To close out today's message, go listen to "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong.

This second message in a yearlong series through the biblical story invites us back to Genesis 1 not as a science debate or a doctrinal proof text, but as a campfire story told to exhausted people in a Middle Eastern desert who had spent their whole lives surrounded by violent, capricious gods. Against that backdrop, the words land differently. One God. One voice. And with each word spoken, something appears from nothing. Light. Sky. Water. Land. Life. And at the end of every day, the same verdict: it is good. On day six, after creating humans in his image, the verdict upgrades. It is very good.

The creation story isn't an argument to win. It's an invitation into wonder. The fight about how and when sucks the life right out of it. But the story itself, told the way a storyteller tells it around a fire, instills hope. God spoke into formless darkness and chaos and said, let there be light. He sits back on day seven and inhabits the temple he built. And the whole trajectory of everything that follows, including the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, is the story of God refusing to let the chaos have the final word.