Genesis 1:1-5
Please stand with me as we go over our current memory Scripture:
Matthew 5:9-12
“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.
“Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for they persecuted the prophets who were before you in the same way.”
And our memory Scripture “refresher” verse(s) is(are):
Ephesians 2:8-10
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God - not by works, so that no one can boast.
“For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
Today we will be reading from Genesis 1:1-5
Bookends …
These are bookends that I made in shop class in 7th or 8th grade.
They are not pretty but for some odd reason I still have them.
What do book ends do? They support books to keep them from falling over. I don’t know how many of you remember ENCYCLOPEDIAS but people would actually go door to door selling them. You would see advertisements for encyclopedias in newspapers, magazines, through the mail and on TV.
The entire premise was that you could find any information you needed in those encyclopedias.
The Bible has bookends, too. They are Genesis and The Revelation of Jesus Christ. These bookends contain explosive statements that demand a response.
With that in mind please join me in your Bibles as we read: Genesis 1:1-5
(Prayer for help)
The Bible has two bookends when it comes to this world. The first is found in Genesis 1:1 where it says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
In this case, “the heavens” means not only the area we call outer space but the atmosphere or the sky as well.
The other bookend of the existence of this earth is found in Revelation 20:11 where it says,
“Then I saw a great white throne and Him who was seated on it. The earth and the sky fled from His presence, and there was no place for them.”
Let me repeat that last sentence. It is awesome and almost always overlooked, “The earth and the sky fled from His presence, and there was no place for them.”
Those are two tremendous bookends, aren’t they?
First God creates this earth and sky from nothing and then, at the end, the earth and the sky flee from His presence, “and there was no place for them” or, they ceased to exist because “they (had) passed away” as it says in Revelation 21:1.
These are two amazing accounts!
“In the beginning God created …”
And here the great battle line is drawn. God or no god, that is the question.
How did it happen? Why are we here? Is all of this the conscious decision and will of an Almighty God or is all of this the happenstance of random chemical and physical “accidents” over countless eons of time?
What does science say?
There is a law of physics called cause and effect. For anything to happen there must be something that causes it to happen.
When you sat down today certain muscles had to relax in order to let your joints rotate. When you stand up those muscles will need to contract causing your joints to extend and the effect will be that you have moved from a sitting position to a standing position.
When you pour water from a pitcher into a glass it is confined and fills the glass. The cause of the confinement is the glass and the effect of the glass is that the water is limited to a defined space. If you miss the glass the water is NOT limited to a confined space and you need to clean it up.
What does that have to do with “in the beginning God created …”?
Let’s take two opposing views, “God created” or “it just happened”.
Both of these take faith.
God created …
- How did God get something from nothing? We don’t know.
- How is God eternal and how did He exist before creation? We don’t know.
- How did God bring order from chaos? We don’t know.
And then we have the opposing view …
“It just happened” commonly known as the Big Bang Theory …
- Where did matter come from? We don’t know.
- How did all of the matter in the universe happen to be located in one tiny space that in a moment before time exploded with such force as to spread matter throughout all of the universe that we can observe? We don’t know.
- What created the laws of physics that would have caused that reaction to happen? We don’t know.
- NASA says, ‘We do not know the exact age of the universe, but we believe that it is around 13 billion years - give or take a few billion. Astronomers estimate the age of the universe in two ways: (a) by looking for the oldest stars; and (b) by measuring the rate of expansion of the universe and extrapolating back to the Big Bang.”
- Of course, this is built on supposition …
o Was there really a Big Bang” We don’t know.
o Do all stars age at the same rate? We don’t know.
o Is earth at the center of the universe and everything is moving away from us so we can measure the expansion or should some things actually be moving in the same direction as us as we move away from the center of the explosion? We don’t know.
o Where was the center of the explosion? We don’t know.
You see faith is involved in either religion, and science is a religion for many people.
Why are we even talking about this comparison?
We are talking about this comparison because it will determine how much faith you place in everything that is written between the “bookends” of the Bible.
What if you are a person who actually, truly believes that “in the beginning God created …” as it says in Genesis 1:1?
AND, what if you are a person who actually, truly believes that God is so unbelievably beyond our capacity to comprehend that Him that “the earth and sky (will actually flee) from His presence” one day and that they will cease to exist as it says in Revelation 20:11?
What IF you believe those “bookend” claims in the Bible?
Believing those two claims as Truths of God will affect how you read the rest of the Bible.
If you believe that Almighty God can literally speak everything into existence then you will have no problem with believing His power to destroy life on earth with a world-wide flood, or, believing His power to part the waters of the Red Sea or the Jordan river at flood stage.
If you believe that Almighty God can literally speak everything into existence then you will have no problem believing in God’s power to cause the walls of Jericho to fall or believing in His power to protect His people from overwhelming armies when they were obedient to Him.
If you believe that Almighty God can literally speak everything into existence then you will have no problem believing that He sent His one and only Son, fully God and fully man, to show us how to live, and to be a sacrifice for our sin and to be raised from the dead.
