The word “Genesis” means “origins.” For answers about God as well as answers about this world and how it came to be, let’s go to Genesis 1.
Have you ever wondered how we even have an account of Creation? If there were no eyewitnesses, if no one existed, how do we have a record of Creation in Genesis 1 and 2? The answer is, God was there. He knew how everything went down, and under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, He told Moses what to write down so that we could have understanding about who God is and have clarity about His purposes for this world.
The truth about Creation is that God is responsible for Creation…all of it.
Let me just say that if you don’t accept the biblical, historical account of Creation, you will have a hard time accepting or making a case for any other part of Scripture. It is foundational for all other biblical truth. It is the cornerstone for God’s workings and ways in our world and for His involvement with humanity. If we are going to profess any miracle held by Scripture, whether the parting of the Red Sea, the sun standing still, the opening of blind eyes or the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, we are going to have to start with the miracle of Creation. If you receive and believe that God created the world and everything in it, then you can believe every other miracle on the pages of Scripture. What I am saying is the magnitude of the miracle of Creation ought to enable you to believe every other individual miracle.
Church, Satan has worked overtime to try to undo God’s credibility, God’s authority, by introducing so-called Scientific theories to explain what happened in the beginning. The Theory of Evolution, the Big Bang Theory, and even a newer school of thought regarding Intelligent Design which at least argues that the complexities of this world are too sophisticated to have been the result of random chance and therefore points to someone at the helm of it all, well, none of them can explain Creation. The only one who can explain Creation is the only One who was there when it happened.
Science cannot explain Creation because it is a Divine miracle. The only explanation for a Divine miracle is God. The One who created the universe understands it. The One Who created the universe isn’t waiting for Science to endorse or accredit His Creation. It cannot be done. Science can only measure Creation in terms of what is and draw conclusions from what can be observed and repeated. Science cannot comment on Creation because it cannot speak to how “what is” has come to be and we can all agree, the Creation of the entire universe and specifically this world, as we know it, cannot be repeated.
Chemistry, physics, botany, astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology and all of the other “ologies” cannot explain or prescribe a way to repeat Creation. By faith, we rely on the record the Creator has given us and quite frankly, it is the only explanation that makes any sense. You cannot read the Creation account and walk away thinking life is the result of random chance or the evolution of lifeforms over millions of years. A reasonable person can’t observe all that exists and walk away thinking that the complexities that exist simply came to be apart from some Divine force and thought and care and plan. It’s simply not reasonable.
Do you agree that it took power to create the heavens and the earth? Chance has no power. Therefore, chance cannot create. Chance has no power. If we flip a coin, the chance it will land on heads is 50%, but chance doesn’t make it land on heads. You know what determines whether or not it is heads after the toss? It isn’t chance! Whether or not it lands on heads or tails is due to the strength with which the coin is flipped plus the strength of the air currents and air pressure as it flies through the air, along with where it is caught and if it is flipped over once it is caught. Chance doesn’t do anything. Chance can’t DO anything. It only describes a probability. Is that clear? There is no chance that chance had anything to do with Creation because chance has no power!
The truth about Creation is crystal clear. Though no human could ever comprehend the mind or wisdom or the intellect of God, He can reduce His communication down to the simplest of truths for us to understand, and He has done that in Genesis 1:1. God discloses who He is from the beginning by helping us understand He is the Creator.
Genesis 1:1-“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
It’s no accident that the first subject of the entire Bible is God. In the beginning, God. The entire Bible is the revelation about God. He is the Source of everything. He is the reason for everything. The Bible is consistent about this truth all throughout the Old and New Testament. Allow me a New Testament witness from I Corinthians 8:6: “Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.”
All things come from God and through Jesus Christ. This word, “God,” in Hebrew is Elohim, and here it is in a plural form. We understand that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were all present at Creation. Creation was the work of our Three-in-one God!
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Listen. God said everything that needed to be said in these ten words. A kindergartener can comprehend these ten words. These ten words set up an understanding of God, His power, His authority, and His will, that set the tone for all of Scripture, for all of human history, for all of God’s plan for His Creation.
A brilliant scientist, Herbert Spencer, died in 1903. He had been haled for his discovery of “the categories of the knowable.” He discovered that everything that exists fits into one of five categories. Here are the categories: Time, force, action, space, and matter. Time, force, action, space, and matter. Say them with me.
Look at Genesis 1:1 again. “In the beginning,” that’s time. “God,” that’s force. “Created,” that’s action. “The heavens,” that’s space. “And the earth,” that’s matter.
