Genesis 1

Genesis chapter 1, and it's been a long time since on Sunday night we were in the book of Genesis.

Tonight we're going to attempt to look at the first chapter.

And again, I'm humbled by this book and by the content we have, and I realize that there's no way I can do it justice.

So I'll just do what I can for you on a Sunday night as by way of exposition and trying to apply it to our lives.

But I trust that whether you know the book already or you've never studied the book, that it'll be a blessing for you just to be kind of reacquainted with the book of Genesis and all the wonderful truths that we find here.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you tonight for your precious word.

We thank you that we can worship you.

And as we read tonight about you creating and your power and your majesty and your glory, Lord, may we leave here tonight with a sense of awe, with a sense of wonder, and may it result in worship.

Lord, we thank you for this revelation of what we could never know or understand apart from you making it known to us.

We pray that tonight we might see and hear and understand your word.

And we'll give you praise and we'll give you thanks.

We ask it in Jesus' name and everyone agreeing said.

Well, we come to one of the most important chapters in the Bible, actually the first 11 chapters of Genesis, one of the first three, and then the first chapter, and then the first verse.

Years ago on Sunday morning, I preached an entire sermon on verse 1.

But look at verses 1 and 2.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, or the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Now, what we begin tonight is a study in the book of Genesis, which is going to take us through the Old Testament.

Now, we may not go directly through the entire New Testament.

We may hop back and forth just a bit, but we are going to cover the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament.

But in a very basic elementary way, especially for new believers, let me explain that the Bible has two testaments, or also known as covenants.

They basically mean the same thing.

We have the Old Testament, or covenant.

We have the New Testament, or covenant.

Now, the Old Testament, beginning with Genesis and ending in Malachi, is a covenant.

Now, a covenant or a testament is an agreement that God makes with man.

And so God enters into a covenant with the nation of Israel.

So it gives us the record of God's chosen people.

We're going to see the Genesis gives us the history of the human race and the history of the Jewish race, or the nation of Israel.

Both of those histories are recorded for us.

So the Old Covenant is a covenant made with Israel.

It is made based on the law and the keeping of the law.

Simply stated, the New Testament, or New Covenant, is a covenant made by Jesus Christ.

And He made it by dying on the cross for us.

And He made it with whosoever believes in Him.

Now, the difference between the Old Testament, or covenant, and the New Testament, or covenant, is the Old is based on law, and the New is based on grace.

And that's a marvelous contrast.

Law says, do this and live.

The New Testament teaching of grace says, Jesus died for you, believe and live.

Law says, do and live.

Grace says, believe and live.

Grace is unearned, undeserved, unmerited favor.

That's the definition of grace.

Grace is God not giving us what we deserve.

So in the New Covenant, Jesus died for our sins on the cross, was buried, rose again, and by believing, which means committing yourself and trusting in Him, and that what He did for you on the cross was you receive it, and you enter into that covenant.

Now, when we celebrate communion or the Lord's Supper, Jesus established that as a memorial of that New Covenant based upon His broken body and the shed blood.

The Old Covenant was based upon the sacrifice of bulls, and goats, and lambs, and turtle doves, sacrificial animals, and there was also meal offerings and so forth.

The New Covenant is based upon Christ's blood.

Better promises.

And it is an eternal covenant.

The New Covenant put an end to the Old Covenant.

There was the doing away of the law and the establishing of grace, which is an eternal covenant.

The Old Covenant, God wrote His laws upon stones.

On the New Covenant, God writes His laws upon the fleshly tablets of our hearts.

Under the Old Covenant, they had to approach through a priest.

Under the New Covenant, Jesus Christ is our high priest.

But enough said about the two covenants.

We need to move on or we'll never get into Genesis tonight.

But take this little handout that I gave you for just a moment.

Let me explain some things about it.

We have the Old Covenant represented in the Old Testament.

Now, the Old Testament has these divisions.

It has the historical books, it has the poetical books, and it has the prophetical books.

Tonight, we begin Genesis, which is the beginning of the historical books of the Old Testament.

Now, the history in the Old Testament has two divisions.

It has the Pentateuch, Genesis to Deuteronomy, the first five books of the Bible.

Jews called it the Torah.

And then we have the historical, which is the 12 books from the first Samuel down to the book of Esther.

And during that time, we see God's past work, and we see the narrative of God's covenant people.

And then we have the poetical books, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon.

We have experience present, God's ways, poetry, and the covenant practice.

And then the third division, the prophetical books, there are 17 of those.

We have two divisions.

We have the major prophets, and we have the minor prophets, kind of like the major and the minor league, I guess.

Now, that doesn't mean one is more important than the other.

It just means the amount of their prophecies, the content of it, that one is larger than the other.

So we have five major prophets, Isaiah to Daniel, and then we have 12 minor prophets, Hosea to Malachi.

We're going to have a great time studying the major and the minor prophets on Sunday night.

We've done that.

We've actually taught through the whole Bible twice, and this will be the third time.

Now, the second division I wanted to point out tonight is the first five books called the Pentateuch.

