion, a world developing in culture and capability.
Doug McMasters: In chapter 4 in verse 20, we have Jebel becoming the father of those who dwell in tents and rave livestock.
Doug McMasters: In verse 21, Jubal becomes the father of all those who play the lyre and the pipe.
Doug McMasters: In verse 22, Tubalcane forges tools.
Doug McMasters: Cities are founded, and music is composed and technology is developing.
Doug McMasters: Human culture is taking shape.
Doug McMasters: And all of it reflecting in some way what God put into us.
Doug McMasters: This ability to tend this garden, to steward it, to develop it, to expand it.
Doug McMasters: But we're not expanding Eden.
Doug McMasters: We're expanding a self-centered culture.
Doug McMasters: We continue to think and design and to build.
Doug McMasters: We continue to form communities and to develop systems, but our capacity to reflect God in all of those things is gone.
Doug McMasters: Our cities are built, they become places of pride.
Doug McMasters: Music is composed, but we elevate ourselves in it.
Doug McMasters: Tools are forged, but they become instruments of harm instead of harvest.
Doug McMasters: Human progress continues, but it doesn't bring us renewal.
Doug McMasters: Our world continues to grow more and more sophisticated, but no more righteous.
Doug McMasters: Every achievement hints at our ingenuity and the capacities that God created us for.
Doug McMasters: And yet we misuse them.
Doug McMasters: And we end up lost in them.
Doug McMasters: And in this, we recognize the tension in our world.
Doug McMasters: We live in an age of extraordinary progress.
Doug McMasters: Scientific, technological, medical, artistic advance.
Doug McMasters: We can accomplish more, it seems, than any generation before us.
Doug McMasters: Yet none of us can make anything good.
Doug McMasters: None of us can heal the human heart.
Doug McMasters: None of it can restore what sin is fractured.
Doug McMasters: And Genesis 11 brings us to the arc of this.
Doug McMasters: Humanity gathered on the plain of Shinar, resolving to establish a name for themselves.
Doug McMasters: A deliberate attempt to reclaim the glory of humanity without God.
Doug McMasters: And the result is not unity or greatness, it's confusion and dispersion.
Doug McMasters: Babel then becomes the anti-Eden, in which we are left fractured and left separated instead of whole and together.
SPEAKER_02: And yet Pastor John, could you switch to the pulpit if possible?
SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
SPEAKER_02: The pulpit?
SPEAKER_02: Yes, please, thanks.
Doug McMasters: How's that?
Doug McMasters: Can you hear me?
Doug McMasters: Okay.
Doug McMasters: What did I say about technological advance?
Doug McMasters: All these things are reminders of what we were meant to be.
Doug McMasters: They're echoes of a world in which we flourished and we could fill it with things that would bring honor and glory to God.
Doug McMasters: In it, it shows an echo of Eden.
Doug McMasters: Because we really do want our creativity to be pure.
Doug McMasters: We want our communities to be whole.
Doug McMasters: We want our progress to reflect righteousness and not rebellion.
Doug McMasters: These are the words of every politician who stands up with a fresh face and says these things and will make it better until he has to be elected the next time.
Doug McMasters: It becomes the same old story.
Doug McMasters: Just like the Who song here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.
Doug McMasters: Won't get fooled again.
Doug McMasters: But we do.
Doug McMasters: We get fooled again.
Doug McMasters: History is filled with all of these attempts to try to find paradise without God.
Doug McMasters: And that brings us to our third echo.
Doug McMasters: And I know this is a difficult message for us to hear, but it's it's very real and visceral for us because it is our human experience.
Doug McMasters: We go to the book of Ecclesiastes in chapter 1, in verses 2 to 11.
Doug McMasters: As scriptures moved us through the early chapters of Genesis into the wisdom literature, the scope of our ache widens, and there we see life's futility and our longing for meaning.
Doug McMasters: The book of Ecclesiastes opens with the preacher speaking, who speaks from a vantage point of someone who is wealthy enough to do everything that he desired, who's lived long enough to see everything, and who has been able in his position to accomplish everything that he's desired.
