The How, Why, and When of Creation, Pt. 1
Genesis 1:1
If you want to open your Bible, you may to Genesis chapter 1...Genesis chapter 1. And we are finally going to arrive at the section on origins in Genesis 1, and then a little in to chapter 2, which is going to be the emphasis of our study in the weeks ahead.
The Bible opens with a monumental statement, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." And with that statement the Word of God, holy Scripture, affirms the existence of the universe and everything in it as the product of God's created act. It's a very important statement. This verse, I'll say it again, affirms the existence of the universe and everything in it as the product of God's created act. We are here shown in this verse that evolution, the dominant theory of science, is not true. What exists, exists not because it evolved but because God created it.
In past weeks we've tried to show that evolution is not scientific. Evolution is not reasonable. Evolution is impossible and irrational. We've been saying that there has never been one shred of evidence that matter on any level chemically can or will, can or will organize itself all by itself. Even when energized, let alone organizing itself by itself upward to viable life and continually higher life, and finally reaching human life, there has never been one shred of evidence that matter does that, or can do that.
It was over a hundred years ago that Louis Pasteur proved that spontaneous biogenesis cannot occur. A cell cannot increase its complexity. A cell cannot add information necessary in its DNA, or its genetic code, to take itself to a higher level. That is impossible. It has never been done, it has never been seen.
Nothing mutates upward. In fact, natural selection, which was a phrase that Darwin leaned on, natural selection, or the process of change or mutation is always downward, never upward. Individual lifes who vary too much from the center of the species go downward, the law of entropy. Thus, mutants don't improve the species, they are a decline. Inevitably they die at the cellular level. Natural selection then is only downward, not upward, and natural selection actually prevents evolution from taking place. No species is capable of moving up. It can decrease itself by a decrease in its information by some inotropic event that sends it into disorganization, but it cannot increase what it is because it cannot come across new information.
It is true that species die out. There are frankly millions of species that have died out in this world. And there are thousands, they tell us, that become extinct every day. There were more species than there are now. There were species in the past that we don't have today, such as dinosaurs. There may well have been other kinds of apes and other kinds of mammals as species, as well as insects and birds and snakes and creatures of the sea and all of that, that have died out and they may look like there are links between various species, but there has never been one shred of proof that one kind of species can become another, let alone a higher kind of life. What appears to be some kind of intermediate link found in some kind of vertebrae field or fossil field, may be nothing other than just an ancient species that went out of existence, as they do by the thousands all the time.
Evolution with its theory of chaos and its theory of unintelligent matter existing in random features, organizing itself by chance into highly complex forms and ultimately to the level of human intelligence and personality, is so preposterous and so impossible, and so scientifically inaccurate that no honest person could believe it. Evolution is a violation of all that modern science knows to be true.
On the other hand, we don't need evolution to explain anything because we just read how it happened in Genesis 1:1. Inorganic matter cannot organize itself upward to become organic matter. Organic matter cannot organize itself by random features to become more complex and ultimately reach the level of human intelligence and personality. That can't and doesn't happen.
Well people ask...and this is a very popular view today...but, "Couldn't God...we acknowledge God, we acknowledge a creator, but couldn't God have used evolution after creating the original matter? Couldn't God have used evolution in the sense of theistic evolution?" No, God couldn't have used evolution because evolution is impossible. Evolution assumes that matter can organize itself upward by itself.
A.E. Wilder Smith, a brilliant scientist who has done some literally ground-breaking work on this subject and who is a staunch creationist, wrote, "The necessary information to build man does not reside in the few elements it takes to compose him," end quote. You cannot explain man even by the components that he can be reduced to in a lab. Genetic information cannot come from nowhere. Genetic information cannot rise spontaneously, nor does matter itself operate itself into organizing itself in to some higher level of complexity. Well, you get the message.
Everything requires information from the outside. Intelligence is critical to all matter and all energy, information from an intelligent life-giving source, namely God. There shouldn't be any question about how the universe came into existence, it is clearly answered right in verse 1 of the Bible.
