The How, Why, and When of Creation, Part 1 B

All creation began and ended in six days.

There's no argument about it. He created the earth. or a lesson from one of it The Bible is not subject to any private interpretation. That's what the Bible says about itself. You can't, on your own, make up some meaning.

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Yes, we are grateful, deeply grateful for those who support us, and if you would like to join us in taking God's Word to people around the world, helping them understand it accurately and apply it to their lives, you can express your support at gty.org. But first, stay here as John continues his look at the battle for the beginning. Go back to Genesis 1 for a moment, and I want to remind you of something that's very important. All creation began and ended in six days, clearly.

There's no argument about it. Look at chapter 2, verse 2, and by the seventh day, God completed His work which He had done and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. He created the entire universe out of nothing, from no preexisting material, and He did it in six days. We know that from verse 5, the first day He created light, and it says there was evening and there was morning, one day. Just to make sure you don't miss it, He says it was one day, and then just to make sure you know exactly what He means, it was the kind of day that has an evening and the morning. What kind of day is that? Well that's basically what we call a solar day. It's just a plain old, normal, common, everyday day.

Now I want to tell you something. God did all this in six days. Verse 8 says there was an evening and a morning on day 2. And verse 13 says there was an evening and a morning on day 3.

And it goes all the way down that way. Verse 19, there was evening and morning on day 4. Verse 23, there was evening and there was morning on day 5. And verse 31, there was evening and there was morning on day 6.

He's just talking about six normal, common days, just like we understand days to be. There's no evolution in that chapter. There's not a hint of evolution anywhere in this chapter.

There's no place for an evolutionary theory because you have days. Verse 31, and God saw all that He made and behold, it was very good. Now God finished His creation six days and He said it's very good.

Now what does that mean? Nothing was bad. Nothing was bad would mean nothing was inferior. Nothing didn't survive. Nothing sort of...you know, like the plants you plant, nothing died out.

You know why? There was no death. There was no death. You see, when God finished His creation, He looked at all of it. In fact, it says several times He saw that it was good.

And He looked it all over in verse 31 and saw that it was very good. Nothing was inferior. Nothing didn't survive. Nothing had died out or been killed in the struggle for the survival of the fittest. If creation had to involve some evolutionary process, then God would have had to have said, Well the good made it to the end.

You didn't say that. And how could there have been billions and billions of evolving years, billions of years of struggle and death and survival in a world where there was no curse, in a world where there was no death? You don't even have death till Genesis chapter 3. Apostle Paul makes it absolutely explicit in the book of Romans that it was through sin that death entered the world. There was no sin in that perfect creation. There was no sin. There couldn't have been any death.

So there's no place for plants and animals to die. No fall, no sin. No sin, no death. No death, no evolution. And the fall came and introduced death. And death introduced the law of thermodynamics, the entropy, the disintegration and disorder. But at this point, no such thing existed.

So there's no way that you can inject evolution legitimately into this text. And just another thing, when God made everything, He made everything full-grown. You know the old, what came first, the chicken or the egg?

You want to answer...you want to know the answer? The chicken, full-grown. God didn't just throw seeds in every direction and unborn life species. He created an absolutely and completely full-grown, fully matured creation that was capable then of reproducing itself, sustaining its life.

That's why He said, it's very good. So how did God create? He spoke it into existence and He did it in six days.

There's no way around that. Just to kind of help you a little bit with that, people say, Well what about the word day? Can't it mean something else? The plain old Hebrew word yom means day. It's used in the Bible to indicate a 24-hour normal solar day or sometimes to refer to the daylight portion of a day. You might say, I'll be gone four days and you mean four days both day and night. Or you might say to someone, This has been a beautiful day and you're referring to the daylight portion of it.

You use the word the same way the Hebrews used it. When yom is modified by a number universally without exception in Scripture, it refers to a normal solar day. Now sometimes day is used in Scripture to refer to some period of time not precisely defined.

Job said, My days are vanity. Psalm 90 verse 9 says, Our days are passed away. And that's not defined, but we understand what that means, a period of time. But even at that, day still means some finite succession of normal days, not some vast age of millennial years or millions of years. And I think maybe the strongest affirmation, and I need to do this because you can ask the question about, you know, why God took six days, why didn't He do it in six minutes or six seconds? Well the answer is He took six days because He wanted to establish a pattern in Exodus chapter 20.

He gives us the pattern. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, six days you shall labor, do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day, therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. God wanted to establish a pattern for mankind, and that pattern was you work six days and you have one day when you set it aside to rest and replenish your body and focus on worshiping God. God chose to do it in six days to set a pattern for us. Now if in fact it took Him billions of years, then the pattern is ridiculous. God's work of creation set the pattern for man who bears His image, six days you work and one day you worship. There's absolutely nothing whatsoever on the pages of Genesis 1 and 2 that allows anything but a six, twenty-four hour solar day creation. It may offend the evolutionists, but that doesn't change the truth.

