Amen. Well, if you return in your Bibles to the book of Genesis, I'm some Warner here. Somebody said to me that so far in my sermon series on Genesis, it looks like a day means a week.
Maybe so. Well, we are doing a little back pedaling last time. I called it the first four days. A little ambitious. We got through one. So now we're doing the second and third day, and I'm hoping that we'll be on the fourth day. We're going the next sermon. But I did want to show you and we did talk about the different ways of understanding Genesis one that real Christians have taken and especially in the last 220 years, many godly believers, real believers, reformed believers, reformed teachers. I've underterpered this chapter, not in the literal way that I interpret it. Many of them have found great epics of time in the chapter in or between the verses others have seen the whole chapter as sort of a non literal, nonhistoric way of teaching that God is the creator of all things and sustainer of all things, though not in the way and the win of what the text literally says and that the whole thing is an emblematic poem or allegory or something like that in real Christians believe that and I'm not here to condemn them if they really believe that's what the Bible teaches. But if we are to hold that this chapter says something true and real about the universe, we saw there are three ways to interpret it and that's the concordist way, the fiddiest way, and I talked about both of those. The concordist would try to put the scriptures under as it were, what the world is saying, and conform them to the world. So when Platonism was invoked in the early church, all these exegytes saw Moses talking about plateenistic realities of forms and ideals in creation and in the Middle Ages when Aristotle came, became the thing to do then all these guys started finding Aristotelianism in the first chapter of Genesis and then in the end of the 1800s, early 19th century when the scientists were saying we need a lot more time. We might need hundreds of thousands of years, they weren't anywhere near saying billions yet, but many started to see gaps in the text and periodic creations and destructions because that's what the scientists were saying to them and so the concordists were seeing an interpreting scripture in accordance with that and trying to conform it to that. At the same time, the fiddiest had their advocates which noting that the Bible is not a science book and it's not. Pointed out that whilst the scientists can say what they're saying and the theologians can say what they're saying and they can contradict each other because one is talking about temporal history, the other is talking about religious conviction and they don't have to agree. And the unfortunate thing with that is it makes faith unreal and untrue in the world in some sort of game in a sense that we're playing. The method I thought was called creationism. It doesn't consider the word under science and it doesn't separate the word from science. It listens to what the scientists are saying. It considers their findings. It really tries to see what they really know from what they're just speculating on and it does so however under the authority of scripture that the scriptures judge the scientists and not the other way around. And I think that's the position we have to take no matter how you interpret the book of Genesis. You have to subject all that man is saying to the authority of this word. Remember beloved and this is something that's made a lot this mistake. Science doesn't actually say anything. You understand what I mean? Science never speaks. Scientists say things and they never say them apart from their own biases, their own beliefs, their own desires and their own mistakes and by the way they disagree a lot on everything, on details all over the place. There's not this monolithic cosmology that all secularists believe in. That's just not true. They're constantly quarreling in their journals and in their magazines about what the evidence actually says. And so it's important I think to me and to hopefully you that we judge everything according to scripture. This alone is infallible. This alone is inherent. This alone is objective truth. And what we want to do is understand what this is saying and recognize that wherever the scientists are saying something else they're wrong. If we get this right and sometimes we mess this up, but if we interpret scripture correctly accurately as God intended, then it can't ever be wrong because it never makes mistakes. And so whatever the scientists might be saying they're going to be proven wrong in time. And we have to be able to do and believe in that. And so as we turn to God's word, I just want to remind you that our goal this morning as every morning is to better understand and to more firmly believe the word of God. Let's pray as we turn to his word. Father again, we thank you for your word. We pray that you would help us to understand it correctly and help us to believe it firmly that we would not be shaken. No matter what Satan would say, no matter what the world would say, no matter what our own flesh says that we would submit to your word and believe and even know that what you say is the truth. And we ask this in Jesus name. Amen. Here now the word of the Lord from Genesis chapter 1, beginning in verse 1. And we will go again through verse 13. This is God's holy word. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And 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. And 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. And God called the light day and the darkness He called night. So the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And 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, then God said that 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. And God said that 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 according to its kind, and God saw that it was good. And it was evening and it was morning the third day. And the Lord established this word in our hearts and pray. Again, if you notice, I read it a little differently because again, the Hebrew text every verse starts with the word and there is no thens thus, and I just think that that little device that we do sometimes in this name this lead us to think that something is being said that isn't. So I read it according to the Hebrew. I want you to notice first of all this morning the divine fiat, the divine fiat. This is that command over and over again. That there be. Okay, fiat comes from the Latin, let it be done. And God creates simply with a word, right? He makes things out of nothing. The Bible in the New Testament describes it as God calls into being those things that were not. He calls those things that were not as though they were to use the old King James. And that's what he did in creation over and over again. And we saw in the first day of creation he created the heavens and the earth, which we said consisted in stuff, undefined, chaotic, disorganized, unrecognizable, but there was something there now. Before that there was God and there was no space, there was no time, there was no things. There was God and there was only God for all eternity, perfectly happy, blissful in himself, not needing anything, not lacking anything, but he created simply to give. And to share his own divine blessedness with beings that he would make that they could know him. And that's the purpose of creation as we saw. And we saw God create the first definable being as light. God said let there be light which we saw is the electromagnetic spectrum, a very small portion of which is visible light. That's what light is. It's electromagnetic energy. It comes from everything because everything is made up of atoms and the electrons vibrating and moving give off some kind of electromagnetic energy or radiation, human beings give off mostly the infrared spectrum as we saw. We know all this. This is stuff that we actually know. And so when God said let there be light at the very least, we're looking at the formation and organization of that stuff into molecular structures, atoms are being formed with protons and electrons and neutrons. There weren't any before, there was something, but now God has made it and that means the laws of physics, the laws of motion, the laws of matter. Suddenly there's laws that are governing stuff that is being ordered by God and then named by Him. He's making things. And of course because the text indicates that the creation is being revealed, is being expressed to us from the perspective of one on the earth, as one on the earth would see it and understand it. And the emphasis is on the earth. We have to admit that in addition to that electromagnetic spectrum, there was actually visible light because someone on the earth only sees the visible spectrum. So when God's electric be light, I'm assuming that all electromagnetic energy is found there including the visible spectrum so that at least on one side of the earth, in fact, only on one side of the earth because God separates the light from the darkness. Do you see that in the text? And he calls the light day and the darkness night and there's evening and morning. We only understand day and night by the presence or absence of light. That's how we define it. Evening and morning, morning is the beginning of the light. Evening is the end of the light. And this cycle repeats. Here is the first measurement of time. God creates time. Now time is there. Remember the cosmologists of our day say the big bang created time. It's hard as it is to understand time being created. If they can say it from nothing, I think it makes more sense to say it from a being who always was. And he made this time now and this measurement day and night, evening and morning, which by the way, on the earth, the only way that makes sense is if the earth is now rotating on its axis before light on one side. And all of that's there. There is light. There is day and night. There is evening and morning. For someone on the earth, we now have to understand this watery planet. And that's all it is at this point is rotating. And if you would have been on the earth, hopefully in a boat, you would have saw morning and evening and day and night because the text says there was day and there was night, morning and evening light on one side. So that brings us to the second day. See, I told you we would move quicker. That brings us to the second day. By the way, all of the properties of the things that we take for granted, right? We have to remember this. Now God creates them, natural laws, laws of physics, laws of motion, laws of matter, energy. God made those, matter in things act the way they do because of God. We should never get it in our heads that God has to be somehow now limited by the creation. You know what I mean? That what God has to govern