The How, Why, and When of Creation, Part 2

Understanding and believing the doctrine of creation in the book of Genesis is foundational in accepting, listen carefully, that the Holy Bible is to be taken seriously when it speaks to the real world. A well-known scientist, himself an evolutionist, made an observation about amino acids, the building blocks of life. He said that for amino acids to have originated by random chance would be as likely as a fully assembled Boeing 747 being formed by a whirlwind blowing through a junkyard of airplane parts.

That anecdote illustrates this. Even evolutionists have questions about how the world and everything in it got here. But does that mean that the theory of evolution is absurd? And if there truly is evidence for a young earth and a literal six-day creation, why is that evidence so often ignored, even in churches? Keep those questions in mind today on Grace to You as John MacArthur continues his study titled, The Battle for the Beginning.

And now here's John. Modern evolutionary theory has demanded and received almost universal acceptance in the world. The theory that no one created the universe as it is, but that it came into being by chance and it progresses through constant changes, mutations and transitions upwardly from simplicity to complexity completely through a random process, basically rules human thought. And I suppose we expect those people who reject God and those people who reject the Bible, those people who do not love the Lord Jesus Christ, who do not know Him, those people who love sin, those people who don't want a moral judge or a moral law, we expect those kind of people to be happy with such a convenient explanation of the way things are. And I suppose that's why it's so shocking that this evolutionary lie has dominated the evangelical Christian community as well. Theologians and exegetes and Bible commentators have felt it necessary to take the simple explanation of creation in Genesis chapter 1 and basically deny it. I was reading a very established and well-known commentary on the book of Genesis in which that is precisely the view of the author who says this really doesn't mean what it says. God really didn't mean that He did this in six days. He obviously meant something else because science has told us that couldn't be the way it is. Frankly, it's not easy to impose evolution on Genesis 1. It's a very difficult task for any commentator or any exegete because there is absolutely nothing in that section of Scripture or for that matter any other place in the Bible to allow for such a bizarre interpretation as evolution.

There is absolutely nothing in the text of Genesis 1-1 to 2-3 where you have the creation account that in any way, shape or form describes anything evolutionary. And you ask the question, why do they do that? Why do people who claim to be Christians do that? Well, there are several reasons.

Number one is to be accepted in academic circles. It's very important if you're in a university setting, if you're in an academic setting that you not be a creationist if you want to maintain your position, if you want your job. Secondly, people do that because they're ignorant of true science. They don't really understand science and where science can go and where it can't go and they have basically been deceived by science falsely, so-called.

And thirdly, I think they may be compelled the same way that Darwin was compelled and that was by the illusion of appearance. Darwin developed his whole system on illusory observations that had nothing to do with DNA, nothing to do with genetics, nothing to do with what really was going on. So for those reasons, being intimidated by the academic community, being intimidated by false science and being somewhat intimidated by observational illusions that have been passed down, they acquiesce and buy into the idea of evolution which is built on the concept of uniformity. It is what we call a uniformitarian concept, that is that everything just continues the same way in this long, multi-billion year process, everything progressing at the very same rate. They observe uniformity, they observe things going at a certain pace and they extrapolate out of that that they've always gone at that pace and that they therefore had to have started with something very simple and paced themselves at that same speed all the way through until we arrive at today.

That process they assume would have taken up to 20 billion years. However, the Bible doesn't allow for any such thing, any such illusion. In 2 Peter chapter 3, it tells us that mockers come and mockers say this, ever since the fathers fell asleep, ever since antiquity, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation. And those mockers who there are basically denying the Second Coming say nothing changes, everything goes along in exactly the same uniformitarian way.

Nothing changes. Obviously they affirm creation, but they say since creation nothing has violated a uniformitarian process. But verse 5 says, when they maintain this, when they say that everything continues the same, it escapes their notice that by the Word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water. And he's referring to creation here through which he says, the world at that time was destroyed being flooded with water, but the present heavens and earth by His Word are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of godly men. So it's people who say everything has always continued as it was from the very beginning have forgotten that there was a time when the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water and another time when it was destroyed by being flooded. In other words, Peter is pointing to the fact that everything has not continued through a uniformitarian process since the beginning, but rather there have been two cataclysmic events, one, creation, and the other, the universal global flood. There have been immense alterations in the earth as we know it. Creation itself was cataclysmic.

