More about Creation
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2018 · 29 July 2018
The lie that the universe as we know it today evolved is the most sophisticated, complex and highly educated lie in existence. It has, for all intents and purposes, captivated the entire world. It is believed by the greatest mass of humanity, at least in the western world. And even though it is impossible and irrational, it is nonetheless perpetuated with great force and with great academic effort.
This evolutionary theory has demanded and received almost universal acceptance in the world. The theory that no one created the universe as it is, but that it came into being by chance and it progresses through constant changes, mutations and transitions upwardly from simplicity to complexity completely through a random process basically rules human thought.
And those people who reject God and the Bible, those people who do not know the Lord Jesus Christ, those people who love sin, those people who don't want a moral judge or a moral law, we expect those kind of people to be happy with such an explanation of the way things are. And theologians and Bible commentators have felt it necessary to take the simple explanation of creation in Genesis chapter 1 and basically deny it.
I was reading recently a very established and well-known commentary on the book of Genesis in which that is precisely the view of the author, who says this really doesn't mean what it says. God really didn't mean that He did this in six days; He obviously meant something else because science has told us that couldn't be the way it is. But there is nothing in the text of Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 that in any way describes evolution.
Why do most people and those who claim to be Christians do that? Number one, so they are accepted in academic circles. If you are in an academic setting, you want to maintain your position and your job. Secondly, people do that because they are ignorant of true DNA science. And thirdly, they may be compelled the same way that Darwin was compelled, and that was by the illusion of appearance in our environment.
However, the Bible doesn't allow for any such illusion. In 2 Peter 3:4 it tells us that mockers come and say, “Ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue just as they were from the beginning of creation.” And those mockers, who are basically denying the Second Coming, say nothing changes. Obviously they affirm creation, but they say since creation nothing has violated the uniformitarian process, the gradual process of change.
But 2 Petrus 3:5-7 say, “For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, 6 and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. 7 But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the Day of Judgment and destruction of the ungodly.”
Peter is pointing to the fact that everything has not continued through a uniformitarian process since the beginning, but rather there have been two great cataclysmic events. One is creation, and the other is the universal global flood. Uniformitarianism is the belief that the origin and development of all things can be explained in terms of the same natural laws and processes seen operating today.
They insist that all geologic features and formations once attributed to geologic cataclysms can now be explained by ordinary processes functioning over long periods of time. Creationists, Henry Morris and John Whitcomb, used evidence from natural processes to prove the necessity of a universal flood to explain the present geological structures of the earth, which cannot be explained from present slow processes.
True science is not at all on the side of evolutionists. Widespread geologic phenomenon such as the preponderance of sedimentary rocks and structures all across earth’s surface, including seashells on the tops of the highest mountains, rapid, almost sudden deposits of fossils, and extremely large and deep fossil graveyards, all point to a watery catastrophe, not some extremely slow natural process of billions of years.
For instance, there’s the vast Tibetan plateau which consists of sedimentary deposits which are thousands of feet thick, located presently at an elevation of three miles above sea level. The Karoo formation of Africa contains an estimated 800 billion vertebrate animals. The herring fossil bed of California contains approximately one billion fish within a four-square-mile area. Uniformitarianism fails to offer a reasonable explanation for this.
When oil reservoirs are tapped by drilling, the immense pressure in the reservoir forces up the oil through a kind of spouting geyser. Scientists named Dickey and others have published the results of their research in Science, “Studies show that any pressure built should be dissipated, bled off into surrounding rocks within a few thousand years. The pressures found within oil beds argues for creation less than ten thousand years.”
Henry Morris wrote on the subject of world population and the Bible chronology. And he shows how the world population is an indication of the age of the earth. The conservative average population growth of one-half a percent per year, which is a fourth of our present rate, that would add up to the present population of the earth in only four thousand years. And according to biblical chronology, four thousand years ago was the Flood.
God created the earth as it is, He created it with the appearance of maturity. Well, on the first day He made light and darkness. On the second day He made the heavens. On the third day He made the earth. On the fourth day He made the heavenly bodies that provide light. On the fifth day He made fish and birds. And on the sixth day He made land creatures and man. And He made them all mature and fully developed.
When Adam was created, he wasn't a newborn; he was a full-grown man. Everything was full grown, fully developed. If you found an oak tree in the Garden, and you were a botanist, you might get your little saw, and saw that little oak tree, and you might start counting rings, and you might find that according to the rings in that oak tree it was 400 years old, but it was actually one day old. It was created fully mature.
And if you saw those mountains, you might have assumed that the mountains, and the canyons alongside of them, and the valleys were formed by years of wind, and water, and eruptions, and earthquake, and the fact is it was all made in one day. And if you looked up into the heavens like Adam did, and you saw the incredible expanse above you, and you wondered how long they’d been there, the answer was 48 hours.
It was sort of like Jesus turning water into wine and there was no process. He just turned water into wine, instant creation in a split second. Evolution is impossible because nobody times nothing equaling everything is impossible. An alteration in genetics can only fulfill the entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Any living thing is subject to the genetics that it has and nothing beyond that.
