The First Five Days

WELCOME:

Welcome everyone! IIt is a blessing to be here today.

Members meeting on the 27th. That’s 2 weeks from today.

Dakota will be wrapping up his study this Wednesday. We will have a meal at 5:30.

SCRIPTURE READING:

Psalm 139:1–6 NASB95

O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; You understand my thought from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down, And are intimately acquainted with all my ways. Even before there is a word on my tongue, Behold, O Lord, You know it all. You have enclosed me behind and before, And laid Your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is too high, I cannot attain to it.

LET US STAND AND WORSHIP!

“The Goodness of God”

Words and Music by Hillsong’

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!

“What a beautiful Name”

Words and Music by Hillsong

“What a beautiful Name”

Words and Music by Hillsong

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:

If you would, please take out your bibles and turn to Genesis chapter 1. We will be picking up where we left off last week in verse 3. Today we are going to look at the first five days of creation. And I am not going to go down through each and every verse and discuss every detail of creation because I don’t think that is the point of these verses. What I want to do instead is read verses 3-23 which covers the first 5 days and then we’ll pull out some main points from these verses.

As way of reminder, verses 1-2 are an overview of the rest of chapter 1. They simply give a short summary statement declaring that God created the heavens in the earth. Verses 3-23 focus upon God’s creation upon the earth (days 1-5). Verses 26-30 focus on God’s creation of mankind.

Let’s read these verses and I want to point out some things to you: READ GEN 1:3-23

I want you to notice how many times God’s name is mentioned: exactly 20 times in 22 verses. This tells us that God is the main subject of these verses.

It is God who is doing the act of creating.

It is God who is commanding things to happen and they do

It is God’s wisdom that is being used to design the earth

And at the end of each day we have God’s evaluation of what He did with the phrase: “and God saw that it was good”.

So let’s begin with this principle from God’s creating work that:

Life begins with Light

Genesis 1:3–5 NASB95

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. God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

Explanation:

Day one seems pretty straight forward and easy to grasp until we get down to day 4. And when we read day 4 we see that God created the sun and the moon and the stars to illuminate the day and the night. The question then is if God created the sun and moon and starts later on, then how is there light in verse 3? And because of this, some people have rejected the literal 6 days of creation and read Gen 1 as a more symbolic description of creation rather than literal.

I would say 2 things to this:

1) God does not need a sun or moon to create light. He is not forced to follow the laws of physics (we certainly see this in Jesus’ life and in the entire creation account). If He can speak the universe into existence from nothing, then we should not be surprised that He can make light appear without a sun or moon or stars.

2) God Himself is THE LIGHT. That is, the very first source of light in the universe is not the sun or the stars but God Himself. In fact, that is the way life will be on the new heaven and the new earth.

Revelation 21:23 NASB95

And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb.

My point here is that what precedes all life in God’s creation is light….and the same is true for us. When God moves in our life, when we are born again spiritually, when we become something new, the first thing we receive from God is not holiness, or great discipline, or a wealth of knowledge…but illumination or light. And by light I mean understanding.

It is the Light that we are given from God that opens our minds to understand what it means to truly turn from our sins and follow Him:

Matthew 13:15 “For the heart of this people has become dull, With their ears they scarcely hear, And they have closed their eyes, Otherwise they would see with their eyes, Hear with their ears, And understand with their heart and return, And I would heal them.’”

Seeing, hearing, and understanding precedes healing (or salvation)

You can tell a whole lot about where a person stands as far as spiritual life by simply listening to what they say.

And this understanding is not just knowing things we have learned from reading the Bible, but it is understanding spiritual truth to a depth to where we live them out.

It is Illumination of spiritual truth that allows us to understand what it truly means to turn to Jesus and follow Jesus and stick with Jesus.

I want to give you a 2 ways of how this happens:

1) It happens by the work of the Holy Spirit. That is God can illuminate someone at any place at any time….He can move in someone’s life instantly and suddenly, and give them enough light to see their own sinfulness, their eternity, God’s righteousness, and Jesus Christ who saves.

2) It happens by reading and understand the Word of God.

God does illuminate people through His Word. That is through preaching, through teaching, and through personal Bible study.

