Creation: Believe It or Not, Part 1

Without a right understanding of origins, there is no way to comprehend ourselves.

There is no way to understand humanity as to the purpose of our existence and as to our destiny. If we cannot believe what Genesis says about origins, we are lost as to our purpose and our destiny. Welcome to What Promises to Be, a fascinating edition of Grace to You. Today, John MacArthur begins one of his most popular studies, and it's a look at origins, what the Bible says about how the universe came to be, and the specific reasons God created it. John calls this study from Genesis chapter 1, the battle for the beginning.

John, maybe a helpful way to begin this study is to set the context. You've spent the vast majority of your ministry teaching from the New Testament. What prompted you to commit to an extensive study of the creation account and put together this series that our listeners are about to hear? Well, Genesis is so critical, not only because it's where God begins the Bible, but because the account of the creation is the most attacked portion of the Bible. It is not only attacked by the unbelieving world and by the agnostic world and atheistic world, it is attacked by the Christian world. You know, there's an organization called Bio Logos, and they attack the book of Genesis and the creation account, quote, unquote, on the basis of science. And they will even go so far as to say, if we don't reinterpret Genesis according to current scientific theory, we're going to be looked at as buffoons.

We're going to be looked at as low-life people, as non-academic, non-scholarship people. So they bend and bow to the scholastic expectations, and as a result of that, they alter the book of Genesis in a tragic way. Look, I think the most important conviction that a Christian could have today may well be a belief in six-day creation.

And the reason I say that is, well, two reasons. Reason number one is if you don't believe the Bible at the front end, when do you start believing it, and what else would you decide not to believe? But secondly, it is that portion of the scripture that is laid down in Genesis that essentially declares the creation of God in explicit, unmistakable terms, six days, 24-hour days, evening and morning, and the only reason you would not believe that is because you have decided to capitulate to those who have rejected it.

It is the most attacked portion of the Bible, and I say that if a Christian can stand up under that attack, that's a strong Christian. If you can fight the battle and be victorious where the battle rages the hottest, you're a faithful believer, and it rages the hottest in Genesis. And so I think this is a really important series, and I honestly believe people are going to be surprised and stunned when they find out how the accuracy of the Bible is demonstrated in true science.

The series The Battle for the Beginning Creation Evolution in the Bible, you do not want to miss a single day of this series. That's right, friend, what you believe about creation matters. It sets the foundation for what you believe about the character of God, the danger of sin, the tragedy of death, and the majesty of redemption. To see the evidence for a literal six-day creation and the consequences of denying it, stay here as John MacArthur begins his study, The Battle for the Beginning. To begin with, I want to address the concept. I want to sort of set the picture in your mind as to the debate.

This is critical for all of us, and it is most critical for those who are students. If you are a junior high student, if you are a high school student, if you are a college or university student in any other than a distinctively Christian school, you are going to be given this indoctrination about evolution as if it were fact. You're going to find that what I'm going to be saying to you is contrary to just about everything you hear. It is also important to all of us because understanding origins in the book of Genesis is foundational to the rest of the Bible. If Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2 don't tell us the truth, then why should we believe anything else in the Bible? If it says in the New Testament that the Creator is our Redeemer, but God is not the Creator, then maybe He's not the Redeemer either. If it tells us in 2 Peter that God Himself will bring about an instantaneous dissolution of the entire universe as we know it, that God in a moment will uncreate everything, then that has tremendous bearing upon His power to create.

The same One who with a word can uncreate the universe is capable of creating it as quickly as He desires. So what we believe about creation, what we believe about Genesis has implications all the way to the end of Scripture, implications with regard to the veracity and truthfulness of Scripture, implications as to the gospel, and implications as to the end of human history all wrapped up in how we understand origins in the book of Genesis. The matter of origins then is absolutely critical to all human thinking.

It becomes critical to how we conduct our lives as human beings. Without an understanding of origins, without a right understanding of origins, there is no way to comprehend ourselves. There is no way to understand humanity as to the purpose of our existence and as to our destiny. If we cannot believe what Genesis says about origins, we are lost as to our purpose and our destiny. Whether this world and its life as we know it evolved by chance without a cause or was created by God has immense comprehensive implications for all of human life.