Now, in the Pentateuch, we have Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

So we have Genesis, the key ideas, beginnings.

The nation is chosen.

We have the people who are prepared.

We have God's character, which is powerful, and sovereign.

We have God's rule, which is that He is the creator.

We're going to see if God created all things, then God is not only transcendent to things in the material universe, but God is sovereign over them, and separate from them.

And then God's command is, let there be light.

And then we have Exodus, we have Leviticus, we have Numbers and Deuteronomy, and I've given you the charts.

I guess there's no need for me to read them all.

You can check them out yourself.

But we come to the book of Genesis.

On my handout, we see the third category, and the book of Genesis is the first book at the beginning of the Pentateuch.

Now, Moses is the author of the first five books of the Bible.

And the story of Moses itself is a marvelous thing, and to think that God had His hand on this young boy during the time of the bondage in Egypt, and that God would use him.

He actually was trained in all of the schools in Egypt, and thus equipped to write the first five books of the Bible, and also writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Moses is writing about things that he could never have known about, apart from Revelation.

Obviously, Moses wasn't around in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth.

But the Bible tells us that all of Scripture is given by inspiration of God.

So this is not human speculation.

This is divine revelation.

And we're going to discover the origin of time, space, and matter, where it all came from, that God created it.

And what a wonderful thing that is.

Now, looking at the book of Genesis that Moses is the author of, there really are simply two main divisions.

It divides into four events and four people.

And I think that's a pretty great division for the book.

The events are creation, the fall, the flood, the nations.

And then the four people are Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.

And so under the four events, we have the beginning of the human race.

Under the four people, we have the beginning of the Hebrew race.

The first 11 chapters are historical.

And then chapters 11 through 50 are biographical.

We have the biographies of these great individuals.

So then you can see the place and the time and the breakdown of our study in the book of Genesis.

You can never, ever understate the importance of the book of Genesis.

If you have Genesis wrong, you are messed up to say the least.

If you don't understand creation, you don't understand man, you don't understand sin, you don't understand the fall, you don't understand the promise of the Redeemer, man's need for a Savior, then you are going to have a misunderstanding of not only the material universe, what is man, the nature of man.

You're going to have a misunderstanding of who Jesus is and why He's needed and what He came for and the whole concept of salvation or redemption through Jesus Christ.

So, Genesis 1-1 is without a doubt one of the greatest verses in the entire Bible.

Let's look at it.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Now, what does He mean by in the beginning?

What He means by that is in the beginning of time.

In the beginning of time.

You see, God is eternal and He does not dwell in time.

Time has its beginning and it will have its ending in God.

When it says in verse 1 that God created the heavens and the earth, the idea is that God created space, He created matter, and He created time.

Now, what was God doing before the beginning?

That's a good question.

And I won't get too sidetracked with this question, but you know I was amazed when I studied it this week that the Bible has a lot to say about what God was doing before He created all things.

Now, the Bible doesn't record the creation of angels.

We don't know when they were created.

We know that they were created, but we don't know when.

It is believed that they were created before Genesis 1.

God created angels.

Angels are created beings.

They are spirit beings.

They are created by God.

And so in the book of Job, it talks about before the heavens were brought forth, that God was with the angels and that they were rejoicing and so forth and praising God in heaven.

But before God created the heavens and the earth, I think it's important to understand that God existed in sublime glory.

God, by His very nature, is eternal.

You know, in the most simplest way, you either believe in an eternal, all-existent God, or you believe in some form of eternal matter.

You get into it with the evolutionists, and they can only go back so far.

When it comes to the origin of life, they are scrambling as to try to explain where life came from.

They kind of reach a vanishing point.

And the reality is, is you either believe that in the beginning, God, or in the beginning, there was matter.

You have to believe that something created this universe or this material universe that we live in, that it came from something.

What is the source of this great effect that we have?

This great cause that we have?

We have this universe.

Where did it come from?

You say, well, it evolved.

Well, where did that which evolved come from?

Well, it just came together and blew up and there was an explosion.

You just reach a point where you can't really explain the origin of matter or life.

And even if you have the origin of matter, then how do you get life out of matter?

Non-life.

So, in the beginning, God.

So we accept that by faith.

You go, well, I don't like faith.

It's just a blind leap in the dark and you Christians are crazy to believe in faith in the beginning, God.

But as I pointed out, somewhere you still have to have faith either to believe in matter or God because you reach that vanishing point.

Now, there's good evidence, and I'm not a scientist, but there is good evidence for the creation model.

If you want to go deeper into this subject, I recommend Henry Morris' book The Genesis Record.

He's both a theologian and a scientist.

And he approaches the book of Genesis from a scientific and historical perspective and does a masterful job at giving a lot of good evidences from the Scripture for special creation.

But someone has said, and it's so true, that if you can believe Genesis 1-1 in the beginning, God, and He created the heavens and the earth, that you're not going to have any problems with the rest of the Bible.

