When I finished my Ph.D. studies in Edinburgh, I was home for a few months with a family, walking across the courthouse square, of which in most southern towns you have a statue of the Confederate soldier, and some old men chewing and spitting tobacco sitting near the soldier, commenting on folk who go by. One of those old men said, who is that boy? I looked younger then. The other one said, that's Dr. Douglas Kelly. He said, he's not a doctor. I know his parents. He said, oh yes, he is a doctor. Well, I've never seen him at the hospital. He said, he's not that kind of doctor. He's one of them kind of doctors that can't do you no good. And I've spent my life proving that. But anyway, I wish to talk to you about what the Bible really teaches concerning creation. Our address right now will be what the Old Testament teaches, and then on Sunday, what the New Testament teaches. And it's of considerable importance, not only because we are Bible believers, and that's the foundation of all our doctrine. But also, as I've appreciated so very much my scientific colleagues here, and have learned so much and depend on them, I will have to say that many theological seminaries and divinity departments of various universities will attempt to write the whole creation science movement off, not so much to say they know the scientific parts aren't true, but simply to say the Bible is not trying to deal with science. It's not even in that realm of thought. So the creation science movement is beside the point of what the Bible itself is doing. Well, I think that's thoroughly wrong. I think the creation science movement is raised up by God, as I shall be saying, extremely important to help us understand that God's Word is addressing science, nature, history, and the real world, and I hope that will come clear in the next several moments. I think it is appropriate that I should, before I get into the actual content of my address, say a little bit about why I respect and appreciate so much the ministry of Answers in Genesis, also Institute for Creation Research, from which I learned so much in my early years, and thank God for these and other creation ministries, here is a reason why I am with them so strongly. They are plainly and unashamedly standing on the clear teaching of the Word of God written on this foundational doctrine of creation. In doing so, In doing so, they are fully prepared to go against the spirit of the age which has caused so many churches, both mainline and also evangelical conservative, to refuse to face the plain statements of Holy Scripture concerning origins. The deviation of so many otherwise good Christian scholars and institutions from the biblical doctrine on creation has been going on at least since the eighteenth century humanist enlightenment, and even more so at faster pace since the triumph of Darwinianism in the last half of the nineteenth century. Take a look at most commentaries on Genesis, including those by evangelicals, or at most systematic theologies And you will find almost incredible scripture twisting to avoid the plain meaning of the text that God created this cosmos a few thousand years ago in the space of six days without any preexistent material by the word of his power. One almost feels that many of these learned volumes are secretly saying anything but that. we must deliver thinking Christians from this embarrassing primitive worldview. Yes, indeed, that has been the sad story of such a large portion of Western Christianity for the last 150 or even 200 years. I believe that one can trace the decline of many formerly great intellectual institutions to their abandoning this most basic doctrine of creation. I don't even like to think of how many colleges and seminaries accommodated their biology department and their Old Testament department first to the thesis of vast ages of cosmic history by the early nineteenth century, and soon thereafter to the thesis of evolution. Chapter 6 of Dr. Nigel Cameron's remarkable book, Evolution and the Authority of the Bible, traces this tragic movement all too well. Once you allow the spirit of the age to override scripture on the fundamental basis of origins, then that spirit will not be quiescent. Soon it will change and pervert other biblical doctrines that it finds offensive to its humanistic presuppositions. In this way, we have witnessed the decline of mainline Christianity in Western culture since our great-grandparents' lifetime, and strangely and sadly, many evangelicals are now working hard to follow this failed approach which has handed over our culture to the humanists. But, I don't want to get you depressed. That is not the whole story of what God has been doing among Christian believers during the last hundred years. Far from it. This is yet another reason why I'm so grateful to the leaders and supporters of Answers in Genesis. I sincerely believe your ministry constitutes the wave of the future. Time and events are with you, not against you. Let me explain what I mean. Dr. Philip Jenkins, who is a professor at Penn State University, in 2001 published a much-read book entitled The Next Christendom, the Coming of Global Christianity. He is a major expert on population statistics and on worldwide social and religious trends. Much to the distress of many liberals, he has persuasively argued that while in the Western world, what he calls the North, Christianity has indeed long since declined into liberalism and hence has continued to shrink. But the exact opposite has occurred in what he calls the South. He doesn't mean the Confederacy, so don't worry. He means Africa. South America and major parts of East Asia, by quote, the South. In these