In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light. And there was light.
And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day and the darkness he called night. And there was evening and there was morning the first day. And God said, Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.
And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.
And it was so. God called the dry land earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called seas. And God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth sprout vegetation. Plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit, in which is their seed, each according to its kind on the earth.
And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit, in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. and there was evening and there was morning the third day. 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 lights in the expanse of the heavens, and give light upon the earth. And it was so. And God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. and the stars.
And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over 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 the fourth day. And God said, Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.
So God created the great sea creatures, and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm according to their kinds. and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters and the seas and let birds multiply on the earth. And there was evening, and there was morning.
The fifth day. Let's pray. God, you are the maker of heaven and earth. And when we look at the creation that you have made, we see order. and form and beauty.
When we think about how this Created order in which we live reflects the one who made it. We are in awe. of your power and your wisdom. Truly, Lord, the heavens do declare Your glory.
So, Lord, as we consider this morning your creation, the works of your hands. We ask that you would open our eyes to see you. and worship you. And order our lives according to your perfect order. I pray in Jesus' name.
Amen. Before we get into our text today, it might be important to address a matter that is actually not addressed directly in our text. But an issue that often looms so largely in people's minds that they miss Moses' point and meaning. I'm speaking, of course, about the influence and widespread acceptance of. Darwinism and various evolutionary theories.
Now, we could spend our entire time together today defending and answering objections raised by unbelieving naturalists. We could spend our time considering the answers that some Bible-believing theologians have given in their attempts to synthesize the words of the Bible. with the prevalent scientific theories of the day. But for our purposes this morning, I don't want to spend all of our time answering the detractors because the Bible is so much more than mere source material for apologetical work. For sure, we need to always be ready to give a defense for the hope that is in us.
But our interaction with the Word of God has got to go far beyond that. We need to be desiring God's word. As the psalmist says, more than gold, even much fine gold, because it is sweeter to us than honey and the drippings of the honeycomb. If we were to read about Christ's resurrection in the Gospels and come away from that, spending all of our time thinking about how to persuade materialists. Of the plausibility of the resurrection, but never spending time thinking about what the resurrection accomplished for sinners or rejoicing in the fact that God did that, we would be missing the point of the resurrection.
There's a time and a place for answering detractors, but there's also a time and a place for considering God's word for the church, for the believer. There's a time to simply sit at God's feet and listen to his word. without asking what the world's opinion of that world is, of that word is.
Now, having said that. It's very likely that Some of us have had seeds of doubt sown into our minds about the reliability of Scripture, particularly when it comes to the creation account of Genesis 1. There are some respectable and even reformed theologians whose exegesis of the Bible's account of creation has probably increased the doubts. of many Christians. I don't want to answer them this morning.
They've been answered, and I'll be glad to suggest some resources to you if you're interested. What I would like to do, though, is very briefly set forth some interpretive principles to help us understand the relationship between faith and science. or better said, between special revelation and general revelation. And then I'd like us to dive into the text of Scripture and bask in the greatness of our amazing God. Very quickly then, let me articulate five rules that ought to govern how we understand Genesis 1, and in fact all of Scripture, and its relationship to the world around us.
First. Scripture is the inspired word of God and is therefore inerrant. If the Bible is from God, there are no errors in the Bible. Secondly, Creation is an infallible revelation. of God.
If creation is from God, and it is, then there are no errors in creation's revelation of God. What it reveals about God is exactly what God, the Creator, intends it to reveal about Him. Thirdly, Scripture takes precedence over creation because it contains a fuller, more specific revelation of God than creation. In other words, wherever there is apparent tension or perceived contradiction between the Bible and science, or between the Bible and my observation, or between the Bible and my gut feeling about something, the Bible takes precedence. Not because Creation is an error.
But because the Bible is fuller. more complete, more specific. Fourthly, Apparent discrepancies between the Bible and creation is an interpretive problem, not a source problem. If I perceive discrepancies between what I read in the Bible and what I observe in creation, the problem is not with the Bible or creation, the problem is with my interpretation of the Bible and or creation. This is due to the fact that sin Has affected my ability to rightly understand God's perfect revelation of Himself.
Fifthly, Genesis presents the creation account as a chronological, historical event. that happened by means of extraordinary providence. Therefore, we should read it as such. You say, Eugene, that's just your opinion. Plenty of theologians insist that Genesis is describing ordinary providence.
