Creation Day 5
Pastor Brad Reaves
Crossway Christian Fellowship
Genesis 1:20-23
20 And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” 21 So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” 23 And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.
In December, 1996, evolutionist and astronomer named Carl Sagan died. His perception was that life just sort of happened and he ended up his life with absolute emptiness – absolute hopelessness. And near the end of his life he was interviewed by Ted Koppel on television. Koppel asked, “Do you, sir, have any words of wisdom for the people of the world?” To which Sagan replied, “We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400-plus-billion other stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe, which may be one of a large number – perhaps an infinite number – of other universes. That is well worth pondering.”
In the end, the most brilliant evolutionist only knows that the universe exists. He doesn’t know how, he doesn’t know why, and mostly he doesn’t know who the creator is. This is the place we find our own society now and dare I say many in the modern church aren’t far from this either.
1 The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good. 2 The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. 3 They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one. (Psalm 14:1-3)
Everything in the universe points to God, the Creator. Even Albert Einstein said, “Of course there is a massive intelligence behind the universe. A man is a fool who doesn’t believe that,” and then went on to say, “But we could never know him.” The humanistic evolutionist refuses to see what is obvious, refuses to meet the God who wants to be known.
The realization that: 1. There is a God who created all we see and know. 2. He is present and active in the world today. 3. He created you in His own image. 4.He can be known by you and desires a personal relationship with you. The realization of these absolute truths completely transforms your outlook on life.
Now, over the past several weeks, I’ve told you there are countless evidences of creation and that the earth was created around 6,000 years ago instead of the billions of years purported by evolutionist. Today, I want to take a few minutes to add to those evidences of God’s marvelous creation:
Some birds navigate by the stars when migrating. In fact, birds raised from eggs inside a building where they have never seen the sky can orient themselves toward home when shown an artificial sky representing a place they’ve never been
Moths have two ears. There are mites who live in a moth’s ear. But interestingly enough, mites occupy only one ear of a moth. If mites get in both ears, the moth can’t fly.
The Bombardier beetle has two chemicals in his little body which mix perfectly and at the right moment combine outside the beetle’s body, they explode. However, the two chemicals that create an explosion outside the body, never combine prematurely to blow up the beetle. How would a beetle evolve those explosives and keep them separate?
there are an average of 1,800 storms in operation at any time, and that those 1,800 storms in operation at any time expend energy at the inconceivable figure of one billion, three hundred million horsepower.
Rain of four inches over an area of 10,000 square miles would require the burning of 640 million tons of coal to evaporate enough water for such a rain. And to cool again the vapors and collect them in clouds would take another 800 million horsepower of refrigeration working 24 hours a day for 100 days.
Some have estimated there are five billion birds in America. Mallards can fly 60 miles an hour, eagles can fly 100 miles an hour, and falcons can dive at 180 miles an hour.
Fossil frogs look the same as today’s frogs. Frogs would have died before the dinosaurs if there was a global impacts of an asteroid millions of years ago
Carbon-14 is the radioactive dating measurement that scientist hail as the gold standard in dating fossils and other things millions of years old. Yet carbon-14 actually decays quickly - with a half-life of 5,730 years. None is expected to remain in fossils after only a few thousand years. In fact, natural events like volcanic eruptions, solar flares, forrest fires, and other common events can easily corrupt carbon-14 dating.
Soft tissue is commonly found in dinosaur fossils such as the triceratops, t-rex, and other animal fossils. Material that would not possibly survive millions of years fossilized.
In fact, fossils are only found in the lowest bearing sedimentary rock without layers of “simpler” life-forms gradually leading up to them in the layers of rock.
Even more, of the 43 land animal order, nearly all (97.7%) were found as fossils. This means that at least one example from each animal order, including dogs, cats, bears bats, rodents, apes, etc. have been found.