according to these laws, who made the laws? He didn't have to do it that way. I imagine there's millions of ways he could have done it. Maybe he could have had gravity repel things and we would all bounce off the earth like a trampoline or something and somehow we'd have some kind of life from that. I don't know. We could all imagine millions of things, but he made the properties, right, the laws, that fluid is the way it is, that solids are the way they are. And all of the things that govern them, all of those things are the creatures of God. God has made them the laws, light, dark, gravity, temperature. These are all things that God created, thought up, governs according to these laws and he's put in place so that we could understand and do the things he's commanded us to do because the earth is this static place that responds the way we predict it to because God has organized it in a rational way. You wouldn't be able to do the things that you do if that wasn't true. And there's no reason why it would be rational if there is no God. Why would things work the way they do? Why wouldn't they just randomly change? What's holding them in place? Why doesn't this just disperse and if Adam's turned into chickens or something? Why not? I mean, what's governing it to be the way that it is? God has ordered it. God is holding it. Christ is the one who sustains and orders and he holds all things together, Scripture says else we would not be able to function and know him and know anything. He made us with this rational knowledge. We don't impose rationality on the creation. They wouldn't be able to make cars go if that's the case. Rationality is the creation. God, a rational being made, a rational creation so that we can manipulate matter and all kind of wonderful things and hopefully to his glory, serve him. But in saying all these things and I want to notice the second day, God made the firmament divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which are above the firmament God called the firmament heaven. And we get a lot of criticism here from the skeptics and the critics of Scripture and they do it unfortunately because of this word firmament which is from the Latin firmamentum which is an accurate translation of the Greek Stereoma which means something solid. Unfortunately the Hebrew which is what God inspired is the word rakia and it does not mean something solid. This is one of the times where I love the New King James especially in the New Testament because it follows the majority text manuscripts which I think is the most objective way to use the manuscripts that we have not that any of them change any doctrines but in the Old Testament unfortunately the New King James had the tendency to follow the Old King James and the Old King James just didn't get the Hebrew as well as we do today. They didn't have near as many manuscripts, they didn't have the Dead Sea Scrolls, there were so much they didn't know about Hebrew that we know today. And so what happens is sometimes the again the New King James puts the word firmament here because the Old King James uses firmament because the Latin uses the firmamentum because this Greek Septuagint which is a translation uses Stereoma which is something solid but rakia which is not something solid it comes from the word rakia which means to spread out. A tent is stretched out with the word rakia or a plate of gold is hammered out real thin stretched out by hammering. That's rakia, that's why the New American standard, the ESV and the Old NIV all use expanse. They don't have the word firmament because it's inaccurate. If you have an ESV it says God made the expanse, that's what Hebrew rakia means. Something stretched out. Do you know what? As interesting as that is, something stretched out made thin. Do you know that there's all sorts of scientific analyses of our atmosphere that describe it that way? I'll give you a few examples on 2021 article on BigThink.com, the title of the article says quote, New Graphic shows just how razor thin earth's atmosphere is. That's what rakia means, something stretched out made thin. Standard by hammering or by stretching. Other articles talk about how the heavens are stretched out. Just the same kind of thing that scripture says. One says it's shockingly thin. On nasa.gov you can read quote, the earth's atmosphere is an extremely thin sheet of air extending from the surface of the earth to the edge of space. If the earth were the size of a basketball, listen to this, the thickness of the atmosphere could be modeled by a thin sheet of plastic wrapped around the ball. It's how thin, how stretched out the atmosphere is, which is exactly what scripture says. And without the atmosphere, we wouldn't have air, we wouldn't have protection from solar harmful energies and rays and radiation in space. So it's interesting to me that it says this. There's a sense in which the word expanse just means our sky, right, it can say that and sometimes. And that's why it says God separates the waters under the expanse, which would be down here in the ground from the waters above the expanse, which could be above the sky and many think that it's the clouds, right, because if you're standing on the earth, water comes from above, waters below, there's space in between that separates the number before that there's no space. There's this watery mass together, there's no like, you know, space, it's all together. And of course, the