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Things that should be done by way of introduction, and I'm not doing, but I am going to do it a little bit this morning, give you a little history. Every particular truth in Scripture has a period of time where it comes under severe attack, and I think we're living in an era where the particular truths of Genesis 1 through 3 are under especially violent attack. Really, if you look at the whole of history from the beginning of Adam and Eve all the way till now, you could sum up all of history as a record of man's word against God's word. You know, you have Adam and Eve and you have the devil in the garden and it suddenly comes down to, are you gonna obey and listen and trust to God's word or man's word? And then you go into the history of Israel and it becomes, okay Israel, are you gonna listen to God's word spelled out through the prophets, spelled out through the covenants? Are you gonna do what you wanna do? Are you gonna listen to man's words? And you can go throughout the church age, you can see the battles that waged in the church era, it all boils down to man's word versus God's word. And if we're all honest with ourself, it also comes right into our living room where the way we lead or fail to lead our family's fathers is between what I want to do versus what God has called us to do. or our marriages, or the way we raise our children, or how evangelistic we decide to be with a lost and dying world. You know, it always boils down to how are we going to listen to God's word, or are we gonna listen to our words? And a lot of you can testify. before you were saved, you listened to your own words, you followed your own way, and you can see the sinfulness, you can see the selfishness, you can see the dereliction of duties, you can see maybe perhaps you were the perfect moral upright Pharisee, you relied on all your goodness, and even that was a form of relying on your word versus God's word. And then salvation took place, and God spoke his word into your heart. You were immediately aware of the sinfulness of your sin, immediately aware of your guilt before God. You repented from your sins, and faith alone, apart from your works, you trusted in Christ's work on the cross alone. He speaks his word into your life, and you understand that's an analogy that God uses in scripture. He compares the creation account to salvation, where God says, let there be light, and light suddenly dawns into our dark heart, and for the first time ever in life, we have these brand new orientations, desires, love for things, hatred for other things, that we've never even had before. Why is that? Is that something you just sort of muster up within you? Just because you're hanging out with the right people? No, it's an act of creation by God himself. And so we can look back at our lives and we can see, oh there was a time where I followed the words of man and now I follow the words of God. It was a radical difference. Everybody can see it. And our lives actually become walking science labs. Empirical evidence that when God decides to speak life into a person, there's a radical and dynamic change that takes place in them. But moving to modern day history, if you'll be patient with me and let me give you a little history here just so we can appreciate the importance of the text a little better, perhaps there's no better example of man's word versus God's word than the role that Darwinism has played in modern history. Darwinism is like the fossil record, okay, of man's words. It is the rock layers and strata, we can look throughout history, we can see the events that Darwinism, the thoughts of man impacted, sort of locked in like fossils, we can see that record, we can track it through time, and we can see, quite literally, what happens when it becomes man's word versus God's word, where man finds himself to be far much more intelligent than God himself or the scriptures are. Well, before 1859, 1859 was when Darwin's Origin of Species came out. Before that, there was already some very corrosive philosophies that were mucking the waters. So it wasn't all Darwin's fault. Sometimes we are a little too simplistic. We blame everything on him. But there was some really bad man-made philosophies that came before that. A couple of them. First one was naturalism. This was a philosophy That means they didn't conclude this in a science lab. It was the idea of philosophers that nothing exists apart from nature or apart from the physical. There's no supernatural, there's no spiritual, there's only the physical. That's naturalism. And then there was this other growing idea, perhaps best expressed in a philosophy called Malthusianism from Thomas Malthus. And this was this idea that humanity can only evolve or graduate to that higher level of utopia that everybody wants through violence and disease and bloodshed and plagues, and yeah, we don't prefer all that, but Malthusianism taught that, well, that's how you get to your utopia. That's how you get to the next level. So actually, if you can induce some sort of great Holocaust, war, if a plague happens to come through and kills the genetically weak, and you know, the strong survive, well that's actually very good for humanity. So it became something that is not enjoyable, but you know, it actually ends up being very good for society. So you have these two very popular ideas. And you can see it echoed in various philosophers. Frederick Nietzsche, who's one of the most dark philosophers, I think, to read, would call this the Superman. You know, we're always trying to get to this point where we're the