Post by Les Brewer on Sept 15, 2017 20:53:28 GMT
Creation Day 4 - Genesis 1:14-19
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Thank you for being here tonight and continuing with us in our study of Genesis chapter 1. Let’s open our Bibles to Genesis chapter 1. We come now to day four in Creation. Day four. It is described in Genesis 1:14 through 19. Let me read that portion of scripture for you. Genesis 1 verse 14, “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 for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. And it was so. And God made the two great lights. The greater light to govern the day and lesser light to govern the night. He made the stars also. And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. And to govern the day and 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 on the fourth day.”
So does the Bible describe the creation of all the luminaries? The stellar bodies that occupy the vast endless space around us. Evolution has struggled incessantly to explain all the bodies that exist in the universe, how they could have evolved out of spontaneous generation. All the trips to the moon, all the satellites sent into space. All of the orbiting paraphernalia have given absolutely no insight into how the universe, the bodies in the universe could have possibly evolved. And that’s understandable since they didn’t.
Here in chapter 1 verses 14 to 19. It simply says, God made them all. When you stop to think about that, it’s so mind boggling I hardly know how to approach it. I guess maybe the best way to approach it is sort of from a personal level. When it says that God made the stars along with the sun and the moon, it is saying something about his immense power. That simple, simple statement almost like an addendum at the end of verse 16, which in the Hebrew literally says, “The stars also.” He just, as if he threw them in. It’s so staggering as to be almost, if not beyond, comprehension. As you learned once as a schoolchild, light travels at 186,000 miles a second, that computes to six trillion miles in a year. That’s how far light goes in a year, six trillion miles. Now, let’s just stop and think about the power of God, if he created all of the stellar bodies, all of the stars by considering a beam of light moving at 186,000 miles a second or six trillion miles a year and let’s begin this morning, Sunday morning, when your alarm clock went off at 6:00 a.m. By the time you really got out of bed, let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and say 6:08 a.m. that light beam was passing the earth and heading out toward the edge of the solar system. As you sat down to your morning coffee at 6:41 a.m., the light beam passed Jupiter. And when I got up to preach at the second service, at about 11:12 a.m. if Clayton stays within his time limit, about that time, out little light beam was passing Pluto.
Now, let’s look ahead at the end of the week. As you leave work on Friday afternoon, that little beam of light will be leaving our solar system. Now you don’t have to think about that little light again till you go to vote for the president in November in the year 2003, and after all this waiting, this beam of light has only reached the nearest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri, which is actually a conflux of several stars. Go on to the year 2010 and our little light beam has only 20 stars behind it and our sun appears as a rather bland yellowish star disappearing into galactic darkness. Imagine this little beam of light has been heading now into the constellation Sagittarius. On this path, it will be headed for the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. It has to travel 32,000 years before it will reach the center of our galaxy, that’s at six trillion miles a year. But wait, it still has another 50,000 years to get to the other side of the Milky Way, which is our galaxy and when it does, it will leave behind about 100 billion stars. Now remember, that the Milky Way Galaxy is only an average sized galaxy and that as far as we know, there are at least 50 billion galaxies in the known universe. Much of this has been determined by the use of the Hubble Telescopic Cameras.
Now, our little light beam has to travel another 80,000 years at it’s six trillion miles per year pace to reach the Magellanic Clouds which is the closest galaxy or series of galaxies to our Milky Way, we are now, having left this morning 160,000 years into the future. And our light beam still moving of the same speed of 186,000 a second faces 1.8 million years of empty space before it reaches the end of the Andromeda Galaxy, which is close enough to earth to be seen with the naked eye.
Looking back from there at the Milky Way you would see a fuzzy elliptical patch, similar to what Andromeda looks like to us on a fall evening, by the way, as a footnote, most of the stars you see are not actually stars, but are rather multiple star systems revolving around a center mass. Now if our little light beam travels a couple more millions of years, it will encounter really open space. Our little friend will now travel another 20 billion years before it reaches the edge of the known universe that we know about. After over 20 billion ears of travel, with about 50 billion galaxies behind it with about 100 billion stars in those 50 billion galaxies. Psalm 8:3 says, our little light beam has only seen the work of God’s fingers. Whereas Job put it in Job 26:14, “Behold, these are the fringes of his ways and how faint a word we hear of him.” Pretty staggering stuff.
Genesis explains all of that by saying this, he made the stars. Now if that’s only the work of his fingers, what could his arm do? The question is often asked, how can such distant light reach the earth so fast in a six-day creation? If it takes our little light beam hundreds of thousands of years to get out there, doesn’t it take hundreds of thousands of years for a light from those far away stars, doesn’t it take hundreds of thousands of years for the light to reach us? Well, first of all, you can file this somewhere. God could not only make the stars out there, make us here, but he could make all the light in between instantaneously. It is also true that light already existed, it was created on day one according to verse 3 of Genesis. And so, all he had to do was put it where he wanted it.
But I really do lean, after continuing to read on the subject to the fact that as one scientist put it, at the time of creation the speed of light was possibly 10 billion times faster than it is now. Some scientists have been working to demonstrate that because of the effect of the fall the speed of light is slower now than it’s ever been and it’s getting slower all along. And if you push it back six or seven thousand years ago, it would be ten billion times faster.
And when you stop to think about this, there are only two ways to understand the origin of the complex solar system. And I’m not even going to get into the complexities of it. And you get into binary stars, stars that literally orbit each other, star systems that revolve around a solid center mass. When you get into massive galaxies, when you get into all the complexities of these things, it is absolutely staggering. In fact, there is nothing about these stars, these galaxies, there is nothing about them that is common to all of them.
They are like fingerprints. They are like human beings, every star, every set of stars. Every set of binary stars, every one of these little galaxies and solar systems has the fingerprint of God upon it unlike any other. George Wald, who was formerly of Harvard and winner of the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine acknowledged the dilemma. He said, and I quote, this is from the Scientific American Journal, quote George Wald, “The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation. The only alternative was to believe in a single primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position.” He’s right. Either you believe in spontaneous generation that once there was none of this and then spontaneously it just came into existence on its own or you believe in supernatural creation. He is right, there is no alternative. Wald, with no rationale given, went on to state his view. “One has to contemplate,” he says, “the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet, here we are, as a result, I believe of spontaneous generation.” End quote. He would say that entire universe billions upon billions of galaxies is the product of irrational random spontaneous generation, something coming into existence out of nothing.
The theory that the entire universe and all that is in it is a result of some random spontaneous process that spontaneously generated cells and spontaneously generated gases allied themselves upward into increasingly complexity over billions of years to sell create the universe. As I have been saying all along, and as science must attest, evolution is not possible. It is impossible. Any kind of spontaneous generation is impossible. Any kind of upward complexity from simplicity is by chance impossible. Evolution has never been observed. Evolution has never been proven because it’s impossible. And there is compelling, conclusive, unarguable evidence of a vast amount in every field of science to prove the utter and total impossibility of evolution making all belief in evolution irrational and erroneous. I have been exposed, in this particular study, to much more than I’m telling you about. I find myself reading and reading and reading and then just pulling out little pieces that I bring to you. But I’m being exposed to every field of science, which in the past, I wasn’t necessarily exposed too and the more and more I read, the more vast becomes the wealth of information that demonstrates beyond argument how impossible evolution is and how clearly what exits has to be the result of a supernatural mind and a supernatural act of creation.
For a moment, for example, let’s bring it down to a smaller level. We go from the vastness of this amazing and immense universe to the minutest complexity of life. Deoxyribonucleic Acid, DNA. This is the material that we have been talking about in the past that carries the life code for the function of every organism, DNA. Now let me just tell you a little bit about DNA. DNA exists in every single cell. Did you get that, every single cell. Now just to make that come right down to where you are, just take a look at your body. You have 100 or so trillion cells. Every one of those cells has a little strip, an actual material, physical strip of DNA. It is a copy of coded information and it’s coiled up, it’s in a coil in every single cell in every living organism including you. Now, you have 46 segments in that little coil. Twenty-three of those came from your father and 23 of those came from your mother to make the 46. The combination then of your father’s and your mother’s DNA and giving you 23 of each made the 46 the uniquely formed to determine what you look like, much of your personalities and abilities and precisely and explicitly that little coil determines exactly how every single cell in your body is to function throughout your entire life.
That little cell operates off that little coil and the code on that coil. Now, let’s get a little wild here. If the 46 segments of DNA in one of your cells and every one of your cells has the same 46 little DNA components, let’s just uncoil them. If we just took one little cell and got the little coiled DNA strip it would be 7 feet long. It would be really thin. It would be so think I am told we couldn’t see it under an electron microscope, but if it were stretched out, it would be 7 feet long. That’s in every one of you 100 trillion cells. It would be so think that the details of it couldn’t be seen.
