Amen. Well, if you would turn in your Bibles to the book of Genesis chapter 1 verse 1, I wanted to make it easier for you to find this scripture reading this morning. So I did my best. I had planned on summarizing someone asked me in the hall. Was that your last sermon in Matthew? Are you going to do something? I had planned on talking about this is the last sermon in Matthew, but my mind was on other things. I believe I was able to preach the text and that was what was most important, but I've been thinking about where do we go after Matthew? It was about four years ago. It was at the end of the year in 2018 that we began the great gospel of Matthew. One of my favorite books in the Bible and by the grace of God we were able to go through that entire book. What a privilege. There are many Christians who are never able to do that. And we were allowed to do that. To consider every verse that God inspired through one of the twelve that were with Jesus. And we were able to look at that and then I was thinking about where do we go next and I had different ideas and I had different thoughts in my mind. You know, it is my intention at some point to go back to second Samuel because we did first Samuel. And I love those books and I like to go into both testaments continually because it's all about Christ in his salvation. It's the same God. It's the same word. God doesn't change at all from the Old Testament to the new. It's entirely the same God, the same way of salvation, the same sinfulness of man, the same savior that's pointed to, the same way of salvation by grace through faith from Genesis to Revelation. It's all his word. It's all the same. And I was thinking about the problems that we are facing today and often I want to take God's word and apply it. And what book can I apply and throughout my ministry I tried to do that and I was thinking about sort of one word that summarizes all that's going on in our world today and it seems to me that that word is uncertainty, uncertainty, confusion, doubt, what is true, what is real. We don't even know that anymore. We're questioning some of the most basic, most self-evident truths that we all know by nature. We're not in the questioning, questioning them. We're getting rid of them in a crazy kind of dystopian reality that we're all experiencing that we're hoping mankind will come back to his senses at some point and affirm reality as it actually is and things as basic as male and female, unchangeable realities that our world says, no, you can change. And it's destroying children in saying one in five children are identifying with LGBTQ in the next generation that you know that one in twenty percent. That's going to end life as we know it if that doesn't change. That's what's coming. I'm certainty, confusion, denying the real, affirming the unreal and we all have to play pretend and go along and we're bullied into it. And in the midst of that I was thinking about my mom and the things I learned from her and how she and my grandmother brought the word of God to us. They were believers. We all went to church, but they believed in being saved. My mom and my grandmother did. And I talked to you before about how my mom bought me that picture Bible and how I devoured it. It was so well written in the pictures where like the best comic books that I had read. I mean, it was well done. Each work was like a work of art and I learned the stories and God was real and alive in the lives of people. And I remember reading that picture Bible thinking, well, if that was only the case today that God was real and alive in the lives of people. But in my religious upbringing, growing up in the mainline Lutheran Church, that was, I don't know, maybe that was back then. Now we kind of just live and maybe kind of hope that there's a God believed that he exists in that way and try to be a good person I guess. But I was thinking in addition to my mom bringing me God's word and eventually God using her to save me and grandmother. I was thinking for what else did we really like about her and my sister and I were able to spend a really amazing time. I've never talked to my sister like I did the last day of my mom's life where we were just in the hospital all day. And we were remembering my mom because she's lying there and you know one of the things that we loved about her was how she encouraged us as children to use our imagination. My mom would tell us stories and she would make up these rhymes and Pam and I began to just say them from memory. Some of them were valuable things. Prayers, my mom made this prayer when we were kids and I started to say it and Pam was like I thought mom got that from somewhere. So I googled it to see, you know, I don't Google anything, I duck, duck, go to it. And it doesn't exist. My mom did make up this prayer dear Lord. Hear me when I pray. Thank you for watching over me today. Now please watch over me tonight and wait me with thy morning light. I said that prayer every night as a child, as an unbelieving child, as an unconverted child, but I was taught you pray and you say that prayer. Mom just gave us that prayer when we were little. And she would tell us, you know, use our imagination. It's so critical for children to be encouraged to use their imaginations to play pretend. Don't ever think there's something wrong with your child when they're doing that. There are certain things you don't want them to pretend. Right, there are certain things that they're wrong to pretend and you need to correct them if it goes in that direction. But just to use their imaginations and to think, I mean that's