Superman, we're the utopia. We are, in essence, the gods. We don't need to rely on God anymore. That was our more base evolutionary stage. Now we don't need God, we don't need religion, we can stand on our own two feet. And so he kind of echoed some of these Malthusian ideas. And these ideas were products of the 18th century enlightenment. And it's hard for us to imagine what it must have been like to be in the enlightenment. But when you have so many years that seem like the dark ages, where just nothing, no advancement is taking place, and then all of a sudden mankind in a decade is discovering more, is inventing more, is learning more than the past five, six hundred, maybe even nine hundred years combined. you begin to think pretty highly of yourself. Schools of science are being invented and starting up and schools of philosophy and inventions and industry and all these things are coming to fruition and it's a very exciting period of time to live in. And if you look at the Enlightenment, well, there was actually a movement before the Enlightenment that gave birth to the Enlightenment. That was the Renaissance, which means rebirth. And the Renaissance was this era where man's kind of coming out from under the thumb of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church for so long had said, we'll tell you how to think, we'll tell you what to believe, we're not even going to translate the Bible into your common language, we'll do the thinking for you. And for so long, man had just trusted a man-made system that had apostatized a long time ago. But in the Renaissance, man said, essentially, we've had enough of it. And so they threw off religion, they threw off everything that had to do with God, and obviously there was a lot that needed to be thrown off, but usually what happens in a movement is the pendulum swings to the extreme at some point, which is what happened in the Renaissance. Not only did they throw off the faulty systems of Catholicism, but they threw off God altogether. And the Renaissance actually climaxed in what's called what we know as the French Revolution. And towards the end of the French Revolution, there's actually the invention of a cult called the Cult of Reason, where they literally worship people's IQs. I mean, they take the religious calendar and they swap it out for an atheist calendar, and they have the goddess of reason come out, a woman comes out dancing, and they celebrate her. She's the goddess of wisdom. She's our brilliance. Let's celebrate our brilliance. And as a result, Well, if you believe in God, you must not be that brilliant. And so there's the massacres of priests, there's the massacres of pastors, and they're turning churches into schools to study the humanities. But actually, it was so bloody and it was so violent that the world just kind of got sick of it. So they allowed religion to come back, just a little bit, because it was just that pure, raw atheism where you're celebrating your own IQ. It was just too much for a lot of people. And so you have the enlightenment that comes out of that, and you have man thinking, looking around, everything he's invented, everything he's created, and thinking, you know, we are actually quite brilliant people. I remember I was once talking with an atheist, and I was reminding him, you know, if you take God out of the scenario, like they did in the enlightenment, You are removing the universal principle, capital P, that gives meaning to everything. And you will, for the rest of your life, struggle to give meaning to human life, to give meaning to virtuous actions. You will struggle to give meaning to everything when you delete God from the scenario. And he said, you know, that's such a tired, worn-out argument by the Christians. I said, well, actually, it was posed by the oldest philosophers we know of. Plato himself said, if you don't have a grand, universal, non-physical, non-natural reality, a moral law, the Bible would call it, if you don't have this, then the particulars under the umbrella of the universals are not gonna make any sense. We're not even gonna be able to properly define an act of charity towards somebody else. And they try. They say, well, charity and morality, that's when we do something that doesn't hurt ourselves or other people. But you could probably think of a long list of pretty grotesque sins that don't hurt me or anybody else, but that the world would say, yeah, that's pretty jaded, there's something wrong with that. So they're always struggling with this definition. Maybe a way to put it is, The big frustration at Christmas is Christmas lights, right? You get them out of the attic and they don't work and then you have to try to find the bulb that actually, you know. So if you find the one, well then the whole section lights up. And so what's going on here is they think, if I remove the bulb of God, if I just wanna remove this one bulb, I don't wanna touch any of the other bulbs, I like the idea that man's valuable, we like all these other things, we'll just remove God. And they think that the strand of lights is gonna stay lit. But what happens? You pull out God and all of a sudden, everything that we value that makes for a meaningful society, the lights go out. Some of those things are man. Suddenly man is no longer valuable because he's made in the image of God. You know, that spooky superstitious stuff. So man is now just a natural cog in the wheel. Well, he's only valuable insofar as he contributes to the ecosystem. Which, you know, they're saying that if man wasn't here, the ecosystem would thrive. So where does that put us on the value