If you can believe that in the beginning, God, and that God created all things, then you're not going to have any problem with the idea that God could perform miracles, that He could make the sun stand still, that He could part the Red Sea, that He could make the walls of Jericho come falling down, or that a virgin could conceive her womb and bear a son that is both God and man, and that Jesus being the God-man could perform miracles and heal the sick and raise the dead.

And all the miraculous that sometimes people say, well, I'm a Christian, but I don't believe in the miraculous.

If you believe Genesis 1-1, why would you have a problem with anything miraculous?

To think that God created the heavens and the earth just absolutely amazes me.

I personally find a great deal more of comfort in the idea that God, when you get to know God as He reveals Himself in the Old Testament, God of grace and mercy and love and compassion and wisdom and knowledge and holy and just, I'm glad that there is a God who created it all, and we're not here just by accident.

That you and I are not just a mistake.

That we didn't just happen.

We are just highly evolved animals.

That there is a Creator and that there's a design.

Wherever there's a design, there's a designer.

In arguing for the existence of God, the Bible doesn't do that.

The Bible doesn't open up with ten chapters on arguments for the existence of God.

It just accepts the fact that God exists.

And as much as that it is a revelation of God, it's kind of in a sense God's autobiography.

If you wrote an autobiography, would you spend the first chapter trying to prove that you existed?

No, you'd just tell us when you were born and how you lived your life and whatnot.

So we find here that God existed, God created, and that God existed in eternal splendor and glory.

That God always has been.

Now when we speak of God being eternal, it means that God always has been.

That God always will be.

There was never a time when God was not.

I'm putting this in the simplest terms that I can.

You say, well, I can't understand that.

I understand why you can't understand that.

Because you're finite and God is infinite.

There's no way we can wrap our minds around the concept of an eternal God.

We are time-space kind of creatures and we're locked into time-space and we think in terms of stuff beginning and ending and so forth in the flow of history.

And we can't conceive of something outside of that.

God always has been and God always will be.

Now what God was in eternity past, God is right now and God always will be.

One of the attributes of God explained in the Bible is what's called immutability.

And that simply means that God does not change.

The very nature of God is that He's immutable.

He doesn't change.

There's no progression of God.

God doesn't ever change.

In our changing world, I find comfort in that.

The way the world changes around us and nothing stays the same, it's nice to know that God never changes.

That He is eternal.

That He existed in sublime glory.

There's also the idea that the Divine Trinity was in loving communion prior to Genesis 1.

1.

Ever thought about that?

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

And before that, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit all existed together as one.

What an awesome thought.

Now we sometimes hear that God created man because he was lonely.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

God doesn't need us.

God is independent from us.

Since God created all things, He doesn't need us to bring Him a drink, to bring Him some food, to give Him a place to sleep, help Him out.

He's the Creator and the Sustainer of all things.

He gives us life and breath and all things.

He didn't create us because He needs us.

It was God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit had communion among themselves and they didn't really need to create man.

Now in saying that, I'm alluding to the doctrine of the Trinity which I believe the Bible teaches.

That there is one God and that one God is manifested in three persons.

There's not one person manifested in three gods.

So there's one God, the Father, one God, the Son, Jesus Christ, and one God, the Holy Spirit.

You say, well, then don't we have three gods?

No, you only have one God.

It's a triunity.

It's interesting that in verse 1, the word God Elohim is in the plural, which technically could be translated gods, but it's conveying the idea that there is three persons within the Godhead.

And when we find in Genesis, God saying, let us make man in our image after our likeness, who's God speaking to?

Not the angels.

They weren't made in the image and the likeness of God.

And then it gets to God the Father speaking to God the Son, the Holy Spirit, the communion that existed there in the Trinity.

And then there was the divine Trinity planning redemption.

Do you know when God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit planned man's redemption?

Before man was ever created.

When you read Genesis 1, 1, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, guess what's already set up?

That God would create man, that man would fail, that man would be redeemed, that Jesus would come, that He would die on the cross, that He would be the Redeemer, that He would die, that He would resurrect, that the Holy Spirit would come to convict man, and the plan was already laid out.

Someone said God the Father drew the plan.

God the Son brought it down to man.

And God the Holy Spirit brought it to us personally when we were created.

And in a sense, those of us that are saved, if you really want to blow a fuse, those of us that are saved, if you really want to blow your mind, those of us that were saved, in a sense, were saved in eternity past.

When did God choose us as believers?

In eternity past.

When God designed the plan of redemption.

And as far as God the Son is concerned, we were saved when He died on the cross and rose from the dead.

As far as God the Holy Spirit was concerned, we were saved on that specific day, that specific moment when we prayed and we invited Jesus Christ to come into our heart and forgive our sins.

I don't know what day of the week it was, but it was August 1971 for me.

And I was at the beach, my favorite place to hang out.

And I sat on the beach all alone.

Beautiful spot.

And I know exactly where it is to this day.

I can take you to it.

I sat there and I just cried out to God and asked Him to forgive my sins and to come into my heart.

And that which God designed and devised in eternity past, before the heavens and the earth were created, that took place personally in my heart when the Holy Spirit moved in to take up residence in me.