And I believe, I think it's accurate to say that if there was a theory other than evolution, except divine creation, if there was something other than divine creation or evolution, scientists would line up to get it. Scientists would gladly take a more rational explanation or a rational explanation than to continue to postulate evolution, but they don't have any alternative except divine creation. And that is intolerable to sinful man because the creator is also the moral authority of the universe and the judge of all men. Evolution doesn't make any sense at all. On the other hand, the Bible does.
Now, starting in verse 2, the first chapter of the Bible expands on verse 1. Verse 1 says that God created the heavens and the earth, and starting in verse 2 we find out how.
"And the earth was formless and void and darkness was over the face of the deep, or the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. God saw that the light was good and God separated the light from the darkness and God called the light day and the darkness He called night, and there was evening and there was morning, one day. "Then God said, 'Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters from the waters,' and God made the expanse and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse and it was so. And God called the expanse heaven and there was evening and there was morning, a second day.
"And God said, 'Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place and let the dry land appear,' and it was so. And God called the dry land earth and the gathering of the waters He called seas. And God saw that it was good. And God said, 'Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants, yielding seed and fruit and trees bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them on the earth,' and it was so. And the earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind and trees bearing fruit with seed in them after their kind, and God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.
"Then God said, 'Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night and let them for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heaven to give light on the earth.' And it was so. God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He made the stars also. And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth and to govern the day and the night and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.
"And God said, 'Let the waters team with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens.' And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves with which the waters swarmed after their kind and every winged bird after its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas and let birds multiply on the earth. And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.
"Then God said, 'Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind, cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind,' and it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth after their kind and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the earth after its kind. And God saw that it was good and God said, 'Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.' And God created man in His own image. In the image of God He created him male and female, He created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.' Then God said, 'Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed it shall be for food for you. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to everything that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food and it was so. And God saw all that He had made and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
"Thus the heavens and the earth were completed and all their hosts. And by the seventh day, God completed His work which He had done and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made."
Now there is the accurate eye-witness account of the creation of the universe. The creation account is laid out from Genesis 1:1 to Genesis 2:3. And the outline of the book of Genesis falls into two parts. The first part is the creation, Genesis 1:1 to 2:3. The second part is called the generations. Starting in chapter 2 verse 4 you start to follow the history of man. The whole creation 1:1 to 2:3, starting in 2:4 you start to follow the history of man all the way to the end of Genesis and through the patriarchal period.
We could say then that Genesis 1:1 gives a general and inclusive account of creation. God created the heavens and the earth. You cannot make a broader statement than that. That covers everything. That's a way of saying God created everything in the universe, everything that exists, whether you're talking about galaxies, or whether you're talking about nebulae or solar systems, whether you're talking about those things that are at the farthest reaches of the universe in space, or whether you're talking about the smallest grain of sand, or whether you're talking about a bacterial microbe on the planet earth, absolutely everything was created by God. He is the creator of all things visible and invisible, and all things means everything from various ranks of angels, every form of life from whales and elephants to viruses. Everything, all things include every form of energy, every form of matter, the speed of light, nuclear structure, electromagnetism, gravity, every law by which nature operates was created within the framework of this creation. All things...all things.
Behind the creation of everything in the universe stands the living God who had eternally existed as God but had not always been creator. But here He becomes creator and He creates everything...absolutely everything.
Starting in chapter 2 verse 4, as I said, He singles out man and goes back over the creation of man. And then tells the story of man which flows right really to the end of Scripture. But this is the only eye-witness account of creation, Genesis 1:1 to 2:3. It is not allegory. There's nothing in the Hebrew text or in the English text, for that matter, to indicate that this is a fanciful story, that this is some kind of an allegorical picture. There's nothing here to indicate that this is some kind of mystical poetry, that this is some kind of lyrical literary style that is something other than actual history. To put it to you, this is purely expressed history from God, written down by Moses. The creator Himself gave Moses this accurate account of history. And we accept the Scripture as inspired of God and inerrant and there's nothing in this text to indicate that it's anything other than plain history.