level? We're just a cog in the wheel. That's as valuable as we get. How about love? Love is an echo of God's love for mankind. That's where we learn how to love. That's why we have the capacity for relational love. But you take the bulb of God out of the scenario, even love goes out. Love is suddenly reduced to instinct, to lust, to a biological chemical reaction, to attraction. That's what it's reduced to, which a lot of them readily admit. And then morals, there's no such thing as right and wrong, it's just what works for you, what works for me. Freedom, even our founding forefathers knew that freedom is an inalienable right endowed by our creator God, because if you don't have a creator God, you have absolutely no grounds upon which to say a man has a basic right to be born free and to live free, why not? Why can't we own one another if it happens to work out well for me and I think it works out well for you in the long run? Teleology, the fact that human history is moving toward a very good goal, a goal, a God-centered goal, which Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 calls the great consummation of all things. Well, if we remove God from the scenario, there's no teleology, there's no grand point toward which we are moving. Everything's pointless. It's just what we make for ourselves. You see, you take God out of the scenario, and the whole strand of lights go out. These lights that are absolutely central to what we understand to be a meaningful, dignified life. Well, all these corrosive philosophies were playing a role even before Darwin's Origins of Species came out. It was just perfect timing for what they needed. Herbert Spencer, who was a huge proponent of Darwin, actually coined the phrase, survival of the fittest. That wasn't Darwin, that was Herbert Spencer. And he openly discouraged people from helping the poor and the needy. And he also said, you know, we should let the genetically weak die off. And during that era, a very common name to name your child was Eugene, because of eugenics. Because you select your child based on genetic strength. And we looked at that and said, that's wrong. But it was just common, I mean, you name your child that, because it was just commonplace in the world. The Nazi movement was driven by this idea. Heinrich Heimler, leader of the Gestapo, said the law of nature must take its course in the survival of the fittest. He believed that science, there you go again, we talked about that last week, the authority of science backs up what we're doing here. Hitler states numerous times that Christianity and its notions of charity needs to be, quote, replaced by the ethic of strength over weakness because, according to their understanding of science, that's what happens. Strength over weakness. So that must be how we, the most highly evolved animals, will thrive. Karl Marx, who wrote the Communist Manifesto, he echoes this all throughout, that a society is going to only advance if it sort of climbs the ladder of violence and struggle. And of course, his philosophy was taken by Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and his Cambodian killing fields. I mean, they got the point. They understood what he was saying. When Karl Marx, the father of communism, read Darwin's Origins of Species, he said, quote, In other words, what Karl Marx knew is that for communism to work, you need a philosophy. Well, he had Malthusianism. You need an economy. You need a sociology. Well, he wrote that. That was his Communist Manifesto. And the only missing link, I didn't even mean to say that, no pun intended, the only missing link that was there was we need this backed up in the science lab. We need some scientific justification for why this kind of grimy, bloody, messy evolution is necessary for man to thrive. And when Darwin's Origin of Species came out, he says it right here, this is what is missing. This is our natural history. This is going to make the whole system work. Now we actually have it. Marx's cohort, Frederick Engels, said, All those worldviews that says we're actually moving toward a meaningful purpose and life has meaning and life has a goal. Darwin's Origin of Species just completely obliterates this. On a scientific level, we know that there is no point whatsoever to life, so we can just create whatever reality, whatever point we want to create in life. But if you were living during this time, even though in their books they said some pretty messed up things, by and large, they're not saying, yes, let's celebrate death. They're saying, hey, we want equality. There's hope for humanity. There's using all these very attractive seductive terms that humanity is saying yes we're tired of this we want something different and all the intelligent people all the scientists you know all the people with the degrees and the great German philosophers are all saying the same thing I mean this is what everybody believes parents are naming their kids after these ideologies and you know so many people can't be wrong right but they were dead wrong And what happened is the 21st century brought full military expression to these philosophies. And the 21st century became the bloodiest century in human history. So much for the Enlightenment. So much for the brilliance of man. So much for the accomplishments of man. They gave to us the bloodiest century. Not one of the bloodiest, but the bloodiest century in human history. So you look at that, and if we're gonna be students of history, you look at that and understand that's what happens when the words of man are taken over against the words of God. That's what happens when God