scientists say the same thing about their big bang, everything is jammed together until it begins to expand and to explode. But there's another sense in which the expanse is all of space, you know, there's no Hebrew word for all of the universe as we know it or the cosmos or something like that. It is the expanse or the heavens. And that's why it's also called heaven here and heaven can be just what's above us, the clouds, or it can be as far as you can go, right, but see the thing is that the ancient people did not believe that there was this hard dome above us, you know, that's what the critics say. Oh, well Moses is a primitive, unscientific person and he's writing to these poor, primitive, unscientific people and they thought that the universe was just this little snow globe that were all inside, shake it up and it snows, you know, hard pop. That's so absurd as to be absolutely insulting to the ancient peoples. Have you ever been outside at night in the woods or in the desert or somewhere where there's no lights, there's no street lights, there's no car lights, somewhere where you can really see and there's no moon, by the way. Do you know what you see, do you see like the nebula, do you see so far, your eyes slowly over time, it's not just the few stars that I can see in Coriopolis, you know, you see it's like what God told Abraham, look to the heavens, see if you can count the stars, if you've ever been it, you've got to get away from all human lights to where your eyes will really accustom themselves to the dark, you can't be a bright full moon or anything because that'll dim everything else. You will see stars like you've never seen, like sheets of stars with your naked eye, there's no dome. All it had to do was become the first night and they would see, oh, the blue dome is gone. That's the most absurd thing that I've ever heard. But that's what they say because of the mistaken use of the word, for a minute, what about the waters above the heavens? Again, I've told you that some say that it's the clouds, each a young doesn't think so and each a young is probably the best conservative reformed authority on early chapters of Genesis of late Professor at Westminster. He wrote, quote, I am unable to accept the opinion that the waters above the expanse refer to the clouds, for this position does not do justice to the language of the text which states that these waters are above the expanse. I agree with him. I'm trying to judge things by the text. I want to say it's the clouds, it makes it easy, makes the text right, makes it easy, but the text actually says that he separated water above the firmament and even the smallest understanding of the firmament is this sky. He would have said the waters in the firmament, it would work, but it's above. So I'm saying that I believe that there were waters in space. When God created the world, I believe it from the text. I believe that there was water in space and that God separated the water in space from the earth by the atmosphere of the earth. Above the firmament was these waters that would have caused problems on the earth. God is now making, he's separating off the earth into the global planet that it is. It's removing this other stuff. The earth is becoming formed out of the other stuff which again the scientists say happened all by itself. You say, well pastor, gosh, I know you're a little bit silly, but to believe that water is just out in space, I mean, I think you've lost it pastor, right? I mean, isn't that what most scientific people would say, probably if they heard me say this? You know, it's interesting. If you read all the ancient creation myths, and I know I'm not helping my case, but they all picture almost every one great celestial oceans in space. I mean, isn't that interesting? You know what makes that interesting because they're also different on all the other details. The one thing that they all seem to have are these primordial oceans in space that the world needs to be protected from because they're going to destroy the world. Why would they all say that? Let me prove that to you. A couple of places, the Anuma Aliche, which everybody likes to compare to Genesis, which is absolutely laughably absurd. In the fourth tab that after the gods and goddesses have all been fighting and being jealous of each other, Marduk, who is the great Bale, God, Bale, the El, he kills TMA to represent the chaos and ocean, who's one of the first gods, and he splits her into like a dried fish half of her carcass, he sets up as the heavens, okay? He makes the universe out of TMA's corpse, but aren't you glad to know that's where you came from? And he says he sealed her up as the sky and he pulled down the crossbar and he posted guards and he commanded them to not let her waters escape. There's water up there that Marduk put the keep from coming down. I mean, it's the Babylonian myth, you know, they don't know anything, and of course you can read the same thing, however, in the Canaanite mythology, celestial seed. Canaanites didn't get it from the Babylonians, we know that, and they didn't get it from them. And then if you read a recent article entitled, quote, Cosmic Oceans, the primordial waters of ancient creation myths, it says this, while creation myths exhibit great variation and often echo the prevailing psychology of their respective peoples, there's one critical motif that remains relatively common to a range of broadly dispersed