However, listen to this, if all the DNA in your body, let’s just take all of it and stretch it out and connect it together, it would stretch from here to the moon one-half million times. Pretty incredible you are, huh? If all this very densely coded information were placed in type written form, if it was just typed out in you, just for you, it would fill the Grand Canyon 50 times. That’s how fearfully and wonderfully you are made, Psalm 139:4 says. So, if you want numbers, I give you numbers.
You can go to the farthest most vast complexity of the universe or you can look into the smallest complexity of the cells within the human body. And all you are going to see is the hand of an intelligent and powerful creator. Now let’s take something in between. We have been real big and real small. Let’s take something not so big and not so small, your brain.
I’m not going to get personal about what size you might have, but let’s talk about your brain. There are so many things I could say about the brain. The study of the brain is truly an amazing, amazing study. Your brain has about 100,000 billion electrical connections. Did you get that? 100,000 billion of them, 10 to the 14th power. In fact, your brain has more electrical connections than all the electrical appliances on the face of the earth, yet your brain with its 100,000 billion electrical connections fits in a quart jar and operates for 70 years on 10 watts of power fueled largely by cheeseburgers and French Fries. To be an evolutionists is the height of stupidity, is it not? Well enough about your brain lest we get more personal. The only reasonable view is that the universe was created by God. More powerful, more complex, and more intelligent than we could ever, ever imagine. But we don’t have to imagine. We don’t have to wonder how he did it, because he told us how he did it. We have the account.
I read source after source after source after source of evolutionary scientists trying to explain how the universe evolved into existence. It’s useless and hopeless. We don’t need that explanation. In six days, God made it and in one day, he filled the universe with all the stars, suns, and moons. Now, let’s go back to the text.
The creation is introduced in verse 1 with an overview statement, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” That’s the summary statement and as I told you weeks ago, in that statement you have everything that is notable categorized. Herbert Spencer died in 1903. He said that all that’s knowable in the universe can be summed up in five categories, time, force, action, space, and matter.
Everything that exists can fit into that. That’s exactly what it says in the first verse of the Bible. That’s time, God, that’s force, created, that’s action, the heavens, that’s space, the earth, that’s matter. That’s all in that verse. What it’s saying in verse 1 is simply the overview, God made the heavens and the earth, as we know them now. Then starting in verse 2 it begins to describe how he did that. He did that in a six-day process. That process is described from chapter 1 verse 2 down to chapter 2 verse 3 an that’s the section we are looking at in Genesis. This is then the generations of the heavens and the earth. The creation of the heavens and the earth, the story of the heavens and the earth being created. Day one, on day one God made the material. On day one we could say on day one, we created the space, the time, and the matter, on day one, he created a universe that was unformed and uninhabitable and then created light as it indicates to us in verses 2 through 5. “There was darkness over the surface of the deep that covered the earth. The spirit of God was hovering there. God said, Let there be light. And there was light. God separated the light from the darkness.” So on day one, he created the material out of which the final shape of the heaven and the earth would be made. And he created light.
On day two, he separated the waters that covered the surface of the earth and took some waters above and left some below on the earth, versus 6 through 8 talk about that and in the middle he created the expanse that we know as heaven. He called verse 8 the expanse, heaven. He left some water on earth. He sent some water above to exactly where we don’t know, but whatever point that water went too in the middle is the heaven of heavens, which is the place of all of the stellar bodies, the luminaries which he created on day four. Then on day three, we noted in verses 9 to 13, he separated the dry land from the water on the earth creating then seas and land and then, two kinds of growing things, trees which produce fruit that has seed and plants which have their seed in themselves.
So day one, the material to shape his universe into its final form and light. Day two, he creates the expanse of heaven between the waters above and the waters below. Day three he separates the dry land from the water, which he gathers into seas and creates the trees and the plants. That brings us to day four. Now we go back from the earth into heaven and he populates this vast expanse of heaven with the luminaries.
That corresponds to day one. On day one he created light, on day four, he created the lights that become the means by which light is transmitted. He attaches the light to stellar bodies. On day two, he created the water below and kind of matching up with that on day five he created the fish for that water. On day two, he also created the heavens above and on day five, he created the birds to fly in that heaven. On day three, he created the land and the plants and trees and on day six, paralleling that, he created man and land animals who would live on those plants and live on the dry land. So there is a wonderful parallel. Day one light, and then the parallel day four, that being the lights, day two, the water in the heavens and day five, the fish for the water, the birds for the heaven. Day three, the dry land and the plants, and say six paralleling that, man and the animals.
So there are six days of creation that are wonderfully balanced. There is a parallelism there as we noted. We come then to day four. In day four, as verse 14 days, God created lights. Go back to verse 3 and you’ll read then, “God said, let there be light.” Then look at verse 14, “Then God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens.” Now I want to remind you again what is so very important to keep stating. All of this flow of creation is introduced with this little phrase, then God said. Verse 3, verse 6, verse 11, verse 14, verse 20, verse 24, verse 26 and verse 29, always the mode of creation always the means of creation, then God said.
That is to say, there is no process. There is no time. Time adds nothing to this, millions of years, billions of years, thousands of years add nothing to this. This is not some process that God initiated, this is something that God completed. God simply said it and it came into existence. I said long ago in the study, there is nothing in the text, there is nothing exegetical that leads to any other conclusion than what we have always called divine fiat creation. He literally speaks it into existence. I read you this morning, Psalm 33, I read it again, verses 6 to 9, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made and by the breath of his mouth, all their hosts,” that is all the stars, moons, suns, comets and everything else that is there. It was all made because God spoke it into existence. Verse 9, he spoke and it was done. He commanded and it stood fast. In other words, it didn’t change. It didn’t alter. It didn’t develop. It didn’t wane. He spoke it into existence. And that’s the way it stayed, exactly the way he spoke it into existence. The moon, the sun, the stars, the galaxies, the billions upon billions of galaxies, everything that is in space, all the material that is there, all the gases that are there, all the atoms that are there. Everything that is there is there exactly the way it was when God made it.
And the complexity of it literally staggers me. You look up and you think stars are in the same place all the time. They are moving so relatively slowly to the viewpoint of earth that they appear to be in the same place all the time. We can actually chart our courses by them, because they don’t appear to be moving, but the fact is, they are moving. Our own sun is taking our entire solar system and dragging it from one end of the universe to the other in an orbit that is huge, in fact, the whole Milky Way Galaxy is in an orbit that scientists calculate take 225 million years to complete. And everything else is in corresponding orbits. The whole thing is incredible. And it all is doing now exactly what God designed it to do and created it to do in a simple word.
“Then God said, let there be…and there was.” That’s it. Let there be lights, verse 14. Let there be lights, often called luminaries. And the lights were to divide back in verse 4, light was to divide. God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, the darkness he called night. There was evening, there was morning one day. So at the very outset when he created light, before there was a moon, before there were stars, before there was sun, there was light. It wasn’t attached to any of those celestial bodies, but there was light. God created light, light is not created by stars. Light is not created by the sun. Light is simply created by God and attached to those luminaries.
God said, let there be lights. And lights, luminaries, celestial bodies, shining were to dived verse 18 says to separate the light from the darkness, just the same purpose that the original creation of light had intended to accomplish, so we have the creation of light in verse 1. Which identifies day and night and the evening and the morning and the first solar day, 24 hour day and it’s now that same light for that same purpose, attached to these heavenly bodies, the sun, the moon and the stars that are identified down in verse 16.
Now, notice again down in verse 14, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens. So we know that when God created the lights, they were to be placed into this expanse that is in the waters below and the waters above, wherever those waters went, the heaven of heavens is between them.
Now the creation of light on day four does produce an important issue because light was already shining and I want to make sure you are clear on it. People always say, well, you can’t have light shining all over the place without any stars, without any sun, without any moon, because the light we know comes from those sources. And they say, if there wasn’t any sun, there couldn’t be any plants on day three, how could God created plants on day three and a sun on day four? Because photosynthesis which is critical to the life of plants doesn’t exist apart from the sun, and so, this doesn’t make any sense and critics depreciate the text of scripture on that basis.
But this is really silly. This is trivial. There was light already on day one. And where there is light there is heat. And where there is light and heat there is photosynthesis. The requisite conditions for plant life to survive on day three were already in existence because light was already there doing what light always does.
It just hadn’t been specifically attached to these stellar bodies. It is evident to all of us, should be evident that stars and the sun are not the creators of light. God is the creator of light. He happens to use them as radiating bearers of light that was already there before them and without them. So, God took the light he already created and attached it to the luminaries he made on day four.
By the way, I thought this was interesting. John Calvin the great reformer wrote in his commentary on Genesis this brief statement. The only difference is this that the light was before dispersed, but now proceeds from lucid bodies, which in serving this purpose, obeyed the command of God. Long before any space travel, John Calvin knew the text of scripture, had it right, light existed and it was at this point, simply connected to these bodies.
