God: Creator and Redeemer

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Hi, I'm Phil Johnson. One of history's most famous scientists once said, To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree. Who said that? It was none other than Charles Darwin, the founder of evolutionary theory. Even Darwin recognized serious problems with his ideas.

So why do so many people today, even professing Christians, eagerly embrace the doctrine of evolution? Well today, John MacArthur will show you why rejecting God as Creator has more to do with sin than it does with science. It's part of our current series titled, The Battle for the Beginning, an in-depth look at what Scripture teaches about the origins of the universe and why it's essential that you embrace biblical creation.

And so with today's lesson, here is John MacArthur. In 1989, scientist Henry Morris wrote an excellent book called, The Long War Against God. And in that book he shows the impact of evolutionary theory on the world. And he reveals the irrefutable fact that the almost universal belief in evolution that permeates every area of human thinking has affected every area of human life, not just how we view the physical world, not just how we view the biological sciences. It has affected social sciences. It has affected behavioral sciences. It has affected psychology. It has affected the humanities. It has affected liberal arts. It has affected philosophy. And it has even affected religion. Quoting Henry Morris, he says this, evolution's lie permeates and dominates modern thought in every field. That being the case, it follows inevitably that evolutionary thought is basically responsible for the lethally ominous political developments and the chaotic moral and social disintegrations that have been accelerating everywhere, end quote. He goes on in his book to show how everything from genocide to fornication to homosexuality to abortion to all matters of the destruction of human dignity, not seeing man as made in the image of God, to crime, to drugs, and everything else is all a part of the result of a materialistic humanistic universe without God. And so, says Morris, evolution is nothing more than the pervasive modern version of the conflict of the ages, the long war against God.

Evolution is empty philosophy. It is vain deceit. It is designed to attack the Creator and His glory. It denies His glorious revelation in Scripture. It denies His authority over the universe of man. It denies the dignity of man. It denies the image of God in man. It is a cunningly devised fable. It is religious harlotry. It is the latest abomination of the earth spawned by the father of lies, Satan.

Now if I could have said it any stronger, I would have. You see, the world has always believed the deceiver. The world has always believed the liar Satan and joined him in his long war against God. The story of the history of the nations of the world, the cyclical story of how the world repeats its same demise is given us in Romans chapter 1, and I want you to look at it. This is a very familiar chapter. I know that and I'm not going to stay here very long, but I do need to remind you that this chapter, chapter 1 of Romans, verses 18 and following, lay out how the scenario of the long war against God is played over and over and over.

And what you have here is the history, the cyclical history of what happens in the nations of the world throughout the history of the world. Verse 18 says, the wrath of God is revealed and it's revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth. Now the truth is obvious. The truth about a Creator is obvious. The truth about a God who is a person because we are persons is obvious. The truth about a God who is moral because we have a moral sense and a moral conscience is obvious. The truth about a God who has established right and wrong is obvious because it's in the fabric of our life. The truth that there is a Creator, a first cause for this massive effect called the universe is obvious because rationality is built on cause and effect and leads you back ultimately to the first cause. Men suppress the truth.

Verse 19 says, that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. And He did that by giving them reason and reason says, reason is basically a sequence of cause and effect patterns. Any time you do research, you work on cause and effect. Any time you come to understand a principle, you understand it because there's a cause and effect relationship. There's a sequence of things that builds to a conclusion. And that's rationality.

Reason is the ability to link things together to come to right conclusions. And God has put into the mind of man rationality so that he can rationally go back to the fact that there had to be a first cause. And that leads him back to God.

And then God has poured into the heart of man, as Romans 2 says, law, moral law written by God on the heart. And so, verse 19 says, what is known about God is evident within them, that God is, according to verse 20, the Creator of the world. You can look at the creation of the world and see His invisible attributes. You can look at creation and you know that God is powerful. You can look at creation and you know that God is intelligent beyond comprehension. You can look at creation and know that the mind of God is so massively and vastly and infinitely and vastly and infinitely complex as to be absolutely incomprehensible to our puny brains. You can look at creation and you can know that God loves beauty and order. You can look at creation and see that God has a delicate touch.

At the same time, God has a powerful, almost overbearing touch that can kill and crush. You can see so much about His attributes. You can see His goodness manifest in the rain and the sunshine and the food we enjoy and the beauty of the world around us and the love that He's poured into life and the wonder of romance and the blessing of children and the exhilarating joy of adventure. You can see that God is a God of beauty and kindness and goodness. So much can be known about His eternal power and divine nature.