ancient cultures from Mexico and Peru to Egypt and Sumeria, and that is the primeval waters. I mean, they all talk about waters in that space, nobody sees that, who came up with that? Hindu, Polynesian, healthy, they all have the waters. The mystic people of Mexico describe the first state of formless, shapeless, watery darkness, the Lakota tribe in North America, waters in this space, who's getting that, who sees that? What if, what if all these testimonies have an actual grain of truth at one time, there was water that you could see? Why do we think this solar system is always the way it appears to us now? There's so many writings of ancient peoples that talk about what we know is Jupiter and Saturn and it is the planets, and they call them different gods and goddesses in the different cultures. And yet for some reason, Jupiter always supplants Saturn and eats some of his children somehow. Why does that always happen? Was there some heavenly reality that maybe they could see? That there was kind of a clash that caused some cosmic disturbances, that pieces of Saturn did get sort of, they looked like, taken up by Jupiter or something. What if that actually happened? What if there was water in space at one time? And these ancient peoples represented it that way, surely that's insane, Pastor. A 2011 article on space.com, quote, an icy moon around Saturn is showering rainwater onto its home planet, creating a vast halo of water vapor around the ringed world the new study finds, huge geysers of water. The discovery means that Encolatus, Saturn's sixth largest moon, is the only moon in the solar system known to influence the chemical composition of its greater planet, researchers said. It also solves a 14-year mystery that had scientists puzzled over the source of the water in Saturn's upper atmosphere, they've not found water all over the place in Saturn. The rings are all ice, it's all water, but there's liquid water all over the place because of the heat of the planet, even though it's so far away from the sun. The article goes on. There's no analogy to this behavior on the Earth, said study leader Paul Hartog of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, no significant quantities of water enter our atmosphere from space. This is unique to Saturn, was it always that way? They're puzzled over the source of, they were, had been puzzled over the source of all this water in Saturn's upper atmosphere. Another article, 2018 on Astronomy.com, says, asks the question actually. If Earth formed close to the sun and Saturn far from it, why is their water so similar? All the water we see on Saturn is everything we can tell, it's the same kind of water on the Earth. And since the scientists say that Saturn formed way out here in Earth here, where did the common water source come from? If Earth formed so close to the sun, Saturn so far away, why is their water so similar? According to the team, the similarities indicate that the same type of water may have been found in the inner and outer solar system during its formation. This would require us to change our current models, yeah, I guess it would. We're on day two in our tax. They say at the beginning of the solar system, I know they believe it's a lot longer ago, they think that there was water in space. The terrestrial, like DH of Saturn's rings and satellites, may indicate a similar water source for the inner and outer solar system, a similar water source, there was water, and God made a firmament and expanse that separated the water that their saying was there. Here's another one for you. This one is my favorite. You can find this on ZMEscience.com, you can also find it on NASA.gov. Here's the title of the article. Just do a search on trillions, oceans, space, don't do it now. The title of the article, enormous water reservoir found in space is bigger than 140 trillion earth oceans. So if you take all the water in our oceans, times it by 140 trillion, that's the water that they see in space, right now. Here's what they say about it. Astronomers have discovered the largest body of water so far known, a reservoir of water floating in space around a distant quasar, holding 140 trillion times the mass of water in the earth's oceans, and quote, God made an expanse, and he separated the wires, and if they're right that the universe expanded, and was expanding, and we're on day two, where's that water at? It's right there because it has to expand further. I think the scripture means what it says. I think that's exactly what God did. I want you to notice the third day. Then God said that 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 gathering together the waters he called seas, and God saw that it was good. You know, all geologists and padiantologists and any scientists that has anything to do with the earth admit that at one time the whole earth was covered in water. That's just a fact. Nobody denies that. You know, we all heard of the primordial soup that the first pyramesium crawled out of or whatever. The whole earth was this slimy water or whatever, and they know this. This isn't some theory. See, a lot of the stuff they have is theories that they speculate on because they think it has to be so, because there's no God and everything has to account for itself, and that's why they make up the stuff they make up. If they know the world was covered by water, why? Because they find fossilized marine creatures on the tops of