how they're learning to solve problems by learning to use their imaginations. That's a crucial part of childhood. Psychologists will tell you that children have to be encouraged and that and my mom encouraged us not only in like these things that she would make up these poems. I'm not going to say any of them, but I could. But in her stories about her childhood, you know, I grew up in Salzburg and north of Salzburg is a place called Salzburg Extension, which is an extension of Salzburg to the north. My grandmother was born in the extension, but north of the extension was narytown. Now, to me growing up, narytown was like a magical place because we would hear these stories from my mom about narytown. Narytown was named because a long time ago, a bunch of brothers named Nari moved to this area just like piston-indieville, which is east of Salzburg is a bunch of piston-indies that live there. We're very logical in Salzburg in naming areas, the extension, piston-indieville, narytown. But my grandmother, Spamley, the cradonis, my grandfather's family, the cradonis, he married my grandmother, who was from the extension, and they moved to narytown because all the cradonis lived in narytown. So my mom grew up in narytown and they had goats and chickens and ducks, birds and dogs and cats. I mean, it was, we get these magical stories about narytown. And we actually came up with a name for them because everybody in the cradonis side has nicknames. My grandfather, my mom's dad was sap. You know, and it's not an insult as I was wondering as I go, why did the cradonis have sap? Because he was the sapper and the coalmines. Sappers go in with the dynamite and blow up the rocks. So it was kind of a commendation that even throughout his life as he was an old retard and they still called him sap. The man who took the dynamite into the mind, my mom's name. I was taught as a young child, Bougie, or Bougie, what was always called, Bougie. And for what I understand in their Italian dialect, which my grandfather's family came over from Italy by a hundred miles north of Rome, Bougie was little girl. I looked at up and translate Italian to English and it doesn't mean that on the internet but I guess that's what it meant from their family. That was my mom's name. Well, we called her stories, her magical stories, Bougie's adventures. Because she would do some of the craziest things. I'm glad I turned out a lot more straight-laced and walking the straight and narrow. But those stories were true. They really happened. Her adventures as a young girl growing up in narytime. And how important it is that when we do use our imaginations, there's a foundation in truth. We have to have truth. We live by the truth. As Christians, we worship God in spirit and in truth. We have to. I wrote a book, my first book, called Preaching with Biblical Motivation. And the thesis of that book that I explored and that I sought to prove was that the only way that Christians are rightly motivated, we can be motivated by all kinds of things just like everybody else. But the way in which Christians ought to be motivated should be motivated. The only way we can be motivated by faith through our faith is with the truth. Our faith apprehends the truth. And that's why we should be moved to obey God because we believe in what is true. It's not fantasy. It's not come up off the way to trick me into doing the right thing. It's it is true. It is real. And therefore, as God has proclaimed it and as it is, God's will think of it. Anything that really happens is God's will because He's sovereign. And He's made all things from nothing as we'll look at in a moment. So that if something happens, therefore it's real, therefore it's God's will, therefore when we lie. When we go beyond sort of imagination and pretend of childhood but when we lie and believe those falsehoods, we're actually assaulting what God has done. We're denying what He has done and we're saying, no, that's not real. Our fantasy which hasn't happened is real. I mean, to lie and to believe something that's manifestly false is a direct attack on the being and on the work of God. And so if we would say that there is no God, we're denying the real. Or if we would say that the earth made itself, we're denying the real, the factual reality. We're proclaiming a falsehood that by definition is against the reveal will of God hasn't done it that way. He's done it this way. And to say, no, that's not true, but this is to assault the very truth of God. And so what I want to do in this text this morning is begin to go back to the foundation of reality that we all need that our world is losing and even purposely rejecting. Go back to the foundation of what is real. Well, this is true that we would begin on page one of the first book that God in His inspired wisdom has given to us to know Him and to be saved in Christ. And that first verse that proclaims not only who God is but what is real. Let's pray as we turn to God's Word. Father in heaven, we do thank you for your word and we thank you especially for this word. Did you inspired your servant Moses to write so that we would know it? So that we would have a foundation in reality about who you are and who we are and what is real. And Lord God as mankind would live by who you are and who we are and what is real, we would be blessed. We would have the best possible lives we could have even in a fallen world because of your mercy and your grace and your tender mercies which are new every morning, even to sinners, for you send rain upon the just and the unjust and you fill our hearts, even the hearts