Clough Genesis Lesson 1
Importance of doctrine of creation - Genesis 1:1
[Alex Haley has done] for black people what historians should have been doing all along and that is giving us a sense of our origins. All men, everywhere, finally, once all is said and done, go back to their roots, to find where they’re going to. Everyone has a cry to do this and the reason the Bible gives why men seek, unconsciously at times, their roots, is because we are made by God to do precisely this. We can observe this in human organizations; when an organization seems to get confused, lost its way, doesn’t know where it’s going, competing programs and so on, what does the group of managers finally do. They come together in a meeting and they say wait, what was the purpose of our organization originally and then from there they decide the plans for the future.
Probably the most poignant example of someone going back to look for their origins to find where they’re going is the illegitimate child who doesn’t know his father or his mother, the bastards of the world, children who literally do not know where they came from. And oftentimes if you look at these people, even late in life, they constantly search; you’ll see them take trips to go back to the place where they think they might have been born, to see if they can possibly get a clue.
There’s an inbuilt desire to find out where you came from. You can see it in civilizations; when a civilization is in a state of flux, change, what does it do? It goes back to its origins. You can see this in the space program. Every time we begin to hear discussions of the space program, inevitably some point is raised in the discussion, well, what all this is going to do is to show us the origin, origin of the earth, origin of the moon, origin of Mars, origin of the solar system, origin of the universe; we want to get back to origins, so you see it that way.
You can go back in history and you can see the renaissance men doing this; this is why Rousseau came up with this idea of the noble savage, trying to explain the origin of government and the origin of society. It’s always going back to origins. You can go back to the ancient Greeks and see it clearly; there you can watch the search for what the Greeks call their arche. This is a Greek term used in philosophy to mean beginning; the same word used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, “In the beginning, God created.” And the Greek philosophers wanted to search for the arche because they wanted a foundation. The pre-Socratic men wanted a foundation for science; Plato and others wanted a foundation for the state, so they wrote books like Plato did, The Republic. And always it was a search for the arche. The famous Greek student of the lever, Archimedes, came up with a point that said give me a place to stand and I’ll move the world. His position has been referred to as the Archimedean point. It’s always that point where if I can get to that one point I can look and I can control everything else, this is the key to everything, I’ve got to search for that arche or that root, or that resting spot.
This may sound abstract till you ask
yourself have you ever done this. Let’s
bring it down to our own family
unit. Do you know personally where your
grandfather came from on body sides of your family? Do you know what his dreams were when he came
to wherever he came to wherever he came to, where your family grew up? Do you know some of the hardships that your
grandfather or his father faced? Do you know where they ultimately come from?
Can you trace your own family backwards for more than four generations,
backwards perhaps to
In this series we’re going to go back even further than our common family, all the way back to the first family, Adam. And we’re going to go back even further to the origin of the universe. We have to do this because if we don’t we can’t find a place where there’s constancy, where there’s absolute stability, where there’s something true tomorrow that’s true today; otherwise we’re wasting out time, just lost in the flux of things, unless we have a platform where we can say this is true, that is false, this is right, that is wrong, and not just today but tomorrow also. When we get to the root, that’s when we have our stability. And that’s what it’s all about so let’s turn to Genesis 1 for the most unique statement in the literature of the world.
This series will be a series in the first
eleven chapters of Genesis, and as we go through these chapters we’re going to
be looking for practical things from a Christian point of view, for our
Christian life, but we’re also going to face fully the scientific problems of
Genesis 1-11. Now in all the literature
of the world and all the different religions of the world, you will never read
a verse like this. This verse, familiar
to you and to me because of our heritage, is a rare piece of truth. It simply can’t be found elsewhere, outside
of
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” To us it’s familiar, but we’re spoiled because most people in history believe the opposite, and that’s what we’re going to spend time on. We want to spend time looking at how man has distorted this truth, and how, in fact, most men distort the truth, how they began distorting the truth thousands of years ago, and in fact, reversed Genesis 1:1 so that to most people it really reads, “and the beginning the heavens and the earth made God through man,” that God and man, man and his religious idea, are all results of the cosmos, the results of the universe. It’s a total reversal. Now if this total reversal happened, and instead of Genesis 1:1 we have the heavens and the earth generating God, man, right and wrong, truth and falsehood and so on, serious things follow. We want to be particularly careful to watch what follows when we reverse things.