Originally the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water, and we'll comment more on that when we go back to Genesis. And there was a time when the entire globe was destroyed being flooded with water which had immense cataclysmic impact on the surface of the earth. This earth has not gone on in a uniform kind of existence, rather two immense cataclysms have affected its current condition, one being creation itself and the other being the flood. Uniformitarians claim that the strata in rocks, the strata sediment, the fossils, and the companion chemistry of geologic dating based on uniformity demand an earth that is billions of years old. During the early 19th century, the central presupposition of uniformitarianism was that the present is the key to the past, that is that everything went always the way it's going now, popularized by James Hutton and Charles Lyle who in turn influenced Darwin. Uniformitarianism is the belief that the origin and development of all things can be explained exclusively in terms of the same natural laws and processes seen operating today. Uniformitarianism has been the backbone of modern historical geology and is responsible for the current widespread assumption that the earth is billions of years old. The uniformitarians insist that all geologic features and formations once attributed to geologic cataclysms can now be satisfactorily explained by ordinary processes functioning over immensely long periods of time.

That's basically their view. Scott Hulse writing in The Collapse of Evolution gave us that definition. Creationists, however, have argued against that, saying that geological evidences support not uniformity but cataclysm. And in particular, the surface of the earth demonstrates massive universal hydraulic cataclysm, that is to say cataclysm related to water. And at creation, there was literally a water-engulfed earth that was reshaped cataclysmically and at the time of the Flood, there was a flood that covered the earth, again having an immense effect on its formation. Two very outstanding theologians and scientists, Henry Morris and John Whitcomb, marshaled evidence from known natural processes including the hydrodynamic drag of flood water to demonstrate the necessity of a universal flood to explain the present geological structures of the earth which cannot be explained from present slow processes. Frankly, folks, science, true science is not at all on the side of evolutionists. Widespread geologic phenomenon such as a heavy preponderance of sedimentary rocks and structures all across earth's surface, including seashells on the tops of the highest mountains, rapid almost sudden deposits of fossils and extremely large and deep fossil graveyards, as well as the pressurized formation of coal and gas all point to a watery catastrophe, not some slow natural process.

And more and more recent studies are confirming this. Douglas Kelley writing in his book Creation and Change says the uniformitarian assumption that millions of years of geological work extrapolating from present slow natural processes would be required to explain structures such as the American Grand Canyon, for instance, is called into serious question by the explosion of Mount St. Helens in the state of Washington on the 18th of May, 1980. Massive energy equivalent to 20 million tons of TNT destroyed 400 square kilometers of forest in six minutes, changing the face of the mountain and digging out depths of earth and rock, leaving formations not unlike parts of the larger Grand Canyon. Recent studies of the Mount St. Helens phenomenon indicate that if attempts were made to date these structures which were formed in 1980 on the basis of uniformitarian theory, millions of years of formation time would be necessarily postulated. Ironically, one of the centerpieces used to demonstrate uniformitarian chronology, the geologic column on closer inspection actually witnesses to catastrophism.

And so it goes. There are some other interesting indicators of a young universe. One that I find fascinating is the issue of moon dust. Before man reached the moon, it was assumed by some scientists who were committed to the paradigm involving a moon probably 3.5 billion years old that there would therefore be a very thick layer of dust on the moon. One writer, R.A. Littleton, an astronomer and consultant to the U.S. space program, wrote this, "...the inner surface is exposed to direct sunlight and strong ultraviolet light and x-rays can destroy the surface layers of exposed rock and reduce them to dust at the rate of a few ten-thousandths of an inch per year. But even this minute amount could during the age of the moon be sufficient to form a layer over it several miles deep." And so his theory was that the moon was several miles deep in dust. Now we are told that astronaut Neil Armstrong read about this and was very concerned that when he stepped out of the spaceship, he might sink forever into a suffocating morass of deep dust. On the other hand, he found very little dust at all. If the calculations indicating the rate of dust accumulation were accurate, there was not a billion years' worth of dust, there wasn't even a million years' worth of dust.

There was, in fact, only a few thousand years' worth of dust if dust is formed in that way by ultraviolet light from the sun. Another interesting thing is about oil gushers, when oil reservoirs are tapped by drilling, the immense pressure in the reservoir forces up the oil through a kind of a spouting geyser. The great pressure that is still surrounding oil formation is thought by some geologist to testify to a young earth.