of unbelievers with food and gladness. And so Father God, we pray as we turn to your Word that you would cause us to believe what is true because you are the God who is true. Put your word in our hearts and insulate us from the false lies of the world and of the flesh and of the devil. Let us be people who live by the truth no matter what. And we pray this in Jesus' name and kind of the false sleep during this long reading of God's Word. I should say this before I read this text, you know I read commentaries. And I had written the sermon a little bit later again that seems to be a lot happening lately. And Friday, Robin and I were able to have a nice time together and we were both doing work but we were together. And I had brought my commentary on Genesis written by James Boyce, the great Jim Boyce, PCA pastor of Ken Presbyterian Church, now deceased. And his sermons, at least his commentary I should say on Genesis, is actually his transcribed sermons. That's a lot of like preachers have that. They'll publish their transcribed sermons, just word-for-word what they preached with a few corrections if they've spoken, you know, grammatically and correctly. But they republished them. There are sermons as a commentary and RC's commentaries are most of them are that way. And Jim Boyce's commentary on Genesis is just his preached sermons of Genesis. If I'd already written the sermon, I'd already practice it once, but I thought, you know, I just want to keep getting ideas. And so I thought, I'm going to read Jim's sermons while Robin and I are together. And so I opened up up and he had a sermon on just one verse like me. And I said, oh, good, Jim, he's doing the right thing. He's doing like, I'm doing it. And I didn't really, and I started to read through it, I thought, well, I wonder what he does on the next sermon, you know, because I'm thinking about that. And he had another sermon, it was just one verse, just still verse one. So two sermons on verse one. If I went to the third sermon, still verse one. I went to the fourth sermon, still verse one. Four sermons, one verse. Fifth sermon, he adds the second verse. Six sermons, still just two verses, seventh sermon, two verses, eighth sermon, two verses, ninth sermon, two verses. Two and a half months in Jim's voices series to get to verse three of Genesis chapter one. Now, I don't think we're going to do that. I haven't plotted out the paricapies yet. But there is a lot here in verse one. There is so much here in the just the fact that God is the creator of heaven and earth. Verse one of Genesis. This is the word of Almighty God. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, the word of the Lord. When I was in seminary, one of the things you try to do is memorize different Hebrew and Greek words. One of the first verses I memorized in Hebrew was Genesis one one. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. There's a lot of technical things that we could talk about that we're not going to talk about. Here we have a bold statement that God made the heavens and the earth in Hebrew expression. That's everything. Every organism, every object, every bit of matter, every molecule, electron, proton, neutron, and when we learn that there are even smaller parts of those as well, everything. There was God and there was nothing and then God made something that wasn't Him and there was non-God and something. The great Peter Jones, one of the apologists of the Christian faith, I think one of the great apologists in the last 50 years or so, has described Christianity as foundationally and basically binary. Christianity is binary. It's one of the things our world hates today, binaries. That's because our world is thoroughly pagan and paganism is thoroughly unitary. Paganism is, as he says it, one is them. Everything must become the one, right? And all, think of it, Eastern religions, everything is about becoming and being the one. There is one in paganism and all the false religions, one. One is the beginning, one is the goal. All is one, pantheism. All is God in some way or in God. One is them as paganism, two is them as he says as Christianity. There is a God and then there is not God. There is a creator and then there is a creature. There is a real relationship. There is not just one. There is two fundamental, fundamentally two beings in the universe, uncreated being and created being. And they will never be just one because God has made something. That is not God and we never want to say that what God has made is God. Or deny that there is a God and all that there is is what he has made. The Genesis account begins within the beginning. God created the heavens in the earth. It's not an argument. There are no proofs offered. Genesis is not written to unbelievers to try to convince them to believe. The book of Genesis was given to Moses with the other five or four books of the pen. It took the first five books while they were in the wilderness being delivered from Exodus. God commanded Moses to write down this revelation before that there was no command. There was God's people and they had faith. You can read about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in Genesis who lived five hundred years before Moses. And before that, before the flood, Noah and his children and there were preachers like Enoch. The Bible says Enoch was a preacher before the flood of Noah. So there was God's word being proclaimed. There were sacrifices. You can read a pain and able giving sacrifices to the Lord. There was worship. There was all kinds of indications that God was still visiting as people from