Introduction
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve shared with you the impossibility of evolution. This is not a philosophical argument, but a theological fact. Evolutionists seek to dispose of God, especially the God of the Bible. Evolution, the gospel, and our salvation are impossibly compatible. When it comes to God’s intelligent design, every living thing has a DNA code programmed with the exact information to produce, preserve, and repair that living thing. It has no less than and no more than that necessary information.
When you think about the complexity of all of creation, it is absolutely staggering. Honest scientists will admit that life had to be designed by an almighty, intelligent God. Think about a 747 which is made up of six million components. As I said last week. What is the probability that a 747 would be fully assembled in a junkyard by a tornado? That’s what science is trying to explain with time+matter+chance with a universe infinitely more complex than a 747.
The more science looks at life, the more complex it becomes. The body, for example, is made up of trillions of cells. In just one of those cells, one out of trillions, the amount of information, the amount of genetic information in one of those cells has been estimated to fill at least one thousand books of five hundred pages. That’s to run one cell out of trillions in one human body. In one gram of DNA, enough to fill a teaspoon, we could store all the information currently on all the world’s computers. Where did, or rather from whom did all this information come?
In 1989 scientist Henry Morris wrote an excellent book called, The Long War Against God. “Evolution’s lie permeates and dominates modern thought in every field. That being the case, it follows inevitably that evolutionary thought is basically responsible for the lethally ominous political developments and the chaotic moral and social disintegrations that have been accelerating everywhere.” He goes on in his book to show how everything from genocide, to fornication, to abortion, to all matters of the destruction of human dignity, not seeing man as made in the image of God, to crime, to drugs, and everything else is all a part of the result of a materialistic, humanistic universe without God. And so, says Morris, “Evolution is nothing more than the pervasive modern version of the conflict of the ages, the long war against God.”
Now, creation is not just a topic of the introduction to Genesis. The identity of God as our creator and redeemer is permeated throughout the entire Bible. Nowhere in the Bible is God separated from His sovereignty over all creation as a creator. From the Old Testament straight through to the New Testament. You cannot know who God is without first understanding that He and He alone is the sovereign over all of creation and before I get into Day 1 of creation, I want you to look at a few verses with me.
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19 For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1:19–20?)
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. (John 1:1–3)
3 By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. (Hebrews 11:3)
16 For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. (Colossians 1:16)
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32 “For ask now of the days that are past, which were before you, since the day that God created man on the earth, and ask from one end of heaven to the other, whether such a great thing as this has ever happened or was ever heard of. (Deuteronomy 4:32)
1 Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord from the heavens; praise him in the heights! 2 Praise him, all his angels; praise him, all his hosts! 3 Praise him, sun and moon, praise him, all you shining stars! 4 Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens! 5 Let them praise the name of the Lord! For he commanded and they were created. (Psalm 148:1–5)
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5 Thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk in it: (Isaiah 42:5)
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10 Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers? (Malachi 2:10)
6 Then I saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people. 7 And he said with a loud voice, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.” (Revelation 14:6–7)
“The New Testament is, if anything, even more dependent on Genesis than the Old. There are at least 165 passages in Genesis that are either directly quoted or clearly referred to in the New Testament. Many of them are alluded to more than once, so that there are at least 200 quotations or references to Genesis in the New Testament. It is significant that the portion of Genesis which has been the object of the greatest attacks of skepticism and unbelief, the first eleven chapters, is the portion which had the greatest influence on the New Testament. There exist over 100 quotations or direct references to Genesis 1 through 11 in the New Testament.
“Furthermore, every one of those eleven chapters is alluded to somewhere in the New Testament, and every one of the New Testament authors refers somewhere in his writings to Genesis 1 to 11, every New Testament author. On at least six different occasions Jesus Christ Himself quoted from or referred to something or someone in one of those eleven chapters, six different times, including specific references to each of the first seven chapters. Furthermore, in not one of these many instances where the Old or New Testament refers to Genesis is there the slightest evidence that the writers regarded the events or personages as myths or allegories. To the contrary, they all viewed Genesis as absolutely historical, true, and authoritative.” (Henry Morris)
Now, with that let’s get to the text:
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1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. (Genesis 1:1–5 )
I. In the Beginning
Douglas Kelly, writing in his book Creation and Change, says, “The uniformitarian assumption that millions of years of geological work extrapolating from present, slow, natural processes would be required to explain structure such as the American Grand Canyon, for instance, is called into serious question by the explosion of Mount St. Helens in the state of Washington on the 18th of May, 1980. Massive energy equivalent to 20 million tons of TNT destroyed 400 square kilometers of forest in 6 minutes, changing the face of the mountain and digging out depths of earth and rock, leaving formations not unlike parts of the larger Grand Canyon. Recent studies of the Mount St. Helens phenomenon indicate that if attempts were made to date these structures, which were formed in 1980, on the basis of uniformitarian theory,millions of years of formation time would be necessarily postulated. Ironically, one of the centerpieces used to demonstrate uniformitarian chronology, the geologic column, on closer inspection actually witnesses to catastrophism.”
There are some other interesting indicators of a young universe. One that I find fascinating is the issue of moon dust. Scientists concluded before we reached the moon that after billions of years of moving through the universe that the moon was probably covered in dust several miles deep estimating that the rate of dust accumulations were a few ten-thousandths of an inch per year. Neil Armstrong read about this, and was very concerned that when he stepped out of the spaceship he might sink forever into a suffocating morass of deep dust. He found just a few inches. If the calculations indicating the rate of dust accumulation were accurate, there was not a billion years’ worth of dust or even a million years, but just few thousand years’ worth of dust.