First the term, “the heaven and the earth.” We’ll deal with the complicated problems of interpreting Genesis 1:1-3. This Sunday we’re only interested in verse 1 and when we look at verse 1 we see this antonymic word pair, “heaven and earth.” That is the author’s way of stating universal truth. The words “heaven and earth” encompass, for the author of this text, everything you mean when you use the word “universe.” Those of you studying math, it’s like you have a set of objects, we have set A and we have the compliment of set A which is all things in the universe under discussion that lie outside of set, so that you can describe the entire universe of discourse by a set and it’s logical compliment. This is what the author of Genesis 1:1 did, the earth and all that is non-earth and all non-earth things are called heaven.
So together “heaven and earth” mean the universe; nothing is omitted. We stress this; nothing is omitted from the antonymic word pair, “heaven and earth.” Nothing! And therefore, if God is spoken of in verse 1 as something different from heaven and the earth, then He is not part of the heaven and earth, He is distinct from the universe, He lies outside of the universe. But man always wants to reverse this. Man always wants to put “heaven and earth,” the universe of which we speak, God, perhaps bigger than man but nevertheless Himself part in, or gods, plural, they are part and parcel of the heavens and the earth. Now there’s no middle ground here, you either believe one way or you believe the other way, there’s no third way of taking this.
Throughout history once this happens we notice something. Once we make God and man subservient to the whole universe, with nothing outside of the universe that created the universe, then man begins to worship the universe. Then nature forces assume the source from which all blessings flow; then man worships the molecules, then he worships the atoms, then he worships the primitive dust cloud and the gas from which it came. It’s got to be this way because whatever you select as your root or your origin, whatever you select, will always be the object of your worship. This must necessarily follow; always has, always will.
But once this follows and men begin to worship the heavens and the earth, and since the heavens and the earth are constantly changing, and they are filled with chaos and flux, then man worships chaos and flux. And that’s why the Bible says he is “tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine.” This is why the prophet says in the Old Testament, the wicked are like “the trouble sea.” He picks on the sea because throughout the Old Testament that is the picture of turbulent motion. “The wicked are like the troubled sea,” like turbulence, like physical chaos, “when it cannot rest, whose waters constantly cast up mire and dirt.” [Isaiah 57:20]
So there you have it, man either worships the God who is absolutely stable, who created the universe, or he worships the universe and he becomes a victim of the flow and the flux and chaos that is part and parcel of that universe.
Let’s look at some historic examples of
where men have made negative Genesis 1:1, because in most societies, and in
most cases, in most places it’s always been the opposite, the mere image of
Genesis 1:1. One of the earliest cities
and civilizations to discuss the matter was
Fortunately, not too long ago archeologists
were digging and they found some of the creation texts from the ancient city of
Now anyone who tells you that is either
being dishonest or stupid because if they have studied the ancient text they
would find no ancient text reads the way Genesis 1:1 reads. Genesis 1:1 can’t be found in any ancient
text. Genesis 1:1 is opposite to the way
the ancient world thought. Genesis is a
radical document. In the postdiluvian
day of our own time we think oh, we are the oppressed, embarrassed believers,
we’ve got this onerous burden of Genesis on our back and we’ve got to defend
this thing from all the skeptics standing around. No, we’re not the first generation; the
generation in which Moses lived was a generation that had the same burden
because in their day no one believed Genesis either. The ancient world view was identical to the
modern evolutionary world view. It may
shock some of you to know this but basically, philosophically it was identical
to
Tablet one of Enuma Elish, the first nine lines, reads this way. Listen, particularly those of you who are familiar with the Genesis text, this is what people say is the same as Genesis. Look at how foolish they are. Here is the Babylonian text, not generated by Christians; these are people who have no axe to grind, they’re just giving us what history has given us, namely, a text from ancient times.
“When above the heaven had not yet been named,
And below the earth had not yet been called by a name,
When Apsu primeval, their begetter,
Mummu and Tiamat, she who gave birth to them all,
Still mingled their waters together,
And no pasture land had been formed, and not even a reed marsh was to be seen,
When none of the gods had been brought into being,
When they had not yet been called by their names, and their destinies had not yet been fixed,
At that time the gods were created.”