says, trust me, even in your philosophy, you don't want to exclude me. And man says, well, there won't be any implications, we'll be better off. And he does it, and there is massive, violent implications for all of this. Even if you look at a lot of these revolutions, it was the death of the family. The government is your family. You don't have. They were actually anti-biological family. You know, the citizens become your family. Gresham Machen says, So that's why we think doctrine is so important, because we think ideas detached from the mind of God, from the scriptures, in the long term, are actually very devastating. Not only on a global historical level, but once again, right into a home, right into a marriage, right into an individual's life that is marked either by living according to what he thinks is right, or living according to what the scripture says is right. And even this week as we were watching bits and pieces of the whole strange fire conference and a lot of just the strangeness that is entering the church under the guise of the movement of the spirit and godliness, Rich was mentioning to me it's interesting how many of their false teachings originate in Genesis one through three. Even that, when God first creates man, right there, you can adjust a few things and say, well, when he creates man, he creates him as a God, he just doesn't delegate authority to him, he gives him his own sovereign authority, which is a really ridiculous thought, and he becomes God, and as God speaks things into creation, we can speak things into creation, and right here in the beginning, they get it wrong, and it creates all this chaos and all this confusion within the church. So how important do you think it is to know exactly what God is saying in Genesis 1, 1-3? So I would encourage you, if you weren't here last week, we talked about some of the various approaches that people try to have to reinterpret the historical understanding of Genesis 1-3. and how they're really, in the end of the day, silly attempts to get the Bible to say something that it doesn't say. And we need to be loyal, we need to be faithful, we need to go back and to say, what does the word of God say because I've learned from history and I've learned from my own life that when I live according to my word, it's always gonna fail. It's always gonna break down painfully at some point. So let's look at that. That's sort of the historical context that has tried to threaten the biblical understanding of origins, the biblical understanding of how and why we're actually here. When you look at the scripture, the scripture actually very clearly teaches that the earth is very young. So that's one, that's the first place where the scripture's understanding of our world and of creation is very different than what most people think. The earth is very young. What we find out, if you look at Genesis chapter five, And verse one says, this is the book of the generations of Adam. In the days when God created man and he made him in the likeness of God, he created them male and female and he blessed them and named them man in the day when they were created. And then Moses goes on and very carefully outlines the genealogy from Adam to Moses. And how long, or I'm sorry, Adam to Abraham, how many years take place? Well, if you look at the genealogy and you kind of do the math, what's a generation? And it's about 2,000 years. And some people say, well, you know, Jewish genealogy wasn't supposed to be exhaustive. So maybe there's some gaps in there. Well, even if there were gaps, we might be able to very liberally, we might even be able to put in another couple thousand years. So maybe the Earth is 8,000 years old. We might be able to extend a few thousand years, but you're not going to be able to read in millions of years into these genealogies. It just can't be done. At some point, there's such yawning gaps that we read into it that it stops being a genealogy anymore. So what we look at this is from Adam to Abraham is 2,000 years. And then we know from scriptures that from Abraham to Christ is another 2,000 years and from Christ to now is another 2,000 years. They do the simple math and we're looking at an earth that is roughly about 6,000 years. It's a young earth. And there are mountains of scientific evidence that the earth is very young. I'm not gonna go into it this morning. Maybe I'll sprinkle it on through as we venture through chapter one. But actually, that's one of the great mysteries that Darwinists will call it, mysteries, because there's so much evidence out there for a very young earth that they don't really know what to do with a lot of that evidence. But for now, go to Genesis chapter one. This is something that didn't happen millions of years ago. Happened around 6,000 years ago. By the way, young earth creationism can go up to 20,000 years. But it can't go to the millions of years. Genesis 1 verse 1 and 2. Remember we talked about that word created. It means to create out of absolutely nothing. not to reform, but to create out of nothing the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void. Remember we talked about formless and void, that tohu vabohu. It's commonly used in reference to the wilderness, to barren regions. It's used in reference to when a nation comes in and destroys another nation and it's just barrenness. So apparently, God, the first thing he does is he creates an unformed and unfilled mass from which he will sovereignly create everything else. Now you think about it, God could have created in any possible way he wanted. He could have just snapped his fingers, if he had