This is why there is such an emphasis on preaching and teaching in this church. For someone may come to a service, knowing nothing at all and really have no worries at all about their eternal destiny, but after hearing what God says, and God gives them understanding, they will turn to Jesus and be saved

Friends this is why we need to come to church with ears to hear. This is why we do not need to come to church thinking about a thousand other things going on in the world, and this is why we need to come to church taking every message and applying it to us personally.

God created the world in 6 consecutive days

Explanation:

Verse 5: “and there was evening and there was morning, one day”

Verse 8: “and there was evening and there was morning, a second day”

Verse 13: “there was evening and there was morning, a third day”

All the way down through Genesis 1, this phrase “a morning and evening” is repeated over and over. And the most straight forward and literal way to read this is that on day 1, God created light. On day 2 God created the waters from the waters. And so on..making creation 6 consecutive 24-hr days.

That would mean if it only took God six days to create, then that would make the earth somewhere around 6,000 years old.

And we come to that number by tracing back from where we are now all the way back to Adam…and the Bible has those recorded numbers for us and we come up with about 6,000 years.

There was about 2,000 years from Adam to Abraham

There was about 2,000 years from Abraham to Jesus

And there has been about 2,000 years from the ministry of Jesus until now

Now there is no problem with that until we start to watch the discovery channel and they tell us the earth is around 4.5 billion years old.

And Christians and theologians have suggested all sorts of ways this can be reconciled, and I will not get into all that because you are here for a sermon and not a lecture.

But I do want to submit to you something that I think holds more weight than anything else:

The only way that we can be absolutely confident of dating is if time has been tracked one day at a time. In other words, unless we have been counting the days on earth, there is no possible way to confidently determine the age of the earth.

Do you know how we know it has been 2,000 years since Jesus walked this earth? Because people have been keeping a calendar since around 2,000 BC, and counting every single day that the sun rose in the morning and set in the evening. We can be absolutely positively sure that it has been just a hair over 2000 years since Jesus was here.

The dating system began with The Sumerian Calendar which was developed in Mesopotamia around 2100 BC. This was the first written calendar that kept up with time one day at a time.

Any attempt at dating beyond this calendar will be nothing more than a guess.

Now we have people who talk about carbon dating. And the carbon dating fossils and meteorites, and rocks and they are finding out they are millions and billions of years old. That’s nothing more than a guess.

Ands what the carbon dating system has shown us is that it is flawed! And there is example after example where what they have dated is wrong.

There is no possible way to know anything for sure, outside of keeping up with time, one day at a time, one year at a time, one century At at time…that’s a fact we can stand on.

Anything outside of that requires faith, trust in what the scientists are telling us, trust in what the man written science books are teaching our children. But not facts.

And along with that:

God created with commands, not with evolution

Explanation:

We have already established from these verses that God created in 6: 24-hr periods. In 6 days, the earth went from a desert wasteland to a planet filled with life. That’s what Gen 1 teaches.

But it also teaches that each species is its own kind and was created that way.

Genesis 1:21 “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.”

Genesis 1:25 “God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good.”

Notice that God made the animals after their kind

That is a canine was made a canine and has always a been a canine. They are from the family of canines

A deer was made a deer and has always been a deer and cannot be anything but a deer.

A turtle was made a turtle and has always been a turtle

A cat cannot become a deer

And a ox cannot become a monkey

And a monkey cannot become a person.

That is because God made us according to our kind

Now the idea of evolution was made popular by Charles Darwin who wrote the origin of the species.

And what Darwin did was travel around to different places in the world and observe animals and birds. And what he noticed was that animals would be somewhat different in a different environment. For example, the same kind of bird may have a longer beak in an environment wheee that longer beak was needed to survive. All of this led him to publish his book which stated that these small changes in animals led to all the different species. We evolved into what we are today.

Scientist have taken that idea and created the theory of evolution. That is, that every living creature today has evolved from a single cell…we are all related. The reason the are different kinds (or species) is not because they were created that way, but because they evolved that way.

I’m not denying Darwin’s discovery. What he discovered WAS adaptivity NOT evolution. His origin of the species is a theory, based upon the adaptivity of animals in their environment, but no evidence whatsoever that those animals who adapted became another kind of animal!