There are over 1000 documented massive fossil graveyard around the world that demonstrate there was a massive water catastrophe with fossil fields in places far from oceans, like the mid-west or highest mountains like the Himalayas. Even more these sea fossils were formed through a cataclysmic event, not millions of years of pressure as most of these sea animals do not fossilize
In 2000, scientists claimed to have resurrected bacteria, named Lazarus bacteria, discovered in a salt Crystal they dated 250 million years old. Scientists were shocked that the bacteria’s DNA was very similar to modern bacterial DNA. If the modern bacteria were the result of 250 million years of evolution, its DNA should be every different from the Lazarus bacteria, based on known mutation rates.
The Earth is 25,000 miles in circumference, weighs 6,586 sextillion tons, hangs in empty space, spins at 1,000 miles an hour with perfect balance. And that’s important, so you’re not just jumping every time the Earth moves. At the same time that it’s spinning at 1,000 miles an hour, it is moving through space around the sun at 1,000 miles a minute in an orbit of 580 million miles. It does so at a perfect angle set to create the seasons, which provide all the crops which feed its inhabitants.
the sun burns up four million tons of matter per second
Atoms are so small it takes three atoms to make up one water molecule, and if you were to take every water molecule in one drop of water and blow them up so that each molecule was the size of a grain of sand, you would have enough grains of sand to make a road one foot thick, one-half mile wide that would go from L.A. to New York City.
What makes matter seem solid are the motions within the atoms. Everything is mostly empty space. If the average person had all the space squeezed out of them, you’d be lost on the head of a pin & a full cubic inch of that material would weigh a billion pounds.
There is something called “The Wheel of Life.” You’ve got them all through you and they are found in the enzyme ATP synthase. Its discovery won a joint Nobel Prize in 1997 for two scientists, Paul Boyer of the USA and John Walker of the U.K. This miniature motor is 200,000 times smaller than a pinhead and it’s revolving 100 revolutions per second. Every cell in your body has thousands of these motors. Someone estimate that your body has 10 quadrillion little motors.
The ATP motor’s job is to make the molecule adenosine triphosphate, ATP, from adenosine diphosphate, ADP, and phosphoric acid a synthesis which requires an input of energy. The ATP can then break down into ADP again giving up the energy by coupling itself to another chemical process within the cell which requires the energy in order to react. So energy is directed and the products are recycled constantly in this little tiny motor, of which you have 10 quadrillion going on all the time.
Says Dr. Walker, “We require our body weight in ATP every day.” So those little motors have to reproduce your entire body weight every day. We’re turning over that amount of ATP, cycling that energy, to keep ourselves thinking and walking around, doing whatever we do. If we have a lazy day, we’ll only use about half our body weight of ATP and if we work hard, up to one ton of ATP is recycled in a day. In 1993, Professor Boyer deduced by indirect means how ATP was produced, but it was left to Dr. Walker in 1994 to provide the first detailed picture of how the motor works. He used x-rays and an electron microscope to take an atomic snapshot. And then they used a tiny fluorescent filament attached to the electron microscope to see the motor spinning
These extremely complex little spinning motors are brilliantly designed. Each motor is built from 31 separate proteins, is 200,000 times smaller than the head of a pin, that are made from thousands of precisely-arranged amino acids. They are producing the necessary energy cycle to keep you alive and keep you functioning. “It’s incredible, to think of these motors of life spinning around in all the cells of our bodies and they are spinning in all the cells of everything that lives.”
14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. (Psalm 139:14)
You cannot conclude anything other than that there was an eternal, preexisting creator. How did the universe come into existence? It came into existence exactly the way it’s described in the opening chapter of the Bible, which is inspired by God, which is true and inerrant and infallible. The truth of origins is clearly given here in six 24-hour solar days, defined as an evening and a morning.
The Bible is very clear, God created it all in six days. Day one, God created the material and light. Day two, the seas and the heavens. Day three, the earth and vegetation. Day four, the sun, the moon, and the stars. Now we come to day five, God creates all the creatures that populate the seas and the skies. Verse 20, “Swarms of living creatures.” This is the first time anything is said to be living. Plants aren’t so designated. The first living beings created by God came on day five.