In terms that are poetical or figurative and not chronological or historical. And I would simply point out that interpretations of the creation account that resort to those explanations are usually driven by a denial or neglect of one of the previous four principles. But friends, the text of Genesis 1 does not give us these options. It's not figurative language. All the markers of Hebrew poetry are missing.
and the markers of Hebrew historical narrative are present. It's not non-chronological language. Over and over and over again, we see the explicit numbering of each day in sequential order. It's not ordinary providence that we read about in this account. Creation from nothing to something and disorder and emptiness to form and fullness are anything but ordinary.
No, this is exceptionally extraordinary providence at work. What Moses wrote in Genesis 1 is saying unequivocally, this is how it happened, and this is the order in which it happened. Therefore, the means at work are extraordinary means.
Now, we don't have to shy away from the apparent tensions that these facts raise as we observe what appear to be contradictions between the observable universe and Scripture's account of creation. There are some real questions that arise if we take Scripture at face value. For example, how could day and night exist before there was a sun? Or why does the universe appear to be much older than the Bible allows when taken at face value? My purpose today is not to answer those questions.
I simply want to make the point that the right way to go about wrestling with those questions is to give unqualified precedence and priority to the inerrancy and sufficiency of Scripture above my interpretation of what I think I see. And if in the end there's still mystery, in how the universe came to be. Then I can rest assured that a God who is capable of the most extraordinary providences. and simultaneously incapable of lying, has told us with perfect precision how he created all things.
So, with the spiritual posture of Peter in John 6, when he said, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Let's turn our attention now to Genesis 1. And discover what it has to tell us about God and about ourselves as we observe the works of His hand. Verse 1, as we saw last week, describes God creating everything.
The stuff, the matter, the space of the universe out of nothing. Verse 2 then describes the state or condition of that stuff at its inception. It was without form. and void, and it was covered in darkness.
So, physical matter that God had made was all there, but there was no shape. or distinguishable form to it. And even if there had been, it would have been invisible. by the sheer darkness of it all.
Now, there's no need to read moral overtones into verse 2's description of the universe at this point, as if without form and void means something evil or sinister.
Some Bible interpreters have done that and come up with speculative explanations that complicate the story and the theology behind the story. Verse 2 is simply describing the state of the stuff that God had created. prior to his organizing it. into the universe as we know it today. What follows then is an account of God bringing order from chaos.
of making form out of formlessness, of filling the void with good things. God is a God of order and form and fullness. Form and fullness are better than formlessness and emptiness. And so God methodically begins to bring structure and organization to the chaos, to the mess. And we might stop and ask, why did God not just create the world in its final state instantly?
Why did he take six days to bring order and form and fullness? The answer is certainly not because he was unable to create the final product instantly. Of course, he could have finished everything. in an instant, but instead he does the work progressively. Why?
Well think about it. By performing the work progressively and sequentially in an orderly fashion, He makes it more evident that he is the cause and sustainer of it all. He makes it more evident that he is the cause and the sustainer of it all. For example, his first order of business is to speak light into existence. This makes all the stuff, all the formlessness visible.
so that his creative work can be seen and known. Much later in the week, he will make what we know as the source of light, the sun and the stars, and by reflection, the moon. But light exists prior to the sun. This sequence demonstrates that God, not the Sun, is the ultimate source of light. The Son is merely God's agent.
His tool. But that agent is entirely optional. God makes plant life before there's a proper ecosystem to sustain plants. He makes a man before there's a mother to sustain the man. You see, the dilemma of the chicken and the egg is no dilemma for a God who can create a mature chicken without an egg or hatch an egg without the help of a hen.
Naturalists and Theologians who fear naturalists lose their minds at the impossibility of it all when what they ought to be doing is worshiping a creator who is capable of creating and sustaining life through the sheer efficacy of his words. God often uses agents to do his bidding. But church, not because he needs them. He's sovereign. He's all powerful.
He needs nothing. And so He creates in a sequential, orderly fashion to demonstrate that His universe is not ultimately sustained by so-called natural causes, but by His almighty hand. As Hebrews 1, 3 says, he upholds the universe. Not by observable means of cause and effect. Not by the laws of nature, but by the word of his power.
How silly of us to Think of God as being somehow limited by his own creation. And yet we are so prone to think that way, aren't we? John Calvin said, To nothing are we more prone than to bind God's power to those instruments whose agency He employs. To nothing are we more prone than to bind God's power to those instruments whose agency He employs. We act like the world will come crashing down on us if we don't get our way or see our plans through or persuade everyone to our opinion.
We act like God is not capable of providing for our needs or healing our bodies or fixing our marriages or saving our children without some help from this person or that circumstance or this instrument. Yo, God is bigger than that. He does not need our help. He deserves your obedience and worship. But he does not need your aid to make the world go around any more than he needs the sun to make light.