Does that sound like Genesis 1:1? Are these people for real that come up to you and tell you that Genesis reflects the ancient worldview? It’s precisely the opposite; Genesis attacks the ancient world view. Genesis is opposite to the ancient worldview. In the ancient world it was the heavens and the earth; in this case the prior version of the heavens and the earth, which was a water chaos and out of this watery chaos, called here Tiamat, it’s a picture of fresh and salt water, when they “mingled their waters together, when none of the gods had been brought into being,” then “the gods were created.” So out from this you get the gods and then later on the gods give us man. That’s the sequence. Now you don’t have to be a genius to see that this is a complete reversal of Genesis 1:1. So it’s simply false… it’s simply false that the Bible reflects an ancient view; the Bible goes against it.
So the Babylonians found their root and
their arche in watery chaos, or we
could generalize it and simply say this: they found their roots, their home,
their resting point in nature. They found it particularly in the chaos of
nature. Remember I said, wherever you
place your home, your arche, your
resting point, your root, whatever you want to call it, whatever you pick for
that you will finally come back to it because you can’t help it any more than
you can help not breathing; you will come back and you will begin to worship
that root. And sure enough, you study the religions that developed out of
So we find if we move from the Mesopotamian flood plain at that time in history over to the very famous continent of India, and to the most famous religion of all, Hinduism, as one Hindu scholar wrote about their views of creation, he said this: At least two thousand years before Darwin the Sankhya yoga philosophers of India set out their view of the universe in evolutionary terms. They visualized the evolution of the present cosmos as a rope, opening out its strands to all the variety of nature and the life as we know it. Since they were monists, the rope had to be always there, or eternal, and the rope kept opening out in the process of creation and then when it finally opened out it would begin to close and the strands would come back together again, and then retwisting its strands in the process of dissolution and thus we are part of an eternal pulsating universe.
Now to some of you who have studied physics and the geosciences that ought to ring a bell, “pulsating” universe, a universe that was always there, that expanded and then ultimately contracted. That sounds familiar. Sure it does; that’s exactly the backbone, philosophically of modern cosmogony. It’s the same, it’s the same as ancient Hinduism, it hasn’t changed. You see, Genesis 1:1 is as much against the views of our day as it was against the views of the days in which it was written. It was always a radical doctrine, always a minority position. And so the Hindus worshiped an eternally pulsating universe and all the gods and goddesses and men were part of these self-operating eternal forces. And if you are going to be a spiritual person you have to figure out some way you can come to terms with this eternal pulsating universe.
But the Babylonians and the Hindus weren’t the only people that did this. Of course as I have hinted in the last few minutes, modern science does it. Modern science holds to precisely the same thing, that is, most modern scientists, at least the ones who are the editors of the journals. The universe to the universe, it just simply transforms itself; there’s no origins, don’t be fooled. The big-bang idea of the expanding universe coming out of an original point source is not Biblical creation. That’s just transformation from a cluster to an expanse, and it could for all we know been contracting before that point explosion. So a pulsating universe has no analogy whatsoever to Genesis 1:1. Don’t try to read the big-bang theory into Genesis 1:1. So we have this, one universe going into another one by transforming, at all times, like the Hindu rope, this universe is eternal. That’s the view and the work of modern science. And if that’s the case, like the Babylonians and like the Hindus modern man must come back to terms, worshipful terms, to the molecules and atoms and so on that made up the universe from which he came or his root.
We’re going to take a few minutes to listen to one of the modern architects of cosmogony, Dr. George Wald, who’s a professor of biology at Harvard University, and this particular address was given before a congress of scientists on the east coast; it was subsequently recorded and reproduced and sent out under the auspices of the American for the Advancement of Science in 1973. George Wald was the man who discovered Vitamin A in the retina of the human eye. He’s the one who, I believe in 1967 got the Nobel Prize for medicine for this discovery. So this is one of the pioneers, one of the big, big men and big thinkers and big contributors in our own generation. Dr. Wald gave this extensive address.
On the recording we’ll hear I took three sections of his address. The first section, lasts three or four minutes, deals with how he views and how modern science views, the origin of the universe. The second section, two or three more minutes, you’ll see it shift, he deals with the origin of life as modern science views it. And then, the third section he deals with man. Listen carefully because this is a serious… he did not intend this to be funny, and some of you who have been raised in Christian circles all your life and have never been exposed to this; this is why I’m doing it. Those of you who have been exposed to this, who have been circulating in non-Christian circles, there’s no big news here. But for those who are unexposed to this kind of thinking, listen carefully.
