Sermon Tone Analysis

Genesis 1:1

Scripture Reading Psalm 33

560 How To Sleep During Speeches

Lancet, British medical journal, gives this advice on how to sleep during speeches at public dinners:

“The head should rest on a tripod formed of the trunk and of the arms firmly placed on the table.

The head should be placed in the hands in a slightly flexed position to allow the tongue to fall forward and prevent stertorous breathing.

The fingers should be outstretched over the face and eyes, pressing the skin of the forehead upwards to wrinkle it.

This gives an appearance of deep concentration.”

—Maxwell Droke

If any of you need to: you can give the appearance of deep concentration...

Henry Morris III (Exploring the Evidence for Creation):

“The evidence for creation can be clearly seen from that which has been made by our Creator.

Our planet has been uniquely created by God for life, especially human life.

Our universe is filled with wonder that demonstrates our wonderful Creator.

Through what was made we can see God’s power, presence, protection, provision, and wisdom.

Nature eloquently testifies to an infinite, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, living, personal God.

Of course he is referring to a couple of passages:

Paul explains how nature (what has been made) reveals God’s invisible attributes.

Creation, or God’s general revelation, reveals the existence of God and expresses His eternal power and divine nature.

This unspoken word is sufficient to condemn but cannot save.

That requires “special revelation”, the full disclosure of God’s will including the plan of salvation…you can’t be saved without Scripture:

So creation reveals the existence of God but only in so far as it condemns all universally for having suppressed the truth about God in unrighteousness.

As we study God’s special revelation—His self-disclosure, we are immediately brought to His explanation of the existence of all things outside of Himself.

Last time...

I.

The Method of Creation

God spoke (10x in Gen 1).

And discovered that the Heb term bara

Since the word never occurs with the object of the material, and since the primary emphasis of the word is on the newness of the created object, the word lends itself well to the concept of creation ex nihilo although that concept is not necessarily inherent within the meaning of the word

When God created something new (as He did in Gen 1:1) He does so without the use of preexisting material.

This is ex nihilo:

Creation ex nihilo (out of nothing)

We see thruout Scripture that God speaks creation into existence.

John reminds us (John 1:3) that there is nothing that exists that God didn’t create.

So we have the method in Gen 1:1—God created (by speaking) ex nihilo (out of nothing).

II.

The Timing of Creation

“In the beginning...”

Not the beginning of God but of creation

There are 2 questions that are raised when approaching the issue of time—relating to creation: 1) how long did God take; 2) when did the creation occur?

A. How long did God take?

Begin with the first question—the Bible is unequivocal on the answer to the question how long did God take?

Reading thru Gen 1-2:2—creation began and ended in 6 days.

God created the entire universe from no pre-existing materials, and He did it in just 6 days.

This is reiterated by Moses in Exodus:

A question is often brought up at this point… “how do we know if this was a literal day (consisting of 24 hours) or referring to unspecified length “ages/eons” as some interpret?

The issue boils down to one’s hermeneutics (how you interpret God’s Word).

I’ve demonstrated to you for many years a literal, historical, grammatical approach to interpreting Scripture.

It has been said “if the literal sense makes sense, seek no other sense.”

There’s no reason to approach Gen 1-2 with any other approach.

We know exactly the kind of day God is talking about because He defines it in:

there is evening and morning and He says it is one day.

That’s not too difficult is it?

That pattern continues thru each of the 6 days of creation; 1:8 evening/morning; 1:13 evening/morning…(vs 19, 23, 31).

Entire creation took only 6 days.

Henry Morris observed in his book The Genesis Record

“God called the light day and the darkness He called night.

As though in anticipation a future misunderstanding, God carefully defined His terms.

The very first time He used the word 'day,' He defined it as the light to distinguish it from the darkness called night.

Having separated the day and night, God had completed His first day's work.

The evening and the morning were the first day.

This same formula is used at the conclusion of each of the six days...as I read you.

It's obvious that the duration of each of the days, including the first, was the same.

It is clear that beginning with the first day and continuing thereafter there was a period established of cyclical succession of days and nights, periods of light and periods of darkness.”

There’s a great deal of debate that centers around the Hebrew yom (day).

Most instances of this term in the Bible refers to a literal day or portion thereof (or defined period of several days) Those all refer to what we understand as a “solar day” 24-hour period.

There are a handful of occurences where yom refers to an indefinite period of time and could be rendered “age/ages.”

Whenever that term is used with a numerical adjective (second day, third day…) it always means (without exception) a literal 24-hour solar day where there is 1 cycle of morning and evening.

God took 6 days to create the entire universe.

He could have done it in 6 million years, or 6 minutes, 6 seconds.

But He did it in 6 days.

Why?

Ex 20:8-11—God took 6 days to create the universe to establish a pattern for all humans.

The pattern makes no sense if He took any other time than 6 days.

Gen 2:1-4 God rested—heb.

Simply means to cease from work.

God doesn’t mention the Sabbath at this point, that comes later under Mosaic Law.

He doesn’t indicate this was designated as man’s rest.

But God rested—and then did something extraordinary with the 7th day.

He blessed it—simply a pronouncement of His pleasure over the entire creation which was just completed.

Then He sanctified it.

God set it apart from the other 6 days and I believe He elevated it above the others to stand as a memorial to those 6 days.

A constant reminder week after week, that God created the universe in 6 days—it didn’t evolve, it didn’t create itself.

But an on-going reminder for man of the greatness of God.

Now this literal interpretation of Genesis 1 meets with a great deal of opposition not only from the evolution camp but also from some within the church who are trying to harmonize what they consider legitimate science and the record of God’s Word.

As I noted last time, the scientific method (observation, verification, repetition) cannot be applied to evolution nor creation (was not observed, cannot be tested—able to be refuted, is not repeated).

So observing what has been created and trying to come up with a hypothesis results in a theory based merely on assumptions (or one’s presuppositions—theistic or naturalistic).

Now some have taken what they consider to be a valuable scientific approach (again based on assumptions) and bring it to Scripture to try and come to terms with the manner of God’s creation.

And what always happens…the Bible takes a backseat to “science” and Scripture is interpreted thru the lens of (assumed) scientific discovery—which is slanted by one’s presuppositions.

Let me just mention a couple of competing views of creationism (believes God created in 6 literal 24-hour days).

Gap Theory—tries to account for the fossil record by inserting a gap b/t Gen 1:1 and 1:2.

They reason that an undetermined amount of time is built into the creation account which explains the existence of the billions of fossils around the world (taking place of millions or billions of years).

This gap is when Satan fell ad brought calamity to the prehistoric earth (eventually God remade the earth into paradise later described in ch 1).

This view was made prominent by Scofield Reference Bible (1st edition 1909).

Major theological problems with this—if death, disease and calamity enters creation before Gen 1:31—and death before Gen 3).

Progressive Creationism (interprets “day as “age”) views the earth as very old.

Robert Newman explains his position “I think the earth is some 4 or 5 billion years old…I believe that unguided evolution is not capable of producing the features we see in our universe—not the universe itself, life, its actual variety, not humankind…It seems to me that God used some combination of supernatural intervention (direct creative acts) and providential guidance (guided evolution) to construct the universe…It’s called progressive creationism b/c we think God’s activity in creation occured in a progression—a number of steps over a long period of time in which God established and perfected each level of the environment before he added a higher level that rests (so to speak) upon the preceeding levels.”

Theistic evolution (fully gifted creation) interprets the universe as God guiding the process of evolution to account for all things.

Trying to harmonize the scientific explanation of the origin of the world (nearly 14 billion years old) with creationism is fraught with problems:

Elevating general revelation to the same level as special revelation