Let’s look at a story told of Jesus in Matthew 8:23-26 and Mark 4:35-39. (KJV) Jesus has been preaching to a large multitude of people when he decided to cross the Galilee Sea with his Disciples:
On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.”
And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just
But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. And they went and woke him, and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” Saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing.”
And he awoke and he said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?”
Then he rose and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He said to them, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?”
And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this? And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Matthew 8:23-27; Mark 4:35-41)
What does this story have to do with the beginning of things? I am hoping we will find out as we explore together how we came to be. It has much to do about time.
Lets go back to some of my own genesis. When I was a boy, somewhere around the age of 14, I joined the MYF, that is, the Methodist Youth Fellowship at the Downingtown Methodist Church. Up until then, I had been forced to attend Sunday School there from the Third Grade through Sixth Grade, and I hated it. No one else in the family was going to any church, so why should I? But each Sunday morn I donned my suit and tie and plopped a wide brim hat upon my head. Looking like a miniaturized Rabbi, I walked a mile down Washington Avenue to the church upon the bonnie banks of the Brandywine, where I stewed in utter boredom for an hour before gladly racing home. (My folks did not force me to stay for worship service.)
When I reached seventh grade and the mature age of 12, I felt defiant enough to refuse any further religious ritual. I didn’t show my face in a church until the summer before ninth grade when I was 14 years old and a budding businessman having my own paper route.
No one forced me back to church this time; I went voluntarily. It wasn’t some grand conversion. You might even say “The Devil made me do it”. Like Eve and that low hanging fruit, I was enticed back to church out of a gluttonous desire for something deliciously tempting. I wasn’t pursuing God; I was pursuing a good hamburger with fries.
A friend named Jakie Ax (left) played the role of chief enticer and Jimmy Dawson (right)backed him up.
It was a time of joining for me, who had never been much of a joiner. I went out for Babe Ruth Baseball and I became a Boy Scout. Jakie Ax and Jimmy Dawson were not only classmates at Downingtown Junior
When we went on camping trips in the tent at night, Jimmy
I never actually filled in the blank, but I told Jimmy I guessed I’d be in Heaven, because I was a pretty good kid (shoplifting aside). Anyway, I went to MYF this one Sunday evening because Jakie said they were going to Dick Thomases’ Brick Oven after the meeting.
I loved Dick Thomases’ hamburgers and Bar-B-Ques; french fries and milk shakes, too. (Ah, the lure of Dick Thomases’ Dusty Miller Sundaes!) I would never miss an opportunity to eat there, even if it meant enduring some kind of dull church meeting.
But after that first Sunday, I kept going back every week, even without the bribe of food, because I found I really enjoyed being there. I didn’t take the religious stuff very seriously, though, and I was always questioning the Pastor. The minister was very good with us kids. He was easy to talk to and his wife made great cookies and hot chocolate. His name was Tom Ogden and you can still see him as he looked back in the ‘fifties if you get a chance to see the movie, “The Blob” starring Steve McQueen. Reverend Ogden (right) played the role of the fire chief in that film.
So what is all this leading to? It happened that one warm autumn evening we met on his porch and he talked about how God had created everything. When he was done, I asked, “If everything was created by God, who created God?”
Boy, I thought I was so smart, like nobody had ever asked that question before. I didn’t find his answer very satisfying either. I don’t know, it kind fell into a generalization, like with God all things are possible. I went home feeling pretty smug with myself. I felt I had stumped him.
So lets examine that first sentence of the Bible, Genesis 1:1 and find out if I was so smart or not.
“Beresheet bara Elohim, et ha shamanism et ha Eretzin” in Herbew means “Beginning God created heaven and land” or as generally translated .in English: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
A Dr.Chuck Missler gives some further information into the Hebrew Beresheet is what became the name of the book, Genesis (Beginning), which is what the word means. Bara means to form out of nothing. Elohim is one of the names of God and the Hebrew here is plural, like Seraphim is the plural of Seraph, giving our first hint of the Trinity. The Hebrew singular for God is elowahh (eloah)
In the beginning who created?
God created, but here my question to my minister still hung in the air. Who created God?
For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. (2 Corinthians 5:1)
Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations.
Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. (Psalm 90:1-2)
The eternal God is your refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms. (Deuteronomy 33:27)
No one created God. He simply always existed. I know that seems impossible, but stop and think about the fact that we exist and the planet exists and the universe exists and all that exists is also impossible. How can you explain there being anything at all because such a thing is obviously impossible. Yet at the same time there being nothing is also impossible.
How can what exists not have a beginning or an end? Isn’t that just as impossible? Our human mind believes everything must have a beginning and an end.
Yet God doesn’t have a beginning or end. He just is, exactly as he told Moses:
God said to Moses, “I Am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I Am has sent me to you.’”(Exodus 3:14)
Scientists had a hard time excepting that idea, so they imagined up a beginning called “The Big Bang Theory”. (Their names were Sheldon and Leonard. Kidding!) They said there was what they refer to as A Singularity, even though this broke a long-standing Philosophic belief that became a prevailing scientific one, as well as a quite logical one to the human mind: ex nihilism nihil fit or out of nothing comes nothing. And scientists do insist before this “singularity” there was nothing, not even space. So in fact, there wasn’t even nothing.