Now, follow along because this is very important as we look at the text. This account of the creation of the lights, defines their purpose on three functions, three functions. They are very clear. Number one function, verse 14, to separate the day from the night. Let there be light in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And each of these three functions is introduced by the phrase, let there be or let them. The first function to separate the day from the night, so we can say, if you are making a little outline, the first function of these was to separate, to separate.
Now in order to separate one thing from another, in order to mark a distinction between two things, those two things must already be in existence. Darkness already was in existence, we know that back in verse 1. Light came into existence also on day one, so it was already in existence. This affirms that day existed without the sun, and night existed without the moon and without the stars. Again, the sun is not the cause of daylight because there had already been three periods of daylight and three periods of dark before day four.
But God created these bearers of light and gave to them the task of separation and now, from our standpoint, it is the sun that brings us the light. In the day, it is the sun that brings us the light, at night, along with the stars. The first purpose then of these luminaries was to separate the day from the night, or to create a day as we know it, a 24-hour day. The second thing was to dominate, first to separate, secondly to dominate.
Follow in the text, and it says in verse 14, “And let them,” there is that let them again indicating a second category. “Let them be for signs.” What kind of signs? “For seasons and for days and years.” Now, the verb here, let them be, means let them serve. God gave these luminous bodies to serve. Let them be as signs, used in its normal connotation as a sign to the inhabitants of the earth. And what were they signs of? Well, it tells you there, they were signs pointing to seasons and days and years. That is to say, these stellar bodies would divide the year into seasons and they would divide the year, they would divide time, I should say, into seasons and into days and years. So you have seasonal times as well as calendar times.
And that’s true. That is true. It is the moon, as you well, know, that determines the month and in the course of the movement of the moon through it’s somewhat odd orbit, it also generates the seasons, the sun does the same. Because the earth is tilted on its axis, it causes the sun to be at varying distances from its surface at different points on the globe at different times of the year, which produces the seasons which are critical for the rejuvenation of life and the growing of crops and the flourishing of the earth and the blessing of mankind. God designed the sun and the moon to function in determining seasons. God also designed, in particular the sun to serve in the matter, and the moon to serve in the matter of days. Because a 24 hour day is simply determined by the fact that that’s the cycle from sunset to sunset or sunrise to sunrise, morning and evening. One period of time where the sun is shining and one period of time where the night is lit by the moon and stars.
So God in determining the orbit of the sun, or of the earth around the sun and the orbit of the moon around the earth, determined a day. A day then is determined by the earth’s rotation around its axis, one 24-hour period is the time of the earth’s rotation. But it is also true that the sun is a determiner of years. Because it takes one full year for the rotating earth, each rotation meaning a day to continue its orbit all the way around the sun. That’s a 365 day time period. So God created the sun and it dominates in the sense that it dominates life on the earth.
It is the agency by which our time in light and dark is determined. It is the agency, along with the moon by which seasons are determined. It is the agency by which the calendar year is determined. Therefore, it is the celestial bodies that dominate our life. They dictate to us when we work and when we rest. When we are awake and when we sleep. When we eat and when we don’t. By the way, an interesting footnote, it is the rotation of the earth on its axis that determined the 24-hour day. It is the rotation of the earths, or the moon’s orbit around the earth that determines the month. And it is the earth’s rotation around the sun that determines the year.
Did you ever ask yourself what determines a week? There is nothing in the celestial bodies that determines a week, yet universally, across the face of the earth, mankind lives by weeks. Where do you think they got that? Out of Genesis chapter 1. That was the period of time in which God created the universe. So days and years are respectively the shortest and longest measures of time definitely fixed by the movement of the sun and also involving the moon and its monthly movements, and of course, within the framework within these days and years, the moon and the sun also affect the seasons.
So, secondly, first of all, these luminous bodies were given to separate and secondly to dominate. They literally dominate our lives. Now, some have suggested that when he says signs here he might mean something else, well, I’m glad you suggested that, it just doesn’t say that in the bible and I would rather just kind of stick with what God wrote here. People say, well, you know, this could refer to land and see navigation by the stars. You know, we line up instruments with the North Star and so forth, and some have even suggested that this could be a veiled reference to the star of Bethlehem, which was assigned to the wise men.
Some really get carried away and see in the stars some astrological signs. Wow, our culture is really drowning in that bunk, that there is some kind of zodiac out there and these stars are actually deities or forces or powers that give out messages that have great impact on people’s lives. That is pagan, it is ungodly, it is unbiblical. It is pseudoscience. It is ridiculous at best, it is demonic at worst. And some Christian teachers have even come along and they have said, they are for signs.
And they say there is the gospel preached up there in the constellations. That is a contrived and biblically unacceptable concoction. Genesis tells us what the signs were. They were signs to indicate seasons and days and years. And in that way, they dominate our life. They control human life. They control human enterprise.
Thirdly, first to separate, second to dominate, thirdly to elucidate or illuminate. Illuminate might be a better word there. It says in verse 15 again, introducing the third category with the same phrase and let them be for lights, in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. Just to provide light to illuminate, to separate, to dominate and to illuminate. And I love this, and it was so. Boy is that an understatement.
I mentioned a couple weeks ago the big bang which of course is a preposterous theory of evolutionists, but somewhat facetiously, I said there was at once one big bang. It wasn’t the kind of big bang, gaseous, cellular explosion that evolutionists talk about, but they have to admit that there seems to have been some rapid explosive almost propelling of the universe outward to it’s vastness at some point. And while we reject the Big Bang Theory, there certainly was a big something when God simply spoke a universe of stellar bodies into existence and instantaneously, they came into existence. It was so.
And remember that little phrase that’s used in verse 7, it was so. Verse 9, it was so, verse 11, it was so. And it’s a technical phrase and it means, it was made permanent. It means that creation, there was a firm and fixed and established condition. This is the testimony and I have mentioned it a couple of times, when Umberto Cassuto who was not a Christian, who is a Jewish writer, who writing from a Jewish understanding from the book of Genesis is so helpful. I have found his commentary more helpful than any that I have read. And he really comes to grips with the Hebrew understanding of the text and he simply says repeatedly this little phrase indicates that it was so and remains so through all the life of the universe. It’s a way of saying something was fixed. And again, it militates against this idea of progressive creationism. That God made something that started some evolutionary process. He made it, he fixed it. It was firm. It was established. Exactly what I read earlier from Psalm 33 and verse 9.
Now as similar in the other description of creation days, the work is now repeated and further defined. Look at verse 16. And God made the two great lights. He’s now defining these lights, the two great lights. The greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He made the stars also. Again, beloved, I remind you, the statement is and God made. An unmistakable affirmation of divine creation, not a prolonged process. And he made the two great lights. The two great lights. The two great lights, being those lights, which dominate our life, the sun and the moon.
Psalm 8:3, the psalmist says, “When I consider thy heavens. The work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which those hast ordained, what is man that though does take thought of him?” God is the creator. God is the maker. Psalm 136 verses 5 to 9, praises God with these words, “To him who made the heavens with skill. To him who spread out the earth above the waters, meaning separating the land from the sea. To him who made the great lights, the very same terms used in Psalm 136, the sun to rule by day and the moon and starts to rule by night.” There Psalm 136 versus 5 to 9 affirming God’s creation of the two great lights. The greater light to govern the day, the lesser light to govern the night, along with the stars also.
Now let’s just look at the greater light to govern the day, that’s the sun, that’s the sun, literally, to rule over the day. And that’s what the sun does. Down in verse 18, to govern the day, that’s the sun’s function. And by the way, when it says this, we want to stop right here. We are not talking about anything that’s a persona here, that ancient tribes have worshiped the sun god, the Egyptians worship Ra, the sun god. They worship the god and goddess of the moon.
The bizarre pagan idolatrous ideas that somehow the sun, the moon, and the stars are literal rulers. They are deities that govern the life of men. That’s not what’s intended here. Ancient Babylonian accounts make the sun and the moon and the stars into gods endowing them with personality and intellect and will. And strangely enough, some of the rabbi’s even picked up on some of this stuff. There are rabbinic myths influenced by such paganism, which make the luminaries into persons. Who somehow communicate with their creator so that some of the Jews actually got involved in worshiping the sun and the moon and if you read Ezekiel chapter 8 you will find an illustration there. Israelites, in the temple of God worshiping the sun. All such idolatry, all such myth is excluded by the Old Testament. They are simply material creation.
Luminous creation in the heavens who rule only in the sense that they are situated above the earth and they control its nights and they control its days and thus they control its life patterns. As I said before, they dominate. The sun being the most dominate governing the day. The lesser light, verse 16 would be the moon and it governs the night in the same way the sun governs the day. Its function is to cast its light over the night. It is therefore dictating to us life in the darkness. He made the stars also.