one high saving, as people condemning and judging the wicked. Ruling over his creation, but as far as we know, there was never any actual commanded written revelation until God said to Moses right down these words. And so Genesis is given to a believing people in the wilderness not to discover that there is a God but to be taught who that God is and how they are to worship him and what they are to believe about him. Which in many ways they already knew from the creation. We sang about it in some of those songs. I really liked them. Frank, I almost forgot to come over here for the pastoral prayer because I just wanted to sing that. It's him we were talking about that says how everything declares that there is a God, right? The heavens, the rocks, the trees and everybody gets that and hears that. But that's not what man says. Though man knows that there is a God, though man knows that he's a creature, creature made by God. And we know this, if Scripture itself says this, Romans chapter 1, verse 19, to hear the full exposition of this come in the evening as Pastor Apples has been leading us wonderfully through the book of Romans. But clearly in Romans chapter 1, beginning in verse 19, what may be known of God? What may be known of God is manifest in them human beings. Manifest plain in them why? How? For God has passed and shown it to them. Everybody has already seen this. God has shown it to them. How has God shown it to them? When did He show it to them? Verse 24, sense the creation of the world where we are in Genesis. Sense the creation of the world his invisible attributes are. Current present tense are continually clearly seen. Everybody sees them. Everybody sees God's invisible attributes. Where do they see them? Being understood by the things that are made. By the things that are made. I used to say when I was at Fox and witness things to some of the people there. Give me any object, acknowledge that it's real. And I'll prove to you that there's a God. I like to start arguing sometimes with Fox with my friends there. But I remember talking with one of them and he seemed to be pretty much persuaded or he just wanted to get away from me. I don't know which. He said, how about this pencil? I said, let's talk about this pencil. Where did this pencil come from? Well, it probably came from some store. Where did it come from there? Probably some from some factory. Where there were probably somebody who went out and cut down a tree. So there was a tree and there was some lead and some metal. And whatever it is that erases are made of. I don't know magic maybe. And somebody put that pencil together, right? Where did the people come from? Well, somebody burst then. And where did they come from? And you just keep going back and back and you have to get to what even Aristotle recognized as a mover who himself is not moved. You can't explain reality without that. You're irrational. You leave the world of sanity without that. Without actually accounting for the reality of all things by a first uncaused cause, a being who needs no cause. If something exists, then in our minds, we know that something had to always exist. Because if there was ever a time when there was nothing, there would be nothing now. Because out of nothing, nothing comes. One of the most basic rules of science and reason that we have. Without reason, you can't think. You can't put one plus one is two and that mean anything without reason. Mankind is the reasonable animal. He has a reasonable soul. Six times in the Westminster documents. Mankind is known as being the one with the reasonable soul. When Jesus Christ became a man that said he took a reasonable soul and a true body. That's how they distinguish between man and the other creatures. The animals they said were the sensitive souls. This was theologians going all the way back to the early church. Animals have sensitive souls. Well, because they lived by their senses, right? By their instincts, we say. You know, a dog sees a squirrel when he cases it. You know, or whatever. They do what they do. Every swallow makes its nest the same way because that's how it knows. It doesn't think, it doesn't reason it. It has basic thoughts, sure, but it's not like man who deliberates, who's aware of himself and all the rest. They're the sensitive souls. They live by senses and they even said plants were the nutritive souls because they actually have a living principle within them too. It makes it an earth meant and reproduces but they don't have any senses and they don't move like the animals, so animals were higher than plants. But man is the highest of all because he has reason. And by reason he can know God and he can know himself. And in fact, he does know God and he can't deny God. Because again, if there is anything, there must be something and that thing can't ultimately have been made by anything or you're back to, well, what made that? Sometimes the kids will be play the game of what came first, the chicken or the egg, right? Well, you have a chicken, you had to have an egg to get the chicken but you had to have a chicken to get that egg. But then that chicken came from another egg and that egg came from another chicken. And where did they all come from? You can't just say chickens and eggs went on forever because that's absurd. It's absurd to have an infinite chain of finite causes. That's absurd. It's a contradiction. It's irrational. It's like a squirrel square circle. It's impossible. To say chickens and eggs go on forever is to say, you don't know where they came from. You're not giving an answer. You need an answer for