What was God doing before the Creation of the World?
For Meditation (Corey Widmer)
This Sunday we are starting a new sermon series for this summer called “Let the Little Questions Come to Me.” This series was inspired by a wonderful podcast from our friend Kaitlyn Schiess called Curiously Kaitlyn, in which Kaitlyn takes a theological question asked by a child and then invites a theologian on to the show to discuss it with her. We wondered, could we glean some questions from our kids at Third and build a sermon series around them?
We solicited questions from our children and received some amazing responses! We received over 75 questions from our children about everything from heaven to the creation to Jesus to the future state of the world. We have taken 10 questions to look at this summer and explore them in our time together in Sunday worship. I think you'll find that our kids are perhaps the best theologians we have, because they aren't afraid to be curious and they are willing to ask deep and profound questions that sometimes big people feel like we are already supposed to know 😉.
This weeks question is “What was God doing before the creation of the world?” It kind of makes our heads hurt to think about God sitting around for all eternity before the world came into being. Was God bored? Lonely? Did he create the world because he was tired of the infinite silence? While the Bible doesn't give too many answers about this, we get some incredible clues, even from the very words of Jesus—that before the creation of the world, there was love. Our God is not a lonely God, but a God of eternal love, in which the Father and Son and Spirit give themselves over to one another in an eternal dance of love. We’ll explore what that means and what the implications are for our life today.
As you prepare for worship, consider:
Read John 17:24-26 and John 4:13-16, our two Scripture texts for today. How might these texts help us answer the question, What was God doing before the Creation of the World?
How have you imagined God in eternity past? How might your picture of God shift when you think of Him as a community of love?
What difference does it make to your faith if you truly believe God is love—and not just loving?
What is one way you can response to God’s invitation to enter the dance, both personally and communally?
John 17:24–26
“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.
“Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”
1 John 4:13–16
This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.