The God of Creation
Notes
Transcript
WELCOME:
SCRIPTURE READING:
Let the glory of the Lord endure forever; Let the Lord be glad in His works; He looks at the earth, and it trembles; He touches the mountains, and they smoke. I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have my being. Let my meditation be pleasing to Him; As for me, I shall be glad in the Lord. Let sinners be consumed from the earth And let the wicked be no more. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Praise the Lord!
LET US STAND AND WORSHIP!
“Agnus Dei”
Words and Music by Michael W Smith
PRAYER OF PRAISE FOR WHO GOD IS
Lord, thank you for your constancy. For never turning Your back on us, for never getting frustrated with us, for forgiving our sins, for allowing us to be part of Your plan. We ask that You would look down upon this gathering of people and fill our hearts with great joy today as we focus on You. Amen!
“Who Am I”
Words and Music by Casting Crowns
“God of Wonders”
Words and Music by Third Day
PRAYER OF ILLUMINATION TO OPEN OUR HEARTS
Lord, give us ears to hear Your voice and eyes to see Your glory. Would you this morning illuminate Your Word and make it known to us? Help us no to make application to others peoples’ lives, but to apply every Word to our own lives. Amen
SERMON
INTRODUCTION:
We are starting a brand new series of messages from the book of Genesis today and pretty excited about it. This has been on my heart for quite some time, and I can’t wait to dive in with you in this great book.
I want to briefly share with you how I come up with sermons.
I pray most of the time for months before starting a series and allow the Lord to guide me toward a certain book of the Bible.
When I have decided on that, I generally preach through that entire book, one section at a time.
This allows the Bible to choose the subjects, not me.
I try my best to extract what the Bible is saying so we hear what God says, not what Jake thinks.
I also try to preach sections of Scripture that are naturally divided in the Scripture.
So if what if what I preach fits right into your life, it’s very likely the Lord is giving you what you need to hear, not what I think you need to hear.
The book of Genesis is about the literally “the book of origins”. That’s what the word Genesis means. And this matter to us because we learn how things began and were intended before culture and modern ideas imposed new ideas that we deem as normal and accepted.
In these first 11 chapters we will learn about the origins of:
The universe and everything we know as our physical world today
The origin of Humanity: what it means to be a human and what does it mean to be made in God’s image
What is Marriage and what is a Family: How did all this begin and how did God intend for these things to be?
The origin of Temptation and sin: We will see the very first time man sinned and what that meant for the entire human race
We will see the first judgement of God for sin in Adam, Eve, and the serpent and how that affects us today
We will see the first demonstration of God’s grace despite man’s sin
And all of that is only in the first 3 chapters..
When we open the Bible, the first sentence we read tells us that God created the heavens and the earth. It was not a Big Bang, it was not evolution, it has not always been here God is the Creator!
And I love what John MacArthur said about this, he said, “This is the first real test of the Bible to whether or not we are truly going to believe what the Bible says and thus believe God!”
If we cannot get past Gen 1, then we will not believe anything else the Bible has to say. If we doubt the declaration of Gen 1 then we are ALSO going to doubt God’s promises, God’s Laws, Heaven, Hell, salvation.
Immediately the reader is forced to choose, do I believe God or do I not believe God?
And the world has its own ideas about how the universe came into existence, and it certainly contradicts what the Bible says and we are forced to choose.
1) The God of the Bible is the sovereign creator of the universe
1) The God of the Bible is the sovereign creator of the universe
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The word “create” refers to God bringing something into existence that is entirely new.
God crested the heavens and the earth means that He produced something new from nothing.
It does not mean that God took something that already existed, and formed it into something else. It means to make something out of nothing.
Scripture credits the existence of the heavens and the earth to God.
Not billions of years evolution
Not a big Bang
Not something that has always existed.
The Bible declares, clearly, that God is the One who created the heavens and the earth
What are “The heavens and the earth”?
Obviously the earth is the planet that we live on.
But the heavens is not a reference to the heavenly dwelling place of God, the place where we go when we die, but referring to everything outside of earth: the moon, the stars, the planets, everything in space, everything in existence!
This verse could be translated with absolute accuracy: “In the beginning, God created everything” (WBC).
In short the heavens and the earth make up the entire universe!