“This universe is made of four kinds of elementary particles: protons, electrons, neutrons and photons; that’s the particles of radiation. You could begin the universe such as this with one of those particles, neutrons; because free neutrons with a matter of a few minutes disintegrate to yield protons, electrons and radiation; one still has the neutrons so one has all the components needed to make such a universe as this. It’s easier to think of starting this universe as hydrogen and because that’s easiest, lets think of it that way. Hydrogen dust is not originally composing all of the stuff that this universe surely large parts of it, large sections of space, and then over the ages here and there, quite by Chance, a little eddy in that hydrogen dust, a little special knot of material, a little special increased density and if it were big enough it would begin to draw in the hydrogen about it through the ordinary forces of gravitation, so it would begin to grow. And the more of it there was the more it would pull in the hydrogen about it, and so one would begin to have a condensing mass of hydrogen. And as such a mass condenses, it would heat up, as any mass condenses it heats up and when the temperature in the deep interior reached about five million degrees something new began to happen, and that new thing was that one of those particles, the protons, now a proton is the nucleus of the hydrogen atom and so we think of those protons frequently as hydrogen, and those protons began to fuse, four protons, each of mass one, fusing to form a{?}of mass four.
But in this transaction a little bit of mass is lost, an alien nucleus has a little smaller mass than that of four protons, and this little bit of mass that is lost is converted to radiation according to Einstein’s famous formula, E=MC2, E is the energy of that radiation, M is that little bit of mass that is lost, and C is a tremendous number, the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, three times ten to the tenth centimeters per second, you square that big a number and you have a fantastically big number and multiply even a tiny bit of mass by that big a number, that means an enormous outpouring of radiation in the center of what has been a collapsing mass of hydrogen, and this great outpouring of radiation, {?} the condensation and this thing comes into an uneasy steady state, and what I’ve described just now, of course, is the birth of a star. Our own star, the sun, was born that way, about five billion years ago; it’s got another five billion years, approximately to run. It’s just an ordinary run of the mill middle-aged star. [Pause]
Those molecules kept forming in the upper atmosphere and kept being leached out of the upper atmosphere into the ocean until sometime, somewhere, or several times in several places an aggregate of organic molecules in sea water reached a point that an experienced biologist had he been present would have been willing to concede as being alive. That thing happened on this planet about three billion years ago, and having got a foothold on life, life began to spread itself over the surface of the earth.
About two million years ago it led to man; I shall have more to say of him shortly. About 400 years ago a collection of molecules organized as William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and about a hundred years after that another collection of molecules organized as Isaac Newton wrote the Principia and about a hundred fifty years ago another such collection of molecules organized as Ludwig von Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony. I only say that kind of thing because it’s true. What do you think when you see a collection of molecules carefully organized writing Hamlet; that just shows you what molecules are potentially capable of doing. You’ve learned a little more chemistry. [Pause]
When you get to such a creature as man, at last, after billions and billions of years, after searching out these molecules from previous generations of stars that have died out of all the corners of the vastnesses of space and bring them together and when they’ve made such a creature as a man, he begins to know that story, he begins to realize it for the first time. It’s matter having reached the point of beginning to know itself. You’ve perhaps heard it said that a hen is just an egg’s way of making another egg; well, in exactly the same sense a man is the atom’s way of knowing about atoms.
Particularly, as we listened to this, we want to remember this, he’s serious. I say this not to be funny, but because it is true. And then adjusting his statement, it just shows you what molecules can do. You see, ideologically that’s exactly what the Babylonians were doing, exactly what the Hindus did, exactly what the ancient people have done: The heavens and the earth in the beginning created gods and men.
But Genesis says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Now you have to decide which way you’re going to go at the very start, because this determines what is our root. Now men who take this last way, to show you the religious nature of it, this is not just science, don’t be snowed, there are religious presuppositions going on here. Look at this statement, this was found in the pamphlet that introduced what we just heard. “Dr. Wald is probing in his own way the cosmic blip, or whatever it was, that spawned the matter of our universe.” And so obviously God words are being used, a “cosmic blip,” in the beginning a cosmic blip made all things. See, re-read Genesis 1:1 plugging into Genesis 1:1 what these men are saying and that will quickly show you what’s happening. Now the fact that this leads to all sorts of interesting conclusions is the fact that as the ancients began to worship their root, chaos, modern man worships the molecules, the hydrogen gas and so on. Here’s a professor, E. G. Conklin who said: “The god of science is eternal process marching on through the evolution of galaxies.”
