Creation Day 4 B

You can go to the farthest, most vast complexity of the universe, or you can look into the smallest complexity of the cells within the human body, and all you're going to see is the hand of an intelligent and powerful Creator.

In a discussion about robotics, a university dean once reminded his audience that like robots, humans and other living things are just bags of tricks. Very good evolved tricks, he said. Of course, you'd expect secular scientists to accept evolution, but many churches have done the same thing by attempting to harmonize evolution with the Biblical creation record.

So what do you think? Did God use evolution to create the universe? John MacArthur addresses that and other questions about origins today as he continues his study on Grace to You, titled The Battle for the Beginning. With a look at the fourth day of creation, here's John. Let's open our Bibles to Genesis chapter 1. We come now to day 4 in creation, day 4. It is described in Genesis 1, 14 through 19.

Let me read that portion of Scripture for you. Genesis 1, verse 14, and God said, Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. And it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night, He made the stars also. And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good, and there was evening, and there was morning, a fourth day. The creation is introduced in verse 1 with an overview statement.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. That's the summary statement. In that statement, you have everything that is knowable categorized.

Herbert Spencer died in 1903. He said that all that is knowable in the universe can be summed up in five categories, time, force, action, space, and matter. Everything that exists can fit into that. That's exactly what it says in the first verse of the Bible. In the beginning, that's time. God, that's force created.

That's action. The heavens, that's space. The earth, that's matter. It's all in that verse. What it's saying in verse 1 is simply the overview. God made the heavens and the earth as we know them now. Then starting in verse 2, it begins to describe how He did that.

He did that in a six-day process. That process is described from chapter 1, verse 2, down to chapter 2, verse 3. And that's the section we're looking at in Genesis. This account of the creation of the lights defines their purpose in three functions...three functions.

They're very clear. Number 1 function, verse 14, to separate the day from the night. Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And each of these three functions is introduced by the phrase, let there be, or let them. First of all, these luminous bodies were given to separate and secondly, to dominate.

They literally dominate our lives. Now some have suggested that when He says signs here, He might mean something else. Well, I'm glad you suggested that. It just doesn't say that in the Bible and I'd rather kind of stick with what God wrote here. People say, well, you know, this could refer to land and sea navigation by the stars.

Well, it could. You know, we line up instruments with the north star and so forth. And some have even suggested that this could be a veiled reference to the Star of Bethlehem, which was a sign to the wise men, Matthew 2. Some really get carried away and see in the stars some astrological signs. Boy, our culture is really drowning in that bunk that there's some kind of zodiac out there.

And these stars are actually deities or forces or powers that give out messages that have great impact on people's lives. That is pagan. That is ungodly. It is unbiblical. It is pseudoscience.

It is ridiculous at best. It is demonic at worst. Genesis tells us what the signs were. They were signs to indicate seasons and days and years. And in that way, they dominate our life. They control human life.

They control human enterprise. Thirdly, first to separate, second to dominate, thirdly to elucidate or illuminate. Illuminate might be a better word there. It says in verse 15, again introducing the third category with the same phrase, and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, just to provide light, to illuminate. To separate, to dominate, and to illuminate. And I love this, and it was so.

Boy, is that an understatement. I mention the Big Bang, which of course is a preposterous theory of evolutionists, but somewhat facetiously I said there was at once some Big Bang. It wasn't the kind of Big Bang gaseous cellular explosion that evolutionists talk about. But they have to admit that there seems to have been some rapid, explosive, almost propelling of the universe outward to its vastness at some point.

And while we reject the Big Bang theory, there certainly was a big something when God simply spoke a universe of stellar bodies into existence, and instantaneously they came into existence. It was so. And remember that little phrase. It's used in verse 7, and it was so. Verse 9, it was so.

Verse 11, and it was so. And it's a technical phrase, and it means it was made permanent. It means at creation there was a firm and fixed and established condition. This is the testimony, and I've mentioned it a couple of times, Umberto Cassuto, who is not a Christian, who's a Jewish writer, writing from the Jewish understanding of the book of Genesis is so helpful.

I have found his commentary more helpful than any that I have read. And he really comes to grips with the Hebrew understanding of the text, and he simply says repeatedly, this little phrase indicates that it was so and remains so through all the life of the universe. It's a way of saying something was fixed.