fingers, and said, okay, everything exists, and everything exists. But instead, he plots it out in a six-day period, rests on the seventh day. So even the way he's created, he knows that we're gonna be reading about the creation, looking back on it, and saying, well, why did God create that way? So God has built into the way that He's created lessons for us, and I think the clear lesson why God would start with a unassembled mass of formless and void is because He's showing His sovereignty over what seems to be chaotic. He's showing his sovereignty over what seems to be disordered and disassembled. He exercises sovereign creatorship over it and creates this amazing uniformity, brilliant design that we see today from what would be comparable to a lump of unformed clay that didn't look like anything. So it was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the surface of the water. And we talked about how moving over the surface, that's a metaphor that's commonly applied to eagles hovering over their young. This is the Spirit of God, as it were, and He's hovering over the waters, the unformed and unfilled muddy mass, and he's getting ready to express the creative power of God onto it and create anything. He's poised, he's ready to create. And then we come to verse three. This is point number one, and we're not gonna get out of point number one this morning. So God's word forms. You could summarize the whole creation account in two words, formed and filled. He first forms, the first three days are forming, the second three days he's filling everything that he's forming, okay? So first statement in Genesis 1-3 is, then God said. Do you know how absolutely amazing those three words are? God said. That tells us we have a talking God. What does that even mean? It means we have a God who likes to communicate. You think about a God who doesn't communicate? Think about a God who just created everything and then just abandoned everything and left it to itself? This kind of deistic approach? He wound up the clock and just abandoned it? We don't have that God. We have a God who likes to talk. In fact, He loves to talk. He's written a Bible through the agency of man to talk to us, and He likes us to pray and talk back to Him. That speaks of an incredibly relational God. And it's interesting, Genesis starts with, in the beginning, God, and the Gospel of John starts, in the beginning, was the word, was the spoken word. In the beginning was the word, the word was with God, the word was God, same as in the beginning with God, all things were made by him, and apart from him was not anything made that was made. So the New Testament, the Gospel of John, starts with, the God who speaks. Genesis 1 starts with the God who speaks and we find out in the New Testament when God speaks, who is it? It's God the Son. It's Jesus Christ. So right here, when we see in verse three, then God said, we are seeing the mind of God, which is being actualized through God the Son. And we've talked about this before, Colossians 2, you can see that. God desires to create, he decrees to create, and he uses his Son to create everything. Colossians 2 makes it very clear that the worlds were framed by the Son of God. who is just simply bringing about the will of the Father. That's what the Son does. And then you have the Holy Spirit who's hovering, so you have the Trinity right here in the opening verses. I love what Martin Luther says about God's Word. One of my favorite quotes. He says, And he who has the word has the whole Godhead. The word of God does not merely carry with it the sign and picture, but the whole being, and is full of God as he whose word or picture it is. In other words, what he's saying is you and I, when we talk, we just make sound effects, and sound effects are symbols of meaning. We've come to memorize and associate certain sound effects with certain meaning, but when God speaks, is that how God speaks? You just make sound effects and we associate with human language? Well, we understand, obviously, the human language that he's writing in, but when God speaks, the Godhead, the power of God, is in the words of God themselves. In fact, the Son of God is a definitive quality of the spoken word of God. So, that's why when we talk about the word of God, we're not just talking about words that God happens to speak. Words are the raw expression of God's power. That's why in 2 Timothy 3, 16, when it says, all scripture is given by inspiration to means to exhale, and you look in the Psalms and you look all throughout the scripture, when God exhales, God doesn't have lungs, not speaking literally, it means he is expressing his pure power. So when the Father expresses his power, we get God the Son. God the Son sent earth. When God breathes out and speaks, we get creation. It's just how God expresses his power. So we have right here that God said. So what did God say? Incredibly powerful. He says, let there be light. And there was light. And God saw that the light was good. Now this has always puzzled me a little bit. Why doesn't God say he saw that the light was awesome, fantastic? I mean, 186 miles per second? I mean, scientists are so baffled by light as it waves, as it particles, and they do experiments, they don't even know what form it takes, and it just chases darkness out of the, you know, you can't recreate it. What in the world is light? God says that's good. In the Hebrew, good actually means practical. God's a very practical God. It's kind of like God created and said, that'll work. That'll do the job, and it does. Imagine working in darkness, it's a very practical thing. And God