All “categories of the knowable” are in the first ten-word statement of Scripture. Ours is a God who uses an economy of words to describe something Scientists cannot explain in volumes of books that would fill this entire worship space. God states it simply because it is simple, and He doesn’t want there to be room for misunderstanding. God makes the Truth plain because He wants us to receive the Truth. Listen, if something is complicated, it isn’t from God. God is direct and clear. Satan is the complicator and twister of Truth. Satan is the one who wants us to try to lean on our own understanding. Satan is the one who wants us ruminating and pondering and pontificating as if we are capable of explaining how all that we see has come to be. Church, everything that starts with us ends with us and our warped, finite, limited, small brains. But everything that starts and ends with God opens endless possibilities for the miraculous which is what happened in Creation and continues to happen as God deals with His Creation.
In the beginning God created the Heavens…The Heavens…A typical galaxy contains billions of individual stars. Our galaxy alone, the Milky Way, contains 200 billion stars. Our galaxy is shaped like a giant spiral, rotating in space, with arms reaching out like a pinwheel, and our sun is one star on one arm of the pinwheel. It would take 250 million years for the pinwheel to make one full rotation. But this is only our galaxy. There are many other galaxies with many other shapes. The average distance between one galaxy and another is about 20 million trillion miles. Our closest galaxy is the Andromeda Galaxy and is about 12 million trillion miles away.
Can you even wrap your mind around how vast, how infinite, how immense and expansive the Heavens are, and what is even more mind-blowing is that our God is greater than all of that because He created it. He created it all, all by Himself.
Isaiah 48:13: My own hand laid the foundations of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens; when I summon them, they all stand up together.
No-one but God can take credit for the creation of the Heavens and the earth. His fingerprints are all over our world. It’s the only reason why it is still standing. Did you know that the universe has a just-right gravitational force? If it were larger, the stars would be too hot and would burn up too quickly and too unevenly to support life. If it were smaller, the stars would remain so cool, nuclear fusion would never ignite, and there would be no heat and light.
Did you know the universe has a just-right speed of light. If it were larger, stars would send out too much light. If it were smaller, stars would not send out enough light.
Did you know the universe has a just-right average distance between the stars? If it were larger, the heavy element density would be too thin for rocky planets to form, and there would only be gaseous planets. If it were smaller, planetary orbits would become destabilized because of the gravitational pull from other stars.
Did you know we have a just-right sun? If it was any bigger, the ultraviolet radiation could sizzle us like French fries, and if it was any smaller, we’d all be frozen popsicles. There is no chance such a universe could create itself.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The Hebrew word for “created” is very specific. It means that God created out of nothing. There were no raw materials. There was no pre-existing matter. God didn’t create even out of Himself, but from outside of Himself, out of nothing, He created everything. That makes God separate from His Creation. Science can’t tackle how all that exists came from nothing. Only God can bring forth something from nothing.
The Hebrew people never questioned how the world came into existence. Read Psalm 136. Who created the heavens and the earth was never questioned. Jesus quoted from Genesis on a number of occasions as if it was simply historical record. While Genesis chapter 1 is written in a poetic and repetitious fashion and chapter 2 is laid out more like a narrative, both are accurate accounts of what happened in the beginning. Let’s move on to verse 2.
Genesis 1:2: 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.
I love the picture of the Spirit of God hovering. When the Spirit of God starts to hover somewhere, when the Holy Spirit draws close, you know something good is about to happen! When the Holy Spirit comes on the scene, you know God is up to something. You know power is about to be released. We read the earth was formless. It was empty, and there was darkness.
Formless, empty, and dark. Oh Church, in verse 2, as the history of Creation is being recited, we see not only what happened as God began to create, but we see the condition of a human soul on display. As God was creating from a formless, empty, and dark reality, we see why we need Him. Without Him, we have a formless, empty, and dark existence. We also know that our lives don’t take shape, our lives remain empty and dark without a work of the Holy Spirit. When God determines to bring life, it takes a work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit’s hovering was preparatory for what God was about to do, and it is still the way He operates in our lives today. May the Holy Spirit hover over us this morning!
Even in the retelling of the Creation account, we begin to see how God wants to move, how He does move, and how when He moves, transformation and new life comes!
Verses 3-5: 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he 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.
Notice first that the creative power of God came forth as He spoke. If you want to know how everything was created, it was spoken into being. God spoke and Creation resulted. How powerful is the word of God? God didn’t have to fashion light to create it. He didn’t have to use a formula to create it. He wasn’t in a laboratory doing experiments to try to determine how to create light. He just spoke and it happened.