Now there basically are only two options. You can either believe what Genesis says or not, and that is no oversimplification. Frankly, believing in a supernatural, creative God who made everything is the only possible rational explanation for the universe, for life, for purpose, and for destiny. Now the divine equation given in the Bible in contrast to nobody times nothing equals everything, the divine equation is found in Genesis 1, 1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

I don't know how it could be said any more simply or more straightforwardly than that. Either you believe God did create the heavens and the earth, or you believe He did not. Really, those are the only two valid options you have. And if you believe that God did create the heavens and the earth, then you are left with the only record of that creation, and that's Genesis 1, and you are bound to accept the text of Genesis 1 as the only appropriate and accurate description of that creative act.

So again I say, you're left really with two choices. You either believe Genesis or you don't. You either believe the Genesis account that God created the heavens and the earth, or you believe they somehow evolved out of random chance. Looking at the account of Genesis 1, 1 for just a brief moment, the words in that first verse are quite remarkable. They are indicative of the incredible mind of God. God says in that first verse everything that could have been said about creation, and He says it in such few terms. The statement is precise and concise, almost beyond human composition.

A well-known scientist named Herbert Spencer died in 1903. He discovered that all reality, all reality, all that exists in the universe can be contained in five categories, time, force, action, space, and matter. Herbert Spencer said everything that exists, exists in one of those categories, time, force, action, space, and matter. Now think about that, time, force, action, space, and matter.

That is a logical sequence. And then with that in your mind, listen to Genesis 1, 1. In the beginning, that's time. God, that's force.

Created, that's action. The heavens, that's space. And the earth, that's matter. Everything that could be said about everything that exists is said in that first verse. Now either you believe that or you don't. You either believe that that verse is accurate and God is the force, or you believe that God is not the force that created everything.

And then you're left with chance or randomness or coincidence. Whether the world was created by God or evolved by chance without cause has been debated a long time. It's been debated since Darwin.

But the debate comes down to this. Either you believe the Bible or you don't. Either you believe the book of Genesis or you don't. And if you don't believe the book of Genesis, then what do you believe? Well, in most cases, you believe in naturalistic evolution. There are some who would be theistic evolutionists who would say, well, God sort of launched it all, but then evolution took over and they would deny that the Genesis account is accurate in saying that God created in six 24-hour days. Progressive creationists would essentially say the same thing, that creation did not occur as Genesis says, but rather it was over long ages and God sort of progressively injecting Himself into the process did some creative work alongside the evolutionary process. Those views, theistic evolution, progressive creationism, also deny the straightforward text of the book of Genesis. So I say again, you either believe Genesis or you don't.

If you don't, you have some options. You can be a theistic evolutionist or you can be a naturalistic evolutionist. Among Christians, there are some who are theistic evolutionists, but among those who make up the unbelieving world, they are naturalistic evolutionists. And so they are left with the incredible notion that nobody times nothing equals everything. Douglas Kelly, who has written on this subject with great insight, says, There is no doubt that the biblical vision of man as God's creature whom he made in his own image has had the most powerful effect on human dignity, on liberty, on the expansion of the rights of the individual, on political systems, on the development of medicine, on every other area of culture. How different, he writes, from the humanistic viewpoint of man as merely an evolved creature, not made in God's image because there is no God. Such a premise has enabled the Marxist totalitarian states conveniently to liquidate millions of their citizens because of the assumption that there is no transcendent person in whose image those citizens are created, no being to give those citizens a dignity and a right to exist beyond what the state determines, end quote. This point has been explored at length by Baron Erich von Kühneldlidden of Austria, who may be the century's greatest scholar on questions of liberty and totalitarianism.

He has written a very important book called Leftism Revisited from De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot, which deals with those issues. And in it he shows that apart from the belief that mankind is created in the image of a transcendent God, the divinely derived dignity and liberty of human beings completely disappears. He says, For the genuine materialist, there is no fundamental, only a gradual evolutionary difference between a man and a pest, a noxious insect, end quote. And his conclusion is the issue is between man created in the image of God and the termite in human form.

He's right. We have two options. Either we evolved out of the slime and can be explained only in a materialistic sense, meaning that we're made of nothing but the material, or we have been created by God and made in His image in a heavenly pattern. And the debate is not just biological.