If you believe that Almighty God can literally speak everything into existence then everything between the “bookends” can be accepted by faith because of Who He Is.
However, if you believe that all that exists is due to pure happenstance, or that it all is the result of random chance, then you will most likely reduce the great miracles recorded in the Bible to be fables or merely nice stories from which we will learn to be a kinder, gentler people.
This is important! What you do with those “bookend” statements define how you read the Bible, it will define how big or small the God of the Bible is in your life.
What you do with the stunning statement of, “In the beginning God created …” will inform the rest of your view of the entire Bible.
What do you believe? Can God really make an iron ax head float? Did Jesus really walk on water?
Look at this … Acts 8:39-40 says,
“When (Philip and the Ethiopian) came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the Ethiopian did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing. Philip, however, appeared at Azotus and traveled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea.”
Do you believe that? Do you believe that The Lord REALLY transported him from one place to another?
OK. That’s enough of testing whether we believe the Bible to be actual accounts where they are portrayed as such or just nice stories.
Let’s look at Genesis 1:2, “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
Sometimes at night when I can’t sleep I try to get my mind off things that are keeping me awake by going over our memory Scriptures.
When I do that I try to start at the beginning of the Bible and go in order. Now even though the first two verses of Genesis have never been one of our memory Scriptures I have read it often enough to get pretty close.
And, I try to imagine the earth as being formless and empty and even though God is Spirit I try to envision Him hovering over this chaotic mass that He will soon organize into a beautiful creation.
But, what did it look like then? Was it like some kind of blob hanging in space? What would it have looked like to see the Spirit of God hovering over the waters? To me it sounds terrifying and yet beautiful. The One who would create us, the One who would pursue us, the One who would redeem us with the life of His Son was hovering, moving, brooding with great care over the dark mass of waters.
Is that an amazing thought or what? Perhaps in eternity when time is not a factor I will be able to go to that place and see our Great God brooding over the face of the deep.
Well, let’s move on to verse 3 where it says, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”
Many people say that this is out of sequence because the sun and the moon were not created until the fourth day of creation. But, it does not say that God created any particular sources of light, it just says that He created light. He created the physics that would be involved in making light energy possible.
When I was in physics class in High School I slept a lot. I can’t believe I passed the course but one thing I do remember, and it is the very basic physics of the how an atom produces light.
Now, in order to be sure that I was not remembering wrong I went into the DuckDuckGo search engine and typed in something like, “How is light produced for dummies” and it returned a very elementary version of what I remembered.
In an atom the nucleus is made up of protons and neutrons, you can think of them as the sun would be in our solar system. Then there are electrons that circle the nucleus very much like the planets, including earth, circle the sun.
When an atom is stimulated by heat for instance some of the electrons may jump from one energy level to a higher energy level. When the heat source is removed the electrons will go back down to the lower energy level and when they do that they often release light.
This is a VERY SIMPLISTIC explanation and the reason I am attempting it is because, it seems from the verse we just read that it was at that point where God created the mechanism that produced light and the light was visible even though the sun had not yet been created.
So what have we seen in these first three verses in this “bookend” of the Bible called Genesis?
- God created everything from nothing
- The Spirit of God was hovering, moving, brooding over the unformed mass of the earth
- God made a change in the chaos by creating light and He did that by speaking it into existence
And, what did God think of His creation?
Genesis 1:4-5 says,
“God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day,’ and the darkness He called ‘night.’ And there was evening, and there was morning - the first day.”
That’s a good day’s work, isn’t it?
One more thing. The second law of thermodynamics basically says that everything is in the process of decay. This is true unless it is being something is being tended to. Don’t take care of the house and it will one day be in ruins.
How is your spiritual life? Is it decaying or dead?
One day, Jesus, the Creator of the light we can see with our eyes said, “I Am the Light of the world. Whoever follows Me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
Are you walking in the spiritual light of Jesus? How do you know?
Do you remember when we spoke about God and the judgment throne in Revelation 20? Listen to this, written by the apostle John, about the final judgment.
Picture your life as it is now. Picture your devotion or lack of devotion to Christ. Picture the sin you may be living in, perhaps without even any shame.
Picture the state of your soul as you see the eyes of God the Creator and the Holy Judge looking at you as the books are opened.
Picture the fact that you already know whether or not your name is found in the book of life.
Now here you are standing before the throne from which even the earth and sky have fled from. Are you there?
Listen to the words from Revelation 20:11-15 where it says,
“Then I saw a great white throne and Him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from His presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books.
“The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.”
You don’t need to tell anyone about what your fate would be.
You don’t need to ask anyone to help you to know. You know.
It will be dreadful for those who do not belong to Jesus.
You CAN know for sure that your name is in the book of life.
How can you know?
Read what is between the “bookends” of Genesis and Revelation. Read it as if your eternal soul depends on it because it does.
Ask the Holy Spirit Who was long ago brooding over the face of the deep to help you to understand the magnitude of what the Savior can do in you to help to make you a child of God.
Final thoughts and prayer.
