"In The Beginning God"

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”

“In spite of the universal prevalence of … pantheistic evolutionary cosmogonies among the nations of antiquity, the inspired account in Genesis does not attempt to refute them or to prove the existence of the true God. The reason for this strange silence is, most likely, the fact that the Genesis account was written before any of these other systems developed. The others were developed later for the very purpose of combating and replacing the true account in Genesis. The latter had been written originally, possibly by God Himself (‘the generations of the heavens and the earth’) soon after the Creation, setting forth in simple narrative form the actual events of Creation Week. At that point in time, there was no need to argue about the reality of God and the Creation, since no one doubted it!” THE GENESIS RECORD, Henry M. Morris, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1976

Men and women much smarter, much more educated, much more focused than I have made their arguments for the literalness and accuracy of the creation account in the book of Genesis.

I do not intend to attempt to match them here or to help them or to develop my own convincing arguments to lay along side theirs.

Today I want to talk about this very first sentence of Scripture and why it is imperative that the sincere student and true believer avoid either in their own thinking or their discourse with others, taking away or attempting to add to the simple truth presented there and in these early chapters of the Bible.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”

IT REFUTES ALL PAGAN BELIEFS

A minute ago I quoted Henry Morris who speculates that perhaps God Himself wrote the creation account. I am not clear on whether Morris means to say that God physically wrote it down and told Adam to safeguard it, or if in His frequent visits with the first couple (Gen 3:8) He told them the details and they recorded the information for future generations.

In any case, and whatever the method was, the details of the creation account could only have come from One who was present before anything else, and therefore could only be the One who accomplished the work.

Ancient tradition supported by some scripture evidence says that Moses is the author of the first five books of the Bible. Nevertheless, he would have to have received this information from sources long before him.

The Biblical record shows that Lamech, Noah’s father, lived for a time in tandem with Adam, and could quite possibly have gotten the information first hand from the first man, then passed it on to his son who carried it into the post flood world with him.

Since Moses’ parents were courageous and faithful people (Heb 11:23) he probably grew up hearing the carefully preserved and reiterated account of creation from them as they had from their parents.

Here’s what I’m getting at. All the pagan beliefs that have sprung up that deny the Genesis record have to have come up long after the original account was widely known and accepted because there was no reason to think otherwise.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

If this is accepted as true, then what follows must be accepted as true and straightforward. He did it in six literal days, He created a man from the dust of the ground and breathed life into that man who then became a living soul (notice He did not breathe life into any other creature) and then He made a mate for the man from the man himself.

Deny any of this, and you must deny the account of the original sin of man and therefore man’s need for salvation and therefore the cross. That is the guilt of every non-biblical philosophy and pagan belief of man, and it is the guilt of the so-called Theistic Evolutionist who wants to have it both ways. These folks choose to believe that God is the source of the ‘Big Bang’; that He set things to motion and evolution sort of took over. These folks choose to believe that the six days of creation are representative of eons of time wherein natural selection produced a flourishing and inhabited planet.

They and the Bible cannot both be right. We must choose to believe the Scriptures or something else, but it is ludicrous to try to blend belief systems that are diametrically opposed to one another and say they are compatible. They are not.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”

This statement refutes atheism, which says there is no God, pantheism, which makes a deity of the creation – and by the way kids, when your schools celebrate ‘Earth Day’ they are engaging in pantheism, which is worship of the creature rather than the Creator. In Isaiah 66:1&2 God declares the earth to be His footstool and says “For My hand made all these things”, so please think about this when your teachers ask you to join with them in their weirdness – it refutes polytheism which says there is more than one god to worship; god of the wind, god of fire, god of war and so forth, it refutes dualism, which says there is a cosmic battle going on between two equal forces, one good and one evil, God and the devil, which cannot be the case since God was alone when He created and the devil was originally a created angel who rebelled and fell, and it certainly refutes evolutionism by the very nature of the statement; ‘in the beginning God created’.