the whole chain. You need a cause that actually could produce and be a reasonable accounting of the whole chain. One chicken can suffice for one egg and vice versa. But all of them need something to make them. That's not a chicken and that's not an egg. And that's what we know by nature. And that's what Romans 1 teaches us. We know. If you walk in the woods and someone says to you, no one's ever been in these woods before. And you're walking and you see a plain Riggley's gum wrapper on the ground. You know, I pick Riggley's because it doesn't even have any words on it. It's just these plain white gum wrapper. You're going to know immediately somebody was there. It's just paper, tiny little piece of paper. Couldn't it evolve there all by itself? I mean, we're told everything evolves all by itself. So why couldn't that little tiny... Why does your mind immediately rule all that out? You know that a human was there. No one else can account for that paper. Because reason demands it. Reason demands an adequate cause for a particular effect. And therefore you have to have a being who always was. Or if he came into being, then you need to explain that. Reason demands it. If you see a pie, you know there's a pie maker. If you grant that anything exists, you know that there's a creator. And that creator, according to Romans 1, is known by every single person. Being understood by the things that are made, even what? What do they know? What do we all know? What does everyone know? What does every atheist know? They know God's eternal power. That he has absolute power. Because he brings something into being from nothing. You know, I worked with a lot of carpenters and construction workers when I was, especially in the summers between college. And I'd worked with subcontractors and contractors. And that was a hard worker. And I did okay. And I would watch these guys. I mean all I did was, you know, carry this dry wall here. And these cinder blocks there. Whatever. I was a laborer. But these guys would build houses up from the ground. There would be ground. And then, you know, in a month and a half there would be a house. But they didn't make it from nothing. They had all these materials brought in, right? And I knew carpenters, who even made their own wood sometime if they were making, they'd actually cut down the tree. And they'd cut out a plank. And they would dry it and everything that you do to make it lumber. All right. I guess you could study and learn how to make nails. You could learn how to make all the materials to make a house and maybe actually do it. But every one of those materials you had to get from the earth. You can't make anything without starting with something. But in creation, God made the heavens and the earth from nothing. And reason demands that. And the scriptures declare it. God made the heavens and the earth in Hebrew way of speaking everything. He made it all. And he made it from nothing. That to me really is the greatest miracle. We can talk about Jesus rising from the dead. And again, I said to you, the most significant doctrine, Christian doctrine, because again, once we understand that that happened, then everything Jesus said or did is true. And he's God. Because if he rises from the dead, he's God. He is who he said he was. So that's why it's the capstone doctrine. And I'm not the one who said that. I just agree with other theologians who say it. But that's not a significant. A dead person coming to life is not as astronomical a miracle, as nothing becoming a person. A miracle beyond description. That nothing would become something. That God who is and all that is is God, and suddenly God wills, shouldn't say suddenly, from eternity, God wills, that He would, in particular time, create. All of it already has had because He's perfect because He doesn't make up things as He goes along. Knowing all that He will do and sustaining all that He does for His glory, all of His will always being done perfectly, that He brings into existence something, something that's not Him, something that's beside Him, yet He's still eternal and infinite, and then compasses all things. Suddenly there is space. Suddenly there is time. Suddenly there is reality that other beings can be in and understand. And now, and of course the greatest thing that God did in creation was to create beings that could know Him, the way in which He knows. Not exactly, right? God knows all things immediately. Do you ever think of that? He knows things immediately. Again, the carpenters, they know their houses, they know how they build it. But they don't know the materials as far as their molecules and their atoms, and they're not there in every part of that material knowing exactly what's going on all the time, sustaining it by their power, is it worth? Not even close. You can learn everything that there's to know about some thing in this world, and yet God knows all of its parts, and all of its laws that cause it to be what it is, and God actually has made all that and willed all that, and it was His idea. You know, when the Theologians talk about from the creation we should know God. We should see God. That's what we see in Romans 1. We know God. What do we know? His eternal power and we know His divine nature. Everybody knows that. Richard Dawkins knew that. He could say all he wants. There's no God. He knows better. He knows there's a God. He knows God's eternal power. He knows God's divine nature as much as anybody. And that's what's so scary about our world today, because we've been living now for about 50 or 60 years in the West, and we've been denying