So much can be known, verse 20 says, that if you don't see God in this and you don't come to recognize Him for who He is, you're without excuse. The creation is not intended to point you back to a one-celled thing in some primordial soup. It's intended to point you back to God and it's intended to show you everything about the mind of God and nothing about some imaginary evolutionary process empowered by chance. Any view like that, any progressive creationistic view, any theistic evolutionary view strikes a blow at the intention of God in creation to manifest His great power. It isn't that God is some one-dimensional God, as the theistic evolutionists would tell us.

He sort of launched it all and then evolution took over. That doesn't give glory to God. That gives glory to the survival of the fittest, which is a viewpoint invented by Charles Darwin and his friends to explain appearances when they didn't know things that they know today that contradict all of that. God is not glorified. God is not honored. When we give evolution, God is not honored. When we give evolution, the credit for creation. When we give evolution, the credit for the complexity of the universe, the complexity of the smallest microcosm of creation. Or when we give evolution, the credit for the macrocosm of creation. God is honored and God is glorified when we give Him the credit for all of it. Verse 21 indicates that rationality and morality built into the fabric of human life, rationality and morality take us to God.

It's inevitable. And so He says in 21, even though they knew God, I mean, there was nowhere else to go but to God, but typically what they do is they don't honor Him as God, they do not thank Him for His creation, but they become empty in their speculations. They trade in God for stupid speculations. And then their foolish heart becomes dark, the light goes out.

And they profess themselves to be wise and they get Ph.D.s and they write books and they are actually fools...fools with a garbled, impossible, incoherent, irrational viewpoint. They call it wisdom, God calls it folly. And therefore, verse 23 says, they literally steal the glory of the incorruptible God. They turn from the incorruptible God, the supernatural God, the God who is bigger than His creation, who is outside His creation. And in God's place, they substitute an image in the form of corruptible man and birds and forfeited animals and crawling creatures. They worship the creation instead of the Creator, verse 25 says. They exchange the truth of God and they believe the lie, Satan's lie that perpetuates the long war against God, and they worship and serve the creature. That's what evolutionists do. They literally believe that the creature is the Creator, don't they?

Sure they do. But you know, this is exactly what Romans says. They threw wisdom away and accepted stupidity and folly because their foolish heart was darkened. Their speculations were empty and futile and useless because they had turned their backs on the only rational explanation for anything which was God because they didn't want God crowding them with His moral standards. They began to worship the birds and the animals and they served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever.

Amen. And so, you know what? God gave them up. He gave them up to sexual sin, homosexuality, and every other kind of sin that He lists in verse 28 to 32. That's the way it goes.

They just plunged into the depth of horrible iniquity. That's the real story of where evolution comes from. It's part of the long war against God. And if we had time, I quote you voluminous quotes from evolutionists who give such blasphemous and mocking statements about God.

There's no need to listen to those. The Bible, on the other hand, clearly and repeatedly states that God is the Creator of everything...everything. John 1, in the beginning was the Word, referring to Christ and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. Now listen to this. All things came into being by Him and apart from Him, nothing came into being that has come into being.

Now how else can you say it? There's no evolution in John 1, 3. All things came into being by Him and apart from Him, nothing came into being that has come into being. Listen, nothing is in existence that He didn't create. In Hebrews chapter 11, a familiar verse, by faith...it's the only way, not by empirical analysis...by faith we understand. In other words, you have to believe the Bible. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the Word of God, that God spoke and everything was created...now listen to this...so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.

Now there is an absolute statement that totally discounts evolution. What you see in the created world was not made out of some other material, but rather everything you see in God's created universe was made by Him out of nothing...out of nothing. And that's exactly what it says in the book of Genesis. That's a great verse, Hebrews 11, 3. Now with all that in your mind, let's go back to Genesis 1, 1. This simple statement, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Folks, you either believe that or you don't. Given that statement and the multiplicity of other statements that I just read to you, if you don't believe this, then you have a lot of other things in the Bible not to believe. You know, it really wearies me to hear the critics assault the Bible. I read an absolutely ridiculous article in U.S. News and World Report about the Apostle Paul which totally misrepresented the Word of God, misrepresented Him and were the foolish musings of Christ-denying and godless men. And they do the same thing to the book of Genesis.

And they all pass themselves off as religious scholars. It is widely held that the Genesis creation account needs to be taken not as literal history, but that it is some kind of Hebrew poetry that is allegorical. Well if that's true, then you're going to have to allegorize all those other passages too.