That's what I'm trying to say. It's not just biological, it's moral and it's spiritual. The debate gets to questions about man's dignity, about man's nature in the image of the heavenly pattern, the image of God. It asks questions about the issue of control. Who is sovereign in the universe?

Who is in control? It asks, Is there a universal judge? Is there a universal moral law?

Is there a law giver? Are people to live according to God's standard? Will there be a final assessment of how men and women live?

Is there a final judgment? You see, these are the questions that evolution was invented to avoid. Evolution was invented to kill the God of the Bible, not because evolutionists and materialists and naturalists didn't like God as Creator, but because they didn't want God as Judge. Evolution was invented in order to kill the God of the Bible, to eliminate the law giver, to eliminate the inviolability of His law, the binding standard for human thought and conduct. Evolution was invented to do away from universal morality and universal guilt and universal accountability.

Evolution was invented to eliminate the judge and leave people free to do whatever they want without guilt and without consequences. I mean, if we just kind of summed up these two alternatives, the materialistic view would say ultimate reality is impersonal matter. No God exists. The Christian view says ultimate reality is an infinite personal loving God. The materialistic view says the universe was created by chance without any ultimate purpose.

The Christian view says the universe was lovingly created by God for a specific purpose. The materialistic view says man is the product of impersonal time plus chance plus matter. As a result, no man has eternal value or dignity, nor any meaning other than that which is subjectively derived. The Christian view says man was created by God in His image and is loved by God. Because of this, all men are endowed with eternal value and dignity. Their value is not derived ultimately from themselves, but from the source transcending themselves, God Himself. The materialistic view of morality says morality is defined by every individual according to his own views and interests. Morality is ultimately relative because every person is the final authority for his own views. The Christian view says morality is defined by God and immutable because it is based on God's unchanging holy character. The materialistic view says about the afterlife, the afterlife brings eternal annihilation or personal extinction for everyone. The Christian view says the afterlife involves either eternal life with God or eternal separation from Him, either the glories of heaven or the terrors of hell.

Now, folks, let me tell you something. Which of those views you take is not a secondary issue. It is a primary issue, not only for science, but for theology. How in the world can Christianity view those as secondary issues? This is the foundation of all truth.

Francis Schaeffer, the great apologist, said that if he had an hour to spend with a person on an airplane, a person who didn't know the Lord, he would spend the first 55 minutes talking about man being created in the image of God and the last five minutes on the presentation of the gospel of salvation that could restore man to that original intended image. Christianity does not begin with accepting Jesus Christ as Savior. Christianity begins in Genesis 1, 1, God created the heavens and the earth for purpose and destiny, which He Himself had determined. 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. People say, well, the book of Genesis is myth and legend and fantasy and allegory and tradition. It doesn't really speak about real facts to the real world.

Yes, it does. The Word of God is to be taken seriously when it speaks to the real world on any and every subject. If we avoid dealing with what the Bible says about the creation of the material universe, then there is a tendency for our religion to be disconnected from the real world. There's a tendency to put Scripture into some mystical category, to put Christianity into some stained glass closet, as Douglas Kelly puts it, that doesn't impact the space-time world. You start out with the book of Genesis, tampering with the literal nature of that text, and you have created a mystical approach to Scripture at the very launch point. Scottish theologian James Denny made this point in the late 1890s.

I quote, the separation of the religious and the scientific means in the end, the separation of the religious and the true, and this means that religion dies among true men. You can't pick up the book of Genesis, take chapter 1, and say this is a fairy story. This is not real history.

This is not reality. This does not reflect a real understanding of the real world in real space in real time without severe implications to the rest of the message of Scripture. The doctrine of creation, as identified in the book of Genesis, is foundational. It is where God starts His story. And you can't change the beginning without impacting the rest of the story and the ending. In the Bible, God speaks, and He speaks in Genesis 1, 1, and says He created the heavens and the earth.

He is the one who spoke in Genesis 1, 1, and who speaks right through Scripture till its very end. When you tamper with Genesis 1, you are tampering with the Word of the living God, and you are taking the divine account of real creation in real space and real time, and you're saying it is not accurate, it is not legitimate, it is not the truth, that is a serious assault. And it loosens up the Scripture from reality and divorces religion, the true religion, from reality.