And no man fares well who sits in judgment on the Bible. Let's ask when...when did this happen? Did it happen millions and billions of years ago? Science used to say two billion years, but now they've changed it.

They lean toward twenty billion and about every year it gets longer. You see, they've never seen anything evolve, so they think it probably took longer. But if things don't evolve, what does longer do?

It doesn't do anything. If things don't evolve, if matter doesn't randomly organize itself by chance upward and upward and upward, if there's no evidence that it ever does that, what does more time achieve? Since there is no evolution, it's not necessary to have billions or millions of years.

All you need is six days, that's all you need. Man didn't evolve finally from an ape over five billion years. He was created in the same twenty-four hours as the apes. So what about fossils? What about fossils? I'll tell you one thing about fossils. They must have been formed after the creation, not before. They had to be formed after the creation. Let me give you a scientific definition of fossils, dead stuff.

Now that's profound, but that's it. Fossils, that's dead stuff. And there's not any death. Romans 5, 12, as I mentioned earlier, death came by sin. There's no death before the fall of Adam. You can't have billions and billions of years of billions and billions of things dying and becoming fossils if you don't have death.

It is true, there are billions of fossils and there are fossil fields all over the world. Massive, massive death did occur. What caused it? There was clearly a tremendous rain of death all over the earth.

There was clearly a massive, massive death. And the Bible gives the absolutely accurate information into what it was. It was the universal worldwide flood, Genesis 6 and 7.

And you can look into the science of that, it's absolutely fascinating. Very likely at that time the once what scientists think was a supercontinent split up and the fountains of the deep were broken up and the earth's surface was changed and tectonic plates collided and pushed up mountains which used to be at the bottom of the sea. That's why you find fish fossils in the Himalayas and in Grand Canyon. The whole earth was fractured. There's not enough rainwater falling for 40 days to drown the earth above the Himalayas in excess of 25,000 feet in elevation.

There's not enough rainwater to fall. The water had to come from somewhere else and it did. It came up from the ocean floors as the earth's surface cracked open and lava poured out, heating the water to a fever pitch. And as the water went into steam into the sky, it eventually vaporized again, turned back into water and fell on the earth and flooded the earth in a massive flood. All this tectonic plate activity colliding, these plates colliding, pushing up mountains and all of that can be traced back to the flood.

In Matthew chapter 24, verses 37 to 39, it refers to the flood there and it uses the Greek word kataklousmos, the word cataclysm. It literally, totally rearranged the surface of the earth and engulfed the entire earth in water. And that massive hydraulic cataclysm is what produced the extinction of many animals instantaneously, frankly, or over a period of the days when it rained and created this worldwide death that produced the fossils. Second Peter 3 talks about how God destroyed the whole earth, verse 6, by flooding it with water. That one great world cataclysm produced the ice caps, produced the ice age and explains the fossils.

And there's much more on that that you can read for yourself. There's an immense amount of scientific material on the flood and its cataclysmic impact on the earth. So we ask the question, when did this happen? When did all of this...how do we...if we don't need ages and ages and ages and ages and billions and billions of years to form fossils...and by the way, that generally won't do it. I mean, if you take the bones of your dead bird and put them in the backyard, how long will it take before they become a fossil? They'll never become a fossil. The ground would have to open up and crush those bones and hold them there for you to have some kind of a fossil. There has to be cataclysm to create that kind of thing, such as we have already seen in the sediments and the bones that are found, for example, in the terrain surrounding Mount St. Helens, which kind of a cataclysm has the same dramatic effect as would appear to a uniformitarianist would have had to occur over millions and millions and millions of years. And so the flood answers the problem of fossils and sediment and the rearrangement of the surface of the earth.

All legitimate science, frankly, points back to the great cataclysm. But now let's see if we can't get a timeline on when this all happened. Well we know here, from the creation of the universe to the creation of man was how long? Six days.

Start counting. From the creation of the universe to the creation of man was six days. Starting in Genesis 5...Genesis 5, you get Adam. And then you start with Adam, Genesis 5, and you go to the flood. And you've got a whole lot of people in there and all the years of their life are given.

You see it there in chapter 5. You have the sequence, he lived so many years and he had a son, and he lived so many years and he had a son, he lived so many years and he had a son. You add up those, you have six days from the creation of the universe to the creation of man. From the first man, Adam, to the flood, you have 1656 years...1656 years the flood comes. Genesis 11 gives you the chronology from the flood to Abraham...from the flood to Abraham.

He starts out with the children of Noah, Shem, verse 10, goes right on down to Abraham. That's 225 years, okay? Six days, 1656 years and 225 years. So something under 2,000 years and you're at Abraham. Start in Genesis 12 with Abraham and go through the Old Testament historical books, Exodus 1, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles.

