We’re back again for week 2 of our series in the creation. If you weren’t here I want to encourage you to watch last week’s message on our website. We’re talking about beginnings and especially as we begin this new church called CrossWay Christian Fellowship, I felt it was important for us to examine the idea of creation as it relates to the gospel. Literally, how you understand creation will ultimately bring clarity or confusion to your understanding of the gospel.
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
There are only two options when it comes to creation. The two options are: there is a God who personally created everything, including you, or there is not. Those are the only two options. If there is not, then everything is an impossible, implausible, irrational result of chance. And the equation that I gave you last week is “nothing + nothing cannot equal something.
If God is not the creator, then He is not the sovereign. If creation did not take place according to how Genesis records it, then we are without hope because evolution deposes God from His throne. So why do we as Christian continue to take our interpretation of Genesis from secular scientists who wants nothing more than to get rid of the God of the Bible? These same people want to alleviate themselves from accountability, morality, and God’s final judgment. As I explained to you last week if God is not our creator, then He is not our Redeemer, and He will not have the authority to create new heavens and new earth as the New Testament tells us.
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Psalm 19:1The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Creation and evolution are incompatible. As we study the creation account you see how theistic evolution is impossible if we hold this creative account as the final authority. If this universe is the product of a Creator God with an infinite amount of intelligence and power, is it possible for us to know Him and if so, are we anything more than a well-developed monkey to Him or a product of primordial slime? Or is there something more and can we know Him? Well, there’s only one answer, if He created us and if He chose to tell us; that’s the only way we can ever know. Not only did he create us. Not only did he choose to reveal Himself and provide for us His revelation. But He Himself crossed through all time to enter His creation as the person of Jesus so that we can know the way
I cannot overemphasize the point that creation is the basis of everything else. It is not merely an issue of biology, but it affects our morality, our view of redemptions, salvation, sin, the family, marriage, our community relationships, the sanctity of life, and the dignity of men. If we are nothing more than animals with advanced brains, then how we related to each other and other animals is vastly different.
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Psalm 19:4–6 Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun, 5 which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy. 6 Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat.
One of the things that science has discovered in modern times is that the sun is in orbit. We talk about the sun as the center of our solar system and everything orbiting around it. However, the sun itself has an orbit, and this orbit goes from one end of the infinite space to the other. The sun is moving and dragging our entire solar system with it. It is not fixed any more than the things that revolve around it are fixed. So the psalmist says you can look up and you can look at the universe and look at the creation and it gives you loud testimony to the glory of God, to the majesty of His intelligence, to the massive character of His power to create all of this.
Hebrews 1 also tells us that God made the world and it is a testimony to His infinite power, the wisdom of knowledge. Everything about this requires of you one thing: faith.
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Hebrews 1:10 And, “You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands;
If you reject God as creator, then you reject God as all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-encompassing. The only way you are going to know Him is through faith. We are natural; God is supernatural. The natural cannot comprehend the supernatural; so on our own, we can’t find God. We’re locked in a time-space world unable to crawl out of it and into eternity to comprehend what is incomprehensible. No scientist, no matter how smart they claim they may be cannot even begin to comprehend the majesty of God or His creative power. The only things we know about God are those things that He has told us, and that’s why He gave us the Bible. Do you believe that?
The word genesis means “origins” or “beginnings.” And I want you to note 16 different origins or beginnings found in genesis.
1. You find the origin of the universe. Genesis 1:1 is unique in all literature, all science, and all philosophy. Every other explanation of the universe starts with eternal matter or energy in some form. Only the book of Genesis starts with eternal God.
2. Origin of order and complexity. Man’s universal observation of his world is an orderly world. It functions on fixed rules and it is profoundly complex. Order and complexity will not come from chaos.
3. The origin of the solar system. In the midst of this vast, limitless universe, God created the earth, the sun, and moon, the planets, all the stars of heaven
4. The origin of the atmosphere and the hydrosphere. The earth is uniquely equipped with a great body of liquid water and an extensive blanket of oxygen-nitrogen gaseous mixture, both of which are necessary for life, and are accounted for only by special creation by God
5. The origin of life, the marvels of the reproductive process.
6. The origin of man. Man is the most highly organized and complex entity in the universe. Beyond his biology, there is a nature that can contemplate abstract emotions of beauty and love, and worship. Man is capable of understanding and thinking about his own meaning. We find that we are made in the image of our creator.
7. In Genesis you also find the origin of marriage, the remarkable universal and stable institution of marriage, and the home. Monogamous marriage is established and given to man by the Creator. The home and the family unit are established by God, not man’s choice, and polygamy, infanticide, promiscuity, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality, and all the corruptions developed after the fall are the corruption of God’s order.
8. The origin of evil and sin. The origin of physical and moral evil in the universe is explained in Genesis as a kind of temporary intrusion into God’s perfect world and allowed for the continuation of human freedom and for God to reveal Himself to man as Man’s Redeemer
9. The origin of judgment on evil. All the forms of God’s wrath are set in motion and illustrated in Genesis.
10. The origin of salvation by grace through God’s mercy. God was merciful to Adam and Eve and doesn’t destroy them. The plan of redemption leading to Christ is even referred to in Genesis 3:15.
11. The origin of language. You know, one of the things that evolutionists struggle with is how you go from apes grunting and making unintelligible noises to the human speech of all kinds of languages. The chasm between the instinctive chattering of animals to abstract, symbolic communication of man is impossible by any evolutionary process. But Genesis also tells us the origin of all the different languages
12. The origin of government; organized systems of human government for the maintenance of orderly social structures through systems of law and punishment.
