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.
• Genesis 1.1 refutes pagan mythologies, showing that the God of Israel lives and cares about his world.
Thus Steve Green sings: “God and God alone / Created all these things we call our own / From the mighty to the small / The glory in them all / Is God’s and God’s alone…. God and God alone / Is fit to take the universe’s throne / Let everything that lives / Reserve its truest praise / For God and God alone.”
This morning we aim to consider how two aspects of creation call all people to praise the maker.
1. We Worship and Adore God for His Glory Revealed in a Galaxy Far, Far Away
No study of Genesis can avoid the question of how old is the universe. Even if we explain the fossils by the catastrophic and world-wide flood of Noah’s day, the distance to the stars still seems to argue for an ancient universe. Peering through a telescope, we see Andromeda, the nearest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way. Light from there appears to have traveled for 2.5 million years to reach our eyes.
Some Christians argue that astronomers must be wrong; the stars are simply closer. But even the creation organization Answers in Genesis, whose motto is “upholding the Bible from the very first verse,” says: “The techniques that astronomers use to measure cosmic distances are generally logical and scientifically sound. They do not rely on evolutionary assumptions about the past. Moreover, they are a part of observational science,…testable and repeatable in the present…. So we have good reason to believe that space really is very big”
So how do explain age? There seem to me to be five families of solutions. A answer frequently heard today is…
1.1. Atheistic Evolution
Dr. William Provine, Professor of Biological Sciences at Cornell University, well explains the implications of this view when he writes with utter frankness: “Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear…. There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death…. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.”
Provine’s beliefs offend thinking men and women, because we know that God made us and we are his. We also see the laws which govern the universe: orderly, purposeful, ethical. Of course men like Provine and Richard Dawkins and Stephen Gould refuse to live the philosophy they profess (full ethical relativity); they practice a moralism derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition, and expect others to treat them the same. We reject atheistic evolution out-of-hand as fatuous and foolish.
1.2. Deistic Evolution
But some Christians hope that placing God behind the forces of evolution provides a way out. This is usually called “theistic” evolution, but since the “god” of this theory merely winds up the world to watch it turn according to the laws of nature, I think it is more accurately named deistic evolution. Deism believes in god based on reason rather than revelation, a god who does not interfere with the running of the world. While this may seem a good compromise with Genesis 1, it does not remotely comply with Genesis 2 through Revelation 22. In his book, Creation and the Flood, Davis Young calls this view “a house built upon sand…which leads logically and ultimately to the death of genuinely Biblical religion.”
1.3. Gaps in Genesis
Back in the 1800s, as Darwin’s ideas gained popular traction, a theory mentioned occasionally through church history solidified and grew in acceptance. Often called the “gap theory,” this view makes the first verse of Genesis describe the creation of all things out of nothing, after which there are ages and eons during which time Satan rebelled and the earth was cast into ruin – the “formless and void” mentioned in verse 2.
A. W. Pink believed this: “Genesis 1.1 carries us back to the primal creation which, like everything else that comes from the hand of God, must have been perfect, beautiful, glorious…. But the next words present a very different picture: ‘And the earth was without form and void,’ or, as the original Hebrew might be more literally translated, ‘The earth became a ruin.’ Between the first two verses in Genesis 1 a terrible calamity occurred. Sin entered the universe. The heart of the mightiest of all God’s creatures was filled with pride—Satan had dared to oppose the will of the Almighty. The dire effects of his fall reached to our earth, and what was originally created by God fair and beautiful, became a ruin…. The unknown interval between the first two verses is wide enough to embrace all the prehistoric ages which may have elapsed; but all that took place from Genesis 1.3 onwards transpired less than six thousand years ago.” The Scofield Reference Bible made this idea the de facto position of a generation of fundamentalism.
The gap theory has strengths: 1) It takes seriously the Satan’s fall and places it in space and time; 2) tries to explain death before Adam; and 3) seeks to make sense of the apparent age of the universe, especially things like fossils. But while it may be correct, there are also difficulties with this interpretation: 1) The Bible nowhere implies this could have happened; 2) The geology of the earth does not seem to match it in any details; and 3) It relies on an unnatural reading of the Genesis 1.1-2.
1.4. Progressive Creation Theories
More popular today among Bible-believing Christians who allow that the universe may be old, are explanations involving God directly in creation over a long period of time. Included would be the framework hypothesis and other theories that see Genesis 1 as an overview, or even a poem about God’s creative acts, and Genesis 2 as the detailed, historical narrative. These ideas suffer from: 1) an apparent lack of agreement between Genesis 1 and the geology of the earth, 2) difficulty explaining how death before Adam agrees with Romans 5, and 3) the exegetical problem of how the word, “day” in Genesis does not mean anything near a day (hence, “day-age”).
1.5. Creationism
Today many evangelicals and more and more fundamentalists hold to a young earth, six-day creationism, sometimes called flood geology. This fits the most natural reading of Genesis 1 and does not conflict with other Bible texts. Many in the scientific community criticize it as naive, and there are textual challenges for the creationist, as well as difficulties explaining things like the time it takes for starlight to reach the earth. But there are also brilliant men and women striving to understand why the universe appears old.