southern or third world countries, Christianity has been massively expanding for over a hundred years and with almost explosive growth since the 1960s. The center and weight of world Christianity has now shifted to these countries, in terms of population I mean. although the intellectual establishment of the North, or as we usually term it, the West, has not yet noticed it. Jenkins clearly demonstrates that the Christianity that is so massively expanding in, quote, the South, or the third world, for instance, 23,000 persons per day, are even now being converted in Africa. which in a few years will probably be the most Christian continent in the world. And that's a very different scene from what is happening in the declining Northern or Western cultures. Whereas the mainstream Christianity of the North has long since apostatized from basic biblical doctrine, so as to please the anti-supernaturalistic bias of reigning humanism, that of the South is unabashedly supernaturalistic and profoundly accepting of the plain teaching of the biblical text from start to finish. To say the least, these fervent believers in their many, many millions in the southern lands have not the slightest problem with the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, the inspiration of Scripture, and six-day creation. Jenkins finds that in our northern or western countries, two things have been happening at the same time. First, our populations have been seriously shrinking. Italy, for instance, has had such a low birth rate for decades that the parents are not even being replaced, and that is the case in most of Europe. Were it not for the phenomenon of immigration from third world economies, Europe, and to a lesser degree, America, would already have shrunk by tens of millions. Thus, these populations are graying, that is, aging and thinning out. As for me, I'm aging, but not thinning. And secondly, these once mighty nations, ours, which are now losing their native populations, are the very ones, as Jenkins shows, where Christianity is the most liberal, where the Bible has been functionally rejected for at least three or four generations. In other words, churches are emptying out in many of the once Christian countries that long ago rejected the clear teaching of Scripture, and their once potent influence on the culture has been severely eroded, as we know. Therefore, Jenkins suggests, rightly, I think, that western or northern liberalism is not the wave of the future at all. On the contrary, it is locked into the fading past and is doomed to irrelevance in light of the burgeoning supernatural Christian belief of the southern countries where population is truly booming and churches are actually outstripping the population growth. For instance, Jenkins shows How out of date is the Episcopalian Bishop, now retired, Dr. John Spong, who certainly would consider himself avant-garde in the very wave of the future. In his 1998 book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Spong states that we must boldly abandon outdated supernatural doctrines and moral teachings. and adjust to the spirit of the age as quickly as possible so we will be relevant. But how out of touch with reality this poor man really is. Let me briefly quote Professor Jenkins. Viewed from Cambridge or Amsterdam, such pleas may make excellent sense. But in the context of global Christianity, this kind of liberalism looks distinctly dated. It would not be easy to convince a congregation in Seoul or Nairobi that Christianity is dying when their main concern is building a worship facility big enough for the 10,000 or 20,000 members they have gained over the last few years. And these new converts are mostly teenagers and young adults, very few with white hair. Nor can these churches be easily told that in order to reach a mass audience, they must bring their message more into accord with Western secular orthodoxies." By the way, most Anglicans now are black, and most Presbyterians are Korean. And more importantly, these people fervently believe the very scriptures that in many cases the home churches of their missionaries rejected fifty or a hundred years ago. Extrapolating from present trends, which is always iffy, Jenkins predicts that by the year 2050 there will be three Christians for every two Muslims, and we will have massively outnumbered Buddhists and Hindus and even secular atheists. I cannot be sure, of course. It is at least possible that one reason for the current Islamic violence directed against us is that their leaders can read these same statistics and see that Islam is losing out to Christianity in numbers of conversions in such places as Africa and East Asia, and thus they are taking the sword in a desperate attempt to reverse it. But as Mordecai once said to Queen Esther, I would say that God has brought Institute for Creation Research, Answers in Genesis, to the stage of intellectual and spiritual action for such a time as this. While the declining, aging, emptying churches of the liberal northern tradition will continue to ridicule or at least treat with the contempt of silence, your forward-looking biblical and scientific efforts, you should not worry too much about it. They have long since lost the edge. They are still anchored into the collapsing humanistic naturalism of the pre-1920s. Much as we continue to love them, we cannot force them to look outside their failing intellectual framework, which, like the Titanic, is doomed to sink. Yes, in the grace of God, some of them will get on board the gospel lifeboat, so to speak. But sadly, many others will go down with the ship of once proud, once triumphant, but now eviscerated humanism. That