Now, God always existed. That’s why in Exodus 3:14, He says, “I am that I am.” He’s the eternal one. Now, the question we did not discuss last time was why He created. And, of course, the first answer is because He wanted to. And the next question is why did He want to? Because He wanted to display His glory, and creation gave Him another opportunity to put His glory on display to heavenly angels as well as to mankind.
In Revelation 4:11 it says, “You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things, and by Your will they exist and were created.” And He desired to do it so that eternally in His presence He will be praised and glorified for this immense display of creative power, which puts His majesty and His nature on display. In Isaiah 43: 20 He says, “I did it for My glory.”
And within this creation God made man. He not only did it to display His glorious great intelligence, power, wisdom, love of beauty and complexity, but also He is displaying so much about His nature in the creation. By virtue of the creation of man He displayed something He would have not otherwise been able to display, and that is His grace and His mercy. He did it to put His glory on display.
God did it also in order to provide a bride for His Son. God one day said to the Son, “I love You so much I want to give You a gift, and so I'm going to create and I'm going to redeem out of humanity a bride for You. And that bride will bear Your image, and that bride will worship You and adore You and serve You forever and ever. This glorious plan of God to give to His beloved, would reflect His glory and praise to Him forever.
To provide a beautiful bride for His Son, the eternal Father created an entire universe, and in it a world which previously had no existence, as the nursery and the home in which the bride would be reared. Such an incredible gift from the Father to the Son required a creation out of nothing. So, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” By doing that, God launched a previous non-existent reality, which is time.
God gave us a sequence. Genesis 1:2-5, “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So evening and morning were the first day.
As day one begins, we find the earth in a unique condition. It was formless and void, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. A Hebrew might translate this like this, “As to the earth, it was formless and void.” What do the Jewish scholars think about this? They say it’s just the word for devastation and emptiness. It was a waste place and there was no life there.
God created them, God spoke them into existence; but yet they were unorganized, and uninhabited. God had not yet shaped them, and God had not populated the cosmos. Secondly, verse 2 says, “Darkness was over the surface of the deep,” and the reason for that is that God hadn't created light. And up to this point, throughout all of eternity there was no created light. Everything was darkness.
What does the deep mean? Deep is a synonym used in Scripture for the sea; in fact, look later in verse 2, “Darkness is over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was also moving over the surface of the waters”, and here God through the Holy Spirit defines the deep as water. So the earth is covered with water. That is referred to also in Psalm 104:6, “You covered it with the deep as with a garment.”
The unformed earth was literally covered with water. This is what 2 Peter 3:5 meant: “The earth was formed out of water and through water.” Proverbs 8:27 says, “He drew a circle on the face of the deep.” The matter became spherical. The third commentary on the state of the earth on day one is, “The Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.” This word “hovering” indicates divine care and supervision.
The biblical worldview of God is that He is directly involved in His creation. His hand is never lifted from the elements and the working of the material order. This is the antithesis of philosophical deism that says God is like the originator of the creation, but then walked away from it. But rather you have the living God superintending, hovering over the waters, being directly in charge of the entire process of creation.
Douglas Kelly says, “The speaking into existence of created light is the first of a series of three separate accomplishments by the creator which were essential to making the chaos into a cosmos. On day one, light separates day and night. On day two, the firmament separates the upper waters from the earth, constituting an atmosphere. On day three, the waters below the heavens are collected into seas, and thus separated from the dry land.
And with the creation of light, there was established a cyclical succession of days and nights, periods of light and periods of darkness. And we see here in verse 5, He called the light day and He called the darkness night, and so you have the cycle of night and day. That means the earth immediately began rotating on its axis, and there was a source of light on one side of the earth corresponding to the sun.
In verse 4, “God saw that the light was good.” Now, that statement is repeated in verse 10, verse 12, verse 18, verse 21, verse 25 and verse 31. Everything that God created was good. And the end of it, verse 31, He sums it up, “And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.” Now, the works of the Creator could only be good, so that doesn't surprise us. God is the source of everything, and everything He made was good.
And verse 4 says, “And God separated the light from the darkness.” This starts the cycle of days. He separates the light from the darkness. And that they would operate consecutively for given periods in an unchanging cyclical order. He made it so because it suited His creative plan. But how could there be light before the sun was created? I don't know. But God can create light, and can create the sun later too.
The reason all creation now is cursed, is not because of God, but because of the Fall and the rebellion of man, the corruption of His totally good creation. In Genesis 3:6-7 we see how the Devil lied to Eve and enticed her to go against God’s command. And in Genesis 3:14-19 God pronounced a curse on all mankind but also on creation, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field.”
Genesis 3:16, “To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.” And to Adam in verse 17-19, “cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; 18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground.”
This glorious creation, corrupted by the Fall, will some day in its corruption find God recreating it all, and then will be created a new heaven and a new earth, which forever will not know corruption. Jesus came to prepare a place for all of us who believe to free us from this curse. And He gives us that choice to make while we are still alive. God is calling you! We have lived here, and praise the Lord, we will live there. Let us pray.