And again, it militates against this idea of progressive creationism, that God made something that started some evolutionary process. He made it. He fixed it. It was firm. It was established. Now as similar in the other descriptions of creation days, the work is now repeated and further defined. Look at verse 16. And God made the two great lights. He's now defining these lights, the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night, He made the stars also. Again, beloved, I remind you, the statement is, and God made an unmistakable affirmation of divine creation, not a prolonged process. And He made the two great lights, the two great lights, the two great lights being those lights which dominate our life, the sun and the moon. Psalm 8, 3, Psalm says, When I consider Thy heavens the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou dost take thought of him? God is the Creator.

God is the Maker. Psalm 136, verses 5 to 9, praises God with these words, To him who made the heavens with skill, to him who spread out the earth above the waters, meaning separating the land from the sea, to him who made the great lights, the very same terms used in Psalm 136, the sun to rule by day and the moon and stars to rule by night. There, Psalm 136, verses 5 to 9, affirming God's creation of the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, the lesser light to govern the night, along with the stars also. Now let's just look at the greater light to govern the day, that's the sun. That's the sun, literally to rule over the day, and that's what the sun does. Down in verse 18, to govern the day, that's the sun's function.

And by the way, when it says this, we want to stop right here. We're not talking about anything that's a persona here. You know, the ancient tribes have worshiped the sun god, the Egyptians worshiped Ra, the sun god. They've worshiped the god and goddess of the moon. The bizarre pagan idolatrous idea is that somehow the sun, the moon, and the stars are literal rulers. They are deities that govern the life of man.

That's not what's intended here. Ancient Babylonian accounts make the sun and the moon and the stars into gods, endowing them with personality and intellect and will. And strangely enough, some of the rabbis even picked up on some of this stuff. There are rabbinic myths influenced by such paganism, which make the luminaries into persons who somehow communicate with their Creator so that some of the Jews actually got involved in worshiping the sun and the moon. And if you read Ezekiel chapter 8, you'll find an illustration there of Israelites in the temple of God worshiping the sun.

All such idolatry, all such myth is excluded by the Old Testament. They are simply material creation, luminous creation in the heavens who rule only in the sense that they are situated above the earth and they control its nights and they control its days and thus they control its life patterns. As I said before, they dominate, the sun being the most dominant governing the day. The lesser light, verse 16, would be the moon and it governs the night. In the same way, the sun governs the day. Its function is to cast its light over the night.

It is therefore dictating to us life in the darkness. He made the stars also. And that's just so staggering.

He made the stars also. That's it. What else can be said? The economy of words here is staggering. Twenty...you don't want to know this. Twenty billion dollars has been spent on exploring the moon. Twenty billion dollars. And one of the things they've been trying to figure out is how the moon evolved.

That's right. That's been one of the major enterprises in moon exploration. So far, twenty billion dollars has been spent in moon exploration. They have no information about how the moon evolved because it didn't. Evolution is clueless. It can't even explain how the moon evolved. How's it going to explain how our solar system evolved?

And how's it going to explain how the Milky Way galaxy evolved along with everything else? One theory says that planets formed when a star... Where did that star come from, by the way? Passing near the sun by its magnetic field, the star was kind of just passing along by the sun. Where the sun came from, they don't say. Where the star came from, they don't say. And how they developed orbits, they don't say. But the star went by the sun and its magnetic field tore matter off the sun. And that matter started doing whatever matter does to turn itself into a solar system. The more popular theory is that our solar system formed from a cloud of swirling gas, dust, and particles.

They don't say where the gas, dust, and particles came from. And, if that is true, if it all just sort of came together, the planets and their known moons must have evolved from the same material so we could assume that they would have common material and similarities, right? If they all came from the same stuff.

They don't. They show the fingerprint of a Creator. Since, listen to this one, about 98 percent of the sun is hydrogen or helium, if in fact our solar system was created somehow by matter that tore off the sun, Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury should have similar composition. Instead, 98 percent of the sun is hydrogen and helium, but less than one percent of these planets is hydrogen and helium. There are no natural processes that could form stars which burn fuel hundreds of thousands of times more rapidly than our sun burns it. There are no explanations for how galaxies could come into being with their billions times billions of stars. And that's why it's so compelling to see in verse 16 that God made it all.