As an example (and this is simplified), one proposal is that God created all matter on day one in a white hole. Instead of sucking matter and energy in, as a black hole does, a white hole expels everything. Then, due to some quantum singularity or other Star Trek sounding science, the speed of light was much greater during the early moments of creation. Matter and light shot out at Warp 10,000 so that the distance to the stars is real, but the light traveled much faster than it does now. I can’t even tell you if that makes any sense.
I can tell you that God made the world and everything in it – and the stars! Because of the way I read the Bible and look at the world, I tend toward the creationism view. But I am not so adamant as to exclude everyone who disagrees. We know that evolution is seriously flawed, an exercise designed to wrest humanity from its duty to worship and glorify the Lord. But I think we err if we make a young earth a test of orthodoxy. There are things which must be believed:
• that Adam and Eve were “hand-made,” the first humans, and all people descended from them;
• that humans are the crown of creation, different from animals and in no way evolved from them;
• that God personally and intentionally made the world and all that is in it; and especially
• that the great duty of mankind is to worship and glorify God, our maker.
God did not place the stars as points for arguments about time. Psalm 8.3-4: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars,… what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” The galaxies require that we wonder at our insignificance, while we simultaneously marvel at God’s love. Michael Card sings the correct response beautifully in “Starkindler”:
A billion bright and holy beams from a light that’s traveled far.
Began the trip from his fingertips, O the wonder of the stars.
Affirm the signs and seasons, so silently they sing
of the wonder of their Kindler, of the power of their King.
O the fiery suns above us, in the vast veil of the sky,
are your servants, flames of fire, are your silent, holy guides.
And like the star-led magi, they guide our souls to you,
as they shine a light of awesome love into eyes that see anew.
Only the spiritually dead fail to see the glory of God revealed in the stars he made.
2. We Worship and Adore God for His Glory Revealed in His Personal Involvement in Creation (Ge 1.2)
After creating matter, God has the materials needed for a planet suitable for his people. But it is not yet “formed” it into a final shape nor “filled” with good things. The earth is “without form and void,” in Hebrew: (Hebrew words)[tohu and bohu]. Two other passages help explain this condition:
Jeremiah 4 describes the destruction of Israel by Nebuchadnezzar. Jeremiah 4.23-26: “I looked on the earth, and behold, it was without form and void (Hebrew words) [tohu and bohu]…. [Next Jeremiah explains what that means.] I looked, and behold, there was no man, and all the birds of the air had fled. I looked, and behold, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins….” There are no people; even the birds flew away. What was once fruitful, is now wilderness. The land is an uninhabitable waste.
Similarly, in Isaiah 45.18: “For thus says the LORD, who created the heavens…, who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it empty, he formed it to be inhabited!)” Isaiah contrasts (Hebrew word) [tohu] with inhabited.
E. J. Young pulls these uses together to draw a picture for us of the earth in Genesis 1.2: “An earth of (Hebrew word) (tohu) therefore, is an earth that cannot…fulfill the purpose for which it was created. It is a desolate earth. Likewise, the similar sounding (Hebrew word) (bohu) signifies something uninhabitable, and we may well render it
as ‘waste….’”
Before verse 1, there was nothing but God; now at verse 2, the earth exists, but it is desolate and uninhabitable, formless and void. Is there hope? Yes, the Spirit of God hovers, like a eagle over her chicks. God will personally transform the primordial chaos into complete paradise.
Suppose a young couple purchases their first home when the little lady is pregnant. They designate one room as junior’s, but it was a game room for the previous owner. The lights are harsh, the wallpaper dark, the floor hard, and there is no crib, changing table, or toys. Day one of baby’s room is: (Hebrew words) [tohu vabohu], without form and void.
They strip the wallpaper, paint a cheery color, and install a new light fixture and carpet. They purchase a crib, a changing table, and a chest of drawers. Over time these hovering pre-parents form the chaos into a comfortable nursery for the much anticipated child to be born in their image.
But some will ask, “Why not buy a house with the baby’s room already done?” My best answer is: “I love forming Daniel’s and Rebekah’s rooms into special places for my children.
Such is the God of the Bible. Not a god too far away to feel my cold heart, to see my sinful motives, to hear my faithless thoughts. The God of the Bible refuses to remain distant. He hovers over his earth, carefully and personally forming a good garden for his people.
How much more does he hover now, “preserving and governing every creature and every action” so as to guarantee that “all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose.” The Father loving us with an everlasting love, the Son living to intercede for us, the Spirit dwelling in us, uniting us to Christ Jesus and comforting and caring for us through every trial and trouble.
If you will have none of a hovering God, a God intimately and personally involved in your life, then you will have none of the God of creation, the God of the Bible. But if you will bow before this God, you will find that he bends heaven and earth to care for his own. Tommy Walker well sang about the God who made the world and all that is in it:
I have a maker; he formed my heart.
Before even time began, my life was in his hand.
He knows my name; He knows my every thought.
He sees each tear that falls, and He hears me when I call.
I have a Father; He calls me His own.
He’ll never leave me; no matter where I go.
He knows my name; He knows my every thought.
He sees each tear that falls, and He hears me when I call, he hears me when I call. (1996 Doulos Publishing (Maranatha! Music))