Now when it says in verse 1 "In the beginning God created," it uses the word bara. Bara when used in the...what's called the cowl-stem(??) of Hebrew is used in Scripture only with reference to the divine work of God. It has a uniqueness about it here and that uniqueness is its absoluteness. It means basically that the infinite, eternal, personal, triune God of the universe brought things into existence which were not in existence prior to this moment. He created, the Latin says, ex nihilo(?), out of nothing. That is there was no pre-existing material. Hebrews 11:3 says, "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." The things that we see in the created universe were not made from something else. They were made from nothing, ex nihilo, without pre-existing material. It's a way of saying everything around us, your body, the bench you're sitting on and the building you're in, the streets around us, the trees, the flowers, the city, the state, the nation, the continent, the world all of it, the stars, the moon, everything, everything you can see, everything you can't see, protozoa, amoeba, or sheer dust, any arrangement of matter at all came into existence instantaneously out of no pre-existing material. It didn't come from things that do appear, it came from nothing. And Genesis is the only record of creation. It is the only source of creation information.
Now as we look at this first verse, let's ask three questions, and I think these are fascinating questions and I think you'll find that out as we go. First question...how? How did God create? By which method? We've already suggested to you that He couldn't have used evolution, for two reasons we affirm that. Number one, the text of Genesis 1 leaves no room for evolution. And two, evolution doesn't happen. How did He do it? How did God do this?
Very simple really, verse 3, "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light." Verse 6, "And God...then God said, 'Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters from the heavens," and that's what happened. Verse 9, "Then God said, 'Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, let the dry land appear,' and it was so." Verse 11, "Then God said, 'Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, fruit trees bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them on the earth,' and it was so." Verse 14, "Then God said, 'Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. Let there be...let them be for signs and for seasons, for days and years. Let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth,' and it was so." Verse 20, "Then God said, 'Let the waters team with swarms of living creatures. Let birds fly above the earth and the open expanse of heaven,'" and goes on to talk about that creation. "And God saw it and it was good." And then in verse 24, "Then God said, 'Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind, cattle and creeping things, and the beasts of the earth after their kind,' and it was so." Verse 26, "Then God said, 'Let's make man.'"
How did God do this? What was His method? He spoke...He spoke...He spoke it into existence out of nothing. This is...this is God. Psalm 33:6 and 9, "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made and all the hosts of them by the breath of his mouth for He spoke and it was done, He commanded and it was established." That is the psalmist's affirmation of the Genesis account of creation. God said, "Let there be...let there be...let there be..." and every time He said it there was. This is what we call fiat creation, He willed it and spoke it into existence. Psalm 148:5 says, "He spoke and they were created."
This is where everything came from. It didn't exist. God willed it to exist. He spoke and it came into existence. That is the divine account of creation. In Mark 13:19 it talks about the beginning of the creation which God created...just in case somebody might question. And you have that all through the New Testament, the emphasis on the fact that God created. Matthew 19:4, "Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female?" Again and again the Scripture makes reference to God as creator. Romans 1 says it's so evident that God is the creator that if you don't see it you're without excuse. Colossians, that great first chapter, verse 16 where it says, "By Him all things were created both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created by Him and for Him." That sums it up. That is always the biblical, the New Testament and Old Testament, affirmation of God as creator. Hebrews 1:10, "And Thou, Lord, in the beginning didst lay the foundation of the earth and the heavens are the works of Thy hands." I mean, Scripture just continually affirms God as the creator and He created simply by willing it and then speaking it into existence.
Listen to Romans 4:17, this is another testimony. It says, "As it is written, a father of many nations have I made you, in the sight of Him of whom he believed, even God...and here is the definition of God...God who gives life to the dead...listen to this...and calls into being that which does not exist." That's Romans 4:17. Creation is God calling into existence what does not exist. There's no room in that for evolution. Evolution is something appearing that has mutated from something else. That's not creation.