That’s just so staggering. He made the stars also. That’s it, what else can be said, the economy of words here is staggering. Twenty, you don’t want to know this, $20 billion has been spent on exploring the moon, $20 billion. And one of the things they have been trying to figure out is how the moon evolved. That’s right. That’s been one of the major enterprises in moon exploration. So far, $20 billion has been spent in moon exploration, they have no information about how the moon evolved because it didn’t. Evolution is clueless. It can’t even explain how the moon evolved. How is it going to explain how or solar system evolved and how is it going to explain how the Milky Way Galaxy evolved along with everything else. One theory says that planets formed when a star, where did that star come from, by the way? Passing by the sun, by its magnetic field the star was kind of just passing along by the sun. Where the sun came from, they don’t say, where the star came from, they don’t say and how they developed orbits, they don’t say but the star went by the sun and its magnetic field tore matter off the sun.
And that matter started doing whatever matter does to turn itself into a solar system. The more popular theory is that our solar system formed from a cloud of swirling gas, dust, and particles. They don’t say where the gas, dust, and particles came from. And if that is true. If it all sort of came together, the planets and their 63 known moons. In our solar system, our planets have a total of 63 moons that we know about. Then the planets in our solar system and the 63 moons must have evolved from the same material, so we can assume that they would have common material and similarities, right? If they all came from the same stuff. Well, they don’t. They show the fingerprint of a creator. Since, listen to this one, about 98 percent of the sun is hydrogen or helium, if in fact our solar system was created somehow by matter that tore off the sun, Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury, should have similar composition.
Instead, 98 percent of the sun is hydrogen and helium, but less than 1 percent of these planets is hydrogen and helium. There are no natural processes that could form stars, which burn fuel hundreds of thousands of times more rapidly than our sun burns it. There are no explanations for how galaxies could come into being with their billions times billions of stars.
And that’s why it’s so compelling to see in verse 16 that God made it all. He made it all. In his inimitable fresh and insightful manner, C.S. Lewis took the discussion of the solar system, evolution to its logical end. I quote from C.S. Lewis, “If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident and the whole evolution of man was also an accident. If so, then all our present thoughts are accidents. The accidental byproduct of the movement of atoms. This holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for everybody else. But if their though are merely accidents, why should we believe any of them?
I see no reason,” says C.S. Lewis, “that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents.” And Lewis goes on writing in his book on miracles. That was from God and the Doc. This is from Miracles. He says, “Each particular thought is valueless if it is the result of irrational causes. Obviously then, the whole process of human thought, what we call reason is equally valueless if it is the result of irrational causes, hence every theory of the universe which makes the human mind a result of irrational causes is inadmissible, for it would be a proof that there are no such things as proofs, which is nonsense. But evolution it’s commonly held and is precisely a theory of this sort.”
Boy, I mean, he could really do a number on them, couldn’t he? And you look at the universe from a scientific standpoint and what you find is not something you find that’s evolved over billions of years, but something very young. There is lack of evidence that the sun and the other stars, for example, derived their energy from nuclear fusion. Evolutionists say it’s some kind of evolution of nuclear fusion.
Fusion reactions in the sun should produce subatomic particles known as neutrinos. In the 1960s, Raymond Davis conducted an experiment designed to detect them. So few neutrinos were detected that Davis said, of those that were, we do not regard this result as a measurement of the solar neutrino flux, because of uncertainties in various background effects. Bottom line, they said if nuclear fusion is creating these, the sun and the stars then we’ll find neutrinos, they looked. They found none.
It has recently been discovered that the sun is oscillating. By studying the nature of these oscillations, scientists gain knowledge of the sun’s interior, just as the study of seismic waves tells us about the earth’s interior. Those studies show that the sun’s central temperature is too low to produce nuclear fusion. Calculations have also shown that if the sun formed by the contraction of a gas cloud, as stellar evolution postulates, its central temperature would never reach the point where nuclear burning could even begin.
Just can’t explain it. Where does the sun get its energy? They have no idea. But by observing, this is interesting, that the sun is contracting or shrinking, they are now proposing a very young age for the sun, says one writer, at most, thousands of years ago. Not only does the sun demonstrate a young universe but the moon. The speed at which the moon is receding from the earth, it’s going away. We know how fast it’s going away. If the earth and moon are 4.5 billion years old, the moon should be out of sight long ago. And so it goes.
The only explanation for the solar system, let’s go back to verse 16. And God made the two great lights. The greater light to govern the day, the lesser light to govern the night. He made the stars also. And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth and here he goes through the same three purposes to separate and to dominate and to elucidate only in reverse order.
To give light on the earth, that’s to elucidate, or to illuminate, to govern the earth, the day and night, that’s to dominant, and thirdly, to separate the light from the darkness. The only explanation is that God made it all. The psalmist had it right, the heavens declare what, the glory of God and the firmament shows his handy work. There isn’t any other explanation. None at all. And then it says, “And God,” verse 18, “saw that it was good.” What does he mean by that?
I told you what that phrase means, it’s used in verse 10, after the dry land and the sea were separated. Used in verse 12, after the trees and the plants. Used again here. It means it was ready for habitation. It was good. It was ready for habitation. Finally got to that point, ready for habitation. That’s why on day five he starts to create the swarms of living creatures and birds and sea creatures and then the next day, the animals and man.
Ready for habitation. It was good, no death, so there can’t be any mutations. There can’t be any natural selection because nothing dies. There is no death, there is no defect, there is no mutation, no evolution is possible. Death doesn’t even come till Genesis 3. It was all good, just the way he made it. Six or seven thousand years ago. And I love how it always signs off as in verse 19, “And there was evening and there was morning the fourth day.” Just in case somebody might not get it, this all happened, in a 24 hour period. Verse 5, day one, there was evening there was morning, one day. Verse 8, there was evening, there was morning, a second day. Verse 13, there was evening, there was morning, a third day. We just read verse 19, verse 23, the same thing, there was evening, there was morning a fifth day. Verse 31, there was evening, there was morning, the sixth day. And then chapter 2 verse 1, thus the heaven and the earth were completed all their host and by the seventh day, God completed his work and he rested on the seventh day.
Hmm, thus did God create. I want to close taking you back to Psalm 8. Turn to Psalm 8 and we’ll just finish there. Psalm 8, “Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth. Who has displayed thy splendor above the heavens?” And he’s looking at the microcosm, looking way out, seeing the glory of God and the vastness of heavenly creation and then he looks at the smallest, “from the mouths of infants and nursing babes though has established strength, because of thine adversaries to make the enemy and the revengeful cease. When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which those hast ordained, what is man?” And you can be sure in the day of the psalmist they probably didn’t know as much as we know about what’s out there. But it still staggered him that God who created the universe cared about him.
“What is man that thou dost take thought of him and the son of man that though dost care for him.” He’s referring to humanity there. “Yet thou has made him a little lower than God. And crowned him with glory and majesty.” We are the pinnacle of the divine creation. “Thou didst make him to rule over the works of thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet. All sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea and whatever passes through the paths of the sea. Oh Lord, our Lord how majestic is thy name in all the earth.”
You see that was really what God was after in creation. God gave us the account of creation so we would praise him such as is done in Psalm 8, right? And what does the evolutionist do? The evolutionist robs God of his what? His glory. He robs God of his majesty. He ought to be falling on his face, oh Lord, our Lord how majestic is thy name in all the earth. And wonder of wonders, you care about us. You care enough to love us, to send a savior to forgive our sins and to bring us to eternal glory. Oh, Lord our Lord. He begins the same as he ends, how majestic is they name in all the earth. That’s the right response to Genesis 1.
Not to question it, not to argue it. Not to debate it. Not to turn science into some hermeneutic to try to explain it away. But to fall on your face and to cry with the Psalmist how majestic is your name, oh Lord, our Lord and what an incredible and wondrous thing it is that the God of the universe cares about me. Cares about me, boy, he knows you. You are fearfully and wonderfully made. He understands the 500,000 trips to the moon that your DNA all stuck together would make. He understands all the coil codes in every one of the multiple trillions of cells in your body.
He understands everything about you. There is as much glory in the immensity and the complexity of the creation of your body as there is in the complexity and the creation of the universe. Everywhere you look, you see his majesty on display, anything less than a life of worship is an affront to God punishable by an eternity in hell, is it not?
Father, we thank you for the clarity of this account, the power of it, the insight of it. We are just overwhelmed again, as we look out at the creation and see what your hand has made. And not only to be in awe of your creative power, whether we look at the most minute part of living organisms or the vastness of endless space, but to be overwhelmed that you care about us and about our eternity when we have hated you and rebelled and sinned and disobeyed and yet you love us and forgive us and sent your son to die for us. Bless you. We praise you.
Indeed, we say with the psalmist, Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name. We thank you that you have created us in your own image and created us to have eternal fellowship with you and made that possible through Jesus Christ to whom belongs the praise and the glory, in whose name we pray, and every one said, Amen.
For those who have not embraced Christ, may Your Spirit give them life even now, may the Father draw them to Himself. These things we ask for your glory. Amen.