Now quite obviously religious shifts have
come in here. These men aren’t playing
games; they are telling us in language that is just as clear as it can be that
God has been replaced at the critical point of Genesis 1:1, at the root, at the
starting point. If we are serious with
George Wald then we have to say that our root is hydrogen gas. Now let’s watch how this works out. We know that if this is the case and God is
replaced, then our prayers, our religious ceremonies, become mere
ceremonies. Here’s a recent statement,
just a few months old, from Professor Sidney Hook. Professor Sidney Hook for many, many years
was the chairman of the philosophy department of NYU in
Time Magazine,
Let’s turn to the Scriptures and watch how incessantly, how repeatedly in instance after instance the authors of Scripture demanded that God be their starting point, that God their Creator is their root, not the universe, not molecules, not DNA. As we look at each of these passages, we want to set them in the historical context. We’re not just going to look at one cold list of Bible references, rather what we want to do now very slowly as we watch carefully each of these references, what you want to do is ask yourself this: why does this author at this point bring up the Genesis 1:1 theme, God “created the heavens and the earth.” Why does he bring it up in practical experience? Otherwise we’re going to talk about this too theoretically and you’ll say well, that’s nice, it’s a course in physics or biology. No, no, no! These are all brought up in real life situations, and as we go through we’ll exercise ourselves by rereading the passage in the light of the modern man.
Let’s go to Exodus 20:11. “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in t hem is, and rested the seventh day; wherefore, the LORD blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.” What’s the context of this? The Ten Commandments. What’s so important about the Ten Commandments? Well, it’s just the whole root of law and ethics, that’s all, a minor point? Just the source of every one of our rights and wrongs, and isn’t it interesting, when we deal with the source of right and wrong what are we talking about? It says the God who “made the heavens and the earth,” and everything “that in them is.” That’s the context in which it becomes important to talk about God as the Creator of all things.
Let’s now reverse verse 11 and read it the way Professor Wald would read it: For over billions of years hydrogen gas gradually spawned all things, that’s the source of my essence, protons, I get my right and wrong categories from hydrogen gas and the eddies therein; I gather what is right and what is wrong and build all my law and my structure, all my stability for society, on the basis of eternal processes marching on.
See what happens, and you wonder why we’re having trouble with what is right and wrong in our day, when we are barraged 99% of our waking hours with evolutionary humanism. Is it any wonder that we’ve eroded the basis of what is right and wrong? Of course, we’ve shifted our root, we’ve shifted our starting point and as a result we necessarily follow; frankly protons don’t give a damn about loving one another. Therefore why should we? Why should we care about people; why should we care about “the meek shall inherit the earth,” when it wasn’t the meek molecule that won out. It was the lucky one, and therefore the ethics of luck, the ethics of chance replace the Ten Commandments. It’s no mystery; don’t pretend it’s a mystery, some sudden thing that’s just happened. It follows as day follows night that when you shift your root you shift your ethics.
Let’s take another passage of Scripture, turn to Job 33. Of all the tragedies I think there’s no greater tragedy than to watch the person who tries to believe both view; poor, to be pitied, individual, trying desperately to hold to the rights and the wrongs of the Bible, this whole edifice, and then trying to desperately prop it up by protons and eternal process marching on, and wonder why the thing is kind of shaky? Because the foundation’s shifted.
Job 33:4, “The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty has given me life.” What’s the situation of Job? You don’t have to be an astute Bible student to know, you know what the situation Job is facing; one of the most intense suffering situations a man can ever face. Job is the book of suffering in the Bible, really truly suffering. And faith with a suffering situation, where there’s no answers, Job goes back to his root. And where’s his root, he knows one thing and his counsels know at least this, that “The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty has given me life.”
Now what would happen if we reread that in the light of what we’ve just heard: An eddy of hydrogen gas has made me, and a fortuitous collection of molecules in a primordial sea has given me life. Doesn’t that really thrill you? Doesn’t that really give you impetus to deal with the suffering problem? It really gives you a base for answers doesn’t it? And then we wonder why this is a lost generation, can’t figure it out, why we are all wondering around, going to and fro, why don’t we have roots in our generation? It’s very simple. You’ve cut the umbilical cord, snipped it right off.