At a particular point in eternity the eternal God spoke everything into existence, made up of components which had never before existed. Therefore we say the material, space-time-universe, had an absolute beginning, not some kind of relative beginning. And the plain...going back to Genesis, the plain meaning of Genesis 1:1 is frankly not arguable, it's unmistakable. "In the beginning God created everything...everything." St. Augustine wrote in his Confession, "For You created them from nothing, not from Your own substance or from some matter not created by Yourself, or already in existence, but from matter which You created at one and the same time as the things that You made from it since there was no interval of time before You gave form to this formless matter," end quote.
There was no pre-existing material. And nothing is in existence that God didn't create. John 1:3, "All things came into being by Him and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being." There isn't anything that exists that God didn't create. That's a very, very clear scripture.
Go back to Genesis 1 for a moment and I want to remind you of something that's very important. All creation began and ended in six days...clearly there's no argument about it. Look at chapter 2 verse 2, "And by the seventh day, God completed His work which He had done and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done." He created the entire universe out of nothing, from no pre-existing material and He did it in six days. We know that from verse 5. The first day He created light and it says there was evening and there was morning, one day. Just to make sure you don't miss it, He says it was one day. And then just to make sure you don't exactly what He means, it was the kind of day that has an evening and a morning. What kind of day is that? Well that's basically what we call a solar day, it's just a plain, ole normal common every-day day.
Now I want to tell you something. God did all this in six days. Verse 8 says there was an evening and a morning on day two. And verse 13 says there was an evening and a morning on day three. And it goes all the way down that way. Verse 19, there was evening and morning on day four. Verse 23, there was evening and there was morning on day five. And verse 31, there was evening and there was morning on day six. He's just talking about six normal common days...just like we understand days to be.
The whole of creation, folks, was over on the sixth day. And the Bible, and this is very important to note, the Bible always speaks of creation as a past event. Mark that in your mind. The Bible always speaks of creation as a past event. Evolution speaks of creation as continuing, right? It's always going on. That's never how the Bible refers to creation. Hebrews 4:3 says, "His works were finished from the foundation of the world." Hebrews 4:10, "For the One who has entered His rest has Himself also rested from His works." The Bible always views creation as completed and finished. It is a past event. God finished creation, never adding to that original creation. On the seventh day He rested from creation and He's continued to rest from creation.
You say, "What's He doing now?" Not creation, conservation. You want to get the flow? Creation, Genesis...conservation, He upholds all things by the word of His power. Millennial Kingdom, restoration, when He restores the earth as we know it in the universe back to its edenic, or near edenic character. So you have creation, conservation, restoration...finally, recreation is the new heaven and the new earth. But creation is a past event. Conservation is a present one. Restoration is a future millennial one. And recreation is the new heaven and the new earth. The creation work, that's past, and the Bible always speaks of creation as a past event. It is not an on-going event. Evolution demands on-going transition, even theistic evolutionists who say they believe the Bible have the evolutionary process of necessity going on and going on and going on and ostensibly bringing new things to life.
END OF SIDE ONE
SIDE TWO
But God created everything in six days. There's no evolution in that chapter. There's not a hint of evolution anywhere in this chapter. There's no place for an evolutionary theory because you have days. Verse 31, "And God saw all that He made and behold, it was very good." Now God finished His creation, six days, and He said it's very good. Then what does that mean? Nothing was bad. Nothing was bad would mean nothing was inferior. Nothing didn't survive. Nothing sort of, you know, like the plants you plant, nothing died out. You know why? There was no death..there was no death.
You see, when God finished His creation He looked at all of it...in fact it says several times He saw that it was good. And He looked it all over in verse 31 and saw that it was very good, nothing was inferior, nothing didn't survive, nothing had died out or been killed in the struggle for the survival of the fittest. If creation had involved some evolutionary process, then God would have had to said, "Well, the good made it to the end." He didn't say that. And how could there have been billions and billions of evolving years, billions of years of struggle and death and survival in a world where there was no curse? In a world where there was no death? You don't even have death till Genesis chapter 3.
