The Beginning Of… Creation Series

Scripture Introduction

Scott Adams, on several occasions, used his comic strip to mock the silliness of evolution. In one, Dilbert says to Bob the dinosaur, “Hi Bob. I haven’t seen you lately.”

Bob replies, “I was doing some evolving. I noticed I have a zit that’s sensitive to sunlight. I’m hoping it becomes an eye.”

No one here is growing a third hand, though that might offer an evolutionary advantage! We have, however, an alternative for how all that is came to be. Please give your attention to Word of the One who spoke the World into existence.

[Read Genesis 1.1-16. Pray.]

Introduction

In the 1700s, James Beattie, a Scottish Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic, described his strange experiment in childrearing, as he delayed teaching religion to his son:

He had reached his fifth or sixth year, knew the alphabet, and could read a little, but had received no particular information with respect to the Author of his being, because I thought he could not yet understand such, and that to be made to repeat words not understood is detrimental to the faculties of a young mind. And I was desirous to determine how far the child’s own reason could go in searching out the great first principle of all religion, the existence of God.

In a corner of a little garden, without informing anyone, I wrote in the dirt with my finger the three initial letters of his name, and sowed garden cresses in the furrows, and covered up the seed and smoothed the ground. Ten days, after he came running to me, and with astonishment told me that his name was growing in the garden. He insisted that I see what had happened.

“Yes,” said I, pretending to disregard him as we came carelessly to the place: “I see it, but there is nothing in this worth notice; it is mere chance,” and I turned away.

He followed me, and taking hold of my coat, said with some earnestness that somebody must have done it.

“So you think,” I said, “that what appears so regular as the letters of your name cannot be by chance?”

“Yes,” said he with firmness. “I think so.”

“Then look at yourself,” I replied, “and consider your hands and fingers, your legs and feet and other limbs. Are they not regular in their appearance and useful to you?” He said they were.

“Then did you come here by chance?”

“No,” he answered. “Something must have made me.”

“And who is that something?” I asked.

He said he did not know. I took particular notice that he did not say (as Rousseau fancies a child in like circumstances would) that his parents made him. I now saw that his reason taught him, though he could not so express it, that what begins must have a cause, and that what is formed with regularity must have an intelligent cause.

When Christians think about honoring God, we usually focus on redemption. Certainly, the great theme of the Bible is God’s saving people through his Messiah, Jesus, the Christ. And when John describes the wonder of heavenly worship in Revelation chapter 5, we hear hymns of salvation, powerful praise presented to “the Lion of the tribe of Judah,…the “Lamb who was slain,…[who] by [his] blood, ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and nation!”

Yet as magnificent as are the heavenly choir’s praise choruses for redemption, the worship service actually begins in chapter 4, where God receives “glory and honor and power for [he] created all things, and by his will they existed….”

This led Francis Schaeffer (Genesis in Space and Time, 27) to write: “Our praise to God is not first of all in the area of soteriology. If we are being fully scriptural, we do not praise him first because he saved us, but because he is there and has always been there. And we praise him because he willed all other things, including man, into existence.”

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” With those seven simple words (in Hebrew), the Bible renounces virtually every other way of describing the universe which has ever crossed the mind of sinful man.

• Genesis 1.1 refutes materialism’s eternal matter, teaching that God created all that is at a point in time.

• Genesis 1.1 refutes pantheism’s comingling of the deity with creation, revealing that God is wholly other, neither in, nor part of nature.

• Genesis 1.1 refutes atheism, showing that God is and was, and in him, and by his will, we have our being.

• Genesis 1.1 refutes agnosticism, insisting that God is seen and plainly known through his works in the world.

• Genesis 1.1 refutes polytheism, attributing creation to the one true and living God.

• Genesis 1.1 refutes evolution, revealing the personal God who made the laws and forces of time and change and nature.