is why, in my opinion, I believe more and more of our efforts must now be directed to these vast, young, Bible-believing populations of Africa, South America, Eastern Asia, and also to the heavily Christian immigrant populations in some of our own countries who are desperate for solid biblical teaching on such matters as creation, fall, redemption. These people, many of them with open hearts, want to know what does God say about origins and how is that the foundation for everything else in doctrine and life. There will always be a very, very important place for apologetics, scientific evidences, careful look at philosophical presuppositions, and we must keep doing that all the time. But I think there's also a place for making sure that we're getting these teachings and the basic teachings of the Word into the languages of these burgeoning cultures which are so open to the truth of God. No one is better placed than Answering Genesis to do this. And for that good reason, I'm certainly standing with you for whatever it may be worth. I've been glad to see that you have some of your material in Spanish, I believe some in Russian. I've put some of my own writings in recent years into French, especially not just for France, but for French-speaking Africa. And I know we'll be moving into other languages as well. Now, for all these reasons then, I'm glad to speak to a group who will have far more acceptance in the future than ever in the past, just because of the trends and what God is doing. You are moving in a winning direction because you stand firmly and fervently on the written word of God. And you are addressing the first area where the devil, who of course is behind the spirit of the age, he changes his face as the ages progress, but he's the one behind the spirit of the age. And the first area where he normally attacks the structure of biblical truth is this. What Genesis teaches about creation. Your firmness in this area is going to be providentially used to guide these teeming millions of young Christians onto a solid theological foundation from which they can go forth conquering and to conquer Christ. That leads me to the first topic of these two addresses. What does the Old Testament, and more specifically Genesis 1 to 3, actually teach us about creation? The 16th century Strasbourg reformer Wolfgang Capito, who did a wonderful book on the creation, still just in Latin, but he said, Creation is the head of the divine philosophy. Creation is the head of the divine philosophy. Creation is the first doctrine with which Scripture begins, and it is absolutely foundational to all the rest of Holy Scripture. It is foundational to everything that makes us wise unto salvation and fits us for a fruitful life in this world and eternal joy in the next. I believe there are two areas where at any time and in any place, people who really want to may get in touch with the reality of God. And I may be speaking to somebody out there that you'd like to know and you'd like to believe, but you're not sure you can or how could you? Two ways you can get in touch with God that he has provided. One is the truth about creation, and the other is the practice of prayer in the name of Jesus. I shall return to this matter of prayer at the end of my second address on Sunday, but here my focus will largely be upon the truth about creation as a major way people may come to experience the absolute reality of God and the truth of his word. I'm a father of five children and I'm sure I've made many mistakes over the years as an imperfectly sanctified person, but I believe in the grace of God. One thing my wife and I did that was right. We saw to it from the time they could talk that they were conveyed who God is, Jesus is, the Trinity, and the truth about creation. And at a very early age, we began explaining to them why evolution was not right and some of the things they would hear and what were the answers. And as far as I know, I think all of them, now in their twenties, seem to be standing firmly for the gospel and for the Lord. And I seriously doubt that they would be, even with our parental and grandparental prayers, had I not, and my wife not, spent hours and hours and hours and lots of time, informal mostly, sometimes formal, on the truth of creation. It's what Capito said, the head of the divine And God has given us the teaching of creation as one of the chief ways we can know God is real, and I'll say more about that in my second talk. Creational truth, then, is a major means of evangelism, and perhaps the chief apologetic question that has faced and continues to face the modern world since the onslaught of humanistic enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Time spent seeking to discern what God himself tells us in his written word about creation is thus time well spent, for it takes us right to the heart of our mission, to our relativistic, secularized generation, as well as our desire to give a solid foundation to those whom God is raising up in the southern countries. Now, in this necessarily selective and fairly brisk walk through God's vast treasury of biblical truth on origins, I think we will come into direct contact with some of the greatest issues, dangers, and hopes facing all mankind today. Only as we see what God teaches us about creation will we have hold of a principle vast enough and deep enough to answer and overcome the wide and powerful atheistic secularism that is entrenched in nearly all the reigning institutions of our largely apostate Western civilization. The late Francis Schaeffer once said that evangelicals tended to see realities around them in bits and pieces, but not the whole picture. That