Sermon Tone Analysis

Genesis 1:1-12

Tape #C3001

By Chuck Smith

 

Shall we turn now in our Bibles to Genesis, chapter 1, verse 1.

The word Genesis means, beginning, and we read,

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (1:1).

Now the question arises, how long ago was that?

And it is obvious that the Bible does not give us a clear distinct answer.

The word /created/ here is the Hebrew word /bara/.

It is only used three times in the Bible, and it is that capacity of creating something out of nothing.

It is a capacity that is exclusively God's.

There are two other words that we’ll be coming across, /asah/ and /yatsar/, that are translated, made or formed.

And they are the Hebrew words used for the assembling of existing materials.

So we say someone created a new television.

No, he didn’t.

He may have assembled existing parts, but he didn’t say, "Television be," and suddenly there was a television there, creating out of non-existing materials.

Only God has the power and the Hebrew word /bara/

It is interesting that in this account of creation we find the /bara/ is used just here at the very beginning, and then we find that God made and God formed using the existing materials and assembled things together out of the materials that then existed once He had created the heavens and the earth.

The book of Genesis goes back to the beginning of creation, the material universe, the beginning of time.

Time is related always to the material.

There is a dimension in which time does not exist, that is the eternal.

We cannot really think, our minds are not programmed to think in that dimension.

To us everything has a start and a finish, a beginning and an end.

But we cannot really conceive of timelessness, of the eternal.

Just how long ago in our time was the creation of the universe?

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

You see, before the heavens and the earth were created, God thought about you.

Christ was crucified before the foundations of the earth.

Before God even created a material universe, He thought about you, He loved you, and He planned for your redemption.

It's hard to really conceive, but such is the stated case of the scriptures.

But then God created the material universe.

There are several assumptions or ways of looking at this.

There are those scientists today who are taking a very literal kind of a look at this and saying it was only around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago that the physical universe was created.

They are beginning to offer a lot of evidence to support their claims.

Dr. Henry Morris has written several books on cosmology and the beginnings and creation of the earth, and I respect highly this man’s opinions and views.

He is a scholarly man and a dedicated Christian.

There has come a system of thought that has definitely dominated our educational system.

It has been so prevailed that it is hard for us to divorce ourselves from the pseudo-science of evolution.

It is not a true science and doesn't deal with empirical facts.

It deals only with theories and hypotheses that change day by day with the changing evidence.

You remember that they were telling us that is the lunar module landed on the moon?

It would probably be swallowed up in the moon dust.

They hypothesized that the moon must be at least six billion years old.

And having no atmosphere, those meteorites that come into the moon and explode are turned into dust.

So there were those that were predicting that the moon dust would be somewhere between seventeen and thirty-five feet deep.

A lot of expense was given to the preparing of the lunar landing module to counteract this tremendous dust cloud that they expected to arise and perhaps swallow the lunar lander.

It was one of the real concerns of the scientists.

Now, you saw on television as they walk on the moon, the moon dust was less than an inch thick.

Now these men who had hypothesized this ancient moon somehow were very silent about the lack of the thirty-five foot covering of dust.

There are a lot of other interesting evidences that you can use to show that the earth is probably much younger than the necessary twelve billion years for the evolution of the single cell into the complex human form.

The only reason why we have postulated an extremely old earth and universe is to accommodate a theory that has very little actual proof or no actual proof, but just a lot of hypotheses that are built upon hypotheses.

Yet, it is so accepted by the intellectual community that no one dares to say that perhaps the evolutionary concepts are wrong.

It reminds me of the story of the king who wanted a new suit.

The tailors came and said, "We are going to sew you the most beautiful suit in the world.

We are going to use an invisible thread to make the material, but only the very intelligent will be able to see it.

Those who are not intelligent won’t see the suit, or the very intelligent people will see it."

And so they measured the king and they began to fit the king with this new suit, and they tried on his new invisible coat.

And they said to all of his counselors, “How do you like that coat, isn’t it beautiful?”

And none of them wanted to appear ignorant.

They wanted to appear very wise to the king, and so they all commented on how wonderful the coat looks and my what a perfect fit and they went on.

Finally, the king dressed in his new suit went out among his subjects wearing his new suit, but alas some poor fool standing on the corner looked and said, "The king is naked."

