Creation Day 3
Genesis 1:9-13
Let's open our Bibles to Genesis chapter 1. We are continuing in a study of creation, the account of creation, the only authoritative account of creation given in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, the book of beginnings, Genesis.
Let me read down through verse 13. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void and darkness was over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. And God saw that the light was good and God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light day and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. Then God said, 'Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters from the waters.' And God made the expanse and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse and it was so. And God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. Then God said, 'Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place and let the dry land appear.' And it was so and God called the dry land earth and the gathering of the waters He called seas and God saw that it was good. Then God said, 'Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed and fruit trees bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them on the earth,' and it was so. And the earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind and the trees bearing fruit with seed in them after their kind and God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a third day."
Now let me sum up what the Word of God in this much of Genesis has taught us about origins. With plain, understanding of the text, the inescapable account says that the eternal God created out of nothing without preexisting material the heavens and the earth, which simply means the universe. He created the universe as it is now in a sequence of six solar days, the first three of which we just read. He capped His creation, as we will find out, on the sixth day by creating man in His own image, an intelligent being with personality, with self-consciousness and cognition. This creation occurred in a period of one week of normal days, about 6000 or so years ago. And the entire creation was mature and aged at the instant of its creation. Death did not exist, nor any corrupting influence and the creation was good. Death and corruption entered the creation for the first time at the Fall of Adam and Eve which is recorded in the third chapter of Genesis. When they sinned in disobedience to God death entered the scene, prior to that there was no death. That means there could be no evolutionary processes because nothing died.
Later the surface of the earth was reshaped drastically and dramatically by the great universal Flood described later in the book of Genesis. A flood which rearranged the earth cataclysmicly as water rose literally above the mountains coming down from above and surging up from the bowels of the earth. As a result of that flood only eight people survived, Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives and the animals survived which were in the ark and from that the replenishing of the earth occurred. That is the Genesis record.
And as I told you last week, science is not a hermeneutic. Science is not a principle for interpreting Genesis or for that matter any other passage of Scripture. And the accuracy of the Genesis account is no different than any other biblical text. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God. All Scripture is moved in the hearts of men, produced in the hearts of men by the working of the Holy Spirit so that they wrote down precisely what the Spirit wanted them to say. And Jesus summed it up when He said in John 17:17, "Thy Word is truth."
Now from that foundation we must conclude that any form of evolution is a contradiction and a denial of the clear revelation of Scripture, and I mean any form...whether it comes from an atheistic evolutionist like Julian Huxley, or whether it comes from a theistic evolutionist like Hugh Ross, any form of evolution is a contradiction and denial of the clear revelation of Scripture which indicates that somewhere around 6000 years ago God created the entire universe as we know it in six 24-hour days.
There's only one source of the account of origins and that is the Bible, the Word of God. And in particular and in specific, Genesis chapter 1. As I have been saying, there are no scientific facts that necessarily contradict the Genesis creation account, rather all true science supports the biblical creation teaching. It has to be that way because Genesis is true. Therefore all true science is in support of the Genesis account.
It's a hard thing for people to admit this because science for so long has reigned supreme on the throne of contemporary thinking. Evolution has been a given...in fact it's become an absolute in our society. But it is systematically coming apart at the seams. The more we know about the nature of the universe, the more we realize the utter impossibility of any form of evolution...even to the degree, and this is an interesting source to quote, that Robert E. Smith, a member of the western Missouri affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union whom you would know to be no friend of Scripture, says this, and I quote, "For the past five years I have closely followed creationist literature and have attended lectures and debates on related issues. Based solely on the scientific arguments pro and con, I have been forced to conclude that scientific creationism is not only a viable theory but that it has achieved parody, if not superiority over the normative theory of biological evolution. That this should now be the case is somewhat surprising, particularly in view of what most of us were taught in primary ad secondary school." He goes on, "In practical terms, the past decade of intense activity by scientific creationists has left most evolutionist professors unwilling to debate the creationist professors. Too many of the evolutionists have been publicly humiliated in such debates by their own lack of erudition and by the weakness of their theory," end quote.
Paul Ackerman has written a book called It's a Young World After All. And in it he says this, some of you have been to Disneyland, I can tell. In the book he says this, "Let me be blunt on this matter. Evolutionists around the world have had to learn the hard way that evolution cannot stand up against creationism in any fair and impartial debate situation where the stakes are the hearts and minds of intelligent, undecided but nevertheless objective and open-minded audiences. Experience will prove that the same is true for the age issue as well. Evolutionist's beliefs regarding the origin and development of life cannot withstand the scrutiny of an informed opposition and neither can evolutionists claim to the effect that the universe has existed for ten to twenty billion years and the earth for 4.5 billion years. To delay the collapse of widespread public acceptance of such claims, it will be necessary for evolutionist scientists to carefully avoid debate," end quote. They cannot survive a debate and so they won't debate.