is, when he was saying this in the late 1970s, Christians were coming to realize that abortion is a problem, humanistic education is a problem, erosion of liberty is a problem, and many of them were attempting to deal with some of these issues piecemeal as best they could. Many good Christians spent their energy on one or two valid issues, but they tended to become worn out and discouraged sometimes because they had not looked at the whole picture, and so could not really come to grips with the underlying problem and the foundational solution. In spite of their often valiant effort on certain issues, even though from time to time they won a few battles, they were sort of scattered. Thus, while the secularist leadership in many ways had the advantage of knowing where they wanted to go, what to do next together, evangelicals were spray shot around the field of battle in many different directions for all his sincerity and good faith, lacking unity, clarity, and thus cultural effectiveness. Yes, they did some good, no doubt about it, but not as much as they could have with a clear vision. Schaeffer was right. An overall vision of the ills of our time is essential to any kind of unity and effectiveness in order to get to the root problem, so that by God's grace we can make ourselves available as a well-organized troop of under-shepherds to administer God's challenging healing truth to the devastating ailment that has been causing the ever-quickening rot of our culture for the past two and a half centuries. The doctrine of creation, as taught in Holy Scripture, is the only way we can get to the heart of our terrible cultural malaise, and it is the only way out of it, since it is a necessary context for redemption, as I shall explore in the second address. Small wonder, then, that Satan would have worked hard at sidetracking the Church from treating this issue with the life-and-death seriousness it deserves since at least 1859. A confiding, thoughtful, and submissive turning to the teaching of Old and New Testaments and its glorious redemption following creation is as essential as anything else to seeing the whole picture once again in clear focus and to know what to do next. Both those of us that have to deal with the sort of apostasy of the West and those that are in the growing Southern churches, none of us can reach our potential. And even these new Christian movements, if they're not given solid teaching on creation, will sooner or later, and probably sooner, begin to experience rot and collapse as we have, unless on the basis of creation the Church of God provides a solid intellectual grid to approach life in this complex world. And the basis of that intellectual foundation for living life to God's glory is always the biblical doctrine of creation and the redemption which follows it. So in the Old Testament teaching on creation, A, I want us to look at what it conveys about who God is. That is the most important question you shall ever face. Who is God? The very first words with which Scripture begins show us a God who is speaking worlds into existence. The precise Hebrew verb used here is very important to understand who this God is. In Hebrew grammar, it is the word bara, the verb bara in the cow stem, a particular mode of the Hebrew verb. And bara, the word for to create, bara in the cow stem is never used of a human. It is only employed in Hebrew of the divine miraculous activity. So since this verbal form, bara in the Kal stem, is used only of God in the Hebrew Bible, it is conveying us an important message, that God alone is able to make a world, or indeed anything whatsoever, out of nothing, ex nihilo in Latin, that is, without the use of any pre-existent materials. Creation out of nothing is miraculous activity of the first and highest order, none less than Almighty God could be the subject of such activity. This point is exemplified in the name God calls himself at the request of Moses. And God calls Moses to go down into Egypt land, tell Pharaoh, let my people go, and Moses says, well, What name will I give Pharaoh to do this tremendous thing that he's not going to let go his workforce? And God says, out of the midst of that burning bush which was not consumed in Exodus 3.14, I am that I am, and in the Hebrew language it has the what we call the Tetragrammaton, the Hebrew letters yod, he, vav, he, from which we get Yahweh or Jehovah. God is saying my name is I am that I am. Pharaoh may think he's somebody, undoubtedly he is, but you tell him I am that I am has sent you and that will handle it. What does it mean, God is I am that I am? It means this. God's existence requires no explanation, no origin. He's beyond the need of an origin. Everything less than God requires an explanation. Everything less than God has need of an origin. for it to be there. Everything less than God is dependent on something else, while God himself is dependent on nothing but himself and is beyond the need of any beginning. I am that I am. That, I believe, is a major point St. Thomas Aquinas is making in his classical fivefold proofs for the existence of God, without listing all these proofs or arguments such as from motion and from change and all that. I think a famous Swiss theologian, von Balthasar, is correct when he says that the whole point of the classical Thomistic proofs of God's existence reposes on one fact. This world itself is contingent. That is to say, this world is dependent upon something outside itself, something infinitely higher than itself, in order to make sense of itself. You cannot understand the world from within the world only. From a very different perspective, in a very different time, Albert