Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity
October 25th,
Year of Our + Lord 2026
Our Redeemer and Our Savior’s Lutheran Churches
Custer
and Hill City, South Dakota
Staying
Safe on the Open Ocean
You can find the audio of this sermon HERE.
Eternal
Father, strong to save, Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, For those in peril on the sea!
I am not a sailor. But I am in peril on the sea! And so are you. The Church of Christ has talked about herself
as an ocean-going ship for almost two-thousand years. Ship stories and metaphors are not as common in
the Bible as courtroom scenes teaching about the justification of sinners, or
shepherd and sheep metaphors, or God as husband to His Bride, which is collectively
all His people. Still, there are some
important ship stories, like when the entire body of believers of the whole
world was on one boat, namely Noah and his family, eight in all, escaping through
the waters of the flood in the Ark. As
we focus on our Old Testament reading this morning, the very beginning of the
Bible, there is a lot of water, and the Spirit of God hovering over the water,
and God forming the waters on the earth into the oceans, allowing dry land to
appear. So we will take advantage of the
image of the Church as a ship sailing through the ocean to help us dig into the
Creation account, and its importance for our faith today.
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, For
those in peril on the sea! Which is all of us. So we need to learn how we can sail
confidently in our little boat through the deep and threatening sea. While not greater than the victory and love
of Christ, dangers do surround the Church on every side, and we cannot take
them lightly. But to take them
seriously, we need to know what the dangers are.
AiG believes that a Christian faith not
built on the foundation of Genesis is weak, and likely to falter. They are right. Tragically, starting in the 1700s, voices
within the Church argued that we need to set aside Genesis as a true account of
our origins. After all, science was
proving the Bible wrong, they claimed. Most
of the early Genesis skeptics in the Church professed to still believe in Jesus
Christ as God and Savior, they just wanted to untether His Good News from the
embarrassing (to them) claims of Moses about how things came to be.
I assume that many of these teachers were
sincere, but the reality is they were tools of Satan. If we set aside Moses’s Creation account, the
whole Bible starts to fall apart. Jesus
in the Gospels assumes the truth of Genesis, and drew directly upon it in many
of His sermons. We can try to have Christian
faith without Genesis, but this makes Jesus to be a fool, ignorant or
untruthful. And sooner or later the same
skeptical approach used on the books of Moses will lead us to discard much of
the rest of Scripture, most importantly the Gospel part, about real forgiveness
won for us by a real Man, who died but rose again, and was revealed to also be
God Himself. This loss of God’s Word and
the Gospel is the sad history we have seen come to its natural terminus in so
many American churches.
So I thank God for AiG and the many other faithful voices, many from our own Synod, who robustly defend the accuracy of Moses, and show how his books connects to reality, and especially to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Now, there are some problematic things about AiG’s teaching, especially in regard to the Ark. We’ll come back to that.
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, For
those in peril on the sea! Do you ever feel like the ship of your faith
is sinking, or at least taking on a lot of water, when you hear the media and
scientists confidently assert that the universe is 3.5 billion years old, or
maybe or 5 billion, or 13 billion, the number always seem to grow. They say we know life came through random evolution,
no Creator required. They declare that the
Bible is simply wrong. As we sail
through our hostile scientific world, Christians may feel particularly
threatened by the flood of voices of the Academy, which ridicule our faith, and
seem so powerful. How can a Christian
keep his head above water?
If you feel this way, I have good news for
you today. Satan prowls around and roars
like a lion, seeking souls to devour.
But the truth is, he a toothless cat, defanged by Christ. Stay close to Jesus, and the Devil cannot lay
a finger on you. In a similar way, the
voices of Atheistic Scientific Materialism, which seem so dominant, actually
face some fundamental problems, which more and more are being discussed
publicly. There are many examples to
choose from, but this sermon is not so much about debunking evolution and scientific
materialism. But I’ll touch on one of
the best examples: the fact that every living cell carries in it a tremendously
complicated encoding machine, made of protein, called DNA.
There is no life without this code, and DNA
is a remarkably complex language, sophisticated far beyond computer code. So, where did the first DNA come from, if
life is a product of random chance?
Every other bit of code or language in the world tells us one indisputable
thing: there is a always a mind behind language and code. So, who is behind DNA, without which there
can be no life?
We of course know it is God. Indeed, our Gospel hints at it, when John
calls the Son of God the “Word.” Logos
is the Greek word John used, which does mean Word, and also a lot more than just
Word. Logos also means reason,
intelligence, the truth that lies behind everything. The fact that hidden in every living cell is a
living language code fits very well with the Son of God being the Word, the
Logos, because all things were created through Him, all life comes from Him.
So, we don’t have to be afraid of anti-Creation
scientists. Their talk gets louder and
louder, precisely because the ground of truth is shifting under their feet and
threatening to knock them over. Do not
fear them, they cannot defeat the Word of God.
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, For
those in peril on the sea! Genesis 1 and 2 do a lot more than describe
the Creation. Already in the first words
of the Bible, God is revealing His character, that He is the Father to whom we
can cry out with confidence. God created
the universe, and us, because He is love. His will is to create, to make more, to make
creatures that reflect His nature and character, so that He can love those
creatures. And, Genesis 1 and 2 teach us
that God’s favorite creature is us. He
created the heavens and the earth for us, and put the chaotic beginning into
the perfect order, for us. He did this so
that we could be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and take care of
it.