But this is the scholarly approach. Well we don't take this as actual history here that God actually created in six days. This is...this is Hebrew poetry. Douglas Kelly who has written absolutely outstanding book to which I shall be continually indebted in this series called Creation or Change says, "'Many biblical interpreters have attempted to avoid the obvious conflict between a straightforward reading of the text of Genesis and opposing naturalist theories of origins. They have done so by suggesting that Genesis, chapters 1 through 11, and especially the first three chapters are poetic writings rather than chronological history. This position is surprisingly common among people who generally hold to a high view of scriptural authority.'"

That's pretty amazing. The great scholar of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, I cut my teeth on many of his writings as a student, Edward J. Young, addressed the question in his writing, Is Genesis poetry or myth? And this is what he said, "'To escape from the plain factual statements of Genesis, some evangelicals are saying that the early chapters of Genesis are poetry or myth by which they mean that they are not to be taken as straightforward accounts and that the acceptance of such a view removes the difficulties.

To adopt such a view, they say, removes all troubles with modern science.'" Then Young says, "'Genesis is not poetry.'" There are more poetical accounts of creation in the Bible, such as Psalm 104, certain chapters of Job, and they differ completely from the first chapter of Genesis. Hebrew poetry has certain characteristics and they are not found in the first chapter of Genesis. So the claim that Genesis 1 is poetry is no solution at all. The man who says, "'I believe that Genesis purports to be a historical account, but I do not believe that account, is a far better interpreter of the Bible than the man who says, I believe Genesis is profoundly true, but it is poetry,'" end quote. So don't give us any of that nonsense about poetry, just say you don't believe it.

That's a better approach. Genesis 1 is not written according to the laws of Hebrew poetry. You can find lots of passages in the Old Testament that are, this isn't.

There are no usages of the typical traditional types of parallelism that occur in Hebrew poetry. And Douglas Kelley says, "'No amount of exegetical straining can find the slightest poetic view of Genesis 1 to 11 in the books of the New Testament.'" If it was poetry, we would expect the New Testament writers to assume that it was poetry and to treat it as poetry. But when you read the New Testament writers commenting on Genesis, it is obvious that they take it as history. Henry Morris summarizes the New Testament usage of the Old in this way. He says, "'The New Testament is, if anything, even more dependent on Genesis than the Old. There are at least 165 passages in Genesis that are either directly quoted or clearly referred to in the New Testament. Many of them are alluded to more than once so that there are at least 200 quotations or references to Genesis in the New Testament.

It is significant that the portion of Genesis which has been the object of the greatest attacks of skepticism and unbelief, the first eleven chapters, is the portion which had the greatest influence on the New Testament. There exist over 100 quotations or direct references to Genesis 1 through 11 in the New Testament. Furthermore, every one of those eleven chapters is alluded to somewhere in the New Testament and every one of the New Testament authors refers somewhere in his writings to Genesis 1 to 11, every New Testament author.

On at least six different occasions, Jesus Christ Himself quoted from or referred to something or someone in one of those eleven chapters, six different times, including specific references to each of the first seven chapters. Furthermore, in not one of these many instances where the Old or New Testament refers to Genesis, is there the slightest evidence that the writers regarded the events or personages as myths or allegories? To the contrary, they all viewed Genesis as absolutely historical, true and authoritative, end quote.

Thank you, Henry, that's good stuff. Walter Brown lists some 71 New Testament references to the early chapters of Genesis and concludes, here's his conclusion, every New Testament writer refers to the early chapters of Genesis, every one. Jesus Christ referred to each of the first seven chapters of Genesis. Every chapter of Genesis 1 to 11 except chapter 8 is referred to specifically somewhere in the New Testament.

Every New Testament writer apparently accepted those early chapters as historically accurate. Now if you go back to the book of Genesis for a moment, the outline of Genesis further supports the historicity of the first chapters. Chapters 1 to 11, primitive history.

Chapters 12 to 50, patriarchal history. That's where Abraham, Isaac and all the way through to Jacob and Joseph. You have primitive history, creation, fall, flood, dispersion. You have patriarchal history, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph.

It's very well divided. Nobody will argue that 12 to 50 is history. Why do they argue that 1 to 11 is history? They really don't want to argue that the flood was not history because there are so many evidences of it. They don't necessarily want to argue that the dispersion, the Tower of Babel and the nations and the language is not history.