Now there's an illustration after an illustration about science, some facet of science that supports a young earth and a biblical account of creation. I've tried to give you a few as we go along. Here's one that I find somewhat fascinating. Every once in a while you see on the weather report that there's some indication of how many raindrops fell and it added up to a tenth of an inch or an half an inch or three inches or whatever. It's not a very sophisticated test that they do to determine that. They just have a container with an open top and when it rains they measure how much water is in the container. You can do that science yourself. It rains a certain number of raindrops and it fills up the can to a certain level. They can then go out after it stopped raining and tell how much it rained by measuring the amount of water in the container.
Now it is possible by that simple method with a slight modification in your procedure to turn the rain gauge into a kind of clock. Let's assume that we live in a location where it rains continuously and rains at a known rate. When we set the container outside under those conditions of continuous rain in a known rate, we can therefore by measuring how much water is in the can determine how much time has gone by. Pretty obvious. So that the can with the water in it becomes a measure of time. It becomes a kind of clock. The longer the container has been exposed, the more water is in it. The more water is in it, the longer it's been exposed. So we can measure a certain amount of time having gone by by the amount of water that's in the can. Now I know I'm not taxing your intelligence with that, I don't want to, I just want to give you a simple illustration.
And when you see the people in southern California make a road through a mountain and they cut a wedge out of that mountain to make a road and you look at the side of that cut mountain you see various lines of stratification, or when you go to the Grand Canyon and you see the amazing geological stratification that has occurred there, you're seeing what evolutionists assume has been this continual building up of sediment for billions and billions and billions of years.
Now evolutionists believe this. they believe that for billions of years this sediment has been building up. But there are a number of ways to pose problems to them, here's one that I find very interesting. Scientists can tell you just about how regularly meteors shower the earth. They've measured that for a long, long time. They can tell you how many meteors burn up in space before they hit the earth, and how many meteors generally, some very small, hit the earth each year. With the passage of billions and billions of years and the building up of sediment, it should be true that that sediment has within it meteors at every interval. If the continuity and the perpetuity and the uniformity of meteor life is equal to the continuity, perpetuity and uniformity of everything else in this theory of uniformity, then this earth has been being showered with meteors for 4.5 billion, or however old it is. And so you should be able to go down the strata, you should be able to go down the geologic column and find meteors all through that column, like the rain shower, therefore you could measure the age of the earth.
Interestingly enough this is what the data shows. A survey of all literature on the occurrence of meteors in sedimentary rock failed to turn up one single case of a meteorite being found anywhere in any geologic column. The meteorite clock indicates we have a very young earth...all the meteors are on the top.
Philip Johnson has written a fascinating book called Darwin on Trial. If you're interested in more scientific information, read that book, he marshals abundant scientific evidence against evolution, as do many, many other writers. Now that's just sort of a little bit of an introductory tidbit about the science side of things. I want to mention one other thing that's a biblical issue before we look at day three.
The question always comes up..at what point were angels created? They're not mentioned in Genesis 1, so how do we know when angels are created?
Well neither Genesis nor for that matter any other text of Scripture states specifically when angelic beings were created. What is definite is that they are creatures and they were created and they did have a beginning. They are immortal. Once created they live forever. But only the triune God is eternal, without beginning and without ending. Angels are created beings.
Now some have suggested that they had to be created on the sixth day because it was on the sixth day that God created man and angels, according to Hebrews 1:14 were created to be ministering spirits sent forth to minister for them who will be the heirs of salvation, and since they were created to serve those who were human and who receive salvation therefore they would have been created along with them on the sixth day. I find that a pretty weak argument frankly, because that's not all angels do. They don't just minister to the saints. In fact, if you go into heaven in Revelation 4 and 5 you find them doing...what?...worshiping God.
Primarily and throughout all eternity they will be worshipers of God. So it would be fair to the purpose of angels which is primarily to worship God to associate them in the created order with some point at which they would begin to praise and worship God. They...they're definitely seen in the book of Revelation worshiping God at the consummation of history. And it seems to me likely that they could well have started worshiping God at the beginning of history.