We do know that Paul in writing to the Corinthians talks about God who commanded the light to shine out of the darkness to shine in our hearts to give us the knowledge of God.

And what we read about tonight is the old creation.

And as Christians, we are the new creation.

And we become the children of God.

So, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

The word created is the Hebrew bara.

B-A-R-R-A.

You say, what significance does that have?

It's very significant in that it means to create out of nothing.

God didn't take existing matter and assemble it and create it.

He actually created matter.

He actually created time.

He actually created space.

God is the only being, you might say, the only one who has the ability to create bara.

Now, maybe you're an artist.

I kind of have an interest in art.

I don't do much of it anymore, but I used to love to paint and draw and things like that.

But maybe you take some watercolors and you get a canvas and you throw a painting together and you didn't really copy it right off a picture.

But that's normally what you do.

You see the artist with their easels and they're set up at the beach and they watch the sunset and they're there painting.

Or maybe it's a landscape, not a seascape, and you're looking at something and you pull the colors together.

You paint a wave because you've seen waves.

I know waves really well.

I can tell when a wave is painted the way a wave should look.

I've seen people paint waves and I figure they live in Arizona and they've never even seen the ocean.

They don't have a clue what they're doing.

Waves don't do that.

Waves don't look like that.

This is dorky.

But you can only assemble what you have taken in, what you've seen, and then you get back and you go, look at my creation.

I created that.

No, you didn't really create it.

You just assembled things that exist, colors and shapes and things you see in nature and you just put it on the canvas.

Now, I'm going to talk a little bit in a moment if I can not waste too much time and get going in the text about man made in the image and likeness of God.

And one of those aspects is creativity.

Have you ever seen a squirrel paint a picture?

No.

They don't have that kind of.

.

.

or play a violin.

We have these little animal shows where they get a squirrel and he plays the violin.

Oh, that's so cute.

But they're programmed to do that.

They don't really have a creativity as man does.

But we cannot even think outside the box in the sense that God is.

We can't devise colors that we've never seen, sounds we've never heard, or things that we've never seen.

All we can take is and assemble existing matter and say, well, we've recreated it.

And it's true man has a creative ability, but he cannot create something out of nothing.

I can't speak things into existence.

And theologically, when God says, and we're going to see it in just another verse or two, let there be light, God spoke that into existence.

It's actually what theologians call fiat, God's ability to speak things into existence.

God has creative fiat.

He can speak things into existence.

You and I cannot do that.

We can't create our own reality.

That's a deception.

We can't speak things into existence.

We don't have fiat or that kind of creative ability.

Now, we need to move on.

There's so much I could say, and I'm just kind of in a sense shooting from the hip, but I did copy a little section out of Henry Morris' commentary, the Genesis record, because I wanted to show you just in a little way how profound this first verse of the Bible is.

Henry Morris says, this one verse refutes all man's philosophies concerning the origin and the meaning of the world.

Interesting.

And he gives us seven things that this verse refutes.

It refutes atheism because the universe was created by God.

You want to refute atheism?

Genesis 1.

1.

Secondly, it refutes panatheism for God is transcendent to that which He created.

There are those that say, oh, the tree is God, or the stars are God, or the butterfly is God, or the bird is God, or the seal is God, or whatever.

And this verse refutes that.

God is transcendent to that which He created.

Thirdly, this verse refutes polytheism for one God created all things.

Fourthly, this verse refutes materialism for matter had a beginning.

And fifthly, this verse refutes dualism because God was alone when He created.

And sixthly, this verse refutes humanism because God, not man, is the ultimate reality.

And seventhly, it refutes evolutionism because God created all things.

Do I believe in evolution?

No, I don't believe in evolution.

Genesis 1.

1 says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Henry Morse goes on to say, actually, all such philosophies are merely different ways of expressing the same unbelief.

Each one purposes that there is no personal transcendent God, that ultimate reality is to be found in the eternal cosmos itself, and that the development of the universe into its present form is contingent solely, excuse me, on the innate proprieties of its own components.

In essence, each one of the above philosophies embrace all others.

Dualism, for example, is a summary form of polytheism, which is the popular expression of pantheism, which presupposes materialism, which functions in terms of evolutionism, which finds its consummation in humanism, which culminates in atheism.

To me, it's just absolutely amazing that one verse in the Bible, the very first verse, blows all of these theories and philosophies of man right out of the water.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Now notice verse two.

And the earth was without form and void.

And darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Now, there are some who teach what's called a gap theory, and perhaps you've heard of what is called the gap theory, and that is that between Genesis 1-1 and Genesis 1-2, that there's an ageless gap in between there.

Personally, I don't believe that theory or hold to that theory.

What they say is that between Genesis 1-1 and Genesis 1-2, Satan fell.

And that Satan's fall to the earth from heaven is what caused the earth to be void and without form.

They quote another verse from the Bible.

This is God creates nothing form or without void.

And so they say this counterdicts that concept.

But reality is that God just simply created time, space, and matter, and that thus He begins to run that by His Spirit.