Here is what scientists admit they do not know about this “singularity”
The singularity didn't appear in space; rather, space began inside of the singularity. Prior to the singularity, nothing existed, not space, time, matter, or energy - nothing. So where and in what did the singularity appear if not in space?
They don't know.
They don't know where it came from, why it's here, or even where it is at the moment. All they really claim to know is that we are inside of it and at one time it didn't exist and neither did we.
Doodle do do, doodle do do! A little Twilight Zone music, please.
In 2012, Peter Higgs and Francois Englert were awarded the
Stephen Hawking then rolled into the picture warning that Higgs Bosom would ultimately lead to the destruction of the whole universe. I admired Hawking since he somehow managed to live 54 years with ALS, yet I sorrow for him because as far as I know he never accepted Christ or God. Hawking was not the only physicist to believe in the Higgs Bosom Doomsday. Many scientists jumped on Hawking’s bandwagon . .Hawking’s said “ that a quantum fluctuation creates a vacuum bubble that expands through space and wipes out the universe.”
I would not get too concerned about this because as Isaiah says of God:
Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand,
Measured heaven with a span
And calculated the dust of the earth in a measure?
Weighed the mountains in scales
And the hills in a balance? Isaiah 40:12
I put my trust and belief in God’s bosom, not Higgs.
You who laid the foundations of the earth,
So that it should not be moved forever,
You covered it with the deep as with a garment;
The waters stood above the mountains.
At Your rebuke they fled;
At the voice of Your thunder they hastened away.
They went up over the mountains;
They went down into the valleys,
To the place which You founded for them.
You have set a boundary that they may not pass over,
That they may not return to cover the earth. (Psalm 104:5-9)
The Lord by wisdom founded the earth;
By understanding He established the heavens;
By His knowledge the depths were broken up,
And clouds drop down the dew. (Proverbs 3:19-20)
Although the official name is Higgs Bosom, it became more well known as the God Particle. Higgs, and several other physicists, hate this name, God Particle, especially Peter Higgs who is a staunch Atheist.
I say, no mater how you slice it, everything always comes back to God.
Much of so-called Science today is based on mathematical calculations and here is their problem. In Algebra we learn about equations; 1 + 3 = 4. The two sides always have to balance. Often we have a missing part, but because an equation must balance, we can find what is missing, so 1+ 3+X = 6, we can solve for X. X = 6-4; therefore X is 2 . If we leave anything out of our equation, then we get a wrong answer because we force the sides to balance when they don’t. If we leave the 3 out of the above equation we are left with 1+X =6, and to force the balance, we say that X = 6 -, which is 5, when X is really two. Our answer is wrong and can lead to dire circumstance. Scientists routinely leave God out of their equations., so…
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
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. (KJV)
You will find other theories concerning this beginning to try and explain away things we can’t explain. One popular one is the “Gap Theory”. It looks at a more literal translation of the Hebrew and concludes that God created the Earth and then some sort of disaster occurred, perhaps the upheaval with Satan. This resulted in the wasting of the original Earth and God restructuring this wasteland without form and void into a new Earth. This is how “The Gap” Theorists translate the first two verses.
In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth -the earth hath existed waste and void, and darkness [is] on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God fluttering on the face of the waters, (Genesis 1:-1-2 YLV)
They then suggest that God created the Earth because something went wrong and He had to rebuild it. I am not going to make any judgment on that, except I don’t buy it. You can make your own determination, but here are my reasons for not believing the Gap Theory”.
One, I think if there was a disaster and a rebuild the Bible would have mentioned it. Two, it would indicate that God really didn’t have complete control and Three, I believe “The Gap” is a way for those embarrassed about the briefness of the Creation to come alongside the secularists and their billions of years claim.
“Oh, a gap, that explains the age put upon the creation. A disaster and reformat, oh sure, that explains the existence of dinosaurs and cavemen. All those fossils were left over from the first Earth that God destroyed.”
I think it is a cop out by those who can’t easily explain some things and I have never felt we needed to find a natural explanation for the miracles of God. That isn’t faith in God; it is reliance on man.
(We’ll get more into God and time later.)
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day. (Genesis 1:1-5.)
It is interesting that God began by creating light for an Earth described as without form, void and dark. If you think science and religion can’t agree on anything, well, yes they can. Here they do. The description here is exactly what the Big Bang Theorists say.
After the Big Bang the earth is referred to as a soup. a unformed and void creation, which for a long time was in total darkness and unseeable. That’s right. The Earth was created, came into existence, but if the scientists or us had been around, we wouldn’t have been able to see it because there was no such thing as light. Then “free electrons”, magically coming from somewhere, began to scatter and light appeared. I’m not even going to attempt to describe either electrons or what it means by them being free, but physicists say these just popped up after the Big Bang. Perhaps popped-up is not quite right, because, of course, they say it took hundreds of thousands of years for them to do this scattering before light appeared, while the Bible simply says God declared, “let there be light and there was light”. We will find that the main disagreements the Bible has with scientists is they leave God out of their equation and leave everything to chance and time. I believe when God commanded light to appear it happened pretty much on the spot.