Just proceed through those books. And you have the chronology from Abraham to the Babylonian captivity...from Abraham to the Babylonian captivity. That would be 430 years in Egypt, 40 years in the wilderness, seven years conquering Canaan, 350 years of the Judges, 110 years of the United Kingdom under Saul, David and Solomon, 350 years under the divided kingdom of Judah and Israel, 70 years...350 years and then you have the Babylonian captivity, 70 years. And then you have the return and the rebuilding, 140 years. So from Abraham to the return and rebuilding of Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the nation Israel, you have about 1,500 or so years, if you add all that up. Following the rebuilding and the restoration, you're at the end now of the Old Testament.

You've got 400 years of silence. So you have about 2,000 years that we sort of started out from the creation to Abraham is about 2,000 years. From Abraham to the New Testament is about 2,000 years. And from the beginning of the New Testament to now is about 2,000 years. Archbishop James Usher, a great scholar, by the way, lived from 1581 to 1656, added all the genealogical, chronological records of Scripture and said that he felt that the creation occurred in 4004 B.C. Now you know, the evolutionists just mock that, the world, the universe, 6,000 years old, but he was no doubt very close to being accurate. And prior to Charles Darwin, any educated man who suggested that mankind was over 6,000 years old was seen as a fool. All historical records fit into that 6,000 years.

You can go back and study European history. You can go back and study the records, the Egyptian records, and they all go back no further than that. You say, well, isn't it possible that some names got skipped in the genealogies? That's one of the things you hear all the time, isn't it possible that some names got skipped?

Let me tell you something. One very hard thing to prove is what got left out. That is very hard to prove. How can you say some other name should be in there?

It's not there, it's not there. Even if you add a few names that got left out of the genealogy of 5 or the genealogy of chapter 11, the history of Israel, that's set, we know that. And the times from Christ to now, we know that. So if you're talking about that first period of time and you want to give a little space to the genealogies, well, you can add a few hundred years here and there.

Nineteenth-century Princeton scholars, William Green and B.B. Warfield, both were inerrantists, they believed in the authority of the Bible. But they tried to harmonize the Bible with evolution and the way they wanted to do it was to stretch the genealogies. There's nothing to argue about over the last two thousand. There's nothing to argue about over the two thousand really from Abraham to the New Testament period, that's pretty well fixed in history. So they decided they had to stuff some years in the first two thousand and they said there were various generations omitted and that father and begat could skip generations and refer to a more remote ancestor.

Well, there's no evidence for it. William Kelly writes, even if Green and Warfield were correct in positing gaps within the genealogies of Genesis, the most generous assigning of gaps between various generations couldn't add more than several hundred or at the most maybe a thousand or so years to the usher's chronology. Indeed, a more careful look at these gaps will indicate that they really do not change the overall biblical chronology for the following reason. The writer of Genesis defined the length of the patriarchal age in terms of the time between the birth of the patriarchs who are actually listed, not in terms of how many other descendants there may have been who are not listed.

You get the point? If you hit the high peaks of the patriarchs and you give the years for those, you can't stuff any more years in between. James B. Jordan wrote, anyone who opens the Bible to Genesis chapter 5 and 11 will notice that the age of each father is given for the time of his son's birth. Adam was 130 years old at the birth of Seth, who was 105 years old at the birth of Enosh and so forth. Thus we appear to have an unbroken chronology from creation to Abraham. There are no gaps in the sequence.

Son follows father in strict succession, it seems. The link between Genesis 5 and 11 is established by Genesis 6-7 and Genesis 11-10. Our fax ad was born in Noah's 602nd year, thus at first glance there appears to be good reason to accept the chronologies of Genesis 5 and 11 at face value. Now even if there are some gaps, as I said, and you wanted to stuff them with everything you could possibly think of, you'd never come up with millions of years.

At best it's just a few thousand years ago. There were three acts of creation, just summarizing, the universe, animals, and man. And man really stands apart, made in God's image so God could communicate with us as intelligent, moral, self-aware beings who can understand abstract symbolic speech and thus can come to know our Creator personally so we can worship Him and serve Him forever. All right, pray with me. Father, thank You again for Your Word which gives light even on this incredible subject of creation.

Continue to lead and direct us as we confidently sit at the feet of the Spirit of God, the author of Scripture who gives us the eyewitness account of the very moment of creation. We bless You that You, the Creator, are also the Redeemer whom we know and love and with whom we communicate regularly and shall fellowship together with forever. Thank You for this great grace to us, in Christ's name, amen. That's Grace to You with John MacArthur. Thanks for tuning in today. For more than fifty-four years, John has been our featured speaker, and in those decades of ministry, few series have garnered more listener response than the one you heard part of today.

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And especially, thank you for praying for Grace to You. That is your most important ministry to us. And if you'd like to review John's current series, The Battle for the Beginning, all 12 messages are free of charge at GTY.org. In fact, all of John's sermons, 3500 total, are available for free, both the MP3s and the written transcripts. So tap into the sermon archive today and point a friend to it as well. You'll find all of the sermons at GTY.org. That's our website one more time, GTY.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson, reminding you to watch Grace to You television on Sundays, check your local listings for Channel and Times, and then be back here on Monday when John continues his in-depth look at Genesis 1 with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.