Now, you notice the Holy Spirit is involved with creation as He is involved with our conversion, and we are thus the new creation.

So the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Then it says in verse 3 that God said.

.

.

Now, beginning from verse 3 down to verse 5, you have day one of creation.

And there are seven days of creation.

On the seventh day, God rested.

God makes man on the sixth day, and then He rests on the seventh day.

God said, let there be light.

And there was light.

God spoke light into existence.

Light is an amazing thing.

And then God saw the light that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness, and God called the light day, and the darkness He called night.

And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Now, I've already taken a lot of time just to get to these verses, and I don't want to get too sidetracked, but let me say that I believe in a literal 24-hour, seven-day week of creation.

And I know that there are people that think I'm absolutely out of my mind and sane for believing that.

But I think that that fits best with the Scriptures, and that if God is the one doing it, why would it be hard for God to create in seven days?

You say, oh, what about the date of the earth?

And what about the idea of the distance of the sun and the stars and the light and the time it takes for them to travel to the earth and all of those kind of things?

Well, for one thing, God could have created these aged elements or these time elements into the creation itself.

When He created Adam, He didn't create a little baby sucking his thumb.

He created him as a full-grown man.

He created him as a full-grown man to begin with.

For another thing, if you have day-age theories that the evening and the morning were the first day, and that first day, a 24-hour day, was really 10 billion years.

That's what it is.

And people just subjectively, randomly pick a time off the top of their head for what that day really means, then you have in the process of, if you're a theistic evolutionist, God creating and then, you know, matter evolving, and there are theistic evolutionists, that God created and then He allowed it to develop, then you have death and decay before you have sin in the world because you don't have sin until man's created.

So it throws the whole concept of man, the fall, and sin out of whack, which eliminates the need for a Savior.

So it really doesn't fit the biblical model.

And then another reason I reject it is that when you get to the Ten Commandments, Exodus chapter 20, and God gives us the commandment of the Sabbath day, He says, six days you work, but on the seventh day you rest.

What does He base that on?

For God created in six days, and God rested, when?

On the seventh day.

Not on the seventh billionth day.

God didn't take billions and billions of years to create.

So I believe that these are, what the Bible says, literally days.

I realize there are a lot of problems and questions that people have, but again, I just encourage you to read Morris' book who deals with those in a very scholarly way.

So the evening and the morning were the first day.

And then we have day two, verses six to eight.

God said, let there be a ferviment.

Now in the Hebrew, literally means that means a spread out spaces.

So it speaks of the space or the cosmos, the universe that we live in.

And in the midst of the waters, let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the ferviment, and He divided the waters which were under the ferviment from the waters which were above the ferviment, and it was so.

And God called the ferviment, take note of this, heaven.

And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Remember when Paul talked about his thorn in the flesh and he said he was caught up into the third heaven?

Well, this would be fulfilling that idea.

The first heaven, second heaven, and the third heaven being paradise.

Now when God created and He divided the light from the darkness and so forth, there was the water above the ferviment, there was the water below the ferviment.

And it's believed that before the flood that the earth was enshrouded in a water canopy and that the harmful rays of the sun filtering through that would not have affected man and his longevity, and that's how you can account for man's longevity prior to the flood.

And there's a lot of interesting research done on that.

Then day 3, verses 9-13, God said, let the waters under the heaven be gathered together to one place and let the dry land appear.

And it was so.

So God created the dry land of the earth.

And God called the dry land earth.

And the gathering together of the waters, I like this, He called seas.

And God saw that it was good.

They're trying to find water on Mars.

Oh, come on, we've got to find water on Mars.

They really haven't discovered water on Mars.

If they do, I could move there and surf or something.

It wouldn't be as crowded.

Isn't it interesting, of all the planets in our universe, the earth sits out there just the right distance from the sun and everything, and the earth has all of this water mass on it.

And everything's needed to sustain life.

I personally, I could be proven wrong, I personally believe that earth is a unique planet.

I don't think there are any little green men out there that we spend all this money trying to talk to them and hoping they'll talk to us.

But I think we're a unique planet.

Never been in outer space, but I understand looking back at earth, and we've seen the photos of earth.

Just such a beautiful place.

God designed it for you and He designed it for me.

What a blessing that is, with all the right balance that we have on this planet for animal life and plant life, for human life.

So God separated the seas.

Many point out how with Moses living at the time and the place he lived, no to write seas in the plural rather than singular.

Again, the answer is by divine revelation.

And God said, let the earth, verse 11, bring forth grass and the herb yielding seed, and the fruit trees yielding their fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth, and it was so.

So God created the plant life and that they have seeds in themselves to reproduce.

And seeds are a marvelous thing.

How they can reproduce after their kind.

And the earth brought forth grass and herb yielding seed after its kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed is in itself after its kind, and God saw that it was good.

Now if we're talking about geological ethics in each of these creative days, I kind of wonder how it is God could look at it and say it is good.

It would actually be God looking at it and saying, it will be good, it's just going to take a few billion years, and in a few billion years, boy, it's really going to come together, it's really going to be something.