A scientist by the name of Dickey and others have published the results on this matter in their research in a volume called Science. This is what they write, "'Studies show that any pressure built should be dissipated, bled off into surrounding rocks within a few thousand years. The excessive pressures found within oil beds, therefore, refute the notion of their age being on the order of millions of years and argues for the youthful age something less than ten thousand years of the rock formation and the oil trapped in it.'"

And then I really like this one. Henry Morris wrote something called Biblical Cosmology and Modern Science, and chapter 6 is on the subject of world population and the Bible chronology. And with painstaking detail in the aid of mathematical equations, he shows how the world population is an indication of the age of the earth. In a later work called Scientific Creationism, he shows that an extremely conservative average population growth of one-half a percent per year, which is a fourth of our present rate, but let's for the benefit of the doubt split it down to just a fourth and say the population grows at a half percent a year, that would add up to the present population of the earth in only four thousand years. And according to biblical chronology, that's right because four thousand years ago was the Flood. He writes, it begins to be glaringly evident that the human race cannot be very old. The traditional biblical chronology is infinitely more realistic than is the millions of years history of mankind assumed by the evolutionists. He says if they were right and there were millions of years, the population of the earth now would be ten to the five thousandth power.

And if we eventually were able to colonize all the other worlds in the universe and to build space cities everywhere in the interstellar spaces, it can be shown that a maximum of no more than ten to the one hundredth power people could be crammed into the entire known universe. You can look at this issue from the standpoint of honest science and have all of the affirmation you want for a young earth. Various physical chronometers, chemical measuring items used to establish the earth's and heaven's age. You can see real science will yield you an accurate answer if you understand this one thing. That when God created the earth, He created it as it is. He created it mature. He created it with the appearance of age.

What do I mean by that? Well, on the first day He made light and darkness. On the second day He made the heavens. On the third day He made the earth. On the fourth day He made the heavenly bodies that provide light. On the fifth day He made fish and birds. And on the sixth day He made land creatures and man and He made them all mature, fully developed. He didn't create seeds and cells. He didn't send out one little cell programmed to split itself over and over again over millions of years. There were no seeds, no embryos, there was no egg, there was a chicken, full grown.

He didn't start with partial light and partial gas and partial electromagnetic field and partial nuclear energy. He created a fully mature universe with the appearance of age. When Adam was made, he wasn't an embryo, he wasn't a newborn, he was a full grown man.

Everything was full grown, fully developed. The cataclysmic creation of the universe yielded a mature creation with the appearance of and the reality of age. Now as we noted all through this series, evolution is impossible because nobody times nothing equaling everything is impossible.

It's not only impossible, it's ridiculous. And there are no transitional forms and genetics makes devolution, not evolution. An alteration in genetics can only be negative, it can only fulfill the law of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics and lessen and it can't make anything greater. There isn't any kind of genetic code that can make a transition.

Any living thing is subject to the genetics that it has and nothing beyond that. As we have seen, honest geology cannot support an old world or an evolving world. The fossil record doesn't prove age, it proves cataclysm and so it goes.

I'm only giving you that just because I'm asking science to be honest in this situation. But with all of that background, let's go to Genesis 1 and let's get the straight story here. How did the universe come to be what it is now? Here's how, verse 1, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The Hebrews had no word for universe. They had a phrase for universe and the phrase for universe that the Hebrews used was the heavens and the earth.

It simply means the universe. In the beginning, God created, bara, ex nihilo, out of nothing, the universe. With no prior existing matter and no prior existing energy, God created the entire universe. Now we asked the question last time, how did He create and we answered it by His Word. Verse 3, then God said, let there be light. Verse 6, and God said, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters.

And verse 9, and then God said, let the waters and so it goes. And God created by simply speaking it into existence. That's how He created. When did He create?

He created in six days about six thousand years ago, maybe a little more than that, but something certainly under ten thousand and closer to six thousand. Now the question I didn't answer last time was why He created. And, of course, the first answer is because He wanted to. And that's the best and truest answer. The next question is why did He want to?

And the answer to that question is pretty obvious. He wanted to because He intended to display His glory. And creation gave Him another opportunity to put His glory on display to heavenly angels as well as to mankind who would come to appreciate His great creative power.