separated the light from darkness. So the light's from darkness. God does three separations. He separates the sky from the land. He separates the dry land from the water. So God's beginning to separate from this unformed and unfilled mass that he's made. And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night, and there was evening, and there was morning one day. So this is the first account of God actually naming what he creates. What does it mean when you name something? Now if you have a child and I say, you know, the elders of the church think we have the right to name your children, you'd probably say, well, I think the power's gone to your head. You don't have a right. I have the right because I'm their parent. So it's an exercise of a right, an exercise of an authority, a God-given authority. So when God names things, He's saying, I'm the owner. I created it. I name it. It's an expression of His sovereignty. And then God creates man, and what does He have man do? He has man name the animals. So that's part of their stewardship, their place under man, and God delegates authority to man. And you would think you wouldn't have to say this, but it's a very, very, very popular false teaching that thinks that God stopped being sovereign and he gave up his sovereignty and he gave his sovereignty to man so that man can sovereignly operate on earth. And then we need God's permission God actually needs our permission through prayer to work here on this earth, all this weird stuff. Not only is that unbiblical, but it's absolutely irrational. It's like saying God, in his goodness, decided not to be good. Or God used his godness to stop being God. God used his sovereignty to stop being sovereign. I mean that doesn't even make sense. He can't stop being sovereign because it's part of his nature. So God doesn't surrender any sovereignty. He doesn't surrender any ground. All he does is create man and he allows man to name animals. He gives him an extension of his authority to be stewards of the earth. But God here is naming light because He's in charge. He created it. Now what light is it? Because the sun is not actually created until day four. So this kind of becomes puzzling. Well, he's created light, but this isn't the sunlight that we regularly enjoy now. So what is this? I think a good hermeneutical question to ask is, what did the original audience think when God said, let there be light, but it wasn't the sun because it hasn't been created yet? What were the original audience, which was the Israelites wandering in the wilderness? I think the first thing they would have thought of is Exodus 14, 20, which we won't take the time to read, but that's the pillar of fire, the pillar of light, this supernatural pillar of light that separated them from the Egyptians when the Egyptians were trying to kill them, this light that led them in the wilderness at nighttime when it was dark, and what is it? Well, it's fire, but it's a physical manifestation of the spiritual glory of God. So it seems to me, we can't be 100% certain because the text just doesn't spell it out, but it seems to me you have, for the first time, God has created a physical manifestation of His spiritual glory because light is a physical property. Light is not supernatural. Light is physical. So God has created what is physical. He's created light. The first physical representation of his invisible glory. And he said, I think light is probably the best thing that physically symbolizes how great and glorious and resplendent I am. And I would happen to agree with that. What do you? I mean, you think about light. Light is pure. Light can be blinding. Light can be soft. You can't contaminate light. I mean, try to get light dirty. Try to throw mud on light. It can shine on a garbage heap, and it doesn't smell. You know, light is completely untainted by everything it interacts with. That's a perfect analogy of who God is. So it seems to me that God has created practical light, but it is here a manifestation of his glory that we see all throughout the scriptures. Well, second thing that God forms is the sky. Look at verse six. Now this becomes a little trickier because what we see here is expanse is sky. We have sky and it separates the waters. So everything under the sky we understand is the oceans and lakes, we understand that. But then what are the waters above the sky? We're actually going to talk about that next time, so I'm not going to answer that now, but we'll talk about sky. Well, what is sky here? Well, if you have a King James translation, the word they use is firmament. And some of the modern translations, they kind of drop that word because you can hear the little word firm, infirmament. And that almost gives the connotation that the skies are hard, they're like a ceiling, they're vaulted. And this has been a point of attack by some because they said, oh look, the pagans in those days believed that the skies was hard, like a vaulted ceiling, they didn't have scientific knowledge, and that's apparently what Moses thought the sky was, so apparently it's a contradiction to what we know to be true, and therefore we found a severe flaw in scripture. But if you look at this Hebrew word for sky, rakia, It is sometimes compared, in Job 37, 18, it's sometimes compared to molten bronze or metal, sometimes compared to hard objects. But we could go to Psalm 104, 1 and 2. We could go to Isaiah chapter 40 and verse 22, where it's compared to a curtain, to things that are not hard, not to things that are, or a sheet. And what we find as we look at all the metaphors that the Bible uses for sky is that sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's soft, and it changes, but the common denominator is something beautiful that's stretched out. And that's how it's used. It's used of gold that's hammered onto the Ark of the Covenant. Not that it has to be hard like gold, but it's spread out. It's hammered and spread out over the Ark of the Covenant. So really all he's saying here when he uses this word rakia for sky is something beautiful that is spread out over us between the two waters. And isn't that fitting, you know, as you begin to, it was such a rich study to just do a word study on sky throughout the Psalms because they're declaring the glory of God. You know, the sky's like God's Sistine Chapel, you know, and it changes all the time. It's not just one really impressive picture. I mean, it can be thunderstorms, it can be lightning one day, it can be not a cloud in the sky the next day, it can be sunrises, it can be sunsets, and they're all different, they vary. They never look the same. That's what God does every day. The way he has composed creation is that it's always this shifting scene. In the night, on a clear night, you can see that moon. The other night I came home, like at 12.30 at night, and I looked out, and the moon was so bright. You could see across to your neighbor's lawn. It was like evening, and you could see all the stars, and it's just amazing. You just stand there, and it's so vast, and I'm so tiny, and God is so great, and I know the Creator. It's just an overwhelming sensation. And God's created that sky, why? Just another way to tell us how incredibly glorious and awesome he is. Well, we'll end there as far as the exposition is concerned. We'll pick up there next time. But let me end, just take a few more minutes of your time and ask you a question. Very important question, most important question anyone could ask you. Is the Word of God obviously standing in authority over your life? I think most of us here would raise our hand and say, we believe the Bible is the Word of God. But think about the creation account. When God speaks, mountain chains rumble into existence. When God speaks, the galaxies are formed. When God spoke on Mount Sinai, it quaked, it trembled, and the Israelites said, please, please don't allow God to speak to us anymore, Moses. You speak for him. It's terrifying without a mediator, but we have the mediator, Jesus Christ. God speaks to us. Do we believe that those same authoritative words are the words in scripture? Do we believe that when we open the word of God, we are hearing from God himself? You know, Albert Muller made one of the most profound statements that challenged and stretched my faith. He said, every time you open your Bibles and read it, it's a miracle that God doesn't strike you dead. It's just as miraculous that the Israelites survived Mount Sinai, that every time we hear the word of God preached, every time we read the words of God, I'm still alive. I've just heard from God and I'm still alive. I mean, absolutely amazing. So if we believe that, if we tremble before the word of God, of course it has an impact on our daily life. It's not just something we subscribe to. I'm a Christian, I believe the Bible's the word of God. It changes everything. It's just a radical change. You look nothing like the world that doesn't believe it's the word of God. Your life looks completely and totally different. In 1 John, The Bible tells us exactly what a life like this looks like. 1 John 2, 5 and 6. By this we know that we are in Him. By this we know that we are keeping His Word. The one who says he abides in him ought himself to walk in the same manner as he walked. What does a man, what does a woman look like who gets it, who understands this is the word of God, it changes everything? He walks in the manner of Christ. He's not as perfect as Christ. But people say, remember the book of Acts, remember when the apostles showed up and they're teaching, and what did the religious leaders do? The Bible says they took note that they had been with Jesus. because they look just like Jesus. They're teaching the same thing Jesus did. They're just as zealous as Jesus was. These men look like Jesus and that's what the world should say when they see us. Whether they say it in contempt or they say it in astonishment, they look just like Jesus. That's why they're Christians, they're little Christs. The word of God impressed upon the heart of a man of God or a woman of God causes you to look like Christ and the world understands it. Colossians 3, 5, therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, greed, which amounts to idolatry. We consider ourselves dead to that because the word of God has nothing to do with that. So it's not even named among us. We're not attracted to the things of the world. We're uprooting those sexual sins. We're uprooting that pride. We're uprooting the cowardice that we have and failing to lead as we should and failing to speak out publicly for the name of Christ. We're always uprooting these things because there's a greater power, there's a greater authority that's always pressing in on our life and that's the word of God. And the believer is always moving forward, even if it's just ever so slowly. The Word of God is always more authoritative in his life than it was the next day. Because he's growing in relation to that. If we call ourselves Christians, but the Word of God has no practical day-to-day bearing on our life other than a moral influence, like any other good book out there, we can't really say that we've encountered the authoritative Word of God. It makes a difference. I