There has to be some explanation for the diversity of languages and nations. What they really want to argue with has to do with the first three chapters of Genesis and what they are most concerned to argue with is creation. They think that science has made its point and debunked the Bible. But Genesis is history. Primitive history, 1 to 11, patriarchal history, 12 to 50. In fact, I'll give you a little fast...this is a fast lesson in Genesis. Look at chapter 5. The word generation is genealogy, history...history. Chapter 5 verse 1, this is the book of the genealogy of Adam. Chapter 6 verse 9, these are the records of the genealogy of Noah. Chapter 10 verse 1, these are the records of the genealogy of Shem, Ham and Japheth. Chapter 11 verse 10, these are the records of the generations of Shem. Verse 27, these are the records of the generations of Terah.

Chapter 25, I think that's the next one. And verse 12, yes, these are the records of the generations of Ishmael. Verse 19, these are the records of the generations of Isaac.

And so it goes. Chapter 36, these are the records of the generation or genealogies of Esau. Verse 9, these are the records of the generations of Esau, again indicated. Chapter 37 verse 2, these are the records of the generations of Jacob. You can just divide this entire book into historical records. It's what it is. If you go backwards, you go from the history of Joseph to Jacob to Esau to Isaac to Ishmael to Abraham to Terah to Shem, Ham, Japheth, Noah, Adam, God.

That's how it goes. It's history. And with that, John MacArthur wraps up today's lesson from his study The Battle for the Beginning here on Grace to You. John's been Grace to You's teacher since 1969.

He also serves as Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary in Southern California. And John, this Battle for the Beginning study explores a topic that I think you'd call strategic, because what a person believes about the beginning of the universe affects way more than most people probably realize. Is that a true statement? Yeah, absolutely.

We were talking a little bit about this yesterday. The bottom line is this. If you don't believe what the Bible says in chapters 1 and 2 of the first book, then you have just decided that you have the right to sit in judgment over the truthfulness of Scripture. And as you proceed from the first couple of chapters in Genesis and come across something else you don't particularly like, you can jettison that on the same basis that you're the final judge of the truthfulness of Scripture. You keep doing that, and you can strip the Bible of everything that is important and everything that is true. And that is essentially—now, listen carefully—that is essentially what critics of the Bible do. They want to deny what Scripture says. So categorically, if you reject the account of creation in the book of Genesis, you belong to that category of people who sit in judgment over the Bible. I don't care what your reason is, you have made yourself the judge over the Word of God.

That is a terrifying position to put yourself in. I just want to bow my knee to God in complete submission and worship and acknowledge that he has written every word of Scripture. That's what he says, certainly in Genesis. And God said, and God said, and God said, and God said, and you're telling me he didn't?

I mean, that is as blatant as it gets. So I don't ever want to attribute to God something he didn't say, and I don't ever want to take away from him something he did say, and he spoke to creation into existence in six days. You know, this is such an important subject because it does define how you view Scripture. And as I said yesterday, this is where the attack rages hot, trying to show that Genesis isn't scientific. Well, it's not intended to be.

It's a miracle. But I want to help you with that. I've written a book called The Battle for the Beginning. The Battle for the Beginning. Of all the books I've written, this may be as crucial as any of them. The Battle for the Beginning is a full-length, soft cover book, tremendously important tool for strengthening your faith in the sufficiency and accuracy of the Word of God. Get a copy of The Battle for the Beginning. You can order it today.

That's right. This is a classic book that shows you exactly what happened and didn't happen on each of the six days of creation. And it will help you make a strong biblical case for creation at school, at work, maybe even in your church. Pick up a copy of John's book, The Battle for the Beginning, when you get in touch today. Go to our website, gty.org, or call us toll-free, 855-GRACE.

The Battle for the Beginning costs $11 and shipping is free. Again, to place your order, call 800-55-GRACE, or go online to gty.org. And when you visit gty.org, remember that we have thousands of free Bible study resources that will help you grow in God's Word. You can download John's 3500 sermons, all free of charge. You can just search by topic, by specific verse, by book of the Bible, or if you're not sure where to start, log on to GraceStream. That's a non-stop broadcast of John's verse-by-verse teaching that goes straight through the entire New Testament. It begins at Matthew 1 and it takes you all the way to Revelation 22 and then it repeats.

It takes about two months to do that. It broadcasts continuously. So log on to GraceStream and be encouraged by God's Word around the clock. Again, the sermon archive, GraceStream, and much more is available free of charge at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson reminding you to watch Grace To You television on Sundays. You can check your local listings for station and times. And be here when John returns to his study of origins with another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on tomorrow's Grace To You.