I want us to think about how BIG the universe is:
We live in the Milky way galaxy
The milky way galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years from one side to the other
That means that traveling at the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second, you could go from one end of the Milky Way galaxy to the other and it would only take you 100,000 years.
For a real life reference: In 1977, NASA launched a spacecraft called the voyager. The voyager has been traveling at around 38,000 mph since 1977! On November 18th of this year, the Voyager will reach 1 light-day away from earth which is further than any other human made object.
It took us 50 years to reach one light day, the galaxy that we live in is 100,000 light years wide
There are 100-200 billion galaxies in the universe.
To try to even fathom how massive the universe is, is more than my simple human mind can handle.
Yet here we are, the middle of this massive universe, floating in the middle of it on this place we call earth, and it is so big we cannot even scratch the surface of it over the course of human history
And the Bible says God created it all
Now how did God create it?
God spoke it into existence
And we are not told from these first two verses, but we are told in more detail in this chapter:
(v 3) “God said, “Let their be light”, and there was light
(v 6-7) “The God said, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters…and it was so”
(v 9) “Then God said, Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place…and it was so”
on and on
Psalm 33:6 “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, And by the breath of His mouth all their host…..(v 9) “For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.”
THE BIBLE IS CLEAR: GOD SPOKE AND IT HAPPENED!
What is bigger and greater than we can even fathom with our human minds, God has done with a simple command!
That with all of our ingenuity and cleverness and the best we can do is get a piece of metal to fly for 50 years and barely scratch the surface of God’s universe.
And if God can do all of that with a simple command, is there really anything that is too hard for God?
Our struggle I think too often is we just think too little of God.
We can not fathom His power, His capabilities, His wisdom, His sovereignty, OR WHAT HE CAN DO WITH A SIMPLE COMMAND.
Imagine how much greater our faith would be if we could just see how big God is!
Imagine how much more courage we could have if we could grasp the magnitude of God!
This is why Jesus said if you have faith of a mustard seed, you can move mountains!
BUT The opposite of this is true as well: If God is so great, so mighty, so beyond what we could imagine…isn’t is amazing that He would even take the time of day He created to intervene and care about our lives?
But God is not just interested in us, but even the tiny details of our lives he cares about.
Jesus said: “the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”
Doesn’t that amaze you?
Our God who is that big, would be that would care so much as even the details of our little lives.
Yet the Bible says that He does.
2) God created the universe at a single point in time
2) God created the universe at a single point in time
“In the Beginning God created the heavens and the earth”
That phrase: “In the beginning” refers to the beginning of time itself.
Up until the 1900’s, it was commonly believed that the universe was eternal. That is to say that it had no beginning; it had always existed.
But Einstein discovered in the early 1900’s that the universe is in fact expanding. And what that means that if we put time in reverse for thousands of years the universe would contract all the way to a single point where it all began.
Now Einstein did not like these results, because he wanted to say what he believed which was that the universe had always been here.
So, he added something called cosmological constant to his work that altered his results making the universe static and unchanging and eternal
And in 1929, another astronomer by the name of Edwin Hubble discovered the same thing Einstein did which was that the universe is expanding which points back to a single point in time when everything began. And nearly everyone agrees and the evidence overwhelmingly supports that conclusion
There are two major theories, on how this beginning happened
The first is what we have read in Gen 1:1 that everything began when God created it.
But as time went on, some people just could not bring themselves to accept that. So the Big Bang Theory was born and put forth as the natural and scientific explanation of how the universe was born 13.8 billion years ago.
Now let me tell you why I do not believe in the Big Bang or even that God caused the Big Bang.
Because the physical evidence of an intelligent creation is all around us
If you listened to Dakota over the past few weeks, he did a great job explaining the fine tuning of creation to support life.
It is amazing how perfect this world is and how far off every other planet in the universe is from being able to sustain life.
Scientist categorize what it takes for life to exist. And a planet must have 14 certain criteria in order for life to exist.
Things such as the a planets size
The size of the moon
The atmosphere
The distance from the sun
The right tilt on the planets axis
The right kind of sun to support life
The only other closest one that anyone has found has 3.
Now there are people who believe that it is mere chance that all this aligned perfectly and made an inhabitable planet which would be an absolute astounding miracle or we can believe there is a Creator.