God. We've been denying Him. We deny that He made anything. We deny that He exists. And I think what we're seeing now in our culture in this madness of denying male and female, and even encouraging children to say, oh, yeah, if you feel like a girl in your boy, well, you can be a girl. You are a girl. Just say it and we'll give you drugs and maybe even God forbid permanently disfiguring surgery. There will harm them for the rest of the lives that many people don't live through, and then they have to take drugs, the rest of their lives, to stop the infection from all the horror that they've done to their bodies, to try to make it that they kind of look like the opposite sex, but they're not. Never, and they never can be, and it's just this great lie, and I was talking to someone about this, who had someone come into their office a Christian and his daughter went through this, and they encouraged her to school, oh, yeah, you're a boy, because you feel like it! And this girl was beautiful, and this beautiful girl begins by her teachers, by people that should be protecting her, by people who are called scientists and doctors, given drugs, so that her own body's natural goodness that would be the woman that God made her to be begins to suppress itself, suppresses the truth, it's suppressing who she is! And she starts to grow hair out of her face, and it starts to disfigure her face over months and years, and this beautiful girl, after multiple years of this madness, and thank God she didn't have the surgery, to permanently disfigure her, she comes to her senses and thank God maybe doesn't listen to the abusers, and that's what they are, child abusers that should be charged criminally, for what they're doing to children, and she stops, but she's permanently disfigured now, just from the hormones, because hormones do horrible things. Powerful things! I can't just go to the drugstore, buy a bottle of hormones, they're dangerous, and they give these kids this stuff, and then they say that, pretend like you're something else, and it's killing people, and it's destroying society, and it's because we said, there is no God, there is no true, there is no real, you can just make your own reality, and God is showing us know you can't. And there are lives that are being destroyed, on this altar of madness, because we don't want to acknowledge, that there's a God in what He has made He has made, and we can't change it, and it is to our best interest to, as much as we can, accommodate ourselves to it, and use it according to the way it should be used. I've said before, you could probably live your life walking on your hands, but you're going to have a much less, less quality of life doing that, because your hands are not made to be walked on. You could learn how to do it. I knew a guy who could do it pretty good, he could even go up a few steps. Wow! Could you imagine if someone said, well, you know what, I actually, I'm supposed to walk on my hands, I believe that I'm a hand-walking human, they have this now, and that's who I am, and so, you know, they start to do that, and then they're like, well, you know what, you would walk better on your hands if we have rotated your feet and put them on the end of your wrists. So we'll do that. And they begin to do that, and you think, that's ridiculous, but that's what they're doing. This particular girl I was talking about, there's another one, and I just read about this one, and the girl's arm is all just permanently scarred, horrible-looking. You know why they could say, took a whole bunch of skin off her arm to create for herself male genitals, from her skin. And of course, it's not real, and she'll be sterile the rest of her life, and all the rest that they don't tell them, and she's permanently just figured, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. I have an outline, and I didn't start a jet. Maybe Jim Boyce is getting a little vengeance on me right now. But what I wanted to see, I had a bunch of quotes and stuff, but maybe we'll do that next time. What I wanted to see is the importance of creation. Christianity, brothers and sisters, does not begin with receive Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior. Christianity, Christianity begins within the beginning. God created the heavens and the earth. And without that, there is no salvation, because there is no mankind, there is no sin, and there is no redemption. And we've got to begin in the beginning. Francis Schaefer said, and I'll end with this, if he had 60 minutes, he said this in December of 1968, which I thought was significant, because I was born in December of 1968. But he said, if I had 60 minutes with an unbeliever on a train or an airplane, he said, I would spend 55 minutes talking about creation and God and the nature of man, and good and evil, and Genesis 1, 55 minutes and five minutes I would talk about Christ in the offer of salvation. We need to get back to the beginning. We need to see what's true and real, and we need to worship the God who made everything. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you for your goodness. We thank you for this word. How we pray that you would bless it to our hearts and minds that no matter what our world says in its madness, in its insistence on destroying itself, that we would believe that we would live out, that we would proclaim with our words, yes, and with our lives, that you are the only God, and that by your will, you created all things. You created us to know you, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent, for it is in His name that we pray. Amen.