Doug McMasters: And then, through all of that effort and through all of that exploration, to recognize that a world outside Eden carries a deep weariness about it.
Doug McMasters: But it's not a weariness of physical exhaustion, it is a tiredness of the soul.
Doug McMasters: The preacher in Ecclesiastes knows that life was meant to be more coherent, more satisfying, and more whole.
Doug McMasters: He looks in chapter one at the cycles of life.
Doug McMasters: He says, generations come, generations go.
Doug McMasters: The sun rises, the sun sets, the wind circles back on itself, the streams run to the sea, only to return again.
Doug McMasters: Human effort, it fills the day, but the sense of lasting gain is outside the reach of the finger.
Doug McMasters: The work is done, but we're not complete.
Doug McMasters: Pleasure is pursued, but we're not satisfied.
Doug McMasters: Wisdom is sought, but our questions still ache in our mind.
Doug McMasters: The world keeps moving and it doesn't stop at fulfillment.
Doug McMasters: What is he doing?
Doug McMasters: Is he just simply being cynical?
Doug McMasters: No, he's being honest.
Doug McMasters: He's being honest because this world is not what it was meant to be.
Doug McMasters: Ecclesiastes gives voice to the ache that rises when we sense the gap between our experience and our design.
Doug McMasters: Made for meaningful work, made for purposeful days, made for joy that endures, made for a world where time was a gift and not a burden.
Doug McMasters: But Ecclesiastes has within it a comment we'll look at in just a moment, in chapter 3 and verse 11.
Doug McMasters: That God has set eternity in a human heart.
Doug McMasters: And that single statement explains so much of what the preacher felt as he looked at and experienced the world around him.
Doug McMasters: This eternity set in his heart was a feature because it's an imprint of Eden on his heart.
Doug McMasters: A longing for permanence, a longing for purpose, a longing for joy.
Doug McMasters: And Ecclesiastes is wrestling with this tension between the longing for what is good and lasting and the frustration of not being able to find it and to secure it.
Doug McMasters: Don't you feel that?
Doug McMasters: I know I do.
Doug McMasters: To pursue things that matter and to find your accomplishments fade or don't fulfill, to seek experiences and pleasure or enjoyment to thrill you, but it doesn't last.
Doug McMasters: To invest in relationships and find they're still fragile and easily broken?
Doug McMasters: To make a sense of your days and find that time moves you past those moments too quickly.
Doug McMasters: These aren't just disappointments.
Doug McMasters: They're longings.
Doug McMasters: Because we were made for something better.
Doug McMasters: Eternity was set into our hearts.
Doug McMasters: This leads us to another echo of Eden back in Genesis in chapter six.
Doug McMasters: Because the world is not only confusing, it's also corrupt.
Doug McMasters: And in chapter six, we're given a sober picture of what the human heart is like outside of Eden.
Doug McMasters: The text tells us here that the Lord saw the wickedness of humanity and that every inclination of the thoughts of the hearts were only evil continually.
Doug McMasters: Wow, is that a comprehensive statement?
Doug McMasters: Listen to how piercing it is.
Doug McMasters: The wickedness of humanity, every inclination of the thoughts of the heart were only evil continually.
Doug McMasters: Down to the very, very deepest mark of who we are is this comprehensive description that all of our capacities that were once reflecting God's goodness are still present, but the direction has changed.
Doug McMasters: Our hearts that were made to love God are now turned to love of self.
Doug McMasters: The mind that was meant to make a discernment of truth and to welcome it now drifts to deception.
Doug McMasters: The will that was there to choose the good now gravitates to the wrong.
Doug McMasters: And the passage goes on to say that this grieved the Lord deeply.
Doug McMasters: The weight of grief of a creator who knows what we were meant to be, of a father who sees children harming himself, themselves, and one another.
Doug McMasters: Genesis 6 is not just meant to show us the fracture, though.
Doug McMasters: It's meant to mark for us why we don't feel right.
Doug McMasters: Because here we're told that we can desire and not produce, we can hunger and not be satisfied, we can long and not find fulfillment.
Doug McMasters: And this is not only in expressions of work and relationship and meaning, it's also in righteousness.
