Shawne B. from Warsaw, Indiana, was talking to her son about all the wonderful things God had made. She would ask him questions like, “Who made the sun?” and “Who made the rain?”
Then, one evening, she looked at the toys scattered on the floor and asked, “Who made this mess?”
After thinking for a bit, her son said, “God did!” (Shawne B., Warsaw, Indiana, “Life in Our House,” Christian Parenting Today, March/April 2000; www.PreachingToday.com)
Our nation is in a mess today, but you can be sure: God did not make this mess.
3,500 years ago, the nation of Israel was in a mess too. God had rescued them from Egypt. He led them through the Red Sea and gave them His law. Then He led them through the wilderness right up to the Promised Land, but Israel refused to go in. They refused to believe that God was strong enough to overcome the giants and walled cities in the land, so they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, where 50,000 people died every year—that’s over 100 people every day.
Then a new generation approached the Promised Land again. That’s when Moses, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote the first book of the Bible, the book of Genesis. He writes to encourage the nation that their God is able to deliver them out of their mess into the Promised Land. His words encouraged them to move forward into a promising, new day, and they can encourage you to do the same. If you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to Genesis 1, Genesis 1, where we see God bringing order out of chaos.
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning, God [Elohim, the Mighty One] created the heavens and the earth.
First, God created time—In the beginning. Before this, there was no time, for God is outside of time. So God created time.
Then He created space. He created the heavens—not the heavens of outer space, but the space between objects, the space between you and me, even the space between the protons and electrons in an atom. Before creation, there was only God, nothing else. So, in order to make things, God had to create the space in which to put those things. First, God created time. Then He created space.
Then He created matter. In the beginning, God created the heavens AND THE EARTH. That’s the stuff of the universe— the atomic particles placed in a space-time continuum.
Genesis 1:1 is the most scientific statement in all of ancient literature, especially when you consider what the ancients believed. In Moses’ day, they believed that Marduk, the strong man of the gods, accompanied by the four winds, pursued Tiamat, a goddess. Tiamat opened her mouth, intending to devour him, but Marduk unleashed the four winds, which entered her mouth and blew her up like a balloon. Then, Marduk, using his sword, sliced her into two halves like a grapefruit. With the upper half, he created the dome of the heavens; and with the lower half, he created the earth (John H. Tullock, ‘The Old Testament Story, 5th ed., p.38).
As a young man, that’s what Moses’ teachers taught him as the accepted theory of origins in his day. Yet, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Moses writes, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
Today, teachers teach their students that the universe started off as some highly compressed mass. Then there was an explosion; and out of that explosion, billions of years later, we have the universe as we see it today. That’s like saying an explosion in a junkyard could eventually produce a Boeing 747 after a million years, or so.
I think it would be easier to believe that Marduk cut Tiamat in half to create the universe. It takes a tremendous amount of faith to believe either theory. I prefer to believe the simple, scientific statement in the Bible: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
GOD MADE EVERYTHING OUT OF NOTHING.
God created all things without anything to start with.
First, God created the building blocks of the universe—time, space, and matter—which originally existed in a shapeless, empty mass of free-floating atoms.
Genesis1:2 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 (ESV).
God created the stuff of the universe. The Holy Spirit energized it. Then God formed and filled his creation. He shaped it, then packed it with great stuff. In the first three days, God made the forms, creating light and darkness in verse 3-5, water and sky in verses 6-8, and land and plants in verse 9-13. In the first three days, God made the forms. Then He filled the forms on days 4, 5, and 6. On day four, He filled the light and darkness with the sun, moon, and stars (vs.14-19). On day five, He filled the water and sky with fish and birds (vs.20-23). And on day six, He filled the land with animals and humans (vs.24-31).
And God did it all in six night and day cycles, that’s six literal days, not years or millions of years. That’s what Genesis 1 says. Verse 5—And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. Verse 8—And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. Verse 13—And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. Verse 19—And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. Verse 23—And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. Verse 31—And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
The Bible says God created everything in six days. Why then do some scientists say the earth is billions of years old? It’s because they need billions of years for their evolutionary hypothesis to have even the slightest chance of working.
They lack any objective, scientific basis to date the earth, because their radio-active dating methods proved to be inaccurate past a few thousand years. In fact, scientists at the Hawaiian Institute of Geophysics tested volcanic lava, which their instruments told them was 3 billion years old. However, that lava was formed from a volcanic eruption that happened only 200 years previously (Chuck Colson, Arguing with Evolution, Breakpoint Series Reprint, 1993).
