Genesis 1:31-2:3

The Untitled, Open-Ended Study Bible

Feb. 8, 2026

Rev. David Collins

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Introductory Remarks

Before we get started today, I just want to say how proud I am of our little community here. There’s so much to feel discouraged about, but not here. I look around this room and I see the kind of world that I want to see everywhere…people who are taking responsibility for problems that aren’t their fault, and are determined to be a part of a better tomorrow.

I’m especially proud of our upcoming Anti-Racism study led by elder Michelle and our Religious Trauma support group led by two of our new members, Amy and Tammy and elder Christina.

It’s so tempting to just rage against all the ugliness in the world, and don’t get me wrong, there is a time and place for that. But our greater effort must be on repair. Especially when it comes to the broken places in the world that many of us who are white and straight haven’t had to endure ourselves, and may have benefited from along the way.

Which is why we also have to keep calling out the racism we keep hearing and seeing from Donald Trump, which this week reached a new low. But let’s also not pretend that he is some kind of outlier.

Granted, it does make it more shameful to have it come directly from the Oval Office, but it’s also healthier than pretending that racism is some foreign body in our culture. It is part of our culture. And until we see that truth, we can’t do anything helpful about it.

The policies are more racist than the picture. And the policies exist to serve the powerful.

Now, I eagerly await the day when the powerful are cast down from their thrones just like Mary prophesied, and maybe the other revelations this week will be a part of that. But that’s something to watch and wait and pray for.

But, that’s not why we came to church today, is it?

We came to engage with the word of God, to love each other, and do what we can to love all our neighbors, even the ones we need to forgive first.

Getting Into It

We’re on week six of The Untitled, Open-Ended Study Bible, and today we get out of the first chapter of Genesis! This is going to take a while, isn't it? But it’s worth it, because not only is there a lot of repair to do in our world, there is a lot of repair to do in our understanding of the Bible.

The wrong belief we’re going to look at today is one that comes up again and again. It’s an idea that’s pretty pervasive…something people bring with them to the Bible, not something they actually find there. But when you bring a strongly held belief to the text, you can almost always find the confirmation you’re looking for. The Bible is big enough, complex enough, and human enough for that. And part of the work before us is learning to tell the difference between what the text is really saying and what we’re determined to hear.

The Universe is Trying to Tell Me Something

You ever notice how people say things like, “The universe is trying to tell me something,” Well, not to be a wet blanket, but no. It’s not. The universe doesn’t care about you. God does. And God is not the universe.

The universe is enormous and indifferent. It’s more like that watery chaos that God tamed than anything else. Stars explode. One day the sun will burn out and take everything it ever warmed with it, and the universe will not feel bad about that.

Now, I get that if you say things like “Thank you Universe!”, you’re probably just trying to not sound like a religious nut, but here’s where that language starts to matter.

You see, the belief we’re going to look at today is the idea that “everything that happens in the world is the will of God”. If it happened, then God must have signed off on it. A lot of us were taught this, sometimes explicitly, sometimes just by osmosis.

“Everything that happens is the will of God”?

And to be fair, people usually mean "everything that happens (that I happen to like) is the will of God".

And I get why it sticks. It can keep the universe from feeling chaotic.

But the problem is that the universe is chaotic. Things break. People suffer for no reason.

And if everything is God’s will, then nothing is actually wrong. Injustice becomes inevitable. Tragedy becomes instructional. And the incredibly important work of naming, resisting, and repairing what is broken starts to look unnecessary…or even faithless.

I’ll bet you’ve noticed this belief in other people, even if they’ve never put it into words. It tends to show up in faith that hasn’t been examined very carefully. It’s convenient. It keeps you from having to wrestle, or question, or take responsibility. Because if everything is already God’s will, then you never have to ask what you’re supposed to do about the suffering in front of you. And that kind of faith can feel secure…right up until the suffering is no longer something that is happening to other people. Then it’s a crisis.

You see, a lot of us were taught that the Bible is absolute truth…and when that happens, the Bible stops being the primary conversation partner. Instead, it gets filed inside a bigger mental folder labeled “Absolute Truth.” And everything else we’re taught to treat as unquestionable gets dropped in there alongside it.

One of the earliest things that goes into that folder is a philosophical idea about God we inherit before we ever read the Bible carefully…the so-called omnis. Omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. All-knowing, all-powerful, all-seeing. And those ideas may or may not tell us something true…but they are not the story the Bible actually tells about God. They come from Greek philosophy. They sound a lot more like Star Wars than Genesis. And if we’re serious about letting the Bible shape our faith, we’re going to have to notice when we’ve confused a philosophical framework for a biblical one. We’ll have time to unpack that as we go…but we need to name it now, so we know what we’re building on.

You see, the God we meet in scripture is not some vague ground of being, or the unmoved mover. God really isn’t the universe itself. And we see that almost immediately when we read Genesis carefully.

Yes, Genesis opens with God creating by speaking…and that does tell us something about God’s power. When God speaks, reality responds.

But it could have just given us a single sentence…“God willed the universe into existence.” And it doesn’t. Because Genesis isn’t trying to explain the nature of reality as much as it’s trying to show us the nature of God.