Oh, it was good.

Trees are awesome.

Fruit trees are awesome.

And we can thank God for that.

Then he goes into verse 13 in closing this third day, and the evening again and the morning were the third day.

Now we have day four, verse 14-19.

God said, let there be lights in the fervorment of the heaven to divide the day from the night and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years.

And I don't think it's a reference to astrology either.

I just think that we can chart by the stars, and the seasons, and the stars and the moon and so forth change during these seasons.

And so he says in verse 15, and let them be for lights in the fervorment for the heavens to give light upon the earth, and it was so.

So these are the light holders.

Interesting, God creates light, and then later he creates the light holders, the sun, the moon, and the stars.

And let them be for lights in the fervor of the heavens to give light upon the earth, and it was so.

And God, verse 16, made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night.

He made the stars also.

Of course, we call them the sun and the moon.

And God set them in the fervorment above the earth to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night and to divide the light from the darkness.

And God saw that it was what?

Good.

You ever look at the moon at night and go, it is good?

Or you ever just feel the warmth of the sun on your face during the day and go, it is good?

Aren't you glad it's not a little too close?

Burn you up?

A little too far away?

Freeze to death?

It's just right?

What an awesome thing is the sun and the moon, and we couldn't have life sustained on this earth without them, and what an awesome thing that is.

Of course, we know that the sun is losing mass and it's reducing in its size and its energy and its power, which means that in a sense it's like a giant clock that was wound up, that it had a beginning.

Scientists talk about what's called the second law of thermodynamics.

If evolution were true, then we wouldn't be able to have the second law of thermodynamics, and that simply is that everything is running down, everything is degenerating.

Instead of the sun growing stronger and brighter and gaining mass, it's getting smaller and getting weaker.

Instead of you and I getting stronger and healthier and being able to retain more knowledge and being able to run faster and jump higher, we get smaller and weaker, except for our ears and nose keep growing.

It's a frightening thought.

You take a car and you set it in the driveway and you leave it alone, it doesn't get shinier, run better, doesn't look better, it deoxidizes, starts to crack.

The tires, you know, I've got a car that just sets a lot.

I've got brand new tires that are all dried and cracked.

I have to buy new ones because I just don't drive it enough.

And it just sets there, you know, and dents appear on it.

Well, that probably somebody ran into the other day.

Somebody ran into my BW bus.

I had a bad day when I discovered that.

That's second law of thermodynamics, man.

It's degenerating.

Fiberglass top is getting cracked.

The curtains are getting dry and brittle.

Canvas, you touch it and it just dissolves, you know.

Things aren't going up, things are going down.

Leave your backyard alone.

Don't water it, don't weed it, don't do anything.

Look how lovely it looks.

Left by itself, it degenerates.

God created these things.

They had a beginning and they will have an end.

There will be a day when there will be no more sun and moon.

Contrast the book of Genesis with the book of Revelation.

God created the sun and the moon and in the book of Revelation there was no need for the sun in the new, you know, kingdom because in heaven God is going to be the light of it and we don't need the sun or the moon for the light.

Let's move on quickly here in chapter 1, verse 20.

We have the fifth day down to verse 23.

God said, let the waters bring forth abundantly.

And the waters, excuse me, abundantly.

And the moving creatures that have life and the fowls that fly above the earth and the open firmament.

So God created all the sea life, which is absolutely unbelievable.

Absolutely incredible.

I love the sea.

I love the life found in the sea.

And then birds, aren't they cool?

Aerodynamically designed just right, you know, with their wings and their bone structure and the way they're designed to just soar.

See a bird and fly and it's just gorgeous.

What does man have to do?

He has to study the aerodynamics of a bird to create an airplane.

We can't create things like that.

We have to take what God has already created and assembled to be able to do our thing.

So we have the evolutionist creating what he called the hopeful monster.

You ever heard of the hopeful monster theory?

Because we really have no transitional forms, and there are hundreds of books, good books, written by creation scientists that deal with these things, there are no transitional forms.

That a lizard one day just all of a sudden laid an egg and popped a bird.

Blew off.

Freaky.

Called it the hopeful monster.

Now I know that we have these prehistoric so-called creatures, you know, and I do believe God created dinosaurs that are part of God's creation.

How they became extinct, I'm not sure.

There are different theories.

They could have died in the flood or just become.

.

.

We have animals become extinct today, don't we?

So the dinosaurs became extinct.

What's the big deal with that?

I saw a picture of a dinosaur once smoking and it said how the dinosaurs became extinct.

Smoking cigarettes.

But to believe dinosaurs existed and there's evidence that they co-existed at the same time as man, that didn't predate man by billions of years, and that they became extinct is no real big problem.

But this, you know, they have.

.

.

Because there's no transitional forms, they have to theorize the hopeful monster theory, you know.

I've read about it.

A lizard laid an egg and a bird popped out.

Just absurdity.

So God created the fowls that fly above the earth and the open firmament of heaven.

God created the great whales and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind.