Einstein had a certain grasp of this contingency or dependency of a limited world, a dependency that cries out for a higher power to explain its very existence. Of course, Einstein was not a traditional theist, but he did feel that he was opposing atheism. You read his book, Out of My Later Years, and other writings. He was probably somewhat in the camp of the strange and complex Jewish philosopher Spinoza, a sort of pantheist. All I will mention here is that Einstein, unlike the logical positivist of the early twentieth century and the postmodernist of today, held, and here I quote, that belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science, and that along with that belief went another one. belief in the intrinsic comprehensibility of the universe. He says this in a classical essay he wrote on Sir James Clark Maxwell, who was a wonderful Christian, a pious Scottish Presbyterian elder, and Einstein felt that Clark Maxwell, through his development of the field theory electromagnetism, had made it possible for Einstein to go on and do his work. So Einstein, in his own faltering way, thought that this comprehensibility of the universe somehow cried out for a higher level of reality, although apparently with Einstein the higher level was something like an impersonal god with a small g. The great physicist Michael Polanyi, however, took some of these scientific insights of Einstein further in his own significant research at Oxford University. Thomas F. Torrance, who was a friend of Polanyi, summarizes Polanyi's position, and those of you who are scientists here will know a number of things about Polanyi, this way. The universe, through its intelligibility, in order to make sense of it, points beyond itself to an ultimate self-sufficient ground. And Polanyi stated that one had to go beyond the impersonal conception of Einstein in entertaining the conception of a personal God as a creative source of all the meaning and rational order disclosed through its investigations of nature. And again, that is why everything less than God, thus the whole creation, visible and invisible, has to be open to a higher level of reality in order to make sense. That is certainly an implication of the famous theorem of Gödel, namely that a system cannot be closed and consistent at the same time. If it is to be consistent, it must be open to a higher level of reality. Among other things, Creation tells us that God alone is eternal. Everything less than God had a beginning. He alone was always there. He alone is eternal. Isaiah cries out, Hast thou not known, hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary, Isaiah 40, 28. Unlike ancient Greek thought, Hinduism, Buddhism, and modern evolutionary monism, scripture teaches that material reality is not eternal. It had a specific temporal beginning, and hence is utterly dependent upon the Eternal One who brought it into being. Ancient Greek thought held that God, or the gods, were as dependent upon the material order as it was upon them. As Saint Athanasius said, they thought that God was a weak, coexisting mechanic, tinkering as best he could with the natural realm. That's how, in the early fourth century, Saint Athanasius sees the Greek views of God, and he was right. But on the contrary, Saint Athanasius goes on in a profoundly biblical way in his book, Contraerionos, chapter one, or book one, to teach that while God is always Father, he's always had a son, he has not always been a creator. It was at a specific point in eternity that he begins to create, although he is always his son's father. Now, much modern evolutionary thinking is based on this Greek assumption that matter, gravity, and nuclear structure are as eternal as God. You know, you can think briefly of what the two laws of thermodynamics teach us about the assumption of such as the eternality of matter, the first law, that of conservation of energy. teaches that nothing is now being created or destroyed. Conservation of energy. Hence, there must once have been forces in operation to have brought this physical cosmos into existence, forces which are not now operative, and that's creation-weak. The second law, that of entropy, teaches that in closed systems things are running down and tending to randomness and decay. must have been here for only a limited time sequence, or it would already be gone. These laws, I'm not saying prove, but at least they are consistent with the Genesis teaching on God's having created all things out of nothing at a point not indefinitely in the past. The Hebrew phrase employed in Genesis 1-1, b'reishit bara Elohim, is an important witness here. As the great Hebraist, Edward J. Young, pointed out, some modern translations of Genesis have followed the pagan Babylonian account of origins, Enuma Elish, by rendering Genesis 1-1 as when God began to create, with the implication that there was already material upon which God could work. But that is pagan nonsense. And Young clearly shows how plain Hebrew grammar requires the traditional rendering, in the beginning God created. In other words, that is to say, the Hebrew grammar is an absolute or an independent clause, not a dependent or a construct clause. Wolfgang Capito got it right. on this in 16th century France when he wrote that to assume, contrary to the scriptures, pre-existing matter is to transfer the eternal attributes of God himself to finite material. A more recent illustration of this effort to avoid the Creator God by attributing supernatural powers to nature is found in some of the chaos theory proponents. popularized by the American novelist Michael Crichton, who states that, quote, self-ordering is by definition the nature of