Scientists lack any objective, scientific basis to date the earth, so they defer to each other. Read any standard geology textbook and you find that the geologists date their rocks by the kind of fossils they find in them. How then do the paleontologists date their fossils? They date their fossils by the kind of rock they find them in. It’s all circular reasoning, which has no basis in any objective standard.
So who are you going to believe? Scientists, who are only guessing at the age of the earth? Or the God who made the earth? I choose to believe God, who says He made everything out of nothing in six days. He is Elohim, God almighty!
Dr. Peter Edwards, an astronomer, says, “You’ll never, ever, get your head around how big the universe is. Don’t go there. It’s just vast. It’s enormous! There’s no way that the human mind can comprehend the true immensity of the universe.”
Then he describes the Hubble telescope zooming in on a very ordinary patch of the night sky. And he says, “If you imagine holding up your finger with a grain of sand on it and looking at the patch of sky that grain of sand blocks out, that's the [size of the] field that the (Hubble) telescope zoomed in to.”
Dr. Edwards says, “What the telescope saw was incredible. There are 10,000 galaxies in a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. If this tiny patch of sky is like every other, then we can calculate... [that] the visible universe contains around 100 billion galaxies. Each one of those galaxies contains around about 100 billion stars. That means the visible universe contains something like 10,000 million million million stars. That means there are more stars in the visible universe than there are grains of sand on the earth (Pete Edwards, "How Big Is The Universe ... Compared With A Grain Of Sand?" The Guardian Channel, YouTube, 2-12-13; www.PreachingToday.com).
Wow! We serve a big God, who created it all just by speaking a word. Don’t you think He has the power to care for you? Sure He does! So rest in that power, especially in these days.
REST IN GOD’S POWER TO CARE FOR YOU.
Trust Him to protect you in the midst of all the turmoil. Depend on Him to deliver you from the thing you fear most.
Ancient Israel feared the sea. They feared it so much that they never developed a navy or a fleet of merchant ships. So imagine how they felt when they read for the first time, in verse 21, that “God created the great sea creatures.” He created the great plesiosaurus. He created the great blue whale or the awesome killer shark. God made what they feared most. That means He controls the object of their fears—those enormous sea creatures.
And God controls the object of your fears, too! You may not fear the sea, but you might fear an uncertain future, a doctor’s diagnosis, or financial ruin. Whatever it is, God’s got it under control. So rest in His power to care for you.
A little girl listened attentively as her father read the family devotions, which described God’s limitless power and mercy. “Daddy,” she asked, placing her little hands on his knees, “How big is God.”
Her father thought for a moment and answered, “Honey, He is always just a little bigger than you need.”
In fact, He is A LOT bigger than you need. So, rest in His power to care for you. More than that...
REST IN GOD’S POWER TO CREATE ORDER OUT OF CHAOS.
Trust Him to turn your troubles into triumphs, to turn your curses into blessings. Depend on Him to work all things together for good in your life.
That’s what God did when He created the universe. Genesis 1:2 says originally it was “without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep.” While literally true in Genesis 1, those words quickly took on connotations of doom and gloom in the Old Testament. In almost every other context, those words speak of calamity and judgment. The original creation started in a state of chaos, but God created a cosmos out of it and called it “good.”
Now, God can do the same for you! He can bring order out of the chaos in your life.
Sandra McCracken, in an article she titled “Cultivating Chaos,” talks about her friends, who lost their home when a tornado carved through their neighborhood. There’s a lonely pine tree still standing in the side yard beside where the house used to be. The deep pit of dirt that was their basement was laid bare, exposed under the Tennessee sky.
Later, workers dug an outline around the edges of a new house they planned to build where the old house once stood. Then, over the next few months, as Sandra’s friends put together architectural plans, rogue clusters of wildflowers grew up all around. Purple, white, and green shoots burst from wind-blown seeds that took up residence in the basement soil that had long been in darkness.
Sandra says, “There’s comfort in seeing these wildflowers grow where a home has become a memory. New life still blooms amid uncertainty, even when we don’t fully understand what’s happening to us. Wildflowers do not apologize for our loss, nor do they diminish our grief. But their gentle sway reminds us that when our best plans seem formless and void, God’s Spirit is hovering near, calling something good to grow.”