Now if you google, or CHAT GPT how all the different animals came to be on planet earth, you are going to find a very detailed explanation that 4 billion years ago, way deep down in the sea, a single cell organism was in a place of warm water and from that came out the entire animal kingdom.

But here is the key to that whole Explanation: THIS IS WHAT SCIENTISTS BELIEVE.

That’s what they believe happened, not what they know happened

So then we have that belief and then we have this biblical account of creation belief.

And here is the thing, it takes faith to believe either of them.

We either place our faith in what God says, or we place our faith in what man says..

I think it’s remarkable that the first five days of creation is written with the added phrase, “and morning and evening were one day, was the second day

And I also think its amazing that God added in the phrase: “after their kind” to show us that God created species, not evolution.

It seems to me that God put that in there to say to the world, we can believe Him or we can believe in the theories of men. We can believe Him, or we can reject Him and believe science: BUT EITHER WAY REQUIRES FAITH!

And I submit to you church, I’d much rather trust the Word of God and put my whole life on the line for it than I would flawed human beings with flawed methods and flawed results that cannot save me!

I’d rather spend my entire life being called a fool for Christ’s sake, and believe what God has said regardless of what the world claim

God saw what He created as good and so should we

I want you to notice that after thing God creates, it says, “and God saw that it was good”.

The light was good

The separation of waters was good

The creation of plants and birds was good

God made a good earth, with a good design.

I have already spent some time talking about last week, but just to remind us, there is no other planet like planet earth. They can look through telescopes for the next thousand years but I don’t think they will ever find another planet even close to as good as ours is.

And that is because Gen 1:2 tells us that God’s creative focus was upon the earth

When we look out at the mountains, or go to the ocean and look out across it, or see the fish, we are seeing what God saw when He said this is good.

When we walk outside in the Spring and feel the warmth of the sun on our skin isn’t it good?

When we look up into the sky and are amazed every time at the millions of stars and how they look on those clear nights. Its good..

Let me give you one personal Example:

Genesis 1:14 “Then God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years;”

Now I know it is hot right now. And I bet there isn’t a person in this room who isn’t looking forward to this heat leaving and the cooler air coming. Even Ashley who says she loves the sun and loves to lay outside and bake in it, is sick of it and ready for it to leave.

But fall is coming. And I love fall for many reasons, but you know what? Fall will get old too. And I’ll be anticipating and praying for huge snow storms to come. But you know what? That will get old too. And I’ll get tired of the snow and taking care of animals in freezing weather, and the short days. And I’ll be anticipating spring. Fishing, new life, vegetation, the smell of that spring grass getting cut.

It has dawned on me as I have gotten older how good seasons are. I can’t imagine living in a world where there was only one season year after year. It would get so boring, so monotonous, I think I would lose my mind.

This is just a small personal example from these verses of what God made is good!

Application:

We have a responsibility to be good stewards of God’s creation

Part of being human, is being over everything on the earth. And we have the ability to make creation better, or make it worse.

It’s not that surprising when people of the world abuse God’s creation, but it is disheartening when God’s people abuse and misuse God’s creation.

Littering, throwing trash out the window, or on the ground

Killing animals just to kill them. Nothing wrong with taking a deer to eat it, but I can’t for the life of me kill a deer just to kill it..

Polluting the air by burning plastics and other chemicals and garbage that shouldn’t be burnt.

Wasting precious resources as if they are unlimited.

One of the things that bothers me in our area is the amount of wooded acres are being dozed for farmland. I understand some of that is necessary, but I do think greed drives much of it.

We as believers, especially need to consider that this earth that God made is good, and we need to treat if that way!

And we have a responsibility to take care of this planet!

Here a word of warning for us: we must be very careful that we are not worshiping creation over the Creator

Now when I say worship, I do not mean the physical act of bowing down and praying to Mother Earth (if you do that then stop it) I am talking about putting creation over God.

It is so easy today to give our time, our admiration, our efforts all for things that really don’t matter that much.

Instead, let’s acknowledge the things that are good as good, but never forget they are only good because God made them good. It’s God that makes them good.

And He alone is worthy of our praise, of our admiration, of our best!

Whom do you worship? Whom does your life say you worship?

Only God is worthy of your worship.

~PRAYER~