Verse 3 introduces a statement that recurs over and over again throughout the creation account. It's a statement, and God said. And God said, let there be light. And God said, Let there be an expanse. And God said, let the waters be gathered into one place.
And God said, Let the earth sprout vegetation. And God said, let the water swarm with living creatures. God's method of creating is speech, words. This tells us something not only of the power of God, but also of the power and effectiveness of His Word. When God speaks, He doesn't speak merely grammatical words.
He speaks things that are not into existence. When we say sun or fish or bird, we're simply making reference to something that is. When God says a word, He creates the thing he just said. Our words are sounds. God's words are realities.
That ought to not only amaze us, it ought to make us consciously dependent upon the Word of God. The same word that created the universe. Is capable of saving our souls because that word is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword. Christian, are you prone to doubt your salvation? Are you given to uncertainty and insecurity when you contemplate the eternal state of your soul?
Look no further than the one who's speaking in Genesis 1. For God who said, let light shine out of darkness. Has also shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The Word of God generates life. The Word of God regenerates the sinner's soul.
Verse four introduces another recurring statement. That God's creation is good. Verse four, verse ten, verse twelve, verse eighteen, verse twenty-one. Verse 25, verse 31, throughout the creation account, God repeatedly designates the things he has made as good.
Now, this recurring statement was not for God's benefit. It's not as if He was stepping back like we do to look at His work and make sure He had done it right. No, he knew it was good before he spoke it into existence. God's declaration that His creation is good was for our benefit, so that we would notice. He wants us to know that His works are good, and He wants us to agree with His assessment that all His works are good.
The word good is a fairly broad term. It refers to the pleasantness of something or the rightness of something. It can refer to the moral quality of something. Like when we say he's a good boy, we mean he behaves rightly, appropriately. It can also refer to the aesthetic quality of something.
Like when we say she looks good, we mean she's attractive, she's pretty. In the case of God's assessment of his creation, all of the above are true. Everything God has made is right. There's nothing immoral or unjust or cruel about what He has made.
Now, certainly, man's sin has affected the created order in ways that has introduced evil and corruption and death into what was originally good and right. But the state of everything God made when He made it was right. It's also true that everything God has made is pleasant and beautiful. There's nothing ugly or disproportionate about what God has made. Again, it's also true that man's sin has affected the aesthetic goodness or beauty of God's creation in negative ways.
Nevertheless, God's world as he made it is a good world. Yes, man has marred that goodness, but God is in the process of restoring that goodness of creation. Go home and read Romans 8 this afternoon and discover how Paul describes that restoration of creation's original goodness. But let's reflect on the nature of the goodness of God's creation for a moment. God is in the process in Genesis 1 of bringing form and fullness.
to the empty void of verse 2. And as he moves towards order and structure and form and fullness, he declares it to be good. This means that form is better than formlessness. It means that order is better than chaos. It means that fullness is better than emptiness.
We could say it this way: God delights in things being done decently and in order. If we insist on disregarding God's order, and love of order. We set ourselves up to be at cross purposes with God, and that is neither good nor safe. If God loves order, we should love order, not chaos. We shouldn't celebrate disorder.
We shouldn't pretend, along with the world, that freedom from structure and freedom from absolutes are somehow of greater value and more virtuous. We wouldn't build a house. as if form and structure don't matter. Why would we build our morality or our truth commitments or our sense of beauty on a foundation of freedom from order? That's the world's way of thinking, not the Christian's way of thinking.
God is a God of order. And so we should imitate that love of order. In the art we create, in the music we make, in the way we worship, in the way we function as a church, in the way we manage our homes, in the way we engage in our vocations, in how we govern our societies. God is a God of order. Another aspect of the goodness of God's creation is the fact that God makes clear distinctions of kind and function.
Clear distinctions of kind. And function. God says, light, you go over there. Darkness, you go over there. Light, you were called day.
Darkness, you were called night. He says, plants over there make seeds, plants over here make fruit, sea creatures get in the ocean, birds get in the sky. God's bringing order to creation. And his bringing order to creation entails separating things into distinctive places, assigning them distinctive places and kind in the universe. Be what I've created you to be and do what I've created you to do.
And notice that in this making of distinctions, God goes so far as to designate some things as greater than other things. and some things as lesser than other things. Verse 16, for example, God made the two great lights. the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night.
So, not only are there distinctions of kind, there are even distinctions of purpose and prominence. In other words, there is hierarchy built into God's order of things.
So let's just pause for a moment. And consider how antithetical this principle of distinction of kind and hierarchical structure is to the world's way of thinking. Ours is a world that tries to erase distinctions between genders, between religions, between contradictory truth claims, as if the one great vice of the world is classifying things according to their kind. Or ours is a world that tries to invent distinctions where God has not made distinctions. And that's to say nothing of the world's repulsion at hierarchy.