The great pressure that is still surrounding oil formations also testifys to a young earth. A scientist by the name of Dickey writes: “Studies show that any pressure built should be dissipated, bled off into surrounding rocks within a few thousand years. The excessive pressures found within oil beds, therefore, refute the notion of their age being on the order of millions of years and argues for the youthful age, something less than ten thousand years, of the rock formation and the oil trapped in it.”
The world population gives us an indication of the age of the earth. With a conservative average population growth of one-half a percent per year, which is a fourth of our present rate, the earth is only four thousand years. And according to biblical chronology, four thousand years ago was the Flood. If man was on the earth for millions of years the population of the earth now would be ten to the five thousandth power. That’s more people than could be crammed into the entire known universe!
II. God Created
So in the Beginning God Created. The Hebrews had no word for universe. They had a phrase for universe, ‘the heavens and the earth’ In the beginning God created, ex nihilo, out of nothing, the universe. With no prior existing matter, and no prior existing energy, God created the entire universe.
III. Without Form or Void
“And the earth was formless and void.” Whenever in Hebrew the subject comes before the verb, it is intended to emphasize something new about it. Tohu means wilderness. It means devastated place. It means waste place. And bohu means empty. It was an empty waste place.
23 I looked on the earth, and behold, it was without form and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light.
You know what he’s seeing here? He’s seeing a land devastated by a foreign army, a land smoldering, burning, a land where the birds have fled away from the smoke and the devastation, a land where there’s nobody left, they've been slaughtered, or they've been taken into captivity. (Jeremiah 4:23)
Maybe the best way to say it would be the earth was unfinished as to its shape, and unpopulated.The entire surface of the earth is water; it’s a deep, it’s a sea, it’s a global, primordial ocean, surrounded by universal darkness.
“And the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water.” Hovering over this unformed and lifeless material, engulfed in water, and steeped in darkness, the Spirit of God; ruach elohim. And this indicates superintending divine care and supervision.
The word “hovering” is a beautiful word. It’s used to describe young eaglets in a nest, unable to survive, unable to live, unable to develop and grow dependent on the care of parents who hover over them, providing food and protection and warmth, so they can survive, and live and grow and develop. It demonstrates that God is directly involved in His creation. His hand is never lifted from the elements. His presence is there superintending, hovering over His creation. This is the antithesis of this philosophical deism that says God is like the originator of the creation, He wound it up and then walked away from it. But rather, you have the living God superintending, brooding over, hovering over the waters, being directly in charge of the entire process of creation.
IV. Let There Be Light
The first thing that happens in creation is that God says, “Let there be light.”
First, notice how light is created. God speaks it into existence. Scientists cannot explain where light comes from because it is God who spoke it into existence. Some would ask if the stars are millions of light years away, how can the universe be only 6 thousand years old? Because God created all the light and everything in-between.
16 who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen. (1 Timothy 6:16)
Barry Setterfield an Australian scientist, proposed the decay in the speed of light in his writings called The Velocity of Light and the Age of the Universe. According to Setterfield, “the first careful measurement of the speed of light was made by a Danish astronomer, Rømer, in 1675 and then by an English astronomer Bradley in 1728. It’s been measured many times since then, and it’s said to have reached an equilibrium at the number I gave you a moment ago. The data indicate that the speed of light in 1675 was about 2.6 faster than today, and that it continued to decline until 1960 when atomic clocks began to be employed to measure it.”
Setterfield charted a rate of about 5.7 kilometers decrease in velocity per second between 1675 and 1728, and 2.5 kilometers per second decrease between 1880 and 1924, and he kept charting the decrease. He worked out a curve tracing the decay. On this basis Setterfield figures the earth was created about 4,040 plus or minus 100 years. At the time of creation the speed of light was going so much faster than it does now. If the speed of light has indeed decayed along with everything else, then the most basic empirical measurement of the age of the solar system would fit precisely into the genealogical chronologies of Genesis.
“Let there be light.” And with the creation of light, God established day and night. As we shall see looking here in verse 5, He called the light day and He called the darkness night, and you have the cycle of night and day. That means the earth immediately began rotating on its axis, and there was a source of light on one side of the earth and there was darkness on the other side.
Some may ask how there could have been light on earth without the sun? However, light is not dependent on the Sun for its existence, but the sun is dependent on light. God created light and there was light, simply because God told it to exist. This was the establishment of a day and night. There is no time period as some try to assert. The language is clear. This is how there will be light in eternity.
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Conclusion
5 And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. (Revelation 22:5)
The Bible begins and ends by describing an untainted world that filled with light but no sun and show God as the everlasting source of light. Jesus himself identifies himself as that light
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12 Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12)
It was an audacious claim because as Jesus spoke these words he was standing in the temple treasury by the massive extinguished torches that had burned that very night in the ceremony of the Illumination of the Temple, which celebrated the Shekinah glory that led Israel for forty years in the wilderness. (Hughes)
Jesus is the light. JEsus is the creator and Jesus is the one who brings order out of chaos. Not only for the world, but for your life as well. What do we want? Light (clarity), Creator (knowing God), Order (peace). It is He who you are looking for now and in the situation you are facing. The very same power that flung the stars out into the unfathomable, expanding universe while orchestrating life in the irreducible complexity of the cells of your body will act on your behalf if you come to him. He will turn your night into day with a word. He will reorder your broken life with a word. He will bring form out of chaos with a word. It is his specialty. He is not only the light, the Creator, and the Son of God—he is the Savior of the World.