The Apostle Paul makes it absolutely explicit in the book of Romans that it was through sin that death entered the world. There's no...there was no sin in that perfect creation. There was no sin, there couldn't have been death. So there's no place for plants and animals to die...no Fall no sin, no sin no death, no death no evolution. The Fall came and introduced death, death introduced the law of thermodynamics, entropy, the disintegration and disorder. At this point no such thing existed.
So there's no way that you can inject evolution legitimately into this text. And just another thing, when God made everything He made everything full grown. You know, the old, "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" You want the answer, you know the answer? The chicken full grown. God didn't just throw seeds in every direction and unborn life species, He created an absolutely and completely full-grown, fully matured creation that was capable then of reproducing itself, sustaining its life and that's why He said it's very good.
So how did God create? He spoke it in to existence and He did it in six days. There's no way around that. Just to kind of help you a little bit with that. People say, "Well what about the word 'day,' can't it mean something else?" It's the plain old Hebrew word yom, it means day. It's used in the Bible to indicate a 24-hour normal solar day or sometimes to refer to the daylight portion of a day. You might say, "I'll be gone four days," and you mean four days, both day and night. Or you might say to someone, "This has been a beautiful day," and you're referring to the daylight portion of it. You use the word the same way the Hebrews used it.
When yom is modified by a number, universally, without exception, in Scripture it refers to a normal solar day. Now sometimes "day" is used in Scripture to refer to some period of time not precisely defined. Job said, "My days are vanity." Psalm 90 verse 9 says, "Our days are passed away." And that's not defined, but we understand what that means, a period of time. But even at that, day still means some finite succession of normal days, not some vast age of millennial years, or millions of years.
And I think maybe the strongest affirmation, and I need to do this because you can ask the question about, you know, why God took six days, why didn't He do it in six minutes or six seconds? Well, the answer is He took six days because He wanted to establish a pattern. In Exodus chapter 20 He gives us the pattern. "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, six days you shall labor, do all your work. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work, you or your son, or your daughter, your male or your female servant, or your cattle, or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy." God wanted to establish a pattern for mankind. And that pattern was, you work six days and you have one day when you set it aside to rest and replenish your body and focus on worshiping God.
God chose to do it in six days to set a pattern for us.
Now if in fact it took Him billions of years, then the pattern is ridiculous. God's work of creation set the pattern for man who bears His image...six days you work and one day you worship.
Henry Morris in his book, The Genesis Record, says, "God called the light day and the darkness He called night. As though in anticipation a future misunderstanding, God carefully defined His terms. The very first time He used the word 'day,' He defined it as the light to distinguish it from the darkness called night. Having separated the day and night, God had completed His first day's work. The evening and the morning were the first day. This same formula is used at the conclusion of each of the six days...as I read you. It's obvious that the duration of each of the days, including the first, was the same. It is clear that beginning with the first day and continuing thereafter there was a period established of cyclical succession of days and nights, periods of light and periods of darkness." There's no other way to interpret that, no other way at all.
You say, "Well then how did we come up with this ages and billions of years stuffed into Genesis?" Not from Genesis, only factors outside Scripture...false scientific theory imposed on the Bible, higher criticism that attacks the historicity of the Bible and distorted human self-centered philosophies. But, you know, false scientific theory and higher criticism coming from unbelieving scholastics have caused Christian scholars to torture this text with unwarranted interpretations. There's absolutely nothing whatsoever on the pages of Genesis 1 and 2 that allows anything but a six, 24-hour, solar-day creation. It may offend the evolutionists but that doesn't change the truth. And no man fairs well who sits in judgment on the Bible.
Let's ask "when," that's why, lets ask when...when did this happen? Did it happen millions and billions of years ago? Science used to say two billion years but now they've changed it. They lean toward 20 billion and about every year it gets longer. You see. they've never seen anything evolve so they think it probably took longer. But if things don't evolve, what does longer do? It doesn't do anything. If things don't evolve, if matter doesn't randomly organize itself