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Thank you for being here tonight and continuing with us in our study of Genesis chapter 1. Let’s open our Bibles to Genesis chapter 1. We come now to day four in Creation. Day four. It is described in Genesis 1:14 through 19. Let me read that portion of scripture for you. Genesis 1 verse 14, “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 for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. And it was so. And God made the two great lights. The greater light to govern the day and lesser light to govern the night. He made the stars also. And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. And to govern the day and 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 on the fourth day.”
So does the Bible describe the creation of all the luminaries? The stellar bodies that occupy the vast endless space around us. Evolution has struggled incessantly to explain all the bodies that exist in the universe, how they could have evolved out of spontaneous generation. All the trips to the moon, all the satellites sent into space. All of the orbiting paraphernalia have given absolutely no insight into how the universe, the bodies in the universe could have possibly evolved. And that’s understandable since they didn’t.
Here in chapter 1 verses 14 to 19. It simply says, God made them all. When you stop to think about that, it’s so mind boggling I hardly know how to approach it. I guess maybe the best way to approach it is sort of from a personal level. When it says that God made the stars along with the sun and the moon, it is saying something about his immense power. That simple, simple statement almost like an addendum at the end of verse 16, which in the Hebrew literally says, “The stars also.” He just, as if he threw them in. It’s so staggering as to be almost, if not beyond, comprehension. As you learned once as a schoolchild, light travels at 186,000 miles a second, that computes to six trillion miles in a year. That’s how far light goes in a year, six trillion miles. Now, let’s just stop and think about the power of God, if he created all of the stellar bodies, all of the stars by considering a beam of light moving at 186,000 miles a second or six trillion miles a year and let’s begin this morning, Sunday morning, when your alarm clock went off at 6:00 a.m. By the time you really got out of bed, let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and say 6:08 a.m. that light beam was passing the earth and heading out toward the edge of the solar system. As you sat down to your morning coffee at 6:41 a.m., the light beam passed Jupiter. And when I got up to preach at the second service, at about 11:12 a.m. if Clayton stays within his time limit, about that time, out little light beam was passing Pluto.
Now, let’s look ahead at the end of the week. As you leave work on Friday afternoon, that little beam of light will be leaving our solar system. Now you don’t have to think about that little light again till you go to vote for the president in November in the year 2003, and after all this waiting, this beam of light has only reached the nearest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri, which is actually a conflux of several stars. Go on to the year 2010 and our little light beam has only 20 stars behind it and our sun appears as a rather bland yellowish star disappearing into galactic darkness. Imagine this little beam of light has been heading now into the constellation Sagittarius. On this path, it will be headed for the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. It has to travel 32,000 years before it will reach the center of our galaxy, that’s at six trillion miles a year. But wait, it still has another 50,000 years to get to the other side of the Milky Way, which is our galaxy and when it does, it will leave behind about 100 billion stars. Now remember, that the Milky Way Galaxy is only an average sized galaxy and that as far as we know, there are at least 50 billion galaxies in the known universe. Much of this has been determined by the use of the Hubble Telescopic Cameras.
Now, our little light beam has to travel another 80,000 years at it’s six trillion miles per year pace to reach the Magellanic Clouds which is the closest galaxy or series of galaxies to our Milky Way, we are now, having left this morning 160,000 years into the future. And our light beam still moving of the same speed of 186,000 a second faces 1.8 million years of empty space before it reaches the end of the Andromeda Galaxy, which is close enough to earth to be seen with the naked eye.
Looking back from there at the Milky Way you would see a fuzzy elliptical patch, similar to what Andromeda looks like to us on a fall evening, by the way, as a footnote, most of the stars you see are not actually stars, but are rather multiple star systems revolving around a center mass. Now if our little light beam travels a couple more millions of years, it will encounter really open space. Our little friend will now travel another 20 billion years before it reaches the edge of the known universe that we know about. After over 20 billion ears of travel, with about 50 billion galaxies behind it with about 100 billion stars in those 50 billion galaxies. Psalm 8:3 says, our little light beam has only seen the work of God’s fingers. Whereas Job put it in Job 26:14, “Behold, these are the fringes of his ways and how faint a word we hear of him.” Pretty staggering stuff.
Genesis explains all of that by saying this, he made the stars. Now if that’s only the work of his fingers, what could his arm do? The question is often asked, how can such distant light reach the earth so fast in a six-day creation? If it takes our little light beam hundreds of thousands of years to get out there, doesn’t it take hundreds of thousands of years for a light from those far away stars, doesn’t it take hundreds of thousands of years for the light to reach us? Well, first of all, you can file this somewhere. God could not only make the stars out there, make us here, but he could make all the light in between instantaneously. It is also true that light already existed, it was created on day one according to verse 3 of Genesis. And so, all he had to do was put it where he wanted it.
But I really do lean, after continuing to read on the subject to the fact that as one scientist put it, at the time of creation the speed of light was possibly 10 billion times faster than it is now. Some scientists have been working to demonstrate that because of the effect of the fall the speed of light is slower now than it’s ever been and it’s getting slower all along. And if you push it back six or seven thousand years ago, it would be ten billion times faster.
And when you stop to think about this, there are only two ways to understand the origin of the complex solar system. And I’m not even going to get into the complexities of it. And you get into binary stars, stars that literally orbit each other, star systems that revolve around a solid center mass. When you get into massive galaxies, when you get into all the complexities of these things, it is absolutely staggering. In fact, there is nothing about these stars, these galaxies, there is nothing about them that is common to all of them.
They are like fingerprints. They are like human beings, every star, every set of stars. Every set of binary stars, every one of these little galaxies and solar systems has the fingerprint of God upon it unlike any other. George Wald, who was formerly of Harvard and winner of the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine acknowledged the dilemma. He said, and I quote, this is from the Scientific American Journal, quote George Wald, “The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation. The only alternative was to believe in a single primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position.” He’s right. Either you believe in spontaneous generation that once there was none of this and then spontaneously it just came into existence on its own or you believe in supernatural creation. He is right, there is no alternative. Wald, with no rationale given, went on to state his view. “One has to contemplate,” he says, “the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet, here we are, as a result, I believe of spontaneous generation.” End quote. He would say that entire universe billions upon billions of galaxies is the product of irrational random spontaneous generation, something coming into existence out of nothing.
The theory that the entire universe and all that is in it is a result of some random spontaneous process that spontaneously generated cells and spontaneously generated gases allied themselves upward into increasingly complexity over billions of years to sell create the universe. As I have been saying all along, and as science must attest, evolution is not possible. It is impossible. Any kind of spontaneous generation is impossible. Any kind of upward complexity from simplicity is by chance impossible. Evolution has never been observed. Evolution has never been proven because it’s impossible. And there is compelling, conclusive, unarguable evidence of a vast amount in every field of science to prove the utter and total impossibility of evolution making all belief in evolution irrational and erroneous. I have been exposed, in this particular study, to much more than I’m telling you about. I find myself reading and reading and reading and then just pulling out little pieces that I bring to you. But I’m being exposed to every field of science, which in the past, I wasn’t necessarily exposed too and the more and more I read, the more vast becomes the wealth of information that demonstrates beyond argument how impossible evolution is and how clearly what exits has to be the result of a supernatural mind and a supernatural act of creation.
For a moment, for example, let’s bring it down to a smaller level. We go from the vastness of this amazing and immense universe to the minutest complexity of life. Deoxyribonucleic Acid, DNA. This is the material that we have been talking about in the past that carries the life code for the function of every organism, DNA. Now let me just tell you a little bit about DNA. DNA exists in every single cell. Did you get that, every single cell. Now just to make that come right down to where you are, just take a look at your body. You have 100 or so trillion cells. Every one of those cells has a little strip, an actual material, physical strip of DNA. It is a copy of coded information and it’s coiled up, it’s in a coil in every single cell in every living organism including you. Now, you have 46 segments in that little coil. Twenty-three of those came from your father and 23 of those came from your mother to make the 46. The combination then of your father’s and your mother’s DNA and giving you 23 of each made the 46 the uniquely formed to determine what you look like, much of your personalities and abilities and precisely and explicitly that little coil determines exactly how every single cell in your body is to function throughout your entire life.
That little cell operates off that little coil and the code on that coil. Now, let’s get a little wild here. If the 46 segments of DNA in one of your cells and every one of your cells has the same 46 little DNA components, let’s just uncoil them. If we just took one little cell and got the little coiled DNA strip it would be 7 feet long. It would be really thin. It would be so think I am told we couldn’t see it under an electron microscope, but if it were stretched out, it would be 7 feet long. That’s in every one of you 100 trillion cells. It would be so think that the details of it couldn’t be seen.