He made it all in His inimitable, fresh, and insightful manner. C.S. Lewis took the discussion of the solar system evolution to its logical end. I quote from C.S. Lewis, if the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident and the whole evolution of man was also an accident. If so, then all our present thoughts are accidents.

The accidental byproduct of the movement of atoms. This holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for everybody else. But if their thoughts are merely accidents, why should we believe any of them?

I see no reason, says C.S. Lewis, for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. And Lewis goes on writing in his book on miracles. That was from God in the Dock.

This is from miracles. He says, each particular thought is valueless if it is the result of irrational causes. Generally then, the whole process of human thought, what we call reason, is equally valueless if it is the result of irrational causes. Hence, every theory of the universe which makes the human mind a result of irrational causes is inadmissible for it would be a proof that there are no such things as proofs, which is nonsense. But evolution is commonly held and is precisely a theory of this sort.

Boy, I mean, he could really do a number on them, couldn't he? When you look at the universe from a scientific standpoint, what you find is not something that's evolved over billions of years, but something very young. There is a lack of evidence that the sun and the other stars, for example, derive their energy from nuclear fusion. Evolutionists say it's some kind of evolution of nuclear fusion. Fusion reactions in the sun should produce subatomic particles known as neutrinos.

In the 1960s, Raymond Davis conducted an experiment designed to detect them. So few neutrinos were detected that Davis said of those that were, we do not regard this result as a measurement of the solar neutrino flux because of uncertainties in various background effects. Bottom line, they said if nuclear fusion is creating the sun and the stars, then we'll find neutrinos.

They looked, they found none. It has recently been discovered that the sun is oscillating. By studying the nature of these oscillations, scientists gain knowledge of the sun's interior just as the study of seismic waves tells us about the earth's interior. Those studies show that the sun's central temperature is too low to produce nuclear fusion. Calculations have also shown that if the sun formed by the contraction of a gas cloud as stellar evolution postulates, its central temperature would never reach the point where nuclear burning could even begin, just can't explain it. Where does the sun get its energy?

They have no idea. But by observing, this is interesting, that the sun is contracting or shrinking, they are now proposing a very young age for the sun, says one writer, at most thousands of years ago. Not only does the sun demonstrate a young universe, but the moon, the speed at which the moon is receding from the earth, it's going away. We know how fast it's going away.

If the earth and moon are 4.5 billion years old, the moon should be out of sight long ago, and so it goes. The only explanation for the solar system, let's go back to verse 16, and God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, the lesser light to govern the night, He made the stars also, and God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. And here He goes through the same three purposes, to separate, to dominate, and to elucidate only in reverse order, to give light on the earth, that's to elucidate or illuminate, to govern the earth the day and night, that's to dominate, and thirdly, to separate the light from the darkness. The only explanation is that God made it all. The psalmist had it right, the heavens declare what? The glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork. There isn't any other explanation.

None at all. And then it says, and God, verse 18, saw that it was good. What does He mean by that? I told you what that phrase means, used in verse 10, after the dry land and the sea were separated, used in verse 12, after the trees and the plants, used again here, it means it was ready for habitation. It was good. It was ready for habitation. Finally got to that point, ready for habitation, and that's why on day five He starts to create the swarms of living creatures and birds and sea creatures, and then on the next day, animals and man, ready for habitation. It was good, no death, so there can't be any mutations, there can't be any natural selection because nothing dies.

There is no death, there is no defect, there is no mutation, no evolution is possible. Death doesn't even come till Genesis 3, it was all good, just the way He made it, six or seven thousand years ago. And I love how it always signs off as in verse 19, and there was evening and there was morning, fourth day, just in case somebody might not get it, this all happened in a 24-hour period. Verse 5, day one, there was evening, there was morning, one day. Verse 8, there was evening, there was morning, a second day. Verse 13, there was evening, there was morning, a third day. We just read verse 19, and verse 23, the same thing, there was evening, there was morning, a fifth day. Verse 31, there was evening, there was morning, the sixth day, and then chapter 2 verse 1, Thus the heaven and the earth were completed, all their hosts, and by the seventh day God completed His work and He rested on the seventh day.