Now, of course, we know that we blew our side of that arrangement, very early on. But our failure, human sin, did not change God’s character nor His desire for a holy people to live with Him forever. God wants to create and bless and enjoy humanity, and that will never change. This is also why He wants to rescue and save His favorite creatures. Genesis 1 reveals this Good News about the Lord, and the rest of the Bible reveals how God achieved His goal.
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, For
those in peril on the sea! It is good and necessary to know the creating
and loving character of God, that He is our loving Father. Because there is a sea of doubt out there
about who God truly is. Which is another
ploy of Satan, because he understands that to truly know God is to be united
with Him; to truly know God is to be saved.
So we want to know all that we can, all that the Bible reveals, about Who
God is.
Eternal Father. Genesis 1 and 2 do not refer to God as Father,
nor do they specifically declare that God is unchanging. But they do describe the unchangeable Eternal
Father as they describe our Creator God.
The rest of the Bible, starting in Deuteronomy, does specifically refer
to God as Father, and also makes it very clear that He never changes. Jesus of course, is the One who truly reveals
God the Father to us.
With this in mind, here is a little
question: When does one become a father?
When is it legitimate for me, a man, to say, “I am a father?” When I have a son or daughter, of course. Without a child, I may want to be a father. I might have a fatherly character. But without making a baby with my wife, I am
not a father.
Second question: How long has our unchanging God been a Father? Well, He is the unchanging, eternal Father,
right? What does this imply about the
Son? Also eternal. If there was a point in eternity when God was
not Father, then there would have had to be a change in God. Which the Bible denies. There has never been a when, when the Father
and Son were not together, and the same is true for the Holy Spirit.
Do we see this in Genesis 1 and 2? Not in so many words, but there are a lot of
clues. First of all, God creates, and
the Spirit of God hovers over the face of the waters. And when God declared His intention to make
man, what does He say? Let us make
man in our image, in our likeness.
Who is God talking to?
Interesting, huh? The rest of the
Bible reveals that this sentence is a conversation within the Godhead, words
between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Genesis 1 is not where we go in Scripture to
prove that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, One true God, who is also three
distinct persons, the mystery of the Holy Trinity. But we can see some of the outline already. Which makes sense, because God is
unchanging.
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, For
those in peril on the sea! God hears His peoples’ cries. The prophet
Jonah, thrown overboard from a boat and swallowed by a great fish, prayed to
God, and was delivered. The Disciples,
theiry boat caught in a storm, were sinking on the Sea of Galilee. They woke Jesus with their cries: Lord,
save us! And, even before we knew to
cry out, even before He created us, the Eternal Father had decided to send His
only-begotten Son to rescue the rebellious sinners who would ruin His good
creation. (These rebellious sinners are us,
and every other descendant of Adam.)
John in the prologue to his Gospel makes the crucial connection for us between Creation and Redemption. Echoing the language of Genesis 1, “In the beginning,” John declares that the only begotten Son, the Word, is God, and was at the Creation, His Father’s master workman. This is God’s character, His desire, His great work, to create and bless, and also to save. We finally understand the God of Creation by seeing what He did on the Cross.
All the blame was and is ours, all the mercy
and all the work is God’s. He was in
the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. 11 He
came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. 12 But
as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God,
to those who believe in His name: 13 who were born, not
of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
God did it all in the Creation, the man did
nothing except name some animals, and be blessed. God does it all in Salvation, too. God makes us children, His children, reborn,
through faith. Which is especially the
gift of Holy Baptism, which the Apostle Peter compares to Noah and His family
being saved through water in the Ark. Baptism, Peter declares, corresponds to Noah’s
story: Baptism now saves you, like Noah
and family were saved in the Ark, only better.
For Baptism delivers eternal rescue.
This passage from Peter is the major source of the Church’s habit of
referring to herself as a boat or ship.
This is why the room you are sitting in is traditionally called the “nave,”
as in navy, or naval, like a ship.
And so we come to my biggest concern with our friends at AiG. We toured the Ark Encounter a few years ago on a Higher Things trip. It was great; you should go. But there was one big omission. I crawled all over the replica of Noah’s Ark that they built, and looked at hundreds of displays. Lots of great stuff. But no mention whatsoever of what Peter says about the Ark and Baptism. Which is really too bad. Because Baptism is God’s means of delivering Christ’s forgiveness to sinners today. By Baptism God brings sinners onboard the Ark which is His Church.
We
need to maintain the historicity of Genesis, and keep God as our miraculous,
all-powerful Creator. But believing in
the Creation does not save us. Only
faith in the blood-bought forgiveness of Jesus can save us. And God chooses to deliver that forgiveness
to sinners today through the washing of water with the Word.
Our Creating and Saving God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, continues to come to save today. This is Who He is, this is His Nature, this is His great joy. Rest in His joy, which is also your peace, the peace which passes all understanding, and keeps your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, unto eternal life, Amen.
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