In fact, there is one passage of Scripture to which we can turn. I'll just refer to it, you can look at it another time. Job 38 verses 4 to 7...Job 38 verses 4 to 7. And it tells us that the angels were present when the foundations of the earth were laid and were rejoicing over it. So it could well have been that that was day one if the foundations of the earth means that original formless void earth that had not yet been shaped and refined into its final form, if it means the foundations in the sense of elements and the components that were there, but as of yet not shaped into their final form, then the angels would have been created at that time. Psalm 104, write that down, Psalm 104 verses 2 through 5 speaks of the shining of God's light during the original creative process and mentions the angels just before referring to laying the foundations of the earth.
Now if the shining of God's light refers to verse 3, "Let there be light," which occurred on day one and it was followed by the foundations of the earth and it means therefore the shaping of the earth that occurs actually on day three, it could well be that the angels were created after that shining light and before the foundations of the earth, meaning the shaping of the earth rather than its unformed character, the shaping which took place, as we will see, on day three.
So you can take your choice. But I believe that the angels would have been created by God either prior to the full creation of the earth that is described on the first day of creation so that they could worship God for doing that, or they were certainly created before the shaping of that earth on day three when the land was separated from the waters as we read.
Now the question of when they were created obviously isn't important enough for God to include it. What is important is to know that they are created by God. They, as it says, in the Nicene Creed are the product of the creator of all things, visible...that would be the material world...and invisible...that would be the spirit world of angels.
Now let's return to the text of Genesis chapter 1. I think it's fair to assume at this point the angels have been created and they are there praising God and worshiping God for the wonder of what they are beholding as He is bringing His creation into magnificent and beautiful shape. Verse 1 gives the overview, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," that's simply an overview of everything. Verse 2 then goes back to describe how He did that. Obviously it includes all of the elements and all of the components, ex nihilo out of nothing He made all the necessary materials from which to shape His universe. And then there came the earth in its...its preliminary condition, formless and void, that is it was chaotic, it was not yet pulled into the order which would sustain life and it was not yet inhabited. And God then creating that earth surrounded by darkness adds light to it in verse 3. And so you have this unformed, uninhabitable earth, a kind of a composite of elements not yet put together in their final form, and you have that surrounded by darkness until the light is created that surrounds it.
And then on day two starting in verse 6, God creates the heavens. The earth is engulfed in water, as we remember, clearly indicated to us in verse 2. The earth is engulfed in water, God slices into that and sends some of that water upwards and it seems to me best to understand that that water goes all the way up beyond the stellar heavens because the space between the upper water and the lower water is called the expanse or space. It's called heaven, and it's where the light is and it's where later on the stellar bodies, the celestial bodies, the sun, the moon, the stars, are all placed. So part of that water goes to the infinite ends of the universe in some fashion, we don't know exactly how to explain all of that. Nothing more than what's in Genesis is a justification for being dogmatic. But God then leaves the earth still engulfed in water but He has created a heaven, that heaven then is filled with light when you come to the end of day two.
The earth is still uninhabited, uninhabitable and not in its final form until day three. Before we go to day three I just want to stick something in here for your thinking. On the day that God created the expanse there was this tremendous cataclysmic movement of water coming off the earth and just literally moving to the extremities of the infinity of heaven. This great expanse that we know as space, the great expanse that we know as heaven takes its shape. And it came into being, just imagine the speed with which the whole of the infinite heavens were created. A little later when we talk about stars, we're going to talk about how vast outer space is, it just staggers your mind. And all of that came into being instantaneously, the full vast universe.
Science has come to the place where they have to recognize this. There are scientific clues, they call it the "Big Bang" theory. We like to call it the "Big God" theory. We know it was a big God. They think it was a big bang. World Magazine records this...this was the May 1 issue this years, I just read it. Scientific evidence for the Big Bang becomes more and more theological according to Cosmic Inflation Cosmology. The idea is that somehow the whole universe just went like that....
A Mr. Gregg Easterbrook explains, quote, "The entire universe popped out of a point with no content and no dimensions, essentially expanding instantaneously to cosmological size. This is now being taught at Stanford, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other top science schools. This explanation of the beginning of the universe bears haunting similarity to the traditional theological idea of creation ex nihilo, out of nothing." Mr. Easterbrook quotes one of the world's top astronomers, Allan Sandage of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution as saying, quote, "The Big Bang can only be understood as a miracle," end quote.
Day two was a big bang by a big God who instantaneously created the universe. Now we have an unformed earth. We have light. And we have a vast universe. And we come to day three in verse 9. "Then God said, 'Let the waters below the heavens," now that would be the waters that are on the earth still, the other waters have gone above the heavens by contrast. And clearly that language indicates that. "Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place and let the dry land appear. And it was so." Now God on day three is going to shape the earth.