Notice that phrase.

After their kind.

Now there is a micro evolution and that is that there are within the species different kinds of dogs, different kinds of cats, different kinds of horses, but we don't have a half dog, half cat.

We don't have, you know, a half horse, half elephant.

You can't breed them together.

I got a great idea.

It's the horse elephant.

We'll just breed them together, man.

It's going to be a super new horse, you know.

It'll be really big and it'll be awesome.

Can't do that.

Cats have cats, dogs have dogs, birds have birds, and they produce after their own kind.

If evolution were true, no doubt, there would be not only transitional forms, but there would be, you know, half cat, half dog, or something that's kind of like in the process of evolution, or a chimpanzee that's kind of like in the transitional stage that still existed somewhere.

And all of the bizarre theories that men have for, you know, why we have developed in the way that we have is just crazy.

So, God creates the birds that fly and the creatures and the sea.

God created great whales.

I love it.

Verse 21, And every living creature that moveth which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind and every winged fowl after his kind, and God saw that it was good and God blessed them saying, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters and the seas and let the fowl multiply in the earth and the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

God said, day six, let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind.

Cattle, creeping things, beast of the earth.

So, he created the lions and the tigers and the leopards and the bears after his kind and it was so.

So, again, all of these reproducing after their kind.

And God made the beast of the earth after his kind.

And the cattle after their kind and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind.

And God saw that it was good.

Now we have the creation of man.

And God said, this was on day six, Let us make man in our image after our likeness.

And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.

So, God created man in his own image and in the image of God created he him male and female and created he them.

Now, God blessed them.

And God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply and replenish, or literally in the Hebrew, fill the earth and subdue it.

And have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.

And man was given dominion over all of the creatures.

And God said, Behold, I have given to you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of the earth and every tree which is the fruit of the tree yielding seed, to which it shall be for meat or food.

To every beast of the earth and to every fowl of the air and to everything that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is life, I have given every green herb and meat.

And it was so.

And God saw everything that he had made and behold, it was, check this out, very good.

Check this out, it isn't in the text there, I just threw that in there.

And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Where did man come from?

What is man?

We could spend a couple of weeks talking about the nature of man.

And I'm telling you, you better have a right understanding of what man is.

The age old question, know thyself.

What is man?

Are we an animal?

Are we the product of evolution?

Are we just a bunch of puffed up atoms?

Are we any different than animals?

No different in that only that we are more intelligent, more highly evolved.

I believe that a lot of the ills that we are experiencing in our society today is the product of evolution.

But a lot of the ills that we are experiencing today is the product of humanism, atheistic evolution.

There is no God.

We're not the product of special creation.

And man is not unique, man is not special.

He's no different than any of the other parts of creation.

Christianity with its roots in the Hebrew Scriptures elevates man to his rightful place.

Created in the image and in the likeness of God.

What an awesome thing.

The glory of man.

The uniqueness of man.

The special design of man in creation.

And God blessed them.

He blessed them with posterity, having children, replenishing or filling the earth.

He blessed them with position, have dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air and every living thing that moves upon the earth.

And He blessed them with possessions.

I've given you every herb bearing seed and the fruit that is in it.

But in looking at the very nature of man, John R.

W.

Stott has recently written an excellent little book.

It's simply titled, Why I Am a Christian.

And in that book, he's written a chapter, and I just want to read a little portion of it.

Bear with me.

I know I've gone a little long tonight, but I don't want to stop just short of these closing thoughts as I quote from Stott's book.

He's written a chapter on what is man.

He calls it the paradox of our humanness.

What makes human beings human?

What makes them unique?

Why are people more important than animals?

Why are we more valuable than a tree or a squirrel?

Many people don't believe we are.

When I was in Santa Cruz, it was funny.

They're, you know, hugging trees and stuff up there, and they were saying that.

.

.

I talked to a guy that looked me right in the face and said, human beings are no different than trees.

They're no more or less valued than a tree.

How sad.

So I can't cut a tree down to build me a house to stay warm and protected from the elements because, poor tree.

You know, it's gotten to where you can't even build sometimes a church or a soccer field because of the poor little old kangaroo rat or the little flies or the little fleas or the little bushes, you know.

We wouldn't want to disturb their habitat.

I know that we should take care of creation.

I don't think that.

.

.

I think we should do all we can to preserve life and not to lose any of our animals or our species.

I think it's a tragedy when we lose an animal.

But when we get to the point where we do not value human life any more than animal life or plant life or tree life, we're in real big trouble.

But I wanted to read actually what Stott says.

I'm jumping right in the middle of a section here and I'll try my best to read it without messing up.

But the divine image is clearly what distinguishes humans from animals, namely a cluster of unique human qualities.

Now, I've shared some of these before, but I've never seen them really laid out quite as clearly as I did in this little article.

So if you want to write them down, we're going to actually see that there are five things that characterize man as being made in the image of God.

Five things that make man made in the image of God.

The first is the capacity for rational thought.

The capacity for rational thought.

The fact that we are made in the image of God unlike animals is that we have the capacity for rational thought.