13. The origin of culture. We find in Genesis urbanization, the development of technology, music, agriculture, farming, writing, education, navigation,
14. The origin of nations; and that is related, of course, again to the Tower of Babel, the table of nations as the only source you’ll ever find of how we have so many different peoples scattered all over the earth with different languages and cultures.
15. The origin of religion; both the true religion and false religions appear
16. The origin of the people of Israel who were the conduit for God’s revelation to all of the world. It was Israel through whom God’s continual revelation came and whom the saving covenant came in Genesis 12 to Abraham, and it would be the Jewish people whom God the messiah enters the world. (MacArthur)
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1 Timothy 3:16 we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.
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2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,
So either we are going to believe Genesis as Scripture or we don’t. How can anyone who claims Christ as their Savior uphold Genesis as Scripture, but reject Genesis 1 and 2 or dismiss it as allegory or lore? Or may you dismiss Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, or the Flood? Where are you going to draw the line and who gave the right to stand in that kind of judgment on Scripture. Even more, why would any believer in Jesus Christ bow a knee to secular scientists as the authority over Scripture? What kind of precedent does that establish over the rest of Scripture? When we capitulate over this, then we abdicate the authority of Scripture over other sacred issues like life, government, and marriage.
We have Christian pastors, teachers, people literally accepting the scientific descriptions of origins that come out of an evolutionary bias as if somehow they’ve been proven, and somehow the Bible must be wrong and give up that point because a six-day creation is not scientifically possible. That is just not true.
The word yom literally means “day,” and you have six of them in the creation narrative. But some Christians believe that scientists have proved that the age of the earth must be billions of years old. So instead of challenging science, they go back to Genesis and fix it. And in so doing they have allowed the authority of the Bible to be undermined. It’s a sad indictment of the church.
There are some Christian leaders who would say, “Yes, there’s a God, and somehow God must be involved in the evolutionary process.” That’s called “theistic evolution,” or “progressive creationism,” a term developed by Russell Mixter in the science department of Wheaton College. God sort of injects Himself at points. Theistic evolution says, “God launched it and started it.” Progressive creationism says, “He jumps in along the way.” But it still took millions and millions and billions of years for it to happen.
This poses serious problems and here’s one of them: If man is created at the end of the evolutionary process, whether it’s a naturalistic evolutionary process, or theistic evolution or progressive creation view where God injects Himself along the way, the problem is that evolution is a process of nature by death. It’s a process known as the survival of the fittest. It’s a process of violence, bloodshed, suffering, disease, and death of the weaker species.
Now here is where you really run into serious problems. If God created the world perfectly with His declaration that “it is good” and you don’t have man until billions of years later. Man comes on the scene as being perfect, created in the image of God. Death doesn’t even come into the picture until man sins. How can you have death before the fall? You don’t have a cursed earth. How could God, who looked over this whole evolutionary deal when it finally reached its completion in man and said He saw it and He looked at it, and He said, “It is good” where there’s been billions of years of death, disease, and suffering?
You see, then the sin of Adam and the curse of death is meaningless because there’s been death for billions of years. It just convolutes all of the biblical records. It disconnects the curse of death from our sin. It removes our need for a Redeemer because the world was already cursed. The secularist scientist of evolution, in their minds, have escaped the curse of sin by denying the responsibility for their own sin and dethroning God as Judge. But it is a fool’s errand. If we stand on Scripture then we are going to stand on the entirety of Scripture because every thread is vital to our eternal Salvation. Creation is necessary for the Gospel.
Every living organism has in it DNA. DNA is genetic material, and on that genetic material in every living thing is a code, and that is an operative code; and that living organism, whether you’re talking about a cell or whether you’re talking about a large man and everything in between, all of that operation of every living thing is dependent on that encoded information. And listen to this: every different living thing has a completely different code.
It has been discovered in recent years that genetic programs consist of about one thousand million bits of information and that information encoded in that living organism determines the nature, the growth, the development, and the death of billions of cells in that living organism. Now, who could ever believe that such supremely complex machines – which is what living organisms are – storing and retrieving the precise information to service a thousand million cells, diagnose defects and repair them and reproduce all developed at random by chance out of nothing?
Where did the information come from? A monkey? Not at all because has a monkey code, and the DNA and the chromosomes and the genetics just keep making the monkey behave like a monkey. There’s no code in there to turn the monkey into a man. There’s no such thing as jumping out of your species. Where did this genetic information come from?
If a primeval kind of amoeba is to develop up to a primate, that primeval cell will have to gather all sorts of new information on how to make kidneys, livers, four-chamber hearts, cerebra, and cerebella.” As this one-celled thing goes, it’s just going to have to collect information. From where? If the law of entropy is true, and it is, that matter is breaking down, things are getting worse, how can things be getting more complex and more ordered simultaneously?
None of this can come into being without the awesome majesty and infinite knowledge of an Almighty God and it was sin that corrupted it. Adam’s sin and every person since including you and me. How are we going to fix it? We can’t. Only the Creator who put everything in its place, from the simplest protein to the massive stars orbiting in our galaxy. A scientist says it had to happen over billions of years. For evolution, maybe. But not for an Almighty God.
“Destroy the family, you destroy the country...Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” -Vladimir Lenin. What we have allowed our children to be fed in our generation is the antagonist of hope found in God.
Let me leave you with this:
2 Peter 3:10–13 "But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. 11 Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, 12 waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! 13 But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
2 Peter 3 tells us that the same God who created the universe will one day, de-create the universe. Redeem this entire world and the corruption of sin. Do you believe that? Are you prepared to stand in judgment against that verse too? The same God who created this world will one day renovate it for eternity. Will you come to Him today, as both your Creator and Eternal sustainer. As your Judge and your Redeemer. That is our hope in Him today.
