God's Creation Series

1. The order of God’s creation (and God said… and it

was so)

2. The goodness of God’s creation (it was good, 1:31)

3. The crown of God’s creation (1:26-28)

4. The purpose of God’s creation (1:29-30)

How many of you like mysteries? You know, the ones where you have to examine the clues to find out whodunit? It seems like in most of those, the who is the easy part. A lot of times you know who did it right away. But in order to prove they did it, you have to have a motive. You have to figure out why they did it. Well, we’re not going to be looking at so much of a mystery today. We’re really going on more of an adventure. During each step of the way of our adventure, we’re going to make a discovery about God’s creation. And once we’ve made our discoveries, they will lead us to the mystery part. The part that reveals God’s motive behind the whole thing. Tonight we’re going to look at the creation of God.

We’re going to begin with the end of our text tonight as we read verse 31.

GENESIS 1:31

As we look at verses 3-31 tonight, there is something you should know right off the bat. I am what is called a young earth creationist. In other words, I believe that God created the universe in 7 literal days, somewhere between 6 to 10,000 years ago. The reason that I say between 6 to 10,000 years ago is that the Bible isn’t really clear on the timeframe. Many years ago, a man named Ussher added up all the ages of all the people in the genealogies in the Bible. You thought it was rough going through the begats in Matthew 1 last month. Can you imagine going through all the begats in the Bible to come up with the age of the earth? Well, that’s what Ussher did. According to his timing, creation happened about 6000 years ago. I believe that is the very soonest it could have happened because Hebrew genealogies are known to have gaps. In other words, they only include the significant people—not everybody. But there aren’t so many holes to make creation any older than 10,000 years. Now, to the 7 literal days part. This is an issue that good people can disagree on. But here’s why I believe in 7 literal 24-hour days. It is true that in Hebrew, the word for day can mean either a literal day or a period of time. That’s why Moses included a qualifier to indicate it was a literal day. He added a number to it. In the Hebrew language, anytime the word day was qualified by a number, it meant a literal 24-hour period of time. As a matter of fact, one qualifier wasn’t enough. He included two qualifiers. Not only did he qualify day with a number, he qualified it by saying, “and the evening and the morning was…” It’s like he put a number in front of it and put brackets around it to make sure we would know he’s talking about a literal 24-hour day. Now, that’s just some background information. We could talk about that for days—literal, 24-hour days. But that’s not our purpose tonight. Our purpose is to look at the creation of God. And by looking at the creation of God—what He created and how He created it—I want us to see why He created it. In order to do that, we’re going to discover four things about creation. The first thing we discover is the order of God’s creation. I want you to do something with me. I want us to go through verses 3-24. Either with a pencil or your finger, I want you to go through with me as we find these words—And God said… and it was so.

The order of God’s creation. The first thing we see about the order of God’s creation is how He did it. He spoke and it happened. There was no process. There was no series of steps involved in each day. He spoke and it happened—instantly. When He created the trees, we can assume they had age rings in them. When He created Adam and Eve, He created them fully grown. When He created the earth, it had what we would consider the appearance of age. When He created light, He formed it in the streams and paths that would make it appear as if it had traveled for billions of light years. God created in an orderly way. His first three days of creation were marked by three separations. First, He separated light from the darkness. Look at verses 3-5:

GENESIS 1:3-5

God spoke the light into existence and then separated it from the darkness. Did you know that scientist still can’t figure out what light is? Sometimes it acts like particles. But sometimes it acts like waves. We see light all around us. But we don’t really have a clue as to what it is. But we know that God created it. And then He separated it from the darkness. Picture a field full of gravel. Then all at once, that gravel is separated and stretched into a series of roads going across that field. That’s what God did with the light. Just like those roads were built before any place they would lead to, God separated the light before He made any planets or stars it would come from. It’s as if He separated the roads before He made the towns. But He also separated the waters from the waters on our planet. Remember, His initial step of creation was to create the heavens and the earth. And the earth was just a watery, chaotic mass—until day 2.