Open your Bibles this morning to Genesis 1:1 and let us read it together.
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Genesis 1:1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
This morning we are launching our new church on Sunday mornings. These next several Sundays are our “soft-launch” preparing for our full launch the Sunday after Labor Day. But there is nothing soft or light about the significance of these Sundays leading up to September. Nor will there be anything soft or insignificant about the next several messages I am about to preach. This is by all intents and purposes the “genesis” of our church. In thinking about that I wanted to takes us to the Genesis of Scripture.
The subject of Genesis and the creation has crossed my path in several different ways over the last 6 months. In doing so, I began to more seriously examine the implications on the meaning of our creation and specifically the idea that man is created in the image of God. As I searched Scripture, listened to lectures, read articles and books, I came to a couple of conclusions: First, this is an issue that has grave and significant repercussions on every other subject in scripture from Genesis to Revelation. Secondly, the church has largely sold itself out on this issue or at least compromised to the point the aftershocks undermine our ability to stand on other issues, and even more importantly, we offset a crucial cornerstone to the meaning of the Gospel message.
So with that thought in mind, I wanted to start us here because how we move forward from here will have long-lasting consequences for our future. If nothing I say today and the upcoming weeks have any meaning to you, then what I say months or years from now will carry little weight.
Now, let me throw a few qualifiers in here for you. First, I am not a scientist. I am a theologian, apologist, and pastor. So, therefore, this is a study of Scripture and understanding that Scripture is the final authority. But I will demonstrate to you in many different ways how science and secular scientist are wrong using their own words, deductions, and arguments. And I will demonstrate to you how time and time again, science must bow its knee to the Bible.
Secondly, we are going to cover some hard topics right out of the gate. Issues like theistic evolution, the day-age theory, progressive creationism, and the so-called gap theory are capitulations of liberal theologians caving to false claims of science. If you look at the Genesis account, there is no room for this kind of compromise, so either you believe it or you deny the truth of Scripture. There is no middle ground.
Lastly, I am firmly standing against and speaking in opposition to what is being taught as fact in most of our schools and in our society. In fact, this is something that is imposed in our society in nearly every corner. From children’s cartoons to nature shows, universities, medical science, philosophy, and history. That over hundreds of millions of years, humans evolved from slime, monkeys, or whatever. By the time I’m done, I will clearly show you how this is categorically false, but even more, our very meaning and relationship with God is lost in this kind of teaching.
If Genesis tells us that God created everything in 6 days and He created man in His image and we reduce this to just allegory or poetry, then why should we believe anything else in the Bible? If the New Testament tells us that the Creator is our Redeemer, but we strip God as Creator, then maybe He is not our Redeemer as well. If 2 Peter tells us that God Himself will bring about an instantaneous de-creation of the entire universe as we know it, then that has tremendous bearing on His power and authority to create. If God is not the Creator, then can he or will he also prepare for us a place in Heaven or the New Creation?
So you either believe Genesis or you do not. It is a clear, unambiguous, absolute account of our origin. What I want you to understand is that the matter of our origin is absolutely critical to everything else we believe. It is foundational to how we live our lives, view morality, life, our relationships, and ultimately Who we are worshipping.
A well-known scientist named Herbert Spencer discovered that all reality, be contained in five categories: time, force, action, space, and matter. Now think about that and then with that in your mind, listen to Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning” – that’s time – “God” – that’s force – “created” – that’s action – “the heavens” – that’s space – “and the earth,” that’s matter. You either believe that that verse is accurate and God is the force, or you believe that God is not the force and you’re left with chance.
So If you don’t believe in a literal biblical creation, then what do you believe? Probably most of you would compromise on some sort of “theistic evolution.” The idea that God sort of let out a bang and then evolution took over. Or maybe you hold the Genesis account of the Bible isn’t confined to six 24 hour days, but rather, broken down into 6 time periods. That was what a high school biology teacher taught me and I believed him. The results were disastrous to my faith, how I understood God, and how I interpreted Scripture for decades until I finally stepped back and allowed the truth of Scripture to be revealed in my heart.
None of these theories coincide with Scripture and when we acquiesce to these beliefs we introduce a whole plethora of problems. You see evolution unseats God from His throne and of His sovereignty. It is not just about biology, but also includes issues of morality, spirituality, and man’s dignity. It asks questions about who is really sovereign in the universe? Is there really a moral law? Is there a moral lawgiver? If so, then are we to live to that standard or not. If we are nothing more than advanced primordial slime, then do I really have to answer to Him if He did not really create me?
This is what evolution was really invented to do; to kill the God of the Bible. Secular science seeks to eliminate the Creator of the Universe and thereby eliminate the moral Lawgiver, Judge, and Savior. In doing so, it strips man of his meaning. In his biography of Darwin, James Moor wrote, “His life was one long attempt to escape from the church and to escape from God. It is this that explains so much that would otherwise be incongruous in his life and character.” Darwin didn’t care if you worshipped a god, just not the God of the Bible. Neither did Hitler.