That is severe. So evolution would love to do that. It would love to ungod God. It would love to strip Scripture of its veracity. It wants to reject God as lawgiver, judge, Savior. It wants to destroy the dignity of man as created in the image of God.

And it gets pretty ridiculous, doesn't it? According to evolution, man is quantitatively better than the animals. That is, he has some features that animals don't have, but qualitatively he's not better.

He has a bigger brain quantitatively, but qualitatively he was not created in God's image. Therefore, it is ethically wrong to violate the rights of other animals who are our literal brothers, evolutionarily speaking. And we hear all that today, don't we? All the time. That infamous organization called PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, their national director, Ingrid Newkirk, made this famous statement, A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.

No difference. All higher forms of life, a rat being a higher form of life, in her view, are to be considered equal. And you've read it all. I've read animal rights groups that maintain eating meat is murder. Man is the tyrant species.

Killing cows is murder. And there was one who said that killing chickens is equal to the holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis on the Jews. This kind of idiocy comes because these people really do believe that man is simply the end of an evolutionary series of chance occurrences that has no purpose and has no destiny and is not made in the image of God. He is not bearing any dignity beyond any other along the line in that evolutionary process.

And you know what? If evolution is true, you can't argue with it. We're just animals. We have just evolved and their argument may be pretty valid. All of these animal rights advocates, writes Marvin Lubino, who have expressed themselves publicly on the subject, are evolutionists. According to evolution, it's merely the luck of the draw that man has evolved a big brain. Had certain mutations not happened in our ancestors and instead happened in the ancestors of the chimpanzees, we might be where they are in the zoo and they might be where we are.

Hence, I have no ethical right to use my superiority achieved purely by chance to violate the rights of other animals who through no fault of their own didn't evolve the same abilities. If man is only an animal, an accident of nature, a collection of chance mutations, then where is his meaning? Where is his dignity? Where is his absolute value? What is his purpose?

Obviously, he has none. There's no explanation to the universe without God. I'll give you one little scientific illustration. Have you ever heard of quantum theory? Well, you've heard about a quantum leap? People say somebody made a quantum leap.

Let me tell you where that comes from. Quantum theory goes back to a scientist, Max Planck, who in 1900 presented the theory that energy comes in discrete units called quanta. In 1927, Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist, found that when a photon strikes an atom, it boosts an electron into a higher orbit. And when that occurs, the electron moves from the lower to the upper orbit, listen to this, simultaneously without having traversed the intervening space. That's a quantum leap. What happens is the electron ceases to exist at one point and simultaneously comes into existence at the other point. This is the famous quantum leap. It goes out of existence and comes into existence simultaneously. All the time, all the time, in all the atoms, all the time, through all of created history, it keeps doing that by chance.

To say it's a quantum leap doesn't explain it. There's only one thing that explains it, and that is the ongoing creative power of God. He sustains the universe and its creation by keeping up all the necessary creative acts, even down to the level of an electron in an atom. He upholds all things. Hebrews 1 by the word of His power. That's Grace to You with John MacArthur.

Thanks for being with us. John is the pastor of Grace Community Church. He's chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary in Southern California. And today he launched a series on The Battle for the Beginning. If you want to review this study at your own pace, you can download each message for free at our website. Make sure you know what the Bible really says about origins and why you can trust all of God's Word. Get John's series on The Battle for the Beginning when you contact us today. Just go to our website, gty.org, where you can download the MP3s and the transcripts for The Battle for the Beginning. This is one of John's most popular series, and it's great for anyone you know who may have questions about origins. Take full advantage of the Grace to You sermon archive.

Go to gty.org. And also, let me remind you about the impact that you have when you support Grace to You financially. Every day this broadcast encourages and equips people around the world with biblical truth. And the same is true of thousands of Bible study resources that are available at the website gty.org. As well as the free books or booklets that we mail out each month, the support of listeners like you helps make all of that life-changing ministry possible. To partner with us, visit our website, gty.org, or call us at 800-55-GRACE. That's 800-55-GRACE. You can call weekdays from 730 to 4 o'clock Pacific Time. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, inviting you back when John continues his series, The Battle for the Beginning, with a look at why you can be certain that God created the earth in six days. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Tomorrow's Grace to You.