The good news of Creation is that we have a Creator, who makes everything and everyone with inherent dignity, worth and purpose.

The Bible opens with the news that God has made all there is: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). While the Bible doesn’t say exactly when or how God made all things, it does answer the more important questions of who and why. Who made us, and why? Who are we, and why are we here? The good news we should celebrate is that we have a Creator, who creates with purpose. We come from somewhere and someone. The opening verses of the Bible hint at, and later explicitly confirm, that this God of creation is one God, who eternally exists in three persons: the Father, the Son and the Spirit. He is the God of shalom, which means peace, flourishing, and wholeness. While this doctrine of the Trinity contains mystery, it is not only mystery. The Trinity means that God always exists in relationship. He not only loves, but he is love (1 John 4:16).

Your part in the story:

The Trinity means that God is eternally in relationship and is complete in every respect. Thus, he made us and everything else not out of some deficiency in himself, but out of overflowing love. And when God created humanity in his image (Gen. 1:27), God made us like him to a degree. Love became part of our original design. Being made in God’s image means we have inherent dignity, purpose and worth. Regardless of your circumstances, ethnicity or gender. Regardless of what others think about you. Regardless of what you do, or don’t do. We are made to experience wholeness, where we are connected to God, others, ourselves and creation. In a word, we are made for flourishing.

God could have left us there, and he would have been perfectly just to do so. But he didn’t. Hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, God promised to send a Savior who would be “pierced for our transgressions . . . and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isa. 53:5–6). God the Father sent his own Son to become a man, taking on our humanity and dying on a cross for our sins. And so now we can stand before God, having been declared innocent because Jesus freely paid our penalty for us. But that’s only half the story. In the great exchange that took place at the cross, the goodness of Jesus’ life is also credited to us. And now when God the Father looks at us in Christ, he sees us with the full affection he has for God the Son. The Apostle Paul wrote about this exchange in a letter to the early Church: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor. 5:21). In Christ, we have been redeemed. We have been bought back. True and lasting shalom is possible again.

Your part in the story:

Nothing in us caused God to do this for us. It is “by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works.” (Eph. 2:8–9). That means we don’t trust in our religiosity, our promises to be better, or even our sorrow for sin. Our faith, or trust, is in Christ alone, who gave his life freely, as a gift. We may be tempted to dismiss this good news as “too good to be true,” but remember it is in God’s nature to love: the infinite love of God overflows. So while we can’t earn this gift, we can accept it, in what could be called the ABCs of the gospel:

• Admit your need for forgiveness.

• Believe that Christ died for your sins, and not just sins in general.

• Commit your life to Christ, by seeking to put him in the center of all you are.