This evolutionary idea is deadly - Survival of the fittest - because evolution isn’t about life - it’s about death. “No one demonstrated the deadly character of this evolutionary idea better than Adolf Hitler. And he was followed up by Joseph Stalin and all of those who massacred masses of people, millions of people, and committed genocide. At the bottom, at the base of their belief system and philosophy, was evolution.” (MacArthur). And so he destroyed the Jews, he destroyed the Blacks, he destroyed the gypsies, and he was aiding natural selection and fulfilling the evolutionary biological dream.
Erich Fromm wrote, “The religion of social Darwinism belongs to the most dangerous elements within the thoughts of the last century. It aids the propagation of ruthless national and racial egoism by establishing it as a moral norm. If Hitler believed in anything at all, then it was in the laws of evolution which justified and sanctified his actions and especially his cruelties.” The same can be said about those who support the abortion of any kind, homosexuality, and so on.
Hebrews 11:3, “By faith, we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God,”
So why would Christian people want to join forces with secular scientists who seek to usurp the sovereignty and authority of God? Now let's take it a step further and let me show you over the next several weeks that the Biblical account of creation is fully substantiated and upheld by scientific evidence. Everything that evolution has said is wrong and the more science continues to try to disprove a 6-day creation and that the earth is actually billions of years old, the more we come to the conclusion that the earth is intelligently designed, created in the way that Genesis tells us it was created about 6000 years ago.
Let me give you a couple of quick illustrations from Daniel A Biddle:
Fossils. If you listen to evolutionists, they will tell you that fossils formed over millions of years. Dinosaur fossils that we find are millions of years old, for example. This is impossible. Nothing organic will ever last that long. They actually have T-Rex soft tissue. Do you know what will happen if you place your favorite pet in the backyard? Nothing. It will eventually disappear. It will not fossilize. Why, because fossilization happens through cataclysmic events like a great flood, not millions of years being stuck in the mud. 97% of the dinosaur fossils found in the midwest are buried with marine life and disarticulated, meaning there was violence in their death. The remaining 3% that were found intact are discovered in the mud and sand layers with their necks arched back, indicating they suffocated or drowned as they died.
We’re going to talk quite a bit about DNA. 1 Gram of DNA Can Store 1,000,000,000 Terabyte of Data for 1000+ Years. You can store all computer information in the world on a teaspoon of DNA. Every detail about you - nothing more, nothing less - is contained in your DNA. We’ll talk later about why this alone completely unravels evolutionary theory. Every generation, there are several new mutations that appear in our DNA, about 75-175 new mutations. Mutations are always injurious. There is never a case where mutations are progressive in development. So man’s genome has been on a steep downward decline since the introduction of sin. Using this well-known information, a lead researcher of Cornell University, geneticist John Sandford, determined that this will eventually lead to the extinction of humans. Even more interesting is that Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson of Harvard used DNA to clock the origin of life back to about 6500 years.
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Romans 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
Why do we the church or those so-called believers in the church wish to suppress God’s truth? Revelation tells us that we are cursed when we change God’s Word. If we tear away God as Creator, we dethrone Him as redeemer, restorer, and the giver of meaning to those He made in His image. Evolution is a false god. A scientific idol that has no room in Christian dogma. It surpasses truth to justify ungodliness and morality. In doing so, it abandons all logic. You look at this room we’re in. You say, someone had to make that. Here’s a piano and someone had to make that. Here’s the entire universe in its vastness and infinitely more complex than anything you or I or anyone could possibly design. It was a random chance.
Evolutionists like this word, chance. You will read it over and over again in their writings. Chance is the cause of everything. Everything happened because of chance. They don’t want God to be the cause so they have to reassign it to something, and chance is that “something.” But chance is actually absolutely nothing. Chance is a mathematical probability that if conditions are right, something may happen. Using the word correctly, there’s a chance that you and I may go to the same restaurant after church today and see each other. But chance did cause us to go to the restaurant, we decided to go, we made the decision, we drove there, and we saw each other there.
Chance does not exist. It’s nothing. Chance is not a force. It is not time, it is not action, it does not contain space, it does not matter. But if you read the writings of these secular scientists, you would believe that everything is by chance. If chance rules, then God is deposed and unseated from His sovereign throne. Is that where you are putting your faith? That is not the God of the Bible. Let me tell you what the God of the Bible tells us
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Proverbs 16:4 The Lord has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of trouble.
That includes you. You were not made by chance and you are not here by chance.
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Ephesians 1:3–4 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love
I want to tell you something very important and I want everyone in the sound of my voice to hear me whether you have been coming to church a long time, or new to the faith, or you just don’t know. God made you. He made you with a purpose and your life has meaning. All of creation testifies to the magnificent and glorious nature of God. Nothing + nothing can never = something. there is no explanation for the universe without God. God reveals to us clearly and precisely who He is and where we came from. Even more, we are made in His image, and sin’s curse on you made you irredeemable without His intervention
1 Peter 1:18–20 knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. 20 He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you
Will you discard the myth of chance today and go running into your Heavenly Father’s arms? He is waiting here for you.
Will you CrossWay Christian Fellowship be committed to the truth of this book. Hold fast to it, live by it, let it guide you, your family, and our church in all that we do, lest we fall into the snares of the enemy. We get this right, we win the war. When we start compromising on anything in here, we are on a slippery slope.
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1 John 5:13 ESV I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.