Look at Job 38:4; here is the first time in this long, long book of Job when God first speaks. Up to this point it’s been man talking about this point of suffering and that point of suffering, why did this happen to me, why did that happen to me. And then in Job 38:4 what are the first words out of God’s mouth. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if you have understanding.” What does God do? He goes back to the root: I am your Creator, and it’s on that base, that’s the resting place, that’s the home base, and then from there I’ve built everything else, but if that isn’t secure the whole “else” topples to the ground. And so dealing with the very practical problem of suffering… we’ve seen two now, the Exodus passage, law and ethics grounded on the creatorship. We come to Job and we look at the whole suffering problem, grounded on the creatorship of God.
Now let’s go to the Psalms. These are Psalms of worship. Look at how often in the book of Psalms God is viewed in His Genesis 1:1 context. We’re going to cite several passages from the book of Psalms because Psalms is the book that everyone likes because it’s so devotional, it’s so highly spiritual. When people get in jams, even the non-Christian, sometimes in the motels will reach over and pick up that Gideon Bible and open it up and read from the Psalms. They may not know anything else in the Bible but they read from the Psalms because the Psalms, they say, give them comfort. Isn’t it interesting that the basis of all the comfort in the Psalms is the fact that God made the heavens and the earth, not the heavens and the earth made God and man.
Psalm 8:3, here is the psalmist thinking about man and his purpose. “When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers,” not the work of chance, not the work of hydrogen gas. “When I consider … the moon and the stars, which You have ordained,” not the pure products of chance, [4] What is man, that You art mindful of him? And the son of man, that You visited him? [5] You made him a little lower than the angels, and You crowned him with glory and honor. [6] You made him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet.” How ironically that verse 6 is the source, or ought to be, of modern science. You see, it’s the other way around. People always say it’s we creationists that are cutting and destroying all possibility of research. No, it’s the humanist that’s destroying science from inside out. It’s only if you have the optimism that God made you and God made the universe and you fit together; only with that conviction can you have real science proceed. And that’s why it says, “You made man to have dominion over the world.”
Now if you really believed, and carried to its logical conclusion that the heavens and the earth spawned all things, with the humanist, if you really believed that then the way you ought to read verse 6 is: man must bow and scrape before nature forces, before the gods of chaos he must bow, he must scrape and he must give allegiance.
Let’s look at another psalm, Psalm 95:5. Here is a psalm of very clear worship and the worship is happy, these people are people that face the same trials you face, they had money problems, they had home problems, they had business problems, they had drugs in their day, they had the whole problem of sex, they had every problem we’ve got but they were optimistic, they weren’t the dead generation. They didn’t go around just sullen, with no happiness whatever. The reason is because they had this, Psalm 95:4-5, “In His hand are the deep places of the earth; the strength of the hills is His also. [5] The sea is His, and He made it, and His hands formed the dry land. [6] So therefore, come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD our maker.”
Again, how would that sound if it were reread today: In the hands of chance are all the deep places of the earth, the strength of the hills is eternal process marching on. [5] The sea came forth from molecules, for they made it, and their forces formed the dry land. [6] Come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before chance, our maker. That’s where it leads. It’s got to lead there. You change your root and you change your object of worship.
Psalm 96:5, an even more serious accusation. “For all the gods of the nations are idols; but the LORD made the heavens.” Now what verse 5 says is if God really didn’t make the heavens and the earth but rather the heavens and the earth spawned God, like that Tiamat thing that I read you from Enuma Elish, if that’s really the case, do you know what we’ve got as Christians? We’re idolaters… we’re idolaters, we ought to be worshiping the universe, not God, because He didn’t make it; we ought to be worshiping eternal process marching on, we ought to be worshiping chance if those indeed are the forces from which all things come.
Turn to Psalm 100:3, again it’s a psalm of happiness, a psalm of optimism, confidence. Why? “Know ye the LORD, that He is God; that it is He that has made us, and not we ourselves; we are His people, the sheep of His pasture.” It’s comforting if God is there, I’m not saying believe it because it’s comforting, I’m just saying observe the fact that there’s comfort here, there’s happiness here, there’s optimism here.
