In The Beginning God Created ... Genesis 1:1-5

Genesis 1:1-5

Please stand with me as we go over our current memory Scripture:

Matthew 5:9-12

“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.

“Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for they persecuted the prophets who were before you in the same way.”

And our memory Scripture “refresher” verse(s) is(are):

Ephesians 2:8-10

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God - not by works, so that no one can boast.

“For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

Today we will be reading from Genesis 1:1-5

Bookends …

These are bookends that I made in shop class in 7th or 8th grade.

They are not pretty but for some odd reason I still have them.

What do book ends do? They support books to keep them from falling over. I don’t know how many of you remember ENCYCLOPEDIAS but people would actually go door to door selling them. You would see advertisements for encyclopedias in newspapers, magazines, through the mail and on TV.

The entire premise was that you could find any information you needed in those encyclopedias.

The Bible has bookends, too. They are Genesis and The Revelation of Jesus Christ. These bookends contain explosive statements that demand a response.

With that in mind please join me in your Bibles as we read: Genesis 1:1-5

(Prayer for help)

The Bible has two bookends when it comes to this world. The first is found in Genesis 1:1 where it says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

In this case, “the heavens” means not only the area we call outer space but the atmosphere or the sky as well.

The other bookend of the existence of this earth is found in Revelation 20:11 where it says,

“Then I saw a great white throne and Him who was seated on it. The earth and the sky fled from His presence, and there was no place for them.”

Let me repeat that last sentence. It is awesome and almost always overlooked, “The earth and the sky fled from His presence, and there was no place for them.”

Those are two tremendous bookends, aren’t they?

First God creates this earth and sky from nothing and then, at the end, the earth and the sky flee from His presence, “and there was no place for them” or, they ceased to exist because “they (had) passed away” as it says in Revelation 21:1.

These are two amazing accounts!

“In the beginning God created …”

And here the great battle line is drawn. God or no god, that is the question.

How did it happen? Why are we here? Is all of this the conscious decision and will of an Almighty God or is all of this the happenstance of random chemical and physical “accidents” over countless eons of time?

What does science say?

There is a law of physics called cause and effect. For anything to happen there must be something that causes it to happen.

When you sat down today certain muscles had to relax in order to let your joints rotate. When you stand up those muscles will need to contract causing your joints to extend and the effect will be that you have moved from a sitting position to a standing position.

When you pour water from a pitcher into a glass it is confined and fills the glass. The cause of the confinement is the glass and the effect of the glass is that the water is limited to a defined space. If you miss the glass the water is NOT limited to a confined space and you need to clean it up.

What does that have to do with “in the beginning God created …”?

Let’s take two opposing views, “God created” or “it just happened”.

Both of these take faith.

God created …

- How did God get something from nothing? We don’t know.

- How is God eternal and how did He exist before creation? We don’t know.

- How did God bring order from chaos? We don’t know.

And then we have the opposing view …

“It just happened” commonly known as the Big Bang Theory …

- Where did matter come from? We don’t know.

- How did all of the matter in the universe happen to be located in one tiny space that in a moment before time exploded with such force as to spread matter throughout all of the universe that we can observe? We don’t know.