The Nature of God

This is a God who speaks and blesses. A God who names and sees. And yes, a God who makes and creates and separates. But once we move out of the opening chapters of Genesis, something shifts. God still acts, of course…but far more often, God speaks. God addresses people. God calls, and warns, and invites. God commands and promises. That tells us that God’s primary way of being present in the world isn’t through constant intervention, but through the response of his people.

And that’s a big part of God’s final verdict on the whole of creation.

Genesis 1:31 God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.

Very good doesn’t mean perfect. And it sure doesn’t mean a world that only works if God is constantly stepping in to adjust it. It means a world that can carry responsibility. A world where God speaks and expects a response. A world where freedom is part of the goodness, not a flaw in the design. This isn’t a hands-off God…but it’s not a micromanaging one either.

The goodness here includes trust and risk.

God doesn’t create a fixed world that’s sealed off from possibility. God creates a world where his creation can respond or not…where choices have far reaching consequences. And that kind of goodness always carries risk. Not because God is careless, but because God believes in us.

Genesis 1:31-2:1 And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all their multitude.

And the word finished here gives too strong a sense of it being complete. Finished is one of those really common words in Hebrew that means lots of different things depending on context. The word can also mean “was prepared” or “that part’s done.” (Check!) It’s a summary sentence that pictures God standing back, hands on hips, paint all over his jeans, having placed the final star in the sky and nodding at it all approvingly.

And I can say that with all confidence because of what God does next.

God rests.

And that’s not a footnote. That’s the climax.

God stops.

Genesis 2:2-3 On the sixth day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.

God doesn’t stop because he’s tired, or because creation is perfect. God rests… for more reasons than we have time to unpack, so let’s start with just a few.

First, this is just who God is.

This is what God is like.

God isn’t some frantic tinkerer, anxiously plugging all the leaks. God rests because God trusts his own work and knows it will hold up. And God doesn’t just make either. God sees and names. God blesses. And most of all, God speaks. God invites people and even things to respond and they do. Creation is participatory. God doesn’t just do it all on God’s own. The creation itself has to play along.

And that’s the second reason God rests. God rests because rest matters.

Rest Matters

We know that in our bodies, even when we refuse to admit it. Everything living needs rest to survive, let alone flourish. Without it, things don’t just get tired…they start to break.

But, you can’t make someone rest and have it mean anything. You can order people to stop working, but that’s not the same thing. Real rest has to be received. It has to be trusted.

Have you ever tried to make a child take a nap who absolutely did not want to? Holding them down doesn’t work. I’ve tried. All you can do is talk about how important it is, and create a restful environment and trust them with the rest.

And that’s what God is doing here. God rests, not as a command, but as an example. God rests because God wants us to rest. And by us, I mean all of us. Everyone.

Rest is not a reward for the worthy.

The law will get very specific when we get to it about how God wants everyone and every thing to rest. And you can hear the resistance in that, especially if you keep in mind the context of the exile in Babylon.

In a world that never stops producing, never stops extracting, never stops demanding more, Sabbath says no. No to the idea that our worth comes from our output. No to the belief that everything falls apart if we stop pushing. No to the belief that rest must be earned.

You could even say Sabbath is like a weekly strike.

Sabbath is political whether we want it to be or not. It always has been.

It draws a line against any system that depends on people being endlessly available, endlessly productive, endlessly expendable. It limits accumulation. It interrupts exploitation. It insists that people, animals, and even the land itself are more than tools for profit.

Rest, in the Bible, is never just personal self-care. It’s a declaration about what kind of world God wants…and what kind of world God refuses.

But it is self-care too. Especially for those who live with constant anxiety. Sabbath is God saying you don’t have to hold everything together. You don’t have to stay alert at all times. You don’t have to earn your right to breathe. Rest becomes a way of handing the world back to God, at least for a while, and letting your nervous system remember that you are not alone, and you are not in charge of everything.

For anxious people, Sabbath isn’t a luxury. It’s grace. It’s permission to stop rehearsing worst-case scenarios, and unclench your jaw. Permission to trust that the world, and your family, and your job, will still be here when you get back.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but I know someone does…

You need to rest.

You need to let go. And not in the way that you’ve been doing, where you just go go go until you can’t and you collapse in a heap. That’s not the way that God rests here.

God rests without distraction, without panic, without fear. And that’s the rest that’s offered to us.

And that brings us right back to the belief we started with…the idea that if something exists, if something happens, then it must be the will of God. Because Sabbath plainly refuses that logic.

God does not bless everything that happens. God blesses rest…a pause in the way the world normally runs. Which already tells us something important…the way things are is not automatically the way God wants them to be.


I mean, if the way things are is the will of God, then why does God keep asking us to do things that only we can do?


Why call people to justice?


Why command care for the vulnerable?


God doesn’t ask us to participate because everything is already settled. God asks because it isn’t.

The world is good, but unfinished.

Creation is participatory.

And some things require a human response.

Sabbath brings that to light. By stopping, God draws a line between what exists and what is good. Between what the world demands and what God desires. And in that pause, God invites us not to explain the world away as God’s will, but to take responsibility for how we live in it.

That’s the rest God models.
That’s the trust God shows.


And that’s the invitation we’re given…not to accept everything as it is, but to rest long enough to remember who we are, and what we’re called to do.