(Think about that passage I began this lesson with.)
Keep in mind that God is light and the absence of light is darkness. The Spirit of God, which is the third person of the Trinity was “hovering over the face of the waters” and since the Holy Spirit is God it probably brought the light.
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. 1 John 1:5
Nonetheless, we have critics who say how could there be an evening and a morning if God didn’t create the Sun until the fourth day. Well, there was dark, then there was light, just as the Jews always counted a day as first the night and then the day. Besides it is really no different with the Big Bang Theory. Everything was dark and then after a while there was light, and yet there was no sun existing in this beginning either. It was all those free electrons’ work.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. (Genesis 1:4-5)
How long was this first day? I don’t know. God hadn't created time yet, had he? We have twenty-four hour days because the Earth revolves on it’s axis and the sun shines on different parts at different times until it makes a complete orbit. Thus a day does not depend on the existence of a sun, but the movement of the Earth on its axis. There wasn’t any sun yet, not until the fourth day according to Genesis, and who knows when the sun “evolved” in the Big Bang scenario. So who knows how long those first, second and third days were. I’m going to assume these were normal days, that is twenty-four hours each. The Earth would still turn on its axis at its normal rate whether there was sunshine or not.
We need to consider that God made the Sun and Moon for a different reason than providing light. He simply applied the light he had already created to their attributes for our convenience.
Light is a thing, you know? It is kind of a scientific mystery made up of photons and waves. And light travels. This fact wasn’t accepted until after 1729 A.D. Before then the consensus of scientists was light did not travel, but was instantaneous. See Consensus is not science, it is opinion. A man named Olaf Roemer discovered light traveled in 1677, but then had to endure 50 years of being laughed at by his fellow scientists. The laughter and jokes never stopped for him actually for he died in 1710, 19 years before James Bradley proved he was right.
Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. and God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day.
I think the word translated at firmament” in most Bibles is a bit confusing. Probably because the word firm is contained within we think of this as solid. It is referring here to the creation of what we call the sky. Clouds are the water above.
It is an ingeniously designed system that was put into place, even though it wasn’t used till much later, for remember there was no rain until the flood came.
When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground— Genesis 3:5-7.
There were underground springs and a mist that watered the garden. Even after the fall this was the water source for the land. It wasn’t for hundreds of years before God allowed rain to fall. No wonder there was flood. Imagine how much water was stored in the clouds by then, although I would guess evaporation had not occurred yet either, but it might have because God was refilling the earth's water by mist.
In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights. Genesis 8:11-12.
Yeah, the hydrologic cycle was there for when needed. This is the the waters on the earth’s surface evaporate and become stored in the clouds. After a while these water warehouses empty their stored up property as rain, which in turn refill the waters of the Earth’s surface. This system proved both a blessing and a curse to humankind when you stop and think about it.
Then God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Genesis 1:9
One more note, the firmament is more firm than we think of it.
Who alone stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the sea; (Job 9:8)
Bless the Lord, O my soul! O Lord my God, you are very great!
You are clothed with splendor and majesty, covering yourself with light as with a garment, stretching out the heavens like a tent. (Psalm 194:1-2)
The oracle of the word of the Lord concerning Israel: Thus declares the Lord, who stretched out the heavens and founded the earth and formed the spirit of man within him:(Zechariah 12:1)
It is he who made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens. (Jeremiah 10:12)
And a bunch of places in Isaiah: Isaiah 40:22, 42:5, 44:24, 45:12 and 51.13. God stretched out the heavens and formed a dome above his world.
Now after the Earth had been this formless place, just roiling seas, God create the dry land, the grounds formally hidden under the waters. Probably this early world was one big landmass surrounded by water. If you look at the world you can see how all the pieces seem to have fitted together.
Everything that is described in Genesis is exactly how the scientists or evolutionists see the forming of our world. (Oh when animals begin coming on stage some of the scientists do put birds out there earlier than the others, but I don’t buy it.) Notice the logic of creation as it developed, the planning of an ingenious mind, not just random chance.
Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth”; and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the third day.
Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so. Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the fourth day. (Genesis 1:6-19
Now on the fourth day God creates the sun and moon and stars. he imbued them with his light, but the main reason he created these objects was the invention of time for man. God is above time and eventually he will destroy time, but humankind needed some measure for itself. Humankind is bound by a timeline. The past is gone and the future is not yet, we have only the present, but God can see the past, present and future as he wishes from Eternity.
We will deal more with Eternity and Time next lesson as far as why I believe creation took place in six 24-hour days.
I leave you with one more passage about Jesus to ponder concerning time and God:
Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them and healed their sick. Now when it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a desolate place, and the day is now over; send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” But Jesus said, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They said to him, “We have only five loaves here and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass, and taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and said a blessing. Then he broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children. (Matthew 14:13-21)
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