complex physical systems, implying that no transcendent intelligent designer is required. Here again, the very attributes of God are transferred to nature. It is the same sort of thing we see happening in the degeneration of pagan society. shown us in Romans 1 when corrupt humans worship the creature rather than the creator. Society degenerates when that happens. That's where we are now. B, how God works. Genesis gives us some significant information on how God worked in the creation of all things out of nothing. First, it is very important for us to understand clearly that the Genesis text is written as historical prose. It is not Hebrew poetry. Why is this question of literary genre, i.e., that it's prose rather than poetry, so important? Here's why. Calling Genesis poetry, which is, as far as I know, only been done since the nineteenth has been a way of avoiding the truth claims of Genesis, where they go contrary to the reigning evolutionary culture of the Enlightenment West. When liberals and all too many evangelicals say, Genesis 1 to 3 constitutes poetry, they think that thereby they remove Genesis from any conflict with science. since Genesis was not really meant to be taken seriously as instruction on how the space-time universe was framed, if it is only poetry. But here is the reply of one of the greatest Hebrew scholars of the twentieth century, E.J. Young, and I quote briefly, Genesis is not poetry. There are poetical accounts of creation in the Bible, Psalm 104 and certain chapters in Job. and they differ completely from the first chapter of Genesis. So the claim that Genesis 1 is poetry is no solution to the question. The man who says, I believe that Genesis purports to be a historical account, but I do not believe that account, is a far better interpreter of the Bible than the man who says, I believe that Genesis is profoundly true, but it is poetry. End of quote from Professor Young. Along these lines, I think that the late Dr. Young, who died in the 1960s, would have appreciated, as I do, this honest statement from a major liberal Old Testament scholar, Professor James Barr of Oxford University. In a letter to David C.C. Watson, written in 1984, Professor Barr said this, and I quote, So far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writers of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the idea that a. Creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience, b. The figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition, a chronology from the beginning of the world up to the later stages in the biblical story, and c.) Noah's flood was understood to be worldwide and to have extinguished all human and animal life except for those in the ark. Or to put it negatively, says Professor Barr, the apologetic arguments which suppose the days of creation to have been long eras of time The figures of years not to be chronological and the flood to be merely a local Mesopotamian flood are not taken seriously by any professor as far as I know." End of quotation. As far as Hebrew grammar is concerned, the prose nature, that is, plain historical mode of writing is indicated in Hebrew text of Genesis 1 to 3 by the constant use of what we call the vowel or the vowel consecutive. The word in Hebrew for and is just a little line like that vowel or some pronounce it well. And when in, you know, 1st and 2nd Kings, 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd Chronicles and so forth, the Hebrew writing is constantly marked by the employment of the vowel consecutive. And he said, and he did, and he went, and this happened, and that happened. very much Hebrew historical kind of writing, and that is the sort of writing that you have in Genesis 1-3, as well as the general absence in Genesis 1-3 of figurative language such as schema, metaphor, and other poetic tropes that you find in poetry. All of this is to say that Genesis 1-11 really does mean what it says. Whether you agree with it or not, you do agree with it, but it is intended to describe events that happen in the real world in normal language that a human mind can to some degree grasp. In other words, the truth claims of Genesis are just as high when it speaks to what we call nature, science, and space-time history as they are when it refers to what liberal proponents of a poetic genesis call religious or spiritual truths. The Bible itself never makes any such distinction between historical or natural facts and spiritual or religious facts. It's not in the Bible. This distinction is a post-Enlightenment subterfuge to escape the plain teaching of Scripture on the real world. so they can avoid offending the spirit of the age. But to follow this deleterious distinction is at the high price of finally abandoning saying anything meaningful to the real world and collapsing spirituality into empty irrelevance. Many who went through this craven escape valve to avoid churchly conflict with pagan secularism are now preaching to emptying, dying churches, and I don't want to be with them. Secondly, a basic outline of the book of Genesis is important to its proper interpretation. The outline of Genesis falls into two parts. The first part is the creation itself, chapter 1, verse 1, through chapter 2, verse 3. And the second part of Genesis could be called the generations or the family tree. Toledot in Hebrew, and that is chapter 2 verse 4 through chapter 50 verse 26. Genesis 1-1 gives a general and inclusive account of creation. God created the heavens and the earth. That's what's called in Hebrew Amerism. There's no one word in Hebrew for the whole cosmos exactly, so Amerism, heavens and the earth, is all-encompassing of absolutely