Now the problem science cannot answer is what was here before the beginning…and the Bible answers that in the first verse: In the Beginning, God
Before there was a universe, or even time, or anything, there was God.
God is the only being (or thing) that is eternal. He has no beginning or end. He is not bound by time like we are, he does not have an expiration date, there never was a time when God was not!
This is why Revelation says God is, “who is and who was and who is to come”
Psalm 90:2 “Before the mountains were born Or You gave birth to the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God.”
And if God is truly eternal, God needs nothing to exist.
He does not depend upon creation, He created it!
He does not depend upon human love towards Him
He does He depend upon humanity
He has no needs outside of Himself.
Now by using science, I am not suggesting here that we can only accept what science affirms… I am using these examples to show you that what the Bible says is an absolute fact and we can trust it!
And when the Bible says that there was a single point in time when everything we see came into existence, we can stand on it and know that it is true!
And that goes for every other miracle in the Bible.
When I was out knocking on doors in Oak Grove, I discovered that when you explain to people the origins of the earth and the universe, and the two options are really the Big Bang and God, most people even atheists would lean toward a Creator. But when I began to tell them about Jesus, who is God Himself, who took on human flesh, died for the sins of the world, and resurrected on the third day, they had a really hard time beleivimg that.
And that always puzzled me, and one day I was thinking about it and thought that kind of reasoning really doesn’t make sense: Is t the greater miracle the miracle the one found in Genesis 1:1? Comparably in magnitude, wouldn’t it be more amazing to create the universe and create man from the dust of the earth than it would be to bring a man back from the dead?
If we can believe Gen 1:1, which is the greatest miracle in the bible, then shouldn’t the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus be even easier to believe?
If we can accept the God of Creation in Gen 1:1, then we should not have a problem with any other miracle in the Bible.
But all of it takes faith:
By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.
3) God’s primary focus in the creation of the universe was on the earth
3) God’s primary focus in the creation of the universe was on the earth
The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the 2surface of the waters.
Notice that we go from a general statement in verse 1 about God creating the universe to a more narrow focus of God’s work on the earth itself.
For ages people have believed that there is other life out there. There have been tons of movies and stories about aliens who visit earth. Even here in our county, there in Kelly they have a festival every year called the “Little Green Men” festival because supposedly in the 1950’s little green men from outer space came and visited a family there. I’m sure we have all seen have seen the documentaries and man made pictures of aliens from Area 51.
But here is what this verse is saying: Had God not intervened and took special interest in planet earth to make it a habitable planet, there would be no life here. And the earth is it! It is the only planet in the universe that can sustain life.
I don’t believe there is any life outside of earth anywhere in the universe because I believe verse 2 describes what all planets are like (in a general sense) without God’s life giving graces upon it which we see in the rest of chapter 1.
“The earth was formless and void”
“Formless and void” literally means a “wasteland and empty”. The earth before God intervened was like a desert wasteland. The point being that it could in no way support any form of life.
Do you know what verse 2 sounds like to me? It sounds just like those pictures and descriptions that we have seen floating around of the recent pictures taken by NASA of what Mars is like.
Dry desert land. Rocky, windy, uninhabitable.
They say on Mars you can have about a 40 degree temp difference from your head to your feet.
There are Volcanoes there taller than Mount Everest
The air is made up of almost all Carbon dioxide, almost no oxygen at all.
Dust storms that can be so severe that they can cover the entire planet
A place where they have not found one trace of life except here on earth.
Why: Because God took the earth that was a desert wasteland and He made it into a habitual place that has life in every area you could imagine.
There is life in the water
There is life in the air
There is life in the dirt
There is life living on the soil
This planet is full of life, even in places we do not want it to be like mold growing on our bread and parasites.
GOD IS THE GIVER OF LIFE
Only God can take something that is empty, hopeless, meaningless, and breathe life into it and transform it into something marvelous.
And that’s exactly what He does people. He takes us in all of our brokenness and hopelessness and meaningless life, and creates new life.
How?
Through the work and person of Jesus Christ.
That when we believe in Him, trust Him with our lives, that He gives us new life, a life with meaning and purpose and eternal life.
“For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son also gives life to whom He wishes.
~PRAYER~
