Do You Know Your Maker?

Genesis 1

Do you know your Maker? God is our Creator, and He made everything that is about 6,000 years ago. We are now beginning to study the only eyewitness account of Creation, and it is awesome. But in order to not have to answer to God, man invented evolution, a fairy tale for adults.

And it is man’s only theory. If there were another theory other than evolution, lost scientists would line up to support it. They would gladly take a more rational explanation than to continue to postulate the ridiculous, impossible idea of evolution, but they don't have any alternative except divine creation and that is simply intolerable to sinful man, because the Creator is also the moral authority of the universe and the judge of all men.

I could bore you with tons of science that disproves evolution, but we aren’t here to study science. We are here to study God and His Word. But just one simple summary statement is warranted: Evolution doesn't make any sense at all. On the other hand, the Bible makes perfect sense. Creation is obvious.

v. 1 is a broad summary. Then the following verses give detail and it’s going to be a fun, eye-opening study that will take some time…I’d say about 6 days, and then we will need to rest!

God created everything. Everything that exists, whether you're talking about those things that are at the farthest reaches of the universe in space, or whether you're talking about the smallest grain of sand or a bacterial microbe on the planet earth, absolutely everything was created by God. He is the creator of all things visible and invisible. And all things means just that - everything, from angels to every form of life like whales and elephants, birds and fish, trees and plants, right down to tiny forms of life we call viruses. That’s right, God created viruses, and before sin entered the world they were only good. But today, viruses can be bad, especially when sinful man gets his hands on them. [Fauci!]

“All things” include every form of energy, and matter, light, nuclear structure, electromagnetism, gravity, every law by which nature operates was created within the framework of this creation. All things. Behind the creation of everything in the universe stands the living God who had eternally existed as a timeless God, but had not always been the Creator. But here He becomes Creator and He makes everything. Starting in chapter 2, God singles out man and then tells our story, which flows right to the end of Scripture.

This is the only eyewitness account of creation. It is not allegory. There's nothing in the text to indicate that this is a children’s story, or mystical poetry, or anything other than actual history. This is the beginning of history dictated by God and written down by Moses.

Now when it says in verse 1 "in the beginning God created," it uses the Hebrew word “barah.” Barah is used in Scripture only of a divine work of God. It means that the infinite, eternal, personal God of the universe brought things into existence which did not exist prior to this moment. He created - in Latin it says ex nihilo, "out of nothing." That is, there was no pre-existing material.

Job 26:7

⁷ He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.

He took nothing, made everything, and then needed somewhere to put it so He hung it on nothing!

Hebrews 11:3

³ Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.

The things we see in the created universe were not made from something else. They were made from nothing, ex nihilo, without pre-existing material. So it's a way of saying everything around us, your body, the pew you're sitting on, the building you're in, the streets around us, the trees, the flowers, the city, the state, the nation, the continent, the world - all of it - the stars, the moon, everything you can see; everything you can't see, protozoa, amoeba or dust. Any arrangement of matter at all came into existence instantaneously, out of no pre-existing material. It didn't come from things that do appear; it came from nothing.

How did God create, or by what method? He spoke!

verse 3, "And God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light."

Verse 6, Verse 9, Verse 11, Verse 14, Verse 20, Verse 24, Verse 26, "Then God said…"

Psalms 33:6,9

⁶ By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. ⁹ For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.

That is the Psalmist's affirmation of the Genesis account of creation. God said let there be, let there be, let there be, and every time He said it, there was. He willed it and spoke it into existence.

Psalms 148:5

⁵ Let them praise the name of the LORD: for he commanded, and they were created.

This is where everything came from. It didn't exist, God willed it to exist. Hebrews 1:10

¹⁰ And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands:

Romans 4:17

^… God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were.

Translation: He causeth things that don’t exist to suddenly appear!

There's no room in that for evolution. Evolution is something appearing that has mutated from something else; and that's not creation. It’s not arguable. It's unmistakable.

John 1:3

³ All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

There isn't anything that exists that God didn't create.