everything. That's the way you get to it in Hebrew. The writer of Genesis could not have made a broader statement than that. Shemaim v'et ha-eretz, heavens and the earth, is a way of saying everything that exists, absolutely everything was created by God. Or in the words of the Nicene Creed, he is the maker of all things visible and invisible. Then Genesis 1, 2 to 31 gives a more detailed account of how God created all things, the heavens and the earth. The verses immediately following, 2, 1 to 3, summarize God's all-inclusive creative activity. The very next verse, Genesis 2, 4, is important for the structure of Genesis. It stands in the Hebrew text. like a great signpost on an interstate highway, pointing the way forward into the rest of the book. Its words, these are the generations, totally doped, offer a clue that this is where the second part of Genesis begins, with a great narrowing down of emphasis from the whole creation to one selected area, namely the story of mankind. It is important not to miss the significance of these words. These are totally dope. These are the generations in Genesis 2.4. Since they indicate a major shift in the book, it is important to realize that Genesis 2.4, these are the generations, start the next section of the book. They do not recapitulate the earlier section. That's important. The details of Hebrew grammar indicate this, and I'm, for the sake of mercy, going to pass over these details and will only note that what all this means is that Genesis 2 verse 4 and following verses are not giving a second and contradictory account of creation. Rather, they are taking us to a new section. They are focusing attention on one part of the overall creation, namely the story of the creation, fall, and promise of redemption to mankind, thus preparing the way for all the rest of the Bible. In particular, we must understand that the liberal higher critical claim that there are two conflicting accounts of creation in the first two chapters of Genesis is a woeful liberal European misunderstanding of how the ancient Hebrews actually wrote history. As the great Jewish scholar of Jerusalem, now deceased, the wonderful writer Umberto Cassuto brings out in his excellent commentary on Genesis, which was translated from Hebrew into English in 1961. Professor Cassuto never lived to finish the rest of the book of Genesis, but it is a marvelous commentary. Thirdly, as we continue to think of how God worked in creation, I do not wish even to attempt to cover the many details of the six days, but instead to draw out a few important points to guide us in grasping the significance of the Bible's own account of cosmic origins. The work of the six days shows us that as God forms the cosmos, he does so in orderly progression. The world is like a stage prepared for mankind. It is prepared step by step. Life is called into being by God on an ascending scale until the climax is reached in man. We have plants on the third day. Then on the fifth day, fish and fowl. And finally on the sixth day, land animals and then mankind. At every step of this orderly progression, God directly gives his command. And there is a physical response. You know, Genesis 1, verses 3, 6, 9, 11, 12, 20, 24, 26, 29, and God said, while consecutive, God speaks and then there is response in the realm of material reality. Psalm 33 says, By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth, for he spake and it was done. he commanded and he stood fast. This rules out deism, which for all practical purposes separates God from the natural world, and it rules out evolutionism, which has the material realm evolving out of its own slime on the inherent basis of its own potencies. Furthermore, the Hebrew text clearly says that God carried out this orderly work over the space of six days. And in Hebrew, when day or yom is used with an ordinal, such as day one, day two, it never means anything but what we mean by twenty-four hour day. The usage of day, yom, elsewhere in the Bible confirms its plain meaning. On the rare occasion when day is used otherwise, then the context will make it clear. No one would have ever doubted that that's what day meant until the theory of vast cosmic ages became popular and church scholars hastened to accommodate a theory that is now seen to be highly questionable and loaded with non-scientific presuppositions. In desperation, many have asked, could God not have done it in vast ages? The answer here is simple. What we think God could or could not have done is not the measure for accurate biblical interpretation. Rather, we are to go by what his inspired word says he did. And others, such as the great St. Augustine, whom I highly honor, suggested that since God is omnipotent, perhaps he did it all in a moment. Now, get this straight. St. Augustine clearly taught that God created the earth only a few thousand years ago, and you'll find that in his book On the City of God. He believes in a young earth, although he did have it. idea about creation in a moment, and then the days were the contemplation by angels of it. But anyway, let's stick with Scripture. Scripture says God chose to take six actual days to get the world shaped the way he wanted it. Perhaps we wonder why. No doubt Augustine's right, he could have done it much faster than that. I think this is the reason. Since mankind, male and female, God's own image bearers, are the crown of his creation, then God was considerate enough to take six days to lay down a healthy pattern for the life of the human race. Six days of work and one of rest. This is not hard to believe when we remember that the beloved Bride of Christ, the Church, is taken from among mankind in