Standing Firm on Literal Biblical Creation : The Claims of Genesis 1

Genesis 1:1-25 Standing Firm on Literal Biblical Creation (The Claims of Genesis 1) Introduction: Historically Christians have always believed in creation. There was little to no debate over the nature and date of creation until the age of reason or the age of enlightenment. Since that time science has gained credibility through its great advances. Science increasingly became identified with the Naturalistic worldview that stood in direct opposition to the Theistic worldview. Scientific evidence became a weapon used by the opponents of Christianity to attack the biblical worldview. Since that time many christians have been afraid to affirm the teaching of Origins found in the Bible seeing them as un-scientific. Instead they have interpreted the text to either accommodate evolutionary theory or they claim Genesis 1-3 simply to be allegorical. This morning I would like to look at the claims of Genesis chapter one and the evidence for believing God’s revelation over scientific speculation. I believe that we can accept the Genesis account for exactly what it says, we don’t need to fit evolution into it, and we do not need to see it as allegorical but we can take it as a literal account of what actually took place in the beginning. We must remember that there is no conflict between Christianity and science. The christian worldview recognizes that God created the world with natural laws and orderliness. This also undergirds the entire scientific enterprise. It is in our opinion that science actually supports the biblical claim rather than contradicting it. 1. The universe had a beginning. a. Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth b. All of the ancient theories of the origin of the universe, as well as men such as Plato, Aristotle, Darwin, Lyell right up through Carl Sagan believed that the universe was eternal. It was Sagan who stated, “The cosmos is all that there is, or ever was, or ever will be”. Those men were all wrong. Of course those who believed the Bible knew they were wrong, but they were proven to be wrong through the work of Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose and George Ellis. i. (Stephen Hawking has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated that it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory, the other great Scientific development of the first half of the 20th Century. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but rather should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined by the laws of science.) c. Listen to the comments of Astronomer, Robert Jastrow, ‘I am fascinated by some strange developments going on in astronomy- partly because of their religious implications… The essence of the strange developments is that the universe had, in some sense, a beginning- that it began at a certain moment in time… Most remarkable of all, astronomers have found proof that the universe sprang into existence abruptly, in a sudden moment of creation, as the Bible said it did.’ 2. God created everything. a. Genesis 1:1 says that, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The words that are used in the Hebrew are not just for the physical heaven and physical earth but actually would include the whole of creation. From the sky to the earth, and all that inhabits them, including space-time, mass energy, and the laws that govern them. Genesis chapter one’s claim is that God created everything whether visible or invisible. 3. God created everything out of nothing. a. Again Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The word here for created is the Hebrew word “Bara”. b. Bara is absolute creation as opposed to secondary or relative creation. We as humans “create “ but only in the secondary sense; we create out of already existing materials. God alone creates from nothing or ex-nihilio. i. Hebrews 11:3 “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” ii. The claim of the writer of Hebrews is exactly this: creation out of nothing. iii. “This verse conveys the real meaning of creation ex-nihilo. It is a way of saying that the visible reality we perceive: the room we are in, the trees, the soil, our bodies, the stars do not originally come from other things that we can see (or even theorize), such as simpler life forms: protozoa, amoeba or sheer dust, as though they were a rearrangement of earlier types of matter. Instead, things that we see were made out of things that do not appear; that is to say, out of nothing”. - Douglas Kelly Professor of Theology at RTS. c. Physicist Arno Penzias made this confession, “Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with a very delicate balance and one which has an underlying (one might say supernatural) plan”. 4. God created everything in six literal days. a. The reason that we are saying six literal days is because of the influence of evolutionary theory on the minds of evangelical scholars. b. The belief that God created the earth in six literal days has been largely rejected and replaced with the theory that the word for day is not limited to a 24 hr period and more likely refers to and indefinite period of time. i. The day age theory - each day represents a long age of time where God used an evolutionary process to create the world. ii. The framework hypothesis - the six days are not spans of time but only a literary convention for presenting a six-fold creation. c. Are the days literal or figurative? i. Yom- Is most commonly used to describe a day as we think of it, a 24 hr. period of time. It is also used to refer to the daylight part of the day. It is occasionally used for an indefinite period such as “the day of the Lord”. ii. Whenever day (yom) is modified by a number (day one or day two) its universal Scriptural usage means normal day. In other words if modified with a number (like here in Genesis one) it only always means a 24 hr. day. 1. All ancient scholars both Jewish and Christian understood these days as literal days. 2. Even liberal scholars (those who reject the inspiration and inerrancy of scripture) believe Genesis one to be referring to literal days. 3. “So far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer of Genesis one intended to convey to the reader the idea that: creation took place in series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours that we now experience. Or to put it negatively, the apologetic arguments which supposes the ‘days’ of creation to be long eras of time… are not taken seriously by any professor, as far as I know”. James Barr, Theological professor, Oxford. 