every mountain. You can, and this is just a fact. Nobody would deny this that they found fossilized sea creatures on the Himalayas, the tops of the Himalayas, on the tops of all the mountains. Nobody denies that everything at one time was underwater. That's not disputed. And yet without plate tectonics, the earth would probably still be a water world according to many scientists. The oceans are as deep as they are because we have plate tect plates, or just the crust of the earth is divided up into these plates that float around on the mantle, and they smash together, and that makes mountains, or one goes on under another one, and that causes, you know, ocean crevices really, really deep. The oceans get deeper because of the plate tectonics and the mountains get higher. So if there were no plate tectonics, the water would just, they wouldn't go deep into the ocean. It would just be covering everything, and there wouldn't be any high points of land. The earth would most think that, yeah, there would, worth would still be a water world. But not only that, the earth is the only planet known to have plate tectonics. Some argue that there may be some evidence that Jupiter's moon Europa has it. Some theorized Venus might have had them in the past, but everybody acknowledges that right now the earth is the only planet known to have plate tectonics, and without plate tectonics again, many scientists say life could not have arisen. Why is that the case? Plate tectonics affects the climate, it affects the motion of the tide. It stirs up and provides life giving new, new fiasis. It kind of recycles what's in the earth, brings it out, puts it back in. Here's a quote, essential, plate tectonics are essential for the existence of a planetary magnetic field, which protects the atmosphere from the interaction with the solar wind. Contrast this with Venus and Mars, which are both dead planets, they have almost no measurable magnetic field. They don't have plate tectonics. Now at this point, we could say, wow, hope. We would be at least thinking about, wow, the Bible is a lot more accurate than maybe I was led to believe. And maybe all we need to do is add a bunch of time. And we're kind of there. I mean, if you read the creation myths, again, the enuma list, carving up Tiamat, I mean, I don't know how you make anything of that, but what the Bible is saying again, very simple, very phenomenal, logical language, the way it appears to you standing on the earth, we can see that many scientists are saying the same thing. And again, since they've gone to this creation account, as it were, of the big bang and everything did have a beginning, and it did expand, it seems to make sense. But you need more than that. Because we can't, again, continue what I've done when we get to verse 11. And God said that the earth bring forth grass, the herb that you'll seed, and fruit trees, that you'll fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself. And it was so, and the earth brought forth grass, the herb that you'll seed according to its kind, the tree that you'll fruit, whether that's three different kinds of plants, or one general with two subkinds, seed inside and outside, we don't know. And God saw that it was good, because they're just broad words. We're talking about plant life, you know, the flora that's out there. But we are talking about fruit and seeds, and we're talking about trees. And the thing is, all of the scientists today say that's not the way it happened. It's not, they say. They say that the first plants evolved from bacteria about a billion years ago, they were somewhat plant-like, somewhat bacteria-like, they had little bit of elements of each they say. It's not that anybody's ever seen it. And they say it started off with algae in the sea for about 500 million years, and then about 500 million years ago, some land plants, these were what's called, you know, it's the word, bryophytes, plants that give spores, not seeds, you know, moss and conifers and ferns and stuff like that, and another 150 million years before you get trees, and seed bearing fruits and things like that. So, but according to Scripture, God created them on the first living things. The land plants came before, the sea plants, sea plants don't come around till day five, according to Scripture, and the plants have the seed in them. They're mature, in other words, God didn't start from nothing, and like a biogenesis brings living plant from dead matter with chemicals and energy. He said, let there be plants with seed and fruit and there was. So full grown trees, I don't know, instantly an hour, by the end of the day, they were there. Plants and trees mature, a mature creation from the beginning. By the way, that answers the question that's demanded by this universe, and that is information. You see this universe, and every more and more, I shouldn't say every, but more and more scholars are admitting scientists that matter, energy, time, environment is just not enough. You need information, you need coding. Coding doesn't generate itself, coding doesn't write itself, it doesn't happen accidentally. You see, if you put a plant under the sun, it's not going to photosynthesize, it's going to die, unless the coding is in the cells of the plant to know what to do with that energy. Yes, we have a sun that keeps putting energy into this system, in that sense, it's not closed, though the sun is part of the larger system and it