GENESIS 1. I. “In the beginning, God…” Over the years I have seen several programs on television about adopted persons went on quests to find their natural parents. Sometimes they were successful and sometimes they were not. It seems that no matter how good a life that an adopted person has with their adoptive parents, there remains a burning desire within most adopted people to find out as much as they can about their real biological roots. This is natural. Even if a person is not adopted, but something happens to one or both of their parents, the desire to find out about them remains. My wife’s natural father died when she was about two years old, so she has no memory of him, only pictures. She has often expressed to me how much she wishes she could have known him. I have another friend whose father died when he was only five years old, so my friend only has sketchy memories of his father. He has expressed to me many times that he wished he had known his father better. My own father died when I was sixteen. He was only forty. He and my mother had been divorced for about six years when he died. I never felt like I knew him very well, and I often wish I had. We all have an irresistible drive within us to make sense out of life. Life just seems to make more sense when we know and understand our origins. People may rave about how life has no meaning, but no one is really satisfied with that answer. We need for life to make sense. We need for life to have meaning. A large part of making sense out of life comes from understanding who we are. We also need to know where we came from, and why we are here. Several years ago, my oldest brother purchased a book from an organization that traces family genealogies. This book contains the history of the Bryant families within the United States, and contains a picture of the family Coat of Arms. There is an explanation of all the symbolic elements of the Coat of Arms. The book also explains the ethnic origin of the Bryant name and lineage. I have never been really interested in genealogies, but I did find some of this material to be interesting. To the Israelites, genealogies were very important. Detailed family records were passed down from generation to generation. A person could literally trace their lineage back for hundreds of years. Although I have never had a burning desire to trace my genealogical records, I do think that our society is missing much when we lose sight of our family roots. We need to know and cherish our heritage. We all want and need to know who we are, but even if we can discover our family roots, our need goes deeper than that. We need to know what life is all about. Why do we even exist at all? Where did we come from? How did it all begin? We have a deep- seated need to know and understand our beginnings. As we ponder the questions of our existence, we find that there are two basic answers that have been offered for the question of how we came to be. There are others, but these are the two most commonly known, and some others are just variations of these two common themes: The first answer we should consider is the answer that has been propagated in the public educational system for the past fifty years or so. This is the theory of evolution. This whole idea was popularized through the writings of Charles Darwin in the late 1800’s. The warp and woof of the evolutionary idea is that man, along with other living creatures, has evolved from a very simple to very complex life form over billions and billions of years of genetic mutations or changes. Evolutionary theory has been called science, but the fact is, that it is not science at all. It is wild speculation that cannot be proven. Science rightly defined is: “the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena.” Evolutionary theory cannot be tested, so therefore it is not really science. Evolution cannot be observed. There is absolutely nothing in the earth’s fossil records that indicates one species has evolved into another. Anthropology to date has not produced the skeletal remains of one single transitionary form. The few examples that evolutionists today use to try to prove out evolution do not represent one species evolving into another, they represent slight variations within a given species. Many species of animals exhibit great variation within the species. Take dogs for example. The canine species can range from the Saint Bernard, which can reach sizes in exess of 200 pounds, to the Miniature Poodle which can be small enough to sit in a coffee cup. But dogs have always been dogs. Evolution cannot be experimentally investigated. We cannot conduct evolutionary experiments in a laboratory. The theory cannot be proven. The problem is that it is taught as if it were fact. Throughout the course of my life I have seen many museum exhibits depicting prehistoric man in various stages of the evolutionary process. I have also seen many artists’ renditions of how these prehistoric, sub-humans were supposed to have looked. The problem is that these renditions and reconstructions are about two percent evidence, and ninety eight percent speculation. You have an anthropologist who finds the skull fragment of some kind of primate, and a knee joint from something a half a mile away, and the brilliant “scientists” get together and construct an entire hypothetical man and then write volumes explaining their speculations about his entire lifestyle. So, the evolutionist’s answer to how we came to be is that we evolved from some lower form of primate, who came about by evolving from some even lower life form, who evolved from some even lower form, and on the cycle goes. How did the lowest forms of life come into being? Well, according to one theory, lightning struck mud and the electronic shock so changed the molecular structure of the clay that life began!!! Where did the mud and the lightning come from? From a big explosion in space. Yes, according to the big bang theory, there was a big explosion in space that caused the cosmos to come into being. Order from Chaos! This makes as much sense as setting off a stick of dynamite in a field and thinking this will produce a house. You see, it is not the fact that the whole idea is preposterous, if you throw in the element of huge amounts of time, suddenly it becomes plausible to the evolutionists way of thinking. The evolutionist’s answer is really no answer at all. Even if it could be proven, (which it cannot) that a big explosion in space started the universe, we are still stuck with an endless set of questions; 1.What caused the explosion? 