However, listen to this, if all the DNA in your body, let’s just take all of it and stretch it out and connect it together, it would stretch from here to the moon one-half million times. Pretty incredible you are, huh? If all this very densely coded information were placed in type written form, if it was just typed out in you, just for you, it would fill the Grand Canyon 50 times. That’s how fearfully and wonderfully you are made, Psalm 139:4 says. So, if you want numbers, I give you numbers.
You can go to the farthest most vast complexity of the universe or you can look into the smallest complexity of the cells within the human body. And all you are going to see is the hand of an intelligent and powerful creator. Now let’s take something in between. We have been real big and real small. Let’s take something not so big and not so small, your brain.
I’m not going to get personal about what size you might have, but let’s talk about your brain. There are so many things I could say about the brain. The study of the brain is truly an amazing, amazing study. Your brain has about 100,000 billion electrical connections. Did you get that? 100,000 billion of them, 10 to the 14th power. In fact, your brain has more electrical connections than all the electrical appliances on the face of the earth, yet your brain with its 100,000 billion electrical connections fits in a quart jar and operates for 70 years on 10 watts of power fueled largely by cheeseburgers and French Fries. To be an evolutionists is the height of stupidity, is it not? Well enough about your brain lest we get more personal. The only reasonable view is that the universe was created by God. More powerful, more complex, and more intelligent than we could ever, ever imagine. But we don’t have to imagine. We don’t have to wonder how he did it, because he told us how he did it. We have the account.
I read source after source after source after source of evolutionary scientists trying to explain how the universe evolved into existence. It’s useless and hopeless. We don’t need that explanation. In six days, God made it and in one day, he filled the universe with all the stars, suns, and moons. Now, let’s go back to the text.
The creation is introduced in verse 1 with an overview statement, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” That’s the summary statement and as I told you weeks ago, in that statement you have everything that is notable categorized. Herbert Spencer died in 1903. He said that all that’s knowable in the universe can be summed up in five categories, time, force, action, space, and matter.
Everything that exists can fit into that. That’s exactly what it says in the first verse of the Bible. That’s time, God, that’s force, created, that’s action, the heavens, that’s space, the earth, that’s matter. That’s all in that verse. What it’s saying in verse 1 is simply the overview, God made the heavens and the earth, as we know them now. Then starting in verse 2 it begins to describe how he did that. He did that in a six-day process. That process is described from chapter 1 verse 2 down to chapter 2 verse 3 an that’s the section we are looking at in Genesis. This is then the generations of the heavens and the earth. The creation of the heavens and the earth, the story of the heavens and the earth being created. Day one, on day one God made the material. On day one we could say on day one, we created the space, the time, and the matter, on day one, he created a universe that was unformed and uninhabitable and then created light as it indicates to us in verses 2 through 5. “There was darkness over the surface of the deep that covered the earth. The spirit of God was hovering there. God said, Let there be light. And there was light. God separated the light from the darkness.” So on day one, he created the material out of which the final shape of the heaven and the earth would be made. And he created light.
On day two, he separated the waters that covered the surface of the earth and took some waters above and left some below on the earth, versus 6 through 8 talk about that and in the middle he created the expanse that we know as heaven. He called verse 8 the expanse, heaven. He left some water on earth. He sent some water above to exactly where we don’t know, but whatever point that water went too in the middle is the heaven of heavens, which is the place of all of the stellar bodies, the luminaries which he created on day four. Then on day three, we noted in verses 9 to 13, he separated the dry land from the water on the earth creating then seas and land and then, two kinds of growing things, trees which produce fruit that has seed and plants which have their seed in themselves.
So day one, the material to shape his universe into its final form and light. Day two, he creates the expanse of heaven between the waters above and the waters below. Day three he separates the dry land from the water, which he gathers into seas and creates the trees and the plants. That brings us to day four. Now we go back from the earth into heaven and he populates this vast expanse of heaven with the luminaries.
That corresponds to day one. On day one he created light, on day four, he created the lights that become the means by which light is transmitted. He attaches the light to stellar bodies. On day two, he created the water below and kind of matching up with that on day five he created the fish for that water. On day two, he also created the heavens above and on day five, he created the birds to fly in that heaven. On day three, he created the land and the plants and trees and on day six, paralleling that, he created man and land animals who would live on those plants and live on the dry land. So there is a wonderful parallel. Day one light, and then the parallel day four, that being the lights, day two, the water in the heavens and day five, the fish for the water, the birds for the heaven. Day three, the dry land and the plants, and say six paralleling that, man and the animals.
So there are six days of creation that are wonderfully balanced. There is a parallelism there as we noted. We come then to day four. In day four, as verse 14 days, God created lights. Go back to verse 3 and you’ll read then, “God said, let there be light.” Then look at verse 14, “Then God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens.” Now I want to remind you again what is so very important to keep stating. All of this flow of creation is introduced with this little phrase, then God said. Verse 3, verse 6, verse 11, verse 14, verse 20, verse 24, verse 26 and verse 29, always the mode of creation always the means of creation, then God said.
That is to say, there is no process. There is no time. Time adds nothing to this, millions of years, billions of years, thousands of years add nothing to this. This is not some process that God initiated, this is something that God completed. God simply said it and it came into existence. I said long ago in the study, there is nothing in the text, there is nothing exegetical that leads to any other conclusion than what we have always called divine fiat creation. He literally speaks it into existence. I read you this morning, Psalm 33, I read it again, verses 6 to 9, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made and by the breath of his mouth, all their hosts,” that is all the stars, moons, suns, comets and everything else that is there. It was all made because God spoke it into existence. Verse 9, he spoke and it was done. He commanded and it stood fast. In other words, it didn’t change. It didn’t alter. It didn’t develop. It didn’t wane. He spoke it into existence. And that’s the way it stayed, exactly the way he spoke it into existence. The moon, the sun, the stars, the galaxies, the billions upon billions of galaxies, everything that is in space, all the material that is there, all the gases that are there, all the atoms that are there. Everything that is there is there exactly the way it was when God made it.
And the complexity of it literally staggers me. You look up and you think stars are in the same place all the time. They are moving so relatively slowly to the viewpoint of earth that they appear to be in the same place all the time. We can actually chart our courses by them, because they don’t appear to be moving, but the fact is, they are moving. Our own sun is taking our entire solar system and dragging it from one end of the universe to the other in an orbit that is huge, in fact, the whole Milky Way Galaxy is in an orbit that scientists calculate take 225 million years to complete. And everything else is in corresponding orbits. The whole thing is incredible. And it all is doing now exactly what God designed it to do and created it to do in a simple word.
“Then God said, let there be…and there was.” That’s it. Let there be lights, verse 14. Let there be lights, often called luminaries. And the lights were to divide back in verse 4, light was to divide. God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, the darkness he called night. There was evening, there was morning one day. So at the very outset when he created light, before there was a moon, before there were stars, before there was sun, there was light. It wasn’t attached to any of those celestial bodies, but there was light. God created light, light is not created by stars. Light is not created by the sun. Light is simply created by God and attached to those luminaries.
God said, let there be lights. And lights, luminaries, celestial bodies, shining were to dived verse 18 says to separate the light from the darkness, just the same purpose that the original creation of light had intended to accomplish, so we have the creation of light in verse 1. Which identifies day and night and the evening and the morning and the first solar day, 24 hour day and it’s now that same light for that same purpose, attached to these heavenly bodies, the sun, the moon and the stars that are identified down in verse 16.
Now, notice again down in verse 14, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens. So we know that when God created the lights, they were to be placed into this expanse that is in the waters below and the waters above, wherever those waters went, the heaven of heavens is between them.
Now the creation of light on day four does produce an important issue because light was already shining and I want to make sure you are clear on it. People always say, well, you can’t have light shining all over the place without any stars, without any sun, without any moon, because the light we know comes from those sources. And they say, if there wasn’t any sun, there couldn’t be any plants on day three, how could God created plants on day three and a sun on day four? Because photosynthesis which is critical to the life of plants doesn’t exist apart from the sun, and so, this doesn’t make any sense and critics depreciate the text of scripture on that basis.
But this is really silly. This is trivial. There was light already on day one. And where there is light there is heat. And where there is light and heat there is photosynthesis. The requisite conditions for plant life to survive on day three were already in existence because light was already there doing what light always does.
It just hadn’t been specifically attached to these stellar bodies. It is evident to all of us, should be evident that stars and the sun are not the creators of light. God is the creator of light. He happens to use them as radiating bearers of light that was already there before them and without them. So, God took the light he already created and attached it to the luminaries he made on day four.
By the way, I thought this was interesting. John Calvin the great reformer wrote in his commentary on Genesis this brief statement. The only difference is this that the light was before dispersed, but now proceeds from lucid bodies, which in serving this purpose, obeyed the command of God. Long before any space travel, John Calvin knew the text of scripture, had it right, light existed and it was at this point, simply connected to these bodies.