And thus did God create." I want to close, taking you back to Psalm 8. Turn to Psalm 8 and we'll just finish there. Psalm 8, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Thy name in all the earth, who has displayed Thy splendor above the heavens, and He's looking at the macrocosm, looking way out, seeing the glory of God and the vastness of heavenly creation. And then He looks at the smallest, from the mouth of infants and nursing babes, Thou hast established strength because of thine adversaries to make the enemy and the revengeful cease. When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man? And you can be sure in the day of the psalmist they probably didn't know as much as we know about what's out there, but it still staggered him that God who created the universe cared about him. What is man that Thou dost take thought of him, and the Son of Man that Thou dost care for him?

He's referring to humanity there. That Thou hast made him a little lower than God and crowned him with glory and majesty. We are the pinnacle of the divine creation.

Thou dost make him to rule over the works of Thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, whatever passes through the paths of the sea, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Thy name in all the earth. You see, that was really what God was after in creation. God gave us the account of creation so we would praise Him such as is done in Psalm 8, right?

And what does the evolutionist do? The evolutionist robs God of His what? Of His glory, robs God of His majesty. He ought to be falling on His face, O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Thy name in all the earth. In wonder of wonders, You care about us.

You care enough to love us, to send a Savior, to forgive our sins and to bring us to eternal glory. O Lord, our Lord, He begins the same as He ends, how majestic is Thy name in all the earth. That's the right response to Genesis 1. Not to question it, not to argue it, not to debate it, not to turn science into some hermeneutic to try to explain it away, but to fall on your face and cry with the psalmist, how majestic is Your name, O Lord, our Lord. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur.

Thanks for being with us. Along with teaching on the radio, John serves as chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. He's also pastor of Grace Community Church, and his current look at Genesis 1 is titled The Battle for the Beginning. Now throughout this series, John, you've emphasized the importance of believing that the earth is young and that God took six literal days to create it. Talk more about why that's important and what else does someone have to give up and neglect or even outright reject in order to embrace evolution and believe that the earth is millions of years old. That costs the integrity of the Bible.

If Genesis 1 says that God created everything in six days, six essentially 24-hour days, evening and morning was the first day, evening and morning was the second day, so basically it's saying there's one rotation of the earth. If that's not true, then the scripture is misleading. That's false.

I mean, that is the bottom line. If you deny the creation account of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, if you deny that God created man out of nothing, not at the end of an evolutionary process, if you deny that, you are denying the Bible. So you don't even get through the first two chapters of the Bible before you're a heretic, before you're a skeptic. It needs to be said that any belief in evolution is contrary to what is written in Genesis 1 and 2. And it needs also to be said, and this makes things I think more clear, that you cannot explain creation by any scientific method, because it's not science. Creating everything out of nothing instantaneously by the word that he speaks in six days has no scientific explanation.

Right. It's a miracle. It is the miracle of all miracles, the miracle of the vast, virtually endless universe and everything that is contained within it, all spoken into existence in six days by God. You only have one eyewitness to creation, and that's God and that's the eyewitness account. So you're doing two things if you deny the biblical account of creation. Number one, you are denying the text of Scripture, and two, you're denying the miracle of creation, which establishes the greatness and majesty and supernatural power and glory of God. This is not a small issue.

This is a very serious issue. I want to say a word about the book The Battle for the Beginning. This is the book on Genesis and its opening chapters that I wrote some years ago.

It explains all of this and a whole lot more. The book The Battle for the Beginning examines what Scripture says about the origin of the universe and mankind's fall into sin, and believe me, it comports with reality. You can get a copy from Grace To You.

Yes, you can. And friend, the best way to make sense of what's happening in the world today and to make sense of all the Bible is to go back to the beginning. For an extensive look at the foundational truths in the book of Genesis, pick up John's book The Battle for the Beginning when you contact us today. You can order right now at gty.org or call us at 800-55-GRACE. This helpful volume makes an ideal follow-up to John's current radio series, and it will build your confidence in what Scripture teaches about creation.

The title to ask for, The Battle for the Beginning. The book costs $11 and shipping is free. To pick up this book, call 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org. And when you visit our website, gty.org, make sure you take advantage of the thousands of free resources.

You can read articles addressing hot-button issues on the Grace To You blog. You can catch up on any radio broadcasts you may have missed. And you can download any of John's more than 3,500 sermons, all of them free of charge in MP3 and transcript format. You can also review today's broadcast or share it with a friend when you visit gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, reminding you to watch Grace To You television on Sundays. Also, make sure you're here tomorrow when John shows you why people reject the clear evidence of God's creation. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time. On the next Grace To You.