God has made some things to be over other things, and that is good. Hierarchy is part of the order God has built into creation. And when we resist or deny that order, we're resisting and denying God. God as Creator gets to determine the categories and the roles of everything. Fish, you're the fish kind.
Birds, you're the bird kind. Males, you're the male kind. Females, you're the female kind. Sun, you're the greater. Moon, you're the lesser.
It is God's prerogative to make such distinctions because it's God's universe. And those distinctions are good because God declares it to be so. If we would live in harmony with God's created order, We must acquiesce to God's estimation of what is good. We must order our lives. according to what God says is good and true.
and beautiful.
Well, there's so much more that we could consider in this marvelous account of God's work of creation, but before we end today, I want us to take note of verse 22. God ends day five of creation by speaking to the sea creatures and the birds. Moses describes this speech as a blessing, and as we read this blessing, we see that it's delivered in the form of a command. Verse 22. And God blessed them, that's the sea creatures and the winged birds, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters and the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.
This statement, of course, is about to be echoed in God's address to Adam and Eve.
So I want us to observe a few things about this statement. First, God's blessing brings with it moral obligation. God's blessing brings with it moral obligation. It's a command, it's an imperative, it's a law. There's something for the sea creatures and the birds to do in response to God's blessing.
This points to something that is fundamentally true of the universe and everything in it, including you and me, and it's this: God's creatures bear moral responsibility to their Creator. God's creatures bear moral responsibility to their Creator. This blessing also points to another fundamental attribute. Of God's world, especially when we read verse 22 in light of what we've already learned about the power and efficacy of God's words. When God speaks, To create, or to bless, or to command, or to judge, when God speaks.
His words are living and powerful and will not return void. You see, when you or I bless someone, we are at best just declaring what we wish would happen. Y'all have a safe trip. Y'all have a great day. God bless you, friend.
We can say these things. We can even mean them from our heart, but we have no actual power to bestow blessings upon a person. Not so with God. When he speaks, it happens. If he says, be fruitful to the birds, rest assured that there's flocks and flocks of birds on the horizon.
They're coming. By the same token, If God says, In the day you eat of it, you shall surely die. Be assured that death will follow disobedience. God's word is efficacious. That means it brings forth what it declares.
It yields what it demands. It produces what it promises. But, friends, that divine word is efficacious in both directions. The God who said, let there be light. can just as easily say, let there be darkness.
And weeping. And gnashing of teeth. His word never returns void. Moses included this account of creation week.
so that we would know who our Creator is. And so that we would know who we are. before him. There's much more to the story. We'll get to that.
But given what we've seen of our Creator this morning, and given the fact that right now the sky over our heads and the ground underneath our feet are declaring the glory of God. Is it not appropriate? to just take a moment and be still. And no. That God is God.
There's a psalm that gives us the appropriate words to say to the Maker of heaven and earth. And I want to conclude by reading this psalm in worship to our sovereign, majestic God. It's Psalm 33. If you'll turn there. And listen.
as I read and praise the Lord with me. Psalm thirty three. Shout for joy in the Lord, O you righteous. Praise befits the upright. Give thanks to the Lord with a lyre.
Make melody to him with a harp of ten strings. Sing to him a new song. Play skillfully on the strings with loud shouts. For the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness. He loves righteousness.
and justice. the earth. is full of the steadfast love of the Lord. By the word of the Lord the heavens were made. by the breath of his mouth all their host.
He gathers the water of the sea as a heap. He puts the deeps in storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord. Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. For he spoke and it came to be.
He commanded and it stood firm. The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing. He frustrates the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the Lord stands forever. the plans of his heart to all generations.
Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord. the people whom he has chosen as his heritage. The Lord looks down from heaven. He sees all the children of man. From where he sits enthroned, he looks out on all the inhabitants of the earth.
He who fashions the hearts of them all and observes all their deeds. The king. is not saved by his great army. A warrior is not delivered by his great strength. The war horse is a false hope for salvation.
and by its great might it cannot rescue. Behold. The eye of the Lord is on those. who fear him. And those who hope.
in His steadfast love, that He may deliver their soul from death, and keep them alive in famine. Our soul waits for the Lord. He is our help and our shield. For our heart is glad in him because we trust. in his holy name.
Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us. even as we hope. in you. Amen. Let's go to the Lord in prayer.
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth? We fear you. We trust you. We hope. in you.
Through the name of Jesus, your Son. and our Saviour, I pray. Amen. Yeah.