Turn to Psalm 115, another worship psalm. Look how often Genesis 1:1 thinking comes into these psalms. Psalm 115:15, “You are blessed by the LORD who made the heaven earth.” Blessed! Not an accidental collation of randomly moving molecules, “You are blessed.” Blessed implies design, purpose, decisions. You are blessed because God is the Creator.
Psalm 121:2, the famous pilgrim travel psalm, faced with chaos on the road, even before the days of the automobile, and in verse 2 the traveler asks the question of verse 1, where’s my help going to come from? In verse 2, “My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth,” Genesis 1:1 again, popping up. In all these experiential needs that people have, they’ve got to go back to their root.
Psalm 124:8, again this one is talking about health, and what does it say, “Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth.” Genesis 1:1 again coming through loudly and clearly.
Psalm 134:3, “The LORD, who made heaven and
earth, bless thee out of
Psalm 136:5, “To Him that by wisdom made the heavens; for His mercy endures forever; [6] To Him who stretched out the earth above the waters; for His mercy endures forever; [7] To Him that made great lights; for His mercy endures forever; [8] The sun to rule by day; for His mercy endures forever; [9] The moon and the stars to rule by night; for His mercy endures forever.” “His mercy endures forever,” there’s the source of optimism and hope. We’re not standing on flux; we’re standing on sovereign promises.
Finally, Psalm 146:6, again talking about the need for stability in your life. “Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is;” and, most importantly, application, “which keeps truth forever.” That’s the educational fallout of creationism. Talk to people in the educational field and they pull their hair out, why can’t we get people interested, why are college enrollments falling off, why can’t we get more graduate students in our department, why aren’t students interested? It’s simple… simple, you’ve told them there’s no truth. You’ve told them and you’ve pounded their heads into the ground about this thing, everything’s changing, everything’s changing. Well, it doesn’t take a genius to come to the conclusion that what I’m learning in the classroom today is going to be different tomorrow so why bother to learn it today. It’s a very simple conclusion, they’re all followers, don’t blame the kid, they’re just following the logical conclusions of what they were taught. But what does the psalmist say? He “keeps truth forever.” Why? Because God is the root and He’s perfectly stable. Now some could say oh well, that’s good, Old Testament, Clough’s always in the Old Testament. Let’s come to the New Testament and see what we get there.
Turn to Matthew 19:4, here’s a situation, very practical, the problem of divorce. Notice the practical situations; we’ve had law, we’ve had ethics, we’ve had suffering, we’ve had happiness, we’ve had need for help on the road, we’ve had suffering in life, now we have divorce. What is it? Jesus “answered and said to them, Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning, made them male and female,” and he quotes Genesis. And he grounds the doctrine of divorce in Genesis, not cultural accommodation. He’s going back to the origin point so He has some truth to tell people, that’s why.
Turn to John 1, talking about the Logos, the preincarnate Christ, the Second Personality of the Trinity. As we began the service this morning we sang Holy, Holy, Holy, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Logos here is the Son, notice John 1:1-3, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [2] The same was in the beginning with God. [3] All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made.” Now John had to add verses 2 and 3 to verse 1 because he knew what would happen. If he just left it with verse 1 somebody would come along and say, yeah John, but you see, really what happened was that God had a lot of materials there, He had all this lumber and rocks and so on and so God just worked with the prior existing material, using prior existing laws to formulate the heavens and the earth. Ah, says John, I’ll cut that little thought off real quick, verse 3, “All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made,” period! So we subscribe to the fact of total creation of all things.
Well, that was fine for preaching in
Finally let’s turn to the end result of it all, Revelation 4; here’s why this doctrine of creation is so important. Revelation 4:11, “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power; for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created.” Remember what we said? You worship your root, you worship your origin. And in verse 11 the origin is worthy because it’s created. We can’t worship eternal processes, matter energy particles, DNA codes, watery chaos, that is not worthy. But God is worthy because He made all things.
Isaiah writes, “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?” Isaiah concludes by saying this: Men, there’s no reason why you don’t know Genesis 1:1, every culture on earth once knew this, it’s a truth that has died in history because of man’s revolt. Isaiah claims that revelation was available to every race and every culture. “Have you not understood,” he says, from creation to the present hour who is your Creator? Of course you do, and you’re responsible for knowing it.
Shall we stand….