is closed. So thermodynamics do apply, but the plants have to know what to do with that. There has to be coding in the cells, they have to be told each cell what to do in order to make energy from that, and so you have to start off with the coding. Where does it come from? It comes from the mature creation that God created, the chicken comes before the egg. You can tell your kids that I said that, and then that's absolutely true. It didn't evolve from nothing, and when I've tried to show you here these first three days and we're going to wrap this up, but is that God orders, God creates, God orders, God separates, God organizes, God names. By the way, the last thing He names in the creation account is in verse 10. He called the waters C's from now on, man does the name. Man is going to do what God has begun, and what we see in the creation account in God's goodness and why He does the things that He does for His goodness. We also see in the way God saves us from our sins, and I want to just go there at this point because Paul likens it that way. He says that it is God, for it is the God who commanded light to shine out of the darkness. Probably that actually happened, who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. In other words, just as certain as God's spiritual light shines in your heart and gives you the knowledge of Christ, God said, let there be light. He's resting the certainty of salvation and what Christ does on the fact that we can all see that God said, let there be light, and that's why this creation account is so important that it seems to me that we affirm that at least that God made it all, that He's sovereign over it all, because if He didn't make it all, and if He's not sovereign over it all, then He can't save us, and in fact we don't really need saving, because there couldn't have been a fall. Now I've tried to give you what I think is the biblical interpretation. Here's the worldly interpretation, so what I've said, and what I've tried to show you and even from scientific journals, the real possibility of these things being identified today by again things that we can see and know, let me give you what passes for intelligence in the unbelieving world. The universe we inhabit exploded into being 15 billion years ago in a titanic fireball called the Big Bang. The modern Big Bang theory does not state that a concentrated lump of matter located at a particular point in space suddenly exploded, sending fragments rushing away at high speed. That's not what the modern version says, but this is what it says now, but that space itself came into being at the moment of the Big Bang. The birth of the universe is said to have happened in the following manner in the beginning, that's what they say, a tiny bubble of space time, a billion trillion trillionth of a centimeter across, ten to the negative thirty-three power, if you're keeping scored home, spontaneously into existence out of nothing. This is so much more scientific than what I had spent all my time on thus far. As the result of a random quantum fluctuation, oh, that explains something from nothing, it was seized by an intense anti-gravitational force which caused it to expand with explosive rapidity and scarcely more than a billion trillion trillionth of a second. The universe will do about ten meters, the centimeters, the size of a grapefruit. The anti-gravitational force then disappeared. Why not? We just created it out of nothing. In the inflationary phase of the accelerating expansion came to an abrupt halt in the mid-averse defeat. The heat energy and gravitational energy of expanding space then produced matter. As the universe cooled more and more structure began to freeze out, first nuclei, then atoms, finally galaxies, stars, and planets. The Big Bang was the abrupt creation of the universe from literally nothing, no space, no time, no matter. It's quite an extraordinary conclusion to arrive at. It is. It's a statement of faith. It's unbelief. And it has nothing to do with science. To avoid the logical idea that the universe emerged from an infotessible point or singularity, the old version of infinite density and depth temperature, a Big Bang cosmologist today, have invented the notion of a smeared out singularity. They claim that prior to 10 to the negative 43 seconds, this is before that earlier one, after the Big Bang, when the universe measured 10 to the negative 33 centimeters across, that the distance between space and time becomes blurred, the laws of physics don't apply as a result of quantum fluctuations. So an infinitesimal point can never form, and the origin of the universe cannot be said to occur at any moment, but it's all smeared out. So those are your options. I think the scriptures are scientifically sound, and I think they're true. And I hope that by giving this account, it builds your faith in Christ, because the same Christ is speaking here in Genesis. And if he can bring life from the dead, he can certainly bring about the universe in six ordinary days. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you for your word, and we pray that most of all we would submit ourselves to you by believing in what you say in everything, Father. And I pray again that I would have expounded your word accurately today, and where I haven't let us all quickly forget and let me learn better. But Father, help us again to believe, and to live for you, and we ask this in Jesus' name, amen.