And here's what Stott says.

He says, although animals have brains, some more rudimentary than others, they lack understanding or intelligence.

Psalm 32 verse 9.

Whereas humans, beings, are able to think, reason, argue, and debate.

We also have, listen carefully, self-consciousness.

That is, we have the extraordinary ability to do what we are doing at this moment, namely to step outside of ourselves and to evaluate ourselves.

To ask ourselves questions about our own identity.

It is true that astronomically speaking, as one scientist said to another, man is extremely insignificant.

But then astronomically speaking, his colleague responded, man is the astronomer.

I like that.

We are restlessly inquisitive about the universe.

As Archbishop William Temple once said, I am greater than the stars, for I know that they are up there, but they do not know that I am down here.

It's an awesome thought.

Have you ever stopped to think about man having the ability to think abstractly?

To argue and to reason?

And then secondly, the capacity for moral choice.

We have a conscience to discern between good and evil.

Together with the degree of freedom to choose between them, we are aware of moral order outside and above us to which we know we are accountable, so we have an inner urge to do what we believe to be right and a profound sense of guilt when we do that which we know to be wrong.

Someone said man is the only animal.

They use the term that blushes.

But animals have no moral sense.

For instance, you can train your dog by repetitive punishments and rewards to obey your commands and to learn that it is allowed to sit on only one chair in the lounge.

If on entering the room you find that it's sitting on a forbidden seat, it will instinctively cower away from you not because it feels guilt, however guilty it may look, but because it knows it's going to get smacked.

Stott is an Englishman.

I like the way he says that.

And then thirdly, we are made in the image of God and unlike the animals because we have the capacity for artistic creativity.

We have the capacity for artistic creativity.

When God created us in His own image, He made us creative like Himself.

We are creative creatures.

And I love that.

So we draw, we paint, we build, we sculpt, we dream, we dance, we write poetry, we make music.

Human beings are both imaginative and innovative.

We appreciate what is beautiful to the eye and to the ear and to the touch.

We were made in the image of God.

And then fourthly, we have the capacity for social relationships.

We have the capacity for social relationships.

Stott says, of course, all animals mate and reproduce and care for their young.

While some go about in flocks and herds, others develop highly complex social structures.

For example, bees, wasps, and ants.

But human beings hunger for the authentic relationships of love.

Love is not just a disturbance.

In doctrine glands, everyone knows that love is the greatest thing in the world.

Loving, or living, excuse me, is loving.

And without love, human personalities disintegrate and die.

Moreover, Christians know why love is preeminent.

It is because God is love in His innermost being.

That when He made us in His image, He gave us the capacity to love and to be loved.

What an awesome thought.

And then fifthly and lastly, man is made in the image of God because he has the capacity for humble worship.

That's an awesome thought.

So worship his or her Creator.

There has been much discussion about the collapse of the Euro-Marxism and its causes.

Many believe the collapse was due to its gross materialism.

For materialism cannot satisfy the human spirit either in its communistic or in its capitalistic form.

We know instinctively that there is a transcendent reality behind the material order and people are seeking it everywhere.

The New Age movement is perhaps the last evidence of this quest.

Quoting from the Old Testament, Jesus said that human beings do not live, indeed, cannot live, on bread alone.

Matthew 4, verse 4.

Here then are five human capacities to think, choose, create, love, and worship that set us apart from the animals and that together constitute the image of God in us.

What an awesome thing.

Now, I've got to stop there.

I've gone way too long, of course.

Man is made in the image of God, but we're going to find out in Genesis that man is fallen.

That man sinned and fell.

The image of God is still retained, but it is tainted.

And our capacity to be like God is limited because of the fall of man.

You'll never be able to really get along in life until you understand both God and man.

What is man?

The psalmist says that thou art mindful of him, or the Son of Man, that thou visitest him.

And to understand that God created you with a design and a purpose and an intent, and that God can redeem us, is a marvelous thing.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank You for this first chapter of the book of Genesis.

A lot of ground to cover.

A lot of information.

But Lord, we're thankful that You are the Creator.

We are the creatures.

And we humbly worship You.

That man has this innate sense that there's something beyond him.

He is a worshiping being.

And we worship You.

We want to know You and fellowship with You.

And we thank You that's possible through Jesus Christ.

That You visited us in the person of Christ.

That You suffered and died on the cross.

That You rose again from the dead to give us life.

That we can be redeemed.

And that image can be restored.

Your love, Your mercy, Your grace, Your righteousness, Your justice, Your compassion, can all be manifested in our lives.

And we can know You in an intimate, personal way.

Christianity is not a religion.

It's a relationship.

A view of personal God.

And Lord, we want to know You.

We want to trust You and believe You that You died on the cross to forgive our sins.

And we receive You as our Savior.

We thank You for the eternal life that You give.

We thank You for the truth of Your Word and the revelation in it we find.

And Lord, we want to, as I said, worship You and live for You and fulfill that for which we were created to bring honor and glory to You.

In Jesus' name we pray, Amen.