Same concept--they have got the idea that if you are extremely wise and intelligent you will believe the evolutionary theory.

Only a fool could believe that God created man!

And they’ve got the whole academic, not the whole.

Thank God there are enough wise men among the scientists that they are saying that the king is naked.

And they are admitting that there is not any real proofs or evidences offered to prove the evolutionary theory.

There is a book called, /Earths In Upheaval/, absolutely destroys the idea of uniformitarianism.

Immanuel Velikovsky, /Earths in Upheaval/, you might get that book.

It just shatters the theory of uniformitarianism, which is the basic theory upon which evolution is built.

More and more scientists are coming out and exposing a lot of the problems of embracing the evolutionary theory.

And that is the only reason why we would want to create an earth of several billion years old or a universe of several billions of years to accommodate a theory.

An interesting paper was done by Dr. Barnes of the University of East Texas in El Paso on the electromagnetic fields that surround the earth.

He’s probably done more study on the electromagnetic fields than any other scientist living today.

Dr. Barnes in this interesting paper points out that over one hundred thirty-five years ago, about one hundred forty-two years ago a Dutch scientist measured the level of the electromagnetic field around the earth, and in every subsequent year there have been measurements of this electromagnet field around the earth.

And we find that this field is gradually decaying at a very constant rate, a predictable rate.

And in the one hundred forty years of measurements there has not been one variance in the rate of decay of the electromagnetic field.

Now this electromagnet field around the earth does have a protective kind of aspect to it, in that it does cause many of the cosmic rays to be repelled or to bounce away without hitting the earth.

We do realize that much of the mutation and age processes and all are caused by cosmic rays.

Those rays, gamma rays, and the various neutrinos that are bombarding our earth are going through our bodies and causing a mutation of our cells and bringing on the aging processes.

We realize that if we put milk, shield milk from the cosmic rays that milk will keep fresh for months without refrigeration, but there is that deterioration that takes place.

We’ll be getting in a little bit to the moisture blanket that God used to have around the earth--that also was a shield against much of the cosmic rays.

We realize that the ozone blanket also shields us from cosmic radiation, especially the ultraviolet from the sun.

With the deterioration of the ozone blanket, as a result of our use of floral carbons in aerosol cans, the SST’s and the detonating of atomic missiles in our atmosphere, now we are receiving a heavier bombardment of the ultraviolet rays causing exposure to the sun, to have a greater detriment and skin cancers are an extremely common thing now.

If a person gets exposed to the sun too much, and the constant warnings to watch your exposure to the sun, it can be very damaging to you.

It used to be a very helpful thing till we started destroying the ozone blanket, but now it has become a very damaging thing exposure too much to the sun.

And we are being warned about it constantly, especially by the skin specialists who deal with the maladies that develop from overexposure to the ultraviolet rays.

In his paper on the electromagnetic fields, in pointing out the decay of the magnetic force in these electromagnetic fields, in postulating, if it has decayed in the last hundred and forty years at the constant rate, then turning it around, and assuming that this has been a constant, which it has been for a hundred and forty years years, turning it around and figuring how strong the electromagnetic force say 25,000 years ago.

The electromagnetic force around the earth, if has been in constant decay for 25,000 years and we turn it backwards, we find that 25,000 years ago the electromagnetic force would have been so strong that it would have heated up the surface of the earth to about 240 degrees.

So there could be no moisture on it.

It would have all evaporated into the atmosphere.

As far back as a 100,000 years, if this decay has been the same over 100,000 year period, the magnetic force would have been so strong, the heat would have been so great that the earth would have been in a molten state.

So, feeding that to the evolutionists who need several billions of years, they talk about how it dies down and than every 10,000 years or so it is recharged.

Oh, very scientific solution.

Who recharges it?

And with what kind of system do they recharge it?

So whenever the gaps appear, for instance, I have the cast of a footprint taken from the Piluxi River in Texas.

This footprint was found alongside of the footprint of a dinosaur fossilized in the Piluxi River.

And they have found hundreds of them intermixed with the dinosaur tracks, crossing the dinosaur tracks and even imprinted within the dinosaur tracks.

This is, of course, a tremendous difficulty for the evolutionists who have the dinosaurs living a hundred million years ago and man coming on the scene about three million years ago.

Here in the Piluxi River is proof that they, at one time, coexisted upon the earth.