Rest In God's Power Series

Shawne B. from Warsaw, Indiana, was talking to her son about all the wonderful things God had made. She would ask him questions like, “Who made the sun?” and “Who made the rain?”

Then, one evening, she looked at the toys scattered on the floor and asked, “Who made this mess?”

After thinking for a bit, her son said, “God did!” (Shawne B., Warsaw, Indiana, “Life in Our House,” Christian Parenting Today, March/April 2000; www.PreachingToday.com)

Our nation is in a mess today, but you can be sure: God did not make this mess.

3,500 years ago, the nation of Israel was in a mess too. God had rescued them from Egypt. He led them through the Red Sea and gave them His law. Then He led them through the wilderness right up to the Promised Land, but Israel refused to go in. They refused to believe that God was strong enough to overcome the giants and walled cities in the land, so they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, where 50,000 people died every year—that’s over 100 people every day.

Then a new generation approached the Promised Land again. That’s when Moses, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote the first book of the Bible, the book of Genesis. He writes to encourage the nation that their God is able to deliver them out of their mess into the Promised Land. His words encouraged them to move forward into a promising, new day, and they can encourage you to do the same. If you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to Genesis 1, Genesis 1, where we see God bringing order out of chaos.

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning, God [Elohim, the Mighty One] created the heavens and the earth.

First, God created time—In the beginning. Before this, there was no time, for God is outside of time. So God created time.

Then He created space. He created the heavens—not the heavens of outer space, but the space between objects, the space between you and me, even the space between the protons and electrons in an atom. Before creation, there was only God, nothing else. So, in order to make things, God had to create the space in which to put those things. First, God created time. Then He created space.

Then He created matter. In the beginning, God created the heavens AND THE EARTH. That’s the stuff of the universe— the atomic particles placed in a space-time continuum.

Genesis 1:1 is the most scientific statement in all of ancient literature, especially when you consider what the ancients believed. In Moses’ day, they believed that Marduk, the strong man of the gods, accompanied by the four winds, pursued Tiamat, a goddess. Tiamat opened her mouth, intending to devour him, but Marduk unleashed the four winds, which entered her mouth and blew her up like a balloon. Then, Marduk, using his sword, sliced her into two halves like a grapefruit. With the upper half, he created the dome of the heavens; and with the lower half, he created the earth (John H. Tullock, ‘The Old Testament Story, 5th ed., p.38).

As a young man, that’s what Moses’ teachers taught him as the accepted theory of origins in his day. Yet, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Moses writes, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

Today, teachers teach their students that the universe started off as some highly compressed mass. Then there was an explosion; and out of that explosion, billions of years later, we have the universe as we see it today. That’s like saying an explosion in a junkyard could eventually produce a Boeing 747 after a million years, or so.

I think it would be easier to believe that Marduk cut Tiamat in half to create the universe. It takes a tremendous amount of faith to believe either theory. I prefer to believe the simple, scientific statement in the Bible: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

GOD MADE EVERYTHING OUT OF NOTHING.

God created all things without anything to start with.

First, God created the building blocks of the universe—time, space, and matter—which originally existed in a shapeless, empty mass of free-floating atoms.

Genesis1:2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters (ESV).

God created the stuff of the universe. The Holy Spirit energized it. Then God formed and filled his creation. He shaped it, then packed it with great stuff. In the first three days, God made the forms, creating light and darkness in verse 3-5, water and sky in verses 6-8, and land and plants in verse 9-13. In the first three days, God made the forms. Then He filled the forms on days 4, 5, and 6. On day four, He filled the light and darkness with the sun, moon, and stars (vs.14-19). On day five, He filled the water and sky with fish and birds (vs.20-23). And on day six, He filled the land with animals and humans (vs.24-31).