Doug McMasters: And so we can admire integrity and yet not practice it.
Doug McMasters: We can celebrate acts of courage or compassion because they resonate deep within us, but then we end up hurting our loved ones.
Doug McMasters: We grieve injustices because we know they violate the way things were meant to be.
Doug McMasters: We want to be patient, but we become impatient.
Doug McMasters: We want to be generous, but self-interest pulls us inward.
Doug McMasters: We want to be truthful, but fear complicates our words, and we shadow our lie, our deceive.
Doug McMasters: We want to be faithful, but distractions crowd out our fidelity.
Doug McMasters: We feel the moral tension between what we were made for and what we are.
Doug McMasters: We long for a world in which righteousness is natural and where goodness is home.
Doug McMasters: It's the imprint of Eden on our soul.
Doug McMasters: And that leads us to the fifth echo.
Doug McMasters: Not just an echo of relationships that are broken, and all the other ones that I've mentioned, but this one, the cosmic groaning and the hope of renewal that Romans chapter 8 talks about.
Doug McMasters: We mentioned this a little bit last week.
Doug McMasters: This this yearning reaches beyond the human heart, into the whole creation itself.
Doug McMasters: And when we reach Romans chapter 8, the ache is expanded into not only culture beyond the individuals, but it has become existential in the very creation itself.
Doug McMasters: The fracture that began in Eden extends to the world.
Doug McMasters: The ground that once yielded fruit is now resisting, creating thorns and briars.
Doug McMasters: The harmony that once marked our relationship to creation is now straining under disorder.
Doug McMasters: The beauty that remains is real, but nature is still red in tooth and claw.
Doug McMasters: And Paul describes creation there as groaning.
Doug McMasters: It's a striking image, isn't it?
Doug McMasters: It's a way of saying that the world knows that this isn't what it should be.
Doug McMasters: The very earth is saying, we want to be back to what we were supposed to be.
Doug McMasters: Longs for a day when the children of God will be revealed, when our renewal and its renewal will come.
Doug McMasters: When the frustration that the natural world has been subjected to, decay and instability and fragility will not be the final word, but wholeness and restoration will be.
Doug McMasters: And that yearning of creation is meant to resonate in our hearts so that we stay looking forward.
Doug McMasters: This language of groaning is not meant to discourage us, but to clarify for us that we need to be looking further yet.
Doug McMasters: And so Paul speaks about hope and anticipation of the creation, longing for a day of liberation, the renewal of God's promises, becoming the realities of eternity.
Doug McMasters: This hope that's not vague or sentimental, but rooted in the very resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, the beginning of the new creation, imprinting within us a longing for that day to come, and in Christ, and I'm getting ahead of myself, a security that it will happen.
Doug McMasters: And this leads us to our final echo, the most significant one, actually.
Doug McMasters: Humanity's reaching for God.
Doug McMasters: And we see this very clearly when Paul stands in Athens in the book of Acts in chapter 17.
Doug McMasters: And he's speaking to all the philosophers on the Areopagus, and he's describing something to them that's been true of every generation since we left Edom.
Doug McMasters: That humanity's been reaching.
Doug McMasters: We've been reaching for meaning, for goodness, for beauty, for justice, for permanence, no, for God Himself.
Doug McMasters: In Acts chapter 17, verse 26 and 27, he said that God has made every nation and determined their times and boundaries.
Doug McMasters: Listen, so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him.
Doug McMasters: This is not a statement about a few spiritually minded people, it's a statement about the human condition.
Doug McMasters: This reaching is not merely intellectual curiosity or religious instinct.
Doug McMasters: It's the expression of a longing that's been woven into the human heart.
Doug McMasters: When we don't understand his ways, we still feel his pull.
Doug McMasters: When we don't know God's name, we still feel his absence.
Doug McMasters: And when our worship is misdirected, the impulse of worship is still intact.
Doug McMasters: As Augustine said, My heart was made for you.
Doug McMasters: My heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.
Doug McMasters: And Paul here is acknowledging to the Athenians that they were religious in every way.
Doug McMasters: And he wasn't commending their idolatry, but recognizing the longing that was beneath it.