Now, follow along because this is very important as we look at the text. This account of the creation of the lights, defines their purpose on three functions, three functions. They are very clear. Number one function, verse 14, to separate the day from the night. Let there be light in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And each of these three functions is introduced by the phrase, let there be or let them. The first function to separate the day from the night, so we can say, if you are making a little outline, the first function of these was to separate, to separate.
Now in order to separate one thing from another, in order to mark a distinction between two things, those two things must already be in existence. Darkness already was in existence, we know that back in verse 1. Light came into existence also on day one, so it was already in existence. This affirms that day existed without the sun, and night existed without the moon and without the stars. Again, the sun is not the cause of daylight because there had already been three periods of daylight and three periods of dark before day four.
But God created these bearers of light and gave to them the task of separation and now, from our standpoint, it is the sun that brings us the light. In the day, it is the sun that brings us the light, at night, along with the stars. The first purpose then of these luminaries was to separate the day from the night, or to create a day as we know it, a 24-hour day. The second thing was to dominate, first to separate, secondly to dominate.
Follow in the text, and it says in verse 14, “And let them,” there is that let them again indicating a second category. “Let them be for signs.” What kind of signs? “For seasons and for days and years.” Now, the verb here, let them be, means let them serve. God gave these luminous bodies to serve. Let them be as signs, used in its normal connotation as a sign to the inhabitants of the earth. And what were they signs of? Well, it tells you there, they were signs pointing to seasons and days and years. That is to say, these stellar bodies would divide the year into seasons and they would divide the year, they would divide time, I should say, into seasons and into days and years. So you have seasonal times as well as calendar times.
And that’s true. That is true. It is the moon, as you well, know, that determines the month and in the course of the movement of the moon through it’s somewhat odd orbit, it also generates the seasons, the sun does the same. Because the earth is tilted on its axis, it causes the sun to be at varying distances from its surface at different points on the globe at different times of the year, which produces the seasons which are critical for the rejuvenation of life and the growing of crops and the flourishing of the earth and the blessing of mankind. God designed the sun and the moon to function in determining seasons. God also designed, in particular the sun to serve in the matter, and the moon to serve in the matter of days. Because a 24 hour day is simply determined by the fact that that’s the cycle from sunset to sunset or sunrise to sunrise, morning and evening. One period of time where the sun is shining and one period of time where the night is lit by the moon and stars.
So God in determining the orbit of the sun, or of the earth around the sun and the orbit of the moon around the earth, determined a day. A day then is determined by the earth’s rotation around its axis, one 24-hour period is the time of the earth’s rotation. But it is also true that the sun is a determiner of years. Because it takes one full year for the rotating earth, each rotation meaning a day to continue its orbit all the way around the sun. That’s a 365 day time period. So God created the sun and it dominates in the sense that it dominates life on the earth.
It is the agency by which our time in light and dark is determined. It is the agency, along with the moon by which seasons are determined. It is the agency by which the calendar year is determined. Therefore, it is the celestial bodies that dominate our life. They dictate to us when we work and when we rest. When we are awake and when we sleep. When we eat and when we don’t. By the way, an interesting footnote, it is the rotation of the earth on its axis that determined the 24-hour day. It is the rotation of the earths, or the moon’s orbit around the earth that determines the month. And it is the earth’s rotation around the sun that determines the year.
Did you ever ask yourself what determines a week? There is nothing in the celestial bodies that determines a week, yet universally, across the face of the earth, mankind lives by weeks. Where do you think they got that? Out of Genesis chapter 1. That was the period of time in which God created the universe. So days and years are respectively the shortest and longest measures of time definitely fixed by the movement of the sun and also involving the moon and its monthly movements, and of course, within the framework within these days and years, the moon and the sun also affect the seasons.
So, secondly, first of all, these luminous bodies were given to separate and secondly to dominate. They literally dominate our lives. Now, some have suggested that when he says signs here he might mean something else, well, I’m glad you suggested that, it just doesn’t say that in the bible and I would rather just kind of stick with what God wrote here. People say, well, you know, this could refer to land and see navigation by the stars. You know, we line up instruments with the North Star and so forth, and some have even suggested that this could be a veiled reference to the star of Bethlehem, which was assigned to the wise men.
Some really get carried away and see in the stars some astrological signs. Wow, our culture is really drowning in that bunk, that there is some kind of zodiac out there and these stars are actually deities or forces or powers that give out messages that have great impact on people’s lives. That is pagan, it is ungodly, it is unbiblical. It is pseudoscience. It is ridiculous at best, it is demonic at worst. And some Christian teachers have even come along and they have said, they are for signs.
And they say there is the gospel preached up there in the constellations. That is a contrived and biblically unacceptable concoction. Genesis tells us what the signs were. They were signs to indicate seasons and days and years. And in that way, they dominate our life. They control human life. They control human enterprise.
Thirdly, first to separate, second to dominate, thirdly to elucidate or illuminate. Illuminate might be a better word there. It says in verse 15 again, introducing the third category with the same phrase and let them be for lights, in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. Just to provide light to illuminate, to separate, to dominate and to illuminate. And I love this, and it was so. Boy is that an understatement.
I mentioned a couple weeks ago the big bang which of course is a preposterous theory of evolutionists, but somewhat facetiously, I said there was at once one big bang. It wasn’t the kind of big bang, gaseous, cellular explosion that evolutionists talk about, but they have to admit that there seems to have been some rapid explosive almost propelling of the universe outward to it’s vastness at some point. And while we reject the Big Bang Theory, there certainly was a big something when God simply spoke a universe of stellar bodies into existence and instantaneously, they came into existence. It was so.
And remember that little phrase that’s used in verse 7, it was so. Verse 9, it was so, verse 11, it was so. And it’s a technical phrase and it means, it was made permanent. It means that creation, there was a firm and fixed and established condition. This is the testimony and I have mentioned it a couple of times, when Umberto Cassuto who was not a Christian, who is a Jewish writer, who writing from a Jewish understanding from the book of Genesis is so helpful. I have found his commentary more helpful than any that I have read. And he really comes to grips with the Hebrew understanding of the text and he simply says repeatedly this little phrase indicates that it was so and remains so through all the life of the universe. It’s a way of saying something was fixed. And again, it militates against this idea of progressive creationism. That God made something that started some evolutionary process. He made it, he fixed it. It was firm. It was established. Exactly what I read earlier from Psalm 33 and verse 9.
Now as similar in the other description of creation days, the work is now repeated and further defined. Look at verse 16. And God made the two great lights. He’s now defining these lights, the two great lights. The greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He made the stars also. Again, beloved, I remind you, the statement is and God made. An unmistakable affirmation of divine creation, not a prolonged process. And he made the two great lights. The two great lights. The two great lights, being those lights, which dominate our life, the sun and the moon.
Psalm 8:3, the psalmist says, “When I consider thy heavens. The work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which those hast ordained, what is man that though does take thought of him?” God is the creator. God is the maker. Psalm 136 verses 5 to 9, praises God with these words, “To him who made the heavens with skill. To him who spread out the earth above the waters, meaning separating the land from the sea. To him who made the great lights, the very same terms used in Psalm 136, the sun to rule by day and the moon and starts to rule by night.” There Psalm 136 versus 5 to 9 affirming God’s creation of the two great lights. The greater light to govern the day, the lesser light to govern the night, along with the stars also.
Now let’s just look at the greater light to govern the day, that’s the sun, that’s the sun, literally, to rule over the day. And that’s what the sun does. Down in verse 18, to govern the day, that’s the sun’s function. And by the way, when it says this, we want to stop right here. We are not talking about anything that’s a persona here, that ancient tribes have worshiped the sun god, the Egyptians worship Ra, the sun god. They worship the god and goddess of the moon.
The bizarre pagan idolatrous ideas that somehow the sun, the moon, and the stars are literal rulers. They are deities that govern the life of men. That’s not what’s intended here. Ancient Babylonian accounts make the sun and the moon and the stars into gods endowing them with personality and intellect and will. And strangely enough, some of the rabbi’s even picked up on some of this stuff. There are rabbinic myths influenced by such paganism, which make the luminaries into persons. Who somehow communicate with their creator so that some of the Jews actually got involved in worshiping the sun and the moon and if you read Ezekiel chapter 8 you will find an illustration there. Israelites, in the temple of God worshiping the sun. All such idolatry, all such myth is excluded by the Old Testament. They are simply material creation.
Luminous creation in the heavens who rule only in the sense that they are situated above the earth and they control its nights and they control its days and thus they control its life patterns. As I said before, they dominate. The sun being the most dominate governing the day. The lesser light, verse 16 would be the moon and it governs the night in the same way the sun governs the day. Its function is to cast its light over the night. It is therefore dictating to us life in the darkness. He made the stars also.
