In the ancient Near East people were created as slaves to the gods. The world was created by the gods for the gods, and people met the needs of the gods.

But our God is a God of grace. If we desire to be like him, we need to go beyond being people who are saved by grace to be people who are characterized by grace.

The Bible considers it much more important to say that God has made everything work rather than being content to say that God made the physical stuff.

The Bible is not a book of rules. The Bible reveals the God whom we serve, and we serve him gladly.

We must be cautious that as we accept by faith that nothing is too hard for God, we do not begin to dictate to him which hard thing he must do. He tends to have things in mind that go far beyond what we are able to ask or even think.

It is not unusual for the question to be raised, “Is the Sabbath a law that we Christians have to keep?” The answer is that if we have to be reminded, commanded, or coerced to observe it, it ceases to serve its function. The Sabbath is not the sort of thing that should have to be regulated by rules. It is the way we acknowledge that God is on the throne, that this world is his world, that our time is his gift to us.

Our world does not reduce God by distributing his power to other deities. Rather, we reduce God by making him a figurehead. We too often portray him as standing back from a world that runs on its own. We banish him to the hidden corners of our lives while we amble through life, pursuing our own ambitious goals driven by narcissism, hedonism, and materialism and refusing to allow God to bridle our self-sufficiency.

The friends believe that Job is on trial – the defendant in a criminal case – and that he has been found guilty. But this is a backward trial. In their assessment, the judge has passed down the verdict, and now they, as the jury, need to try the case and find the evidence to uphold the verdict. To this end, Job is intensely cross-examined.

As we begin our study of Genesis 1 then, we must be aware of the danger that lurks when we impose our own cultural ideas on the text without thinking. The Bible's message must not be subjected to cultural imperialism. Its message transcends the culture in which it originated, but the form in which the message was imbedded was fully permeated by the ancient culture. This was God's design and we ignore it at our peril.

The most central truth to the creation account is that this world is a place for God's presence.