4. “If the word day in this chapter does not mean 24 hours, the interpretation of Scripture is hopeless”.- Marcus Dods, Theological professor, New College, Edinburgh 5. The reason that many evangelical scholars reject a 24 hr day or opt for long ages is because of academic pressure. In the intellectual world to believe in a literal six day creation is the equivalent of a person that believes the earth is flat. a. All of these views were developed to accommodate the evolutionary theory that the universe is billions of years old. d. The Gap theory. i. Those who hold to the gap theory generally believe in a six day creation, yet is still another attempt to accommodate million or billions of years. ii. The Gap theory or restitution theory. 1. billions of years ago God created the space-mass-time universe. Then the geological ages took place over billions of years of earth history. The different forms of life developed that are now preserved in the fossil record. These life-forms represent those ages - the invertebrates of the Cambrian Period, the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous Period ... finally the mammals, birds and ‘ape-men’ of the Tertiary Period - just before the recent epoch. 2. Then the idea is that, at the end of these geological ages, a great cataclysm took place on earth, with Satan having rebelled in heaven and many of the angels following him in that rebellion. God, therefore, cast him to the earth, and the earth underwent a great cataclysm, leaving it finally without form and void, and with darkness on the face of the deep, as described in Genesis 1:2. a. Subsequently, according to this idea, God then re-created or reconstituted the earth in the six literal days of creation recorded in the first chapter of Genesis. The argument for this theory makes verse two read, ‘The earth became without form and void’ (some would render it ‘The earth became waste and desolate’), as though it had previously been a beautiful world. But now, because of the cataclysm, it was a devastated remnant of a world, so that there was a change of condition. It became without form and void. i. The word tohu “without form” is actually translated 10 different ways in about 20 occurrences in the Old Testament. Isaiah 45:19 has the same word, and there it has to be translated ‘vainly’ or ‘in vain’. It is also proper to translate it that way in Isaiah 45:18. It depends on the context as to how it is to be precisely translated. Genesis 1:2 the context simply indicates the earth had no structure as yet. It was unformed; it was not even spherical at that point, but was comprised of only the basic elements of earth material. Ready to be formed and inhabited by God’s good creation. e. Problems with the Gap theory. i. Not in the text. ii. It requires death before the creation and fall of Adam. iii. Requires all other life forms to have been created millions or billions of years before man. (The fossil record contains life forms that we can identify today right along side of what they would call pre-historic or pre-Adamic life forms). iv. Lastly and this one should close the issue for us. It contradicts the plain statements of Scripture- 1. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Ex 20:11 f. Why does the earth appear to be old? i. God made Adam a fully mature human being, I believe that God also made a mature earth. 5. God did not use any process that harmonizes with the theory of evolution. a. All biological life is categorized and each category produces after its own kind. b. Fish did not become reptiles, reptiles did not become birds, birds did not become mammals etc. 10 times God says everything produces after its kind! 6. The confessions of the Evolutionist/scientific community. a. Sir Fred Hoyle i. The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40 thousands zeros after it. It is enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.’ b. Nobel prize winning biologist Francis Crick. i. ‘An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going’. c. Harvard University biochemist and Nobel Laureate, George Wald i. ‘One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet we are here- as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation… When it comes to the origin of life there are only two possibilities: Creation or spontaneous generation. There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved one hundred years ago, but that leads us to only one other conclusion, that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds; therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance!’ ii. Why are we (the Church) seeking to accommodate the naturalistic scientific community when so many of them are confessing the weakness of their theories? Conclusion: As I said last week we as Christians who affirm Biblical inspiration, inherency, and authority should not be so quick to accept the claims that the scientific community are claiming. We should bring all things under the light/ scrutiny of God’s word. For us, God’s Word is to be the final standard for all things. If what the scientific community says contradicts scripture we reject it. “What is Athens to Jerusalem?” Because we believe that the Bible is God’s inspired, inherent, authoritative Word we believe that whatever true science discovers will eventually be found to be in sync with the teachings of the scripture. Here’s the deal.On the surface it looks like these men are unbiased scientist but the truth is these men are waring against the belief that their is a God to who we must give account. This is a worldview, it is a religion. From the biblical standpoint, it firmly and repeatedly asserts that Jesus was and is the Creator of the universe and everything in it. John 1:3 - “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” 1 Cor. 8:6 - “yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” Col. 1:16 - “For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.” Hebrews 1:1-3 - “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. 3 He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. Therefore we reject the naturalistic worldview and carefully study and scrutinize any attempt to harmonize the scripture with it.