2. Where did the original elements involved in the explosion come from? 3. How does order and beauty evolve from chaos when the law of entropy proves that things left to themselves react in exactly the opposite way? Things deteriorate unless an outside element greater than the things themselves is introduced that alters the pattern of deterioration. The elements of nature, apart from God’s supernatural power, do not get better, they get worse. The second answer given as to the origins of man’s existence is the answer of creationism. The gist of this belief is that a being (or beings, depending on your belief system) greater than man, and greater than the world itself, intentionally made the world and everything in it. Someone may argue that creationism cannot be proven scientifically. I won’t argue that point. But neither can evolution. We cannot prove in the scientific sense that God exists by conducting experiments. Neither can we prove that evolution brought about our existence. Our acceptance of either position, and consequently our rejection of the other, is based on what we choose to believe. It is not a matter of science, it is a matter of faith. Is evolution a faith? Yes it is! It takes more dogmatic determination to stick to a belief in evolution than it does to believe in God, because evolution is so less reasonable. Given the belief in a creator of some kind, many of the world’s religions have explained the creator in a multitude of ways. To the Hindu, the creator or God is a power force that pervades everyone and everything. Everything and everyone is all a part of God. This idea was popularized in the song “I am the Walrus” written by the Beatles on the White Album. The words went something like this: “I am you, and you are me, and we are all together. I am the eggman, you are the eggmen. I am the Walrus.” Hindus also worship many little ‘gods” or avatars, manifestations of god in specific locals and in specific circumstances. To the Hindu, the way to find God is through an inner path of discovery or getting in touch with the god within each of us. Hinduism does not answer the questions of origins, it simply puts the believer into an eternal circle, where there is no beginning and no end. The whole idea of the “eternal circle of life” has been popularized in our time, even in children’s movies, such as “Pocahontas” and “Little Foot.” There is another theory or belief that has become popular, primarily as the result of a book entitled “Chariots of the Gods” that was popular in the 1970’s, that goes something like this: Many years ago extra-terrestrial beings came to earth and mated with primates, creating the human race. They explain the existence of man as a result of spaceman’s bestiality. Where did the love starved spacemen come from? Who knows? Other creation myths exist that seek to explain the earth’s origin. I will not take the time to go into them all, as they are too numerous and bizarre. The belief that I will discuss is the Biblical account of creation contained in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures. This account of Creation is accepted by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all of which are based in part on the Old Testament Canon. “In the Beginning, God…” What does this say to us? Matthew Henry, in his great devotional commentary puts it this way; “Let us learn hence, that atheism is folly, and atheists are the greatest fools in nature; for they see there is a world that could not make itself, and they will not own that there is a God who made it.” Genesis gives us the satisfactory answer to the question of our origins. Our existence has a reason and an order. We were brought into existence by an orderly Creator for a reason. Compare this to the answer provided by the evolutionists, namely that we are the result of billions of years of chance genetic mutations. The evolutionist will argue; “If there is a God, where did He come from?” To that I answer, “If there was a big bang, where did it come from?” These are ultimately questions that no one can answer. It gets back to what I said earlier. Whether you believe in a Creator, or in evolution, your belief is based on a choice in faith, not on facts that can be proven in any scientific sense. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” I am glad that my Creator is greater than me. I am glad that I do not have to act as if I have all the answers. I don’t, and neither does anyone else. It is only foolish pride that stands in man’s way of coming to the knowledge of the truth because he will not admit that he is weak, finite, and cannot figure everything out by his intellect. I am glad that I am not left as an orphan by the forces of blind fate, and uncontrollable nature. I know my family roots. If my ancestors swung from the trees, it was by their necks and not their tails! “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” We see a parallel here with our own lives. Chaos represents the state of an unregenerate, graceless soul. There is disorder, confusion, and every evil work. It is empty of all good. It is dark until God through His grace affects a change. The Creator could have made His work perfect at the first, but by this gradual process, He demonstrates what is, ordinarily, the method of His providence and grace. No matter who you are, or where you are at in life, God gave you your life. Even in a lost state, you owe your existence to God. We are born into this world in a lost state, without the life of God within us. Our lives are formless and empty, covered in darkness. So many people in the world live in such misery and despair. They feel that life has no meaning. They lose hope. Until a person has God in his life, life is empty, chaotic, and covered in darkness. And as in the beginning, the Spirit of God hovers over the darkness and confusion of our lives, waiting to bring order and light. Jesus said, “Here I am, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.” “And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” In 1st John we read these words: “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.” God is light. That means that the original light that God shed on the Creation was not the light of the sun. The sun and the rest of the cosmos was not created until the fourth day. When God said, “Let there be light,” He was defusing the light He contains within Himself onto creation. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” And in II Corinthians, Paul writes these words: “For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made His light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” “And God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness.” Notice that the Scripture never says anything about God creating darkness. And God never said that darkness is good. But He does separate the light from the darkness. Darkness is simply the absence of light, or the absence of God’s presence, just as evil is the absence of goodness. Darkness is not a created thing, it is the absence of God’s created light, and evil is not a created thing, it is good that has been corrupted. The Genesis account of creation goes on to explain how God continued in the creation process: ” And God said, “Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water. “So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning–the second day. And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. 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 sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights–the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning–the fourth day. ” Notice that God created the atmosphere next. Then He created the land and seas. Then He created the vegetation. All of this occurs before the creation of the sun, moon, and cosmos. This contradicts the way this process would be explained by an evolutionist. To the evolutionist, the sun would have to exist first, because plant life needs sunlight to live. But in Genesis, we see that all created life is sustained by God, and is not dependent on other created things apart from His sustaining power. The Genesis account shows us that the earth is the center and focus of God’s creative activity. The rest of the cosmos, the sun, moon, stars, and planets are subservient to God’s purposes for earth. Earth is not some small insignificant populated planet in a sea of billions and billions of other planets that have become inhabited by the blind forces of cosmic chance, as has been depicted by Science Fiction and Hollywood productions. The sun is meant to give light and heat to the earth, the moon is to serve as our night light, and the stars are to mark off the seasons, and aid in navigation, especially on the open seas. Man’s investigation of the cosmos proves to show forth God’s glory and handiwork. That is the only purpose of the observable cosmos This present-day idea that we have about distant galaxies being populated by other intelligent creatures is a fantasy. That is not to say that I do not believe in a celestial order of existence. I believe in the celestial realm, but it is outside of the realm that man can perceive with his physical senses. It is outside of the realm of the observable cosmos. You might say it is another dimension which we, in our current state, are incapable of seeing, unless God enables us to see it, which He sometimes does, but He is in charge of when, and how that veil is lifted. Within this created cosmos, earth is the center of God’s creation, and the cosmos that we can observe with our satellites, manned and unmanned space crafts, and super power telescopes, outside of the earth’s atmosphere, do not contain life as we know it. There is absolutely no scientific evidence to prove that life exists anywhere within the observable cosmos other than on planet earth. As with evolution, our societies current belief in UFO’s, extraterrestrials, etc., is total speculation and there is not a shred of evidence to indicate any other life exists in the observable cosmos other that what exists on this planet. The next thing that we learn from the Genesis account of Creation is that God created all living things after their own kind: “And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky. So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth. And there was evening, and there was morning–the fifth day. And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.” All of the varied and intricate life forms that are in existence on planet earth, all the way from the creatures at the bottom of the sea, to the birds of the air, to the land dwelling animals, to the millions of species of insects, God created them all individually, and they reproduce after their own kind. Some animals have become extinct over the years, but no one species ever evolved into another species. Birds have always been birds, they did not evolve from lizards, etc. The next thing that we learn from the Genesis account of creation is the most exciting of all: “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground–everything that has the breath of life in it–I give every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning–the sixth day. ” This gives our lives meaning and purpose. We are the handiwork of a loving and creative God who fashioned us to be like Himself. He put us in charge of His creation. This is what gives life meaning and purpose. We are not the result of the blind forces of chance. We are not trapped in some frustrated cycle of death and rebirth, in the cycle of reincarnation. We are not eventually absorbed into some cosmic sea of nothingness. God created each of us as individuals, with an eternal, individual spirit that will live forever, either in HIS glorious presence, or in the blackness and despair of outer darkness that is life outside of His presence. I have heard many people make the statement, “If there is really a God, why does He allow suffering in the world? Why doesn’t He do something about the mess that the world is in?” The answer to this question is found here in this passage from Genesis. Man was made in the image of God, and God put man in charge of His creation. Man chose to disobey the command of God and go his own way. Because of this, we have made a great mess out of the world. It is not God’s fault that the world is in the mess that it is in, it is ours. But God has done something about it. He has sent His Son, Jesus Christ into the world to be the sacrifice for our sins, and show us the way back to restored fellowship with God. This is the answer for our questions about our beginnings and the reason and purpose for our lives. If anyone prefers to believe some crazy theory about a big explosion in space creating an orderly solar system, where on one particular planet, lightning struck mud causing primitive life to start that eventually evolved into human beings, that is their prerogative. Being a fool is anyone’s prerogative, I suppose.
Danny's Stump 