The witness of Scripture is consistent and clear. God spoke Creation into being. No one else can do that. The very act of speaking something into being sets God apart as God. This is but one reason we can worship Him as God. Psalm 33:6-9: “6 By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth. 7 He gathers the waters of the sea into jars. He puts the deep into storehouses. 8 Let all the earth fear the Lord. Let all the people of the world revere him. 9 For he spoke, and it came to be. He commanded, and it stood firm.”
Listen, our words are closely connected to our thoughts. God’s Words, God’s Creation reveal His thoughts for this world and for humanity. Not only did He speak to create the light, but He called the light good. In fact, if we had time to study each day of Creation, we would see God spoke about each facet and called it good, very good. It wasn’t good in the sense that He inspected what He made, and it passed the test, but it was good in the sense that an Extreme Chocolate Blizzard from Dairy Queen is good! It was good in the same way that my first sip of Diet Coke in the morning is good! In other words, He was enjoying what He had created! It brought Him pleasure. And it was also good in that all that was being made was revealing His glory! Let all the earth revere Him. Let all the earth fear Him. Who is like our God who is so powerful and mighty and intentional and loving and lovely that He even enjoys and wants to enjoy what He has created which includes the likes of us!? The whole point of our ministry is to communicate that you were made for a relationship with God! The Creator wants to enjoy hanging out with you! That’s amazing!
Friends, is there any wonder we are awed when we go to the beach? Is there any question about why the Grand Canyon inspires moving feelings and thoughts deep inside of us? When we see what He has made, we are connected with the power of His words and the delight He has taken in doing all He has done. It should prompt us to sing, to bow, to raise and clap our hands in awe of our Creator, God. God is still speaking, Church! He is still enjoying being active in Creation. He is still expressing His enjoyment over connecting with His Creation in and through His Word. When we read it, when we meditate on it, when we obey it, we give Him the pleasure of pouring out His delight again and again.
The first thing God created was light. I love that. Light was first. That’s the way He still works. He brings light to our understanding. He turns the light on in a spiritual sense for us so that we have the capacity to see Him. Jesus was called the “Light” by John, as He came into the world.
John 1:1-5 1In the beginning was the Word, (Jesus) and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome[a] it.
God is about illumination, about understanding. He doesn’t want us living in the dark about who He is.
Now He didn’t create the sun until the fourth day so what light came into existence on day one? I don’t know. God isn’t dependent on something physical to produce light. He didn’t have to create the sun for there to be light. He just had to speak it, and it was so. Light is more than a physical substance. It has a supernatural aspect, and we see it here on day one. When God speaks, light bursts onto the scene.
We don’t have time to walk through all God created on each day. My plan is to get into more of that on Wednesday night, so come then for part two. Allow me to make one more point as I remind you how Genesis 1:5 ended: 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. The Hebrew word for “day” always refers to a literal 24-hour period. In Exodus 20, when the Ten Commandments say that we should work for six days and rest on the 7th day, the word for “day,” is the same as the word used here in Genesis 1. Even in the rhythm of Creation, God was revealing His will for us. We would be a people of work AND would have a day of rest from work during which we could honor and worship the Lord. We aren’t talking about six ages or six long periods of time as some would suggest. Creation took place in six days, six twenty-four-hour periods. God not only got His work of Creation done, but He instituted the day of rest as a pattern for us.
The fact that God described morning and evening after He named the light, “day,” and the darkness, “night,” is all I need to know to believe that we are talking about Creation happening in six literal days. God created everything out of nothing in six days. It is from this understanding where worship begins. God is the Creator. He is the Architect. He is the Designer. He is the Owner.
The reason Satan has introduced the Theory of Evolution and the Big Bang Theory and other false ideologies is because he knows if he can get you to question that God is the Creator, he can get you to doubt that God has a plan, a purpose and an expectation for all that He has created, and that includes you and me. If God isn’t Creator, well, then, it’s easy to dismiss God as the Lawgiver and Judge, now isn’t it? Hear me. All of Scripture hangs on what you do with Genesis one.
Two more Scriptures and a statement. Psalm 19:1-2: “1 The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. 2 Day after day they pour forth speech. Night after night they reveal knowledge.”
Romans 1:20: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”
The only way you can know yourself is to know who God is. He is the Source for everything including wisdom, knowledge and understanding. He created the Heavens and the earth out of nothing, and He did it by His word. And He did it simply to enjoy all He created. Creation tells us about God’s desire to shape what is formless, to fill what is empty, and to bring light where there is darkness. What He did in Creation, He will do for every willing person who is ready for a Divine Miracle, and that is the truth about Creation.
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