Genesis 2:2

² And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

Just to make sure you know exactly what He means, each was the kind of day that has an evening and a morning. What kind of day is that? That's basically what we call a solar day. It's just a plain old normal, common, everyday day.

The Bible always speaks of creation as a past event. Evolution speaks of creation as continuing; it's always going on; but that's never how the Bible refers to creation.

Hebrews 4:3,10

^… the works were finished from the foundation of the world. ¹⁰ For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his.

The Bible always views creation as completed and finished. It is a past event. God finished creation, never adding to that original creation. On the seventh day He rested from creation, and He's continued to rest from creation. You say, What's He doing now? Not creation; conservation. He is now conserving it. Then in the Millennial kingdom, restoration; when he restores the earth as we know it and the universe back to its Edenic or near-Edenic character. So you have creation, conservation, restoration. Finally, recreation is the new heaven and the new earth. But creation is a past event; conservation is a present one. Restoration is a future, millennial one, and recreation is the new heaven and the new earth.

Creation is not an ongoing event. Evolution demands continuing transition, even theistic evolutionists who say they believe the Bible have the evolutionary process of necessity going on and going on and going on, and ostensibly bringing new things to life.

Genesis 1:31

³¹ And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

God finished His creation in six days and He said "It's very good." Now what does that mean - nothing was bad. Nothing bad means nothing was inferior, nothing didn't survive, nothing died out like your mums are going to! You know why; there was no sin, so there was no death.

Nothing had been killed in the struggle – “the survival of the fittest.” If creation had involved some evolutionary process, then God would have had to have said only the good made it to the end. He 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. The 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. The Fall came and introduced death, and death introduced the law of thermodynamics, entropy, disintegration and disorder. But at this point none of these bad things existed.

When God made everything, He made everything full grown. The old "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" You want the answer? The chicken, full grown. He created an absolutely and completely full-grown, full-matured creation that was capable then of reproducing itself, sustaining its life, and that's why He said it's very good or complete.

You can ask the question about why God took six days - Why didn't He do it in six minutes or six seconds. The answer is, He took six days because He wanted to establish a pattern.

Exodus 20:9-11

Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: ¹⁰ But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work… ¹¹ For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

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. By the way, don’t let anything derail that in your life, no ball game, no family event, no travel day…make God’s day the priority!

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 no other way to interpret that. No man fairs well who sits in judgment on the Bible. We don’t judge the Bible…the Bible judges us!

Question: When did this happen? Did it happen millions or billions of years ago? Every day their estimate gets longer. You see, they've never seen anything evolve so they have to increase the odds.

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 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 24 hours as the apes.

So what about fossils? What about that dead stuff in the ground? There's no death before the fall of Adam. You can't have billions of years of 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 death did occur. What caused it? It was the universal, worldwide flood. Genesis 6 and 7, we’ll get to it in this study. That's why you find fish fossils and palm branch fossils in the Himalayas.

And it all happened in that one year of the flood as sediment fell and buried things in preservation. If you take the bones of a dead bird today and put them in the backyard, how long will it take before they become a fossil? They'll never become a fossil. They will rot and turn to dust. The ground would have to open up and hold them far beneath for you to have some kind of a fossil. There has to be cataclysm to create that kind of result.

For example, in the terrain surrounding Mount St. Helens, that eruption produced in hours the same dramatic effect that evolutionists would say would take millions of years.

But you can add it up from genealogies. 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. Creationists believe it happened around 4004 BC.

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 Chinese records, the Egyptian records, and they all go back no further than that.

Next, science comes along and asks, what about the speed of light? If God created a star out there, and it's a million light years away, it would take a million years for us to see it. There’s a very good answer to that, and it will take up the Wednesday night message to cover it right. You need to know how to answer that. We don't find anything in science that will legitimately cast doubt on the veracity of this creation in six days, 6,000 or so years ago.

We were made in God's image so He could communicate with us as intelligent, moral, self-aware beings who can come to know our Creator personally so we can worship him and serve him forever. Do you know Him? Do You Know Your Maker?