Eventually, workers covered the wildflowers in that dirt basement with a new foundation. And inside that new foundation, they built a new room with an improved tornado shelter. Out of the chaos, they created a new beginning in a stronger home (Sandra McCracken, “Cultivating Chaos,” Christianity Today Magazine, November 2020, p. 31; www.PreachingToday.com).
That’s what God can do for you! When your best plans seem formless and void, God’s Spirit hovers near, calling something good to grow. Out of the chaos, God can create a new beginning and put you in a stronger place.
Trust Him to do it for you. Rest in God’s power to care for you. Rest in God’s power to create order out of your chaos. And finally...
REST IN GOD’S POWER MAKE YOU INTO A NEW CREATION.
Trust Him to create a new life for you. Depend on Him to recreate you into His own image.
God’s Spirit and God’s Word worked together in God’s original creation. Verse 2 says, “The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” Then verse 3 says, “And God said, ‘Let there be... and there was.’” Verse 6 also says, “And God said, ‘Let there be... and there was.’” Again, verse 9 says, “And God said... and it was so.” No less than nine times, God speaks... and it was so, as His Spirit hovers over it all. God’s Spirit and God’s Word worked together in God’s original creation.
And God’s Spirit and God’s Word work together in each new creation today. The Bible says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17), “born again... through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Peter 1:23), “by the... renewal of the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5). God’s Spirit hovers over people, moving them to believe God’s Word, which makes them new creatures in Christ.
In 1833, Charles Darwin traveled to the South Sea Island, looking for the so-called “missing link.” As he studied the cannibals living there, he concluded that no creatures anywhere were more primitive than they. He convinced himself that nothing on earth could possibly lift them up to a higher level and concluded that he had found his “missing link,” a lower stratum of humanity that fit his theory of evolution.
34 years later, Darwin returned to those same islands; but to his amazement, he saw those same, former cannibals occupying churches, schools, and homes. They wore clothes and frequently gathered to sing hymns.
What happened? Missionary John G. Patton had been there, proclaiming the Word of God. This impressed Darwin so much that He made a generous contribution to the London Missionary Society (Paul Lee Tan, Encyclopedia of 7700 Illustrations, #1454).
God’s Spirit and God’s Word turned cannibals into Christians. God’s Spirit and God’s Word created new creations in Christ, and God’s Spirit and God’s Word can do the same for you no matter your past.
Please, let Him do it for you. As you listen to God’s Word today, welcome the Holy Spirit’s conviction, and trust Christ, who died for you and rose again.
Just rest in God’s power today. Rest in God’s power to care for you. Rest in God’s power to create order out of your chaos, and rest in God’s power to make you into a new creation.
Over a hundred years ago, in a Scottish seaside inn, a group of fishermen were relaxing after a long day at sea. As a serving maid was walking past the fishermen's table with a pot of tea, one of the men made a sweeping gesture to describe the size of the fish he claimed to have caught. His hand collided with the teapot and sent it crashing against the whitewashed wall, with the tea leaving an irregular brown splotch.
Standing nearby, the innkeeper surveyed the damage. “That stain will never come out,” he said in dismay. “The whole wall will have to be repainted.”
“Perhaps not.” All eyes turned to the stranger who had just spoken.
“What do you mean?” asked the innkeeper.
“Let me work with the stain,” said the stranger, standing up from his table in the corner. “If my work meets your approval, you won't need to repaint the wall.”
The stranger picked up a box and went to the wall. Opening the box, he withdrew pencils, brushes, and some glass jars of linseed oil and pigment. He began to sketch lines around the stain and fill it in here and there with dabs of color and swashes of shading. Soon a picture began to emerge. The random splashes of tea had been turned into the image of a stag with a magnificent rack of antlers. At the bottom of the picture, the man inscribed his signature. Then he paid for his meal and left.
The innkeeper was stunned when he examined the wall. “Do you know who that man was?” he said in amazement. “The signature reads ‘E.H. Landseer!’” Sir Edwin Landseer, the famous painter of wildlife, had turned the mess into a thing of beauty (“Mistreated,” Leadership, Vol. 12, no. 3; www.PreachingToday.com)
Please, let the Great Creator do the same for you. Let God turn your mess into a masterpiece of His grace and power.