In Revelation 4.11 it says, worthy art thou our Lord and our God to receive glory and honor and power for thou didst create all things and because of thy will they existed and were created. I told you He did it because He wanted to. He did it because He wanted to do it. And He desired to do it for the very reason that eternally in His presence He will be praised and glorified for this immense display of creative power which puts His majesty and His nature on display. In Isaiah 43 verse 7, Isaiah 43 verse 20 He says, I did it for My glory.

I did it for My glory. And within this creation He made man and to take it one step beyond, He not only did it to display His glory, His great massive intelligence, massive power, massive wisdom, massive love of beauty and complexity and yet order and systematization. He's displaying so much about His nature in the creation, but also in the creation He was given the opportunity by virtue of the creation of man to display something He would not otherwise be able to display and that is His grace and His mercy. And so He did it to put His glory on display, the glory of His creation and the glory of His redemption.

You could also say that He did it in order to provide a bride for His Son. As I've told you before and I used to think that I've never read this anywhere and I just...it just hit me when I was studying the Scripture that God one day said to the Son that He loved Him with a perfect love and said, I love you so much, I want to give you a gift and so I'm going to create and I'm going to redeem out of humanity a bride for you and I'm going to bring that bride to glory and that bride will be clothed in righteousness and holiness forever and that bride will bear your image and that bride will worship you and adore you and serve you forever and ever and that's my love gift to you as a son. This glorious plan of God to give to His beloved, the second member of the Trinity, an expression of love, of eternal divine love by granting to Him a redeemed humanity who would reflect His glory and serve Him and praise Him forever. That's Grace to You with John MacArthur.

Thanks for being with us. John's current study from Genesis chapter 1 is called The Battle for the Beginning. Now, John, in your lesson today, you answered one of the most foundational questions of the Christian life. Why did God create the world? Every believer needs to know that, as you said today, God created the world for His own glory. And now, I have another one of those foundational questions and it's simply this.

Why did God use a book, the Bible, to reveal Himself and His purposes in creation? Talk about that a little. You mean as opposed to a music video? Yeah, or a movie.

I don't know. Yeah, because a book freezes words. I suppose there are people who thought God should have made a movie because a movie is more dramatic, but it doesn't stop. It doesn't freeze anything. The Bible freezes words. It freezes the content. It embeds it in stone.

It's there. It's not moving, which lends to examination, comparison, study, analysis. That is the uniqueness of that medium. Even the preaching of Jesus, people could walk away and not maybe remember all of it, the preaching of the apostles.

When you put it down in print, it's fixed. And there's no possibility of mistaking what was said. That's why it was so important when Jesus said to the disciples when He was in the upper room, when the Holy Spirit comes, He's going to lead you into all truth. He's going to bring to your remembrance the things that I said unto you. What He's saying is He's promising them the writing of the Gospels and the writing of the New Testament. If we didn't have this book with words that are specific, that have been passed down generation to generation and protected from their original inspired autographs, we wouldn't know we had the Word of God with this kind of precision.

God is—and I think we have to say this a lot to this generation—God is very precise. Now we actually have a book on this subject. The book Final Word. We've just been talking about that book, Final Word, Why We Need the Bible.

We're making this book free to anyone who requests a copy. That's right, Final Word, Why We Need the Bible. Every word of God is pure. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable. So, we should be grateful that God has given us something fixed, something immovable, something that He Himself has guarded against being changed, His living Word. And it is alive, but it is alive in words that are frozen forever on the pages of the Word of God. What a gift to us.

Yes, it certainly is. And friend, since knowing and trusting the Bible is so important, I encourage you to request John's book, Final Word. It can help you fully appreciate Scripture's power and authority over all of life. To get a free copy, contact us today. Call our toll-free number, 800-55-GRACE, or go to gty.org.

Final Word looks at reasons you can believe every word of Scripture and how you can be sure that the Bible is without error. It could be a great resource to go through with your small group. To get your free copy, call 800-55-GRACE, or go to gty.org. And if you're benefitting from these broadcasts and you believe that verse-by-verse teaching transforms lives, remember you can help take John's Bible teaching to places that most of us will never go personally. Your support makes you part of a missionary endeavor throughout the English and Spanish-speaking world. You can donate by mail, send your tax-deductible gift to Grace To You, Post Office Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412, or call us at 800-55-GRACE, or go to gty.org. And thanks especially for your prayers. We know your prayers make a difference. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace To You staff. I'm Phil Johnson inviting you to tune in at the same time tomorrow, when John looks again at the direct personal role God had in creation. Be here for another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You. We'll be right back.