It begins, verse 9 does, as always in the Genesis account, "Then God said..." You see it again in verse 11, "Then God said..." And verse 14, "Then God said..." And verse 20, "Then God said..." And so it has been in the past, verse 2, "Then God said," verse 6, "Then God said." Everything comes into being from nothing by God simply speaking it into existence.
On the first day God divides light from darkness. On the second day God divides the water below from the water above. On the third day God divides land from sea. "Let the waters below the heavens..." That clearly is the water that still remains on the earth. The water above has gone into the expanse of heavens. The waters now still remain on the earth. Back in verse 2 the earth is covered with the water...the surface of the deep, it's called, and the surface of the waters. Still the earth is engulfed in this water. Beneath the water is the solid matter hidden beneath the waters covering the earth.
God then commands these waters that cover the earth to be collected or gathered into one place. The Septuagint uses the word "synagogue," a gathering place. All of the water surrounding the earth is now gathered into one place and at the same time verse 9 says, "God said, 'And let the dry land appear,' and it was so." So God separates the water from the dry land. This is just a simple statement, a simple sentence, but can you even begin to fathom the cataclysm that occurred when that was spoken by God? All of a sudden the material that is in its unformed condition, buried under the depths of the surface sea starts to move. And all of those necessary elements start to work to produce land, to push up to create the surface of land. The water moves, gathering itself into one place. Tremendous chemical reactions get under way as the elements combine with each other to form the complex of minerals, the complex of rock and soil, making up the solid earth as to its crust and its mantle and its core. Just a staggering act of creation.
Henry Morris writes, "Great earth movements got under way. Surfaces of solid earth appeared above the waters and an intricate network of channels and reservoirs opened up in the crust to receive the waters retreating off the rising continent." Continent rises...it may well have been only one great continent, later divided into multiple continents by the cataclysm of the breaking up of the tectonic plates during the Flood when the fountains of the deep broke open the continent and pushed it into its current form. But at this time the continent, perhaps only one continent, rises and all the water is gathered into one place. This is an incredible thing. The water is assembled not only in one great sea, but assembled certainly into numerous distinct basins. The gathering of the waters is a plural term. There were multiple waters. They were all gathered so that they touched each other in the sense that they were all connected. There would have been underground reservoirs, there would have been underground tubes, streams and rivers and springs and fountains but all connected together. All the water flowing everywhere in the earth interconnected.
And the condition would not be, as I said, the same as our post-flood seas. Everything changed at the time of the Flood. But God created the seas and He created the dry land.
Now I want to show you that this is the clear testimony of Scripture that God created all of this instantaneously. Look at Job 38. This is worth a look because I'm going to take you in to something that is fascinating to me. Job 38 verse 8, now the Lord is talking to Job here and, believe me, the Lord is not an evolutionist. Job 38:8, the Lord asks Job, just reminding Job that he ought to keep his mouth shut. You know, in verse 4 before we get to verse 8, He says, "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?" That's not evolution, folks, that's creation. Where were you? "Where were you when the morning stars, the angels, sang together an all the sons of God shouted for joy in creation?" That's that text that indicates that they were there at creation. In verse 8, "For who enclosed the sea with doors, when bursting forth it went out from the womb, when I made a cloud its garment and thick darkness and swaddling band; and I placed boundaries on it and I set up bolt and doors and I said, 'Thus far you shall come but no farther and here shall your proud waves stop.'" Where were you, Job, when I created the sea and I bounded it with shore lines and I told the sea...You can't go beyond that, that's your limit. It's a reference to God's creative work as described on day three in Genesis.
Turn to Psalm 74. Psalm 74, first of all, and verse 13, here the psalmist is extolling God and in verse 12 he talks about God being his King from of old, his ancient King whose works, deeds of deliverance in the midst of the earth...who works deeds of deliverance in the midst of the earth. Then in verse 13, "Thou didst divide the sea by Thy strength...Thou didst divide the sea by Thy strength." In other words, it was You that created the sea. And he adds in verse 13 this most interesting statement, "Thou didst break the heads of the sea monsters in the waters."
Go to Psalm 104, I'll come back to that in a minute, but Psalm 104 verse 7. He says in verse 5 He established the earth on its foundations so that it would totter forever and ever. Can you imagine a lopsided world going around like this...? And we'd all be going around the same way, jumping off a few feet every rotation. That's called the science of isostasy, that the earth is in perfect balance. The heavier materials of the earth sunk to the center, the lighter ones to the outer part and it is perfectly balanced.
Verse 6, "Thou didst cover it with the deep as with a garment," that's exactly what Genesis 1 says, "The whole of the earth was covered with water, the waters were even above