Doug McMasters: Their altars and their philosophies were attempts to make sense of this world that feels at the same time beautiful and broken, familiar and foreign.
Doug McMasters: And this longing for God is not something we acquire, it's something we have.
Doug McMasters: We know that we were made for fellowship with God, that we feel his absence.
Doug McMasters: And we try to paper it over with achievements or relationships or pleasure or pursuits of various kinds, but they don't satisfy that deeper desire.
Doug McMasters: They quiet us for a moment, perhaps, but they don't resolve the problem.
Doug McMasters: The longing is there because it's not a longing for something, it's a longing for someone, for God.
Doug McMasters: And all the echoes gather here.
Doug McMasters: The ache in our relationships, the frustration in our culture, the weariness of our work, the tension of our moral lives, the groaning of creation itself, they all point in this one direction that we were made for God.
Doug McMasters: And we're only going to find our fulfillment when we are back into the relationship that God designed for us to have with Him.
Doug McMasters: Nothing else can satisfy the longing heart.
Doug McMasters: Paul says here, in him we live and move and have our very being.
Doug McMasters: That our existence is tied to him, our purpose is tied to him, and our hope is tied to God.
Doug McMasters: And so he shows us in Acts 17 that this longing is universal.
Doug McMasters: It cuts across cultures and languages and generations, it's present in all the questions that people ask, and all the fears people carry, and all the hopes people nurture, and all the disappointments people endure.
Doug McMasters: It's present in those moments of quiet reflection.
Doug McMasters: It's present in the restless searching that marks our life.
Doug McMasters: And I want to finish with this because in the weeks to come, we're going to answer this one and last week's.
Doug McMasters: Is that these echoes matter?
Doug McMasters: Yes, they're uncomfortable, and yes, they're difficult, and yes, they color every one of our days, but they're purposeful.
Doug McMasters: Because we were not meant to be satisfied here as it is.
Doug McMasters: We're not meant to be just left in what is just happening in the moment.
Doug McMasters: They're meant to.
Doug McMasters: Lead us to long for the one that we should be satisfied in.
Doug McMasters: Because the ache for fellowship finds its answer in the one who is willing to call sinners his children and friends.
Doug McMasters: The ache for a better world finds its answer in the kingdom that Christ brings.
Doug McMasters: The ache for meaning finds its answer in the purpose that God gives us.
Doug McMasters: The ache for righteousness finds its answer in God's grace and in his transforming power.
Doug McMasters: And the ache for renewal finds its answer in the hope of the resurrection.
Doug McMasters: The ache is meaningful, the echo is purposeful, so that we might find our answer in the only place it can be found, and that is in God through our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Doug McMasters: Because Jesus doesn't silence the echoes, he fulfills them.
Doug McMasters: He doesn't erase the longings, he completes them.
Doug McMasters: And he doesn't dismiss the aches, he heals them.
Doug McMasters: Because the story that began in Eden doesn't end in exile.
Doug McMasters: It moves through the aches, it moves through the longings, it moves through the groanings, and it arrives for those in Christ where He will make all things new.
Doug McMasters: Because the God we reach for is a God who in mercy and love and grace reaches to us.
Doug McMasters: The one whose image we bear is the one who's come to restore the image in us.
Doug McMasters: This ache is not the end of our story.
Doug McMasters: It's simply an invitation to find the real story in his story.
Doug McMasters: Let's pray together.
Doug McMasters: Move our hearts, we pray, to find all that we ache for in you.
Doug McMasters: We pray, Father, that these truths will cause us to loosen our grip on the things that we cling to to find meaning in that reside outside of your person.
Doug McMasters: To hold on to relationships and work and culture and meaning, and even the earth itself with a looser grip, and to cling to you with a tighter one, and to look to you with an eye of hope and a sense of anticipation, just as the world itself has.
Doug McMasters: This creation that has birth pains, longing for the coming day.
Doug McMasters: Father, we pray that we would find our satisfaction in that place, that only satisfaction can be found in you through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Doug McMasters: And we pray this in his name.
Doug McMasters: Amen.