If you look at the sequence, you will also see that the days correspond: Day 1 God creates the lights, and Day 4 God creates the luminaries. Day 2 God separates the waters and the heavens and Day 5 God creates the sea creatures and the birds. Day 3 God creates dry land, and Day 6 God creates land animals and humans.
20 And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” (Genesis 1:20)
Swarm is the word chosen here because it has the idea of movement, and I remind you that the distinctiveness of living creatures is that they move. Plants are not called living creatures because they aren’t mobile. He literally, in a moment, spoke into existence all the creatures that swim. Just instantaneously, at the same moment on the same day, they all came into existence. They were not somehow in a process of development as species evolved into other species and mutated into other species.
7 Praise the Lord from the earth, you great sea creatures and all deeps, (Psalm 148:7)
“The first introduction of animal life was not a fragile blog of protoplasm that happened to come together in response to electrical discharges over a primeval ocean as evolutionists believe.” (Henry Morris)
21 So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:21)
So you find here that it doesn’t use the word “swarming” for the birds. Rather, it says “Let the birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of heaven.” They are free to fly, literally in the Hebrew, ‘on the face of heaven.’ That’s a wonderful picture because you could translate it they fly in front of heaven, all the way up into the very limitless ends of the eternity of space that God made.
Lastly we see that God, for the first time, orders multiplication - or reproduction.
And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” (Genesis 1:22)
All living organisms characteristically have three properties: 1). They are self-sustaining. 2). They are self-repairing. 3). They are self-reproducing.
There is something known as a von Neumann machine after the scientist von Neumann. A von Neumann machine is self-sustaining or self-perpetuating, self-repairing and self-reproducing. So far we have never, by all of our science, been able to manufacture anything like that. We can’t come up with a computer that sustains its own life and its own energy, repairs itself, and has little computers. We don’t have such a machine and the reason is the complexity of it is too vast. The complexity of it is too complicated. If we could get something complicated enough to do that, it would be in disrepair all the time. It couldn’t keep up with the self-repairing process.
We can’t create a von Neumann machine, and yet every single cell that exists is just that. This amazing capability, biochemical reproductive systems being placed in every little DNA strip in every cell of every creature, and with that comes the capability to be fruitful and multiply. This is an assurance of propagation. It has nothing to do with evolution.
I was driving a man up to Chambersburg the other morning, just as the light from the sun was painting a beautiful horizon. Over a farm there was a large swarm of blackbirds that were migrating, and as they flew along they were creating beautiful patterns of waves as birds or fish do when they fly together in large groups. We commented on the beauty of the scenery and then he said to me, “You know, someone programmed an algorithm using small dots on a computer screen, and they made the algorithm such that the dots were programed to move, but not bump into each other. The more dots they added to the program, the more they saw these same patterns the birds make. There is no purpose behind these wave patterns other than the birds are not running into each other.”
I said to him, “Yes, but how do the birds know not to run into each other?” To which he replied, “It’s just instinct.” I said, “Oh no. Just as those dots on a computer screen needed someone intelligent to tell them not to collide, so did these birds!”
You know, there are many good reasons today to be afraid or to worry. The geopolitical climate, this virus and the power being used to leverage this virus against us, there’s a groaning in the earth. The state of humankind as we know it is on a serious downward spiral, and from my perspective, it’s only getting worse.
26 Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? (Matthew 6:26)
There is no greater discovery than seeing God as the author of your destiny. Unless I understand the Cross, I cannot understand why my commitment to what is right must take precedence over what I prefer. One of the most staggering truths of the Scriptures is to understand that we do not earn our way to heaven. Works have a place–but as a demonstration of having received God’s forgiveness, not as a badge of merit of having earned it. Will you come to Him today?