That’s just so staggering. He made the stars also. That’s it, what else can be said, the economy of words here is staggering. Twenty, you don’t want to know this, $20 billion has been spent on exploring the moon, $20 billion. And one of the things they have been trying to figure out is how the moon evolved. That’s right. That’s been one of the major enterprises in moon exploration. So far, $20 billion has been spent in moon exploration, they have no information about how the moon evolved because it didn’t. Evolution is clueless. It can’t even explain how the moon evolved. How is it going to explain how or solar system evolved and how is it going to explain how the Milky Way Galaxy evolved along with everything else. One theory says that planets formed when a star, where did that star come from, by the way? Passing by the sun, by its magnetic field the star was kind of just passing along by the sun. Where the sun came from, they don’t say, where the star came from, they don’t say and how they developed orbits, they don’t say but the star went by the sun and its magnetic field tore matter off the sun.
And that matter started doing whatever matter does to turn itself into a solar system. The more popular theory is that our solar system formed from a cloud of swirling gas, dust, and particles. They don’t say where the gas, dust, and particles came from. And if that is true. If it all sort of came together, the planets and their 63 known moons. In our solar system, our planets have a total of 63 moons that we know about. Then the planets in our solar system and the 63 moons must have evolved from the same material, so we can assume that they would have common material and similarities, right? If they all came from the same stuff. Well, they don’t. They show the fingerprint of a creator. Since, listen to this one, about 98 percent of the sun is hydrogen or helium, if in fact our solar system was created somehow by matter that tore off the sun, Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury, should have similar composition.
Instead, 98 percent of the sun is hydrogen and helium, but less than 1 percent of these planets is hydrogen and helium. There are no natural processes that could form stars, which burn fuel hundreds of thousands of times more rapidly than our sun burns it. There are no explanations for how galaxies could come into being with their billions times billions of stars.
And that’s why it’s so compelling to see in verse 16 that God made it all. He made it all. In his inimitable fresh and insightful manner, C.S. Lewis took the discussion of the solar system, evolution to its logical end. I quote from C.S. Lewis, “If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident and the whole evolution of man was also an accident. If so, then all our present thoughts are accidents. The accidental byproduct of the movement of atoms. This holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for everybody else. But if their though are merely accidents, why should we believe any of them?
I see no reason,” says C.S. Lewis, “that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents.” And Lewis goes on writing in his book on miracles. That was from God and the Doc. This is from Miracles. He says, “Each particular thought is valueless if it is the result of irrational causes. Obviously then, the whole process of human thought, what we call reason is equally valueless if it is the result of irrational causes, hence every theory of the universe which makes the human mind a result of irrational causes is inadmissible, for it would be a proof that there are no such things as proofs, which is nonsense. But evolution it’s commonly held and is precisely a theory of this sort.”
Boy, I mean, he could really do a number on them, couldn’t he? And you look at the universe from a scientific standpoint and what you find is not something you find that’s evolved over billions of years, but something very young. There is lack of evidence that the sun and the other stars, for example, derived their energy from nuclear fusion. Evolutionists say it’s some kind of evolution of nuclear fusion.
Fusion reactions in the sun should produce subatomic particles known as neutrinos. In the 1960s, Raymond Davis conducted an experiment designed to detect them. So few neutrinos were detected that Davis said, of those that were, we do not regard this result as a measurement of the solar neutrino flux, because of uncertainties in various background effects. Bottom line, they said if nuclear fusion is creating these, the sun and the stars then we’ll find neutrinos, they looked. They found none.
It has recently been discovered that the sun is oscillating. By studying the nature of these oscillations, scientists gain knowledge of the sun’s interior, just as the study of seismic waves tells us about the earth’s interior. Those studies show that the sun’s central temperature is too low to produce nuclear fusion. Calculations have also shown that if the sun formed by the contraction of a gas cloud, as stellar evolution postulates, its central temperature would never reach the point where nuclear burning could even begin.
Just can’t explain it. Where does the sun get its energy? They have no idea. But by observing, this is interesting, that the sun is contracting or shrinking, they are now proposing a very young age for the sun, says one writer, at most, thousands of years ago. Not only does the sun demonstrate a young universe but the moon. The speed at which the moon is receding from the earth, it’s going away. We know how fast it’s going away. If the earth and moon are 4.5 billion years old, the moon should be out of sight long ago. And so it goes.
The only explanation for the solar system, let’s go back to verse 16. And God made the two great lights. The greater light to govern the day, the lesser light to govern the night. He made the stars also. And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth and here he goes through the same three purposes to separate and to dominate and to elucidate only in reverse order.
To give light on the earth, that’s to elucidate, or to illuminate, to govern the earth, the day and night, that’s to dominant, and thirdly, to separate the light from the darkness. The only explanation is that God made it all. The psalmist had it right, the heavens declare what, the glory of God and the firmament shows his handy work. There isn’t any other explanation. None at all. And then it says, “And God,” verse 18, “saw that it was good.” What does he mean by that?
I told you what that phrase means, it’s used in verse 10, after the dry land and the sea were separated. Used in verse 12, after the trees and the plants. Used again here. It means it was ready for habitation. It was good. It was ready for habitation. Finally got to that point, ready for habitation. That’s why on day five he starts to create the swarms of living creatures and birds and sea creatures and then the next day, the animals and man.
Ready for habitation. It was good, no death, so there can’t be any mutations. There can’t be any natural selection because nothing dies. There is no death, there is no defect, there is no mutation, no evolution is possible. Death doesn’t even come till Genesis 3. It was all good, just the way he made it. Six or seven thousand years ago. And I love how it always signs off as in verse 19, “And there was evening and there was morning the fourth day.” Just in case somebody might not get it, this all happened, in a 24 hour period. Verse 5, day one, there was evening there was morning, one day. Verse 8, there was evening, there was morning, a second day. Verse 13, there was evening, there was morning, a third day. We just read verse 19, verse 23, the same thing, there was evening, there was morning a fifth day. Verse 31, there was evening, there was morning, the sixth day. And then chapter 2 verse 1, thus the heaven and the earth were completed all their host and by the seventh day, God completed his work and he rested on the seventh day.
Hmm, thus did God create. I want to close taking you back to Psalm 8. Turn to Psalm 8 and we’ll just finish there. Psalm 8, “Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth. Who has displayed thy splendor above the heavens?” And he’s looking at the microcosm, looking way out, seeing the glory of God and the vastness of heavenly creation and then he looks at the smallest, “from the mouths of infants and nursing babes though has established strength, because of thine adversaries to make the enemy and the revengeful cease. When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which those hast ordained, what is man?” And you can be sure in the day of the psalmist they probably didn’t know as much as we know about what’s out there. But it still staggered him that God who created the universe cared about him.
“What is man that thou dost take thought of him and the son of man that though dost care for him.” He’s referring to humanity there. “Yet thou has made him a little lower than God. And crowned him with glory and majesty.” We are the pinnacle of the divine creation. “Thou didst make him to rule over the works of thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet. All sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea and whatever passes through the paths of the sea. Oh Lord, our Lord how majestic is thy name in all the earth.”
You see that was really what God was after in creation. God gave us the account of creation so we would praise him such as is done in Psalm 8, right? And what does the evolutionist do? The evolutionist robs God of his what? His glory. He robs God of his majesty. He ought to be falling on his face, oh Lord, our Lord how majestic is thy name in all the earth. And wonder of wonders, you care about us. You care enough to love us, to send a savior to forgive our sins and to bring us to eternal glory. Oh, Lord our Lord. He begins the same as he ends, how majestic is they name in all the earth. That’s the right response to Genesis 1.
Not to question it, not to argue it. Not to debate it. Not to turn science into some hermeneutic to try to explain it away. But to fall on your face and to cry with the Psalmist how majestic is your name, oh Lord, our Lord and what an incredible and wondrous thing it is that the God of the universe cares about me. Cares about me, boy, he knows you. You are fearfully and wonderfully made. He understands the 500,000 trips to the moon that your DNA all stuck together would make. He understands all the coil codes in every one of the multiple trillions of cells in your body.
He understands everything about you. There is as much glory in the immensity and the complexity of the creation of your body as there is in the complexity and the creation of the universe. Everywhere you look, you see his majesty on display, anything less than a life of worship is an affront to God punishable by an eternity in hell, is it not?
Father, we thank you for the clarity of this account, the power of it, the insight of it. We are just overwhelmed again, as we look out at the creation and see what your hand has made. And not only to be in awe of your creative power, whether we look at the most minute part of living organisms or the vastness of endless space, but to be overwhelmed that you care about us and about our eternity when we have hated you and rebelled and sinned and disobeyed and yet you love us and forgive us and sent your son to die for us. Bless you. We praise you.
Indeed, we say with the psalmist, Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name. We thank you that you have created us in your own image and created us to have eternal fellowship with you and made that possible through Jesus Christ to whom belongs the praise and the glory, in whose name we pray, and every one said, Amen.
For those who have not embraced Christ, may Your Spirit give them life even now, may the Father draw them to Himself. These things we ask for your glory. Amen.