wanna end by just reading a series of quotes that I put together by Jonathan Edwards. And the reason is, Jonathan Edwards, First Great Awakening, early 700s, He's preaching. He's not whipping up the audience in a musical frenzy. He's not manipulating. All he's doing is opening the Bible and he's preaching the word. And as he's preaching the word as a faithful pastor, he's not even trying to bring out an awakening or revival or anything. He's just preaching the word. And God's spirit grants something amazing in his little church there in Northampton, Massachusetts. People just start getting saved. And he sits down and he writes as a pastor, what does it look like when the Spirit of God through the teaching of the Word of God impacts people? And he writes down these amazing descriptions. He says, senseless sinners have been awakened by the hundreds. And the inquiry has been, what must we do to be saved? You want to know if a unbeliever has understood the gospel and they're on the cusp of conversion? They want to know, how do I be delivered from my sins? They're not saying, how do I have a better life? How do I have a peaceful life? How do my dreams come true? They're saying, what do I do to find deliverance? That's a man who's encountered the Word of God. Some of the most rude and disorderly are become regular in their behavior and sober in all things. The silly and the airy have become grave and serious. Some of the greatest sinners have appeared to be turned into real saints. Drunkards have become temperate. Fornicators and adulterers are chased Swearers and profane persons have learned to fear that glorious and fearful name, the Lord their God. They went from using it as a curse word to fearing the name. The carnal worldlings have been made to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. Yea, deriders and scoffers at this work have come under its conquering power. Some have gone to hear the preacher, as some did to Paul, what will this babbler say, who have not been able to resist the power of the Spirit with which he spake, have sat trembling under the word and gone away weeping. The virtuous and civil have become convinced that morality is not to be relied upon in life, and so excited to seek, after their new birth, a vital union with Jesus Christ by faith. The formal professor, likewise, that means the ones just doing it out of duty, has been awakened out of his dead formalities, brought under the power of godliness. At the same time, many of the children of God, speaking of age, young people, have been greatly quickened and refreshed, have been awakened Actually, later on he talks about children. Right there he's talking about Christians. They've been awakened and quickened and refreshed. They have been awakened out of their sleeping frames they were fallen into and excited to give diligence to make their calling and election sure and have had previous reviving and sealing times. They found a refreshment and a new zeal in their walk with the Lord. I think that's a very articulate description of people who've encountered the authoritative word of God. Is that your experience? Is that my experience? Heavenly Father, I pray that you would visit us once again with the centrality and the authority of your word. We have a decision to make. Either it's a book of fairy tales written by men, And then we have to deal with the consequences already lived out in the 20th century, one of meaninglessness and pointlessness, a desperate grasping at straws to find value in life, find some sort of standard morality. You can either do that and face you on judgment day. And here you say the answer was so clear, it was right in front of you, it was presented before you. Oh Lord, we can respond, we can repent, we can say indeed, this is the word of God. We can say with the Jewish people in Acts 2, what must we do to be saved? We can be delivered from our sins. Lord, I pray that you would pour down your Spirit on those this morning, Lord, who are holding out for whatever silly reason, Lord. Bring conviction upon them. Open their eyes. May they never see you so clearly. May they run to the cross. May they fall before you as countless others have. May they swallow that pride. May they surrender to you. Lord, we know we have your promises. We know that you will scoop them up. We know you'll fulfill your word to Isaiah that you sit in the heavens longing to be gracious, longing to show compassion. So may the unsaved, the unbeliever find it even today. Lord, those of us who know you, maybe we've settled into a comfortable situation in our life, or we're going through the motions, we're not doing anything really bad, Lord, that in and of itself is a far cry from how you want us to advance. Lord, so I pray that now in the quietness of our heart, we would reevaluate how we are as fathers, how we are as mothers, how we are as young people in a world that is so blind and confused. Lord, how we are as single people, how we are as we age and we grow elderly, Lord, may you cause us to just do some serious inventory of our life. and be able to identify where we haven't yielded our life to the authority of your word. Because Lord, we want to experience the blessing and the harmony and the peace with you and in life that comes from a life that is obedient to your inspired words. Help us to depend and lean and trust in your scripture above all else. In your name, amen.
God's Word vs Man's Word: Darwinism and the Bible
Identifiant du sermon | 9971518537210 |
Durée | 49:28 |
Date | |
Catégorie | Dimanche - matin |
Langue | anglais |
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