this physical cosmos, and that all of history is moving towards the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation 19. Why would not God adapt the rhythms of the created order, six days' work, one of rest, for the welfare of mankind because the chosen ones out of mankind, all those who finally believe, will be the wife of God's beloved son. He cares about his daughter-in-law. And that is why I think he took six days work, one day of rest. In a certain sense, We can think of the summary of the six days work as moving from something like what the ancient Greeks called chaos to what they called cosmos. Not exactly, but a little bit like that. That is, all reality was called into being apparently as a sort of watery, muddy, unformed matrix. And over the days, God made three separations. Light from darkness on day one. firmament from waters on day two, seas from land on day three. This made physical life possible. And during this period, God made not only these three separations, but he also made several additions. Plants on the third day, heavenly luminaries on the fourth day, water and air animals on the fifth day. and land animals and mankind on day six. It is as though he organized the house and then filled it with beautiful furniture and inhabitants. A lovely cosmos indeed. Let me deal with one objection here as to this biblically clear scenario. How could there have been light on day one before sun and stars were created on day four. This great Hebrew commentator, to whom I refer to Umberto Casuto, beautifully responded by saying that what happened on day four was more like a crystallization of the light that God had already made available in the universe in a different, more diffuse form earlier. And John Calvin, in his commentary on Genesis, wisely states that in this way the sovereign God demonstrates that ultimately light depends on him, not the sun. After all, God is light and can call it forth whenever and in whatsoever form he deems best. One other comment about the orderly creation of plant, animal, and human life. All of these forms of life are organized in terms of kinds. In Hebrew, mean, probably something a little broader than species. And God made these kinds to reproduce with their seed in them, Genesis 111. they're divinely programmed to reproduce after their kinds by means of seed. This certainly goes contrary to the evolutionary hypothesis which has one kind evolving into another without the slightest empirical scientific basis for that assumption to this day. The post-1953 understanding of the DNA molecule and the genetic code contained in it has reinforced, in a certain sense, Watson and Crick certainly wouldn't have meant it to, but it has reinforced the biblical teaching of the stability of the kinds so that like reproduces like. There is great variational potential within each kind, but no change has ever been biologically observed as yet from one kind to another. That's the problem of the massive gaps in the fossil record. By the way, the fairly useful supplement for high school biology textbooks of pandas and people, the central question of biological origins, has carefully critiqued the main Darwinian mechanism for the so-called evolution of species, mutations within genes. The book shows that mutations do not create new structures. They merely alter existing ones, usually harmfully. Nor have they transformed the fruit fly into a new kind of insect. Experiments have simply produced variations within the fruit fly species. Many of you know they tried to bombard fruit flies with radiation in order to introduce these changes. And since the fruit flies have short generations, they felt they could work the equivalent of a million years or so in a fairly short space. However, it didn't work to produce any evolution. But there's something that has a much shorter generation span than fruit flies, and that is bacteria. One bacterial generation lasts approximately 30 minutes. What an opportunity that seemed to offer. So the French zoologist, P.P. Grasset, studied mutations in generations of these bacteria, which multiply 400,000 times faster than human generations. So researchers in France could trace mutational change in bacteria in relatively brief compass equivalent to 3,500,000 years of change within the human species. But, I think Grasset is a fully honest scientist, he found that these bacteria have not essentially changed during all these generations. Thus, is it reasonable to assume that humankind has evolved during the same equivalent time period in which bacteria have been stable. What empirical science has instead demonstrated, as far as it is relevant to these thoughts on like reproduces like, is just that, that what Genesis 1 indicates about reproduction is fully consonant with the best of what operational science has uncovered since Mendel and on into the genome research. But various types of philosophical or religiously based science are what constitute the challenge to and flat denial of scripture. We must keep in mind the profound difference between empirical or operational science and philosophical religious science. That's what I'm always saying to my classes at the seminary. So they won't be falsely intimidated by what they hear in the popular culture, which does not make this distinction. Operational science is at least potentially able to fit in with clear teachings of scripture. But religious or philosophical science, by definition, opposes the teachings of Scripture because it's based on the presuppositions of a different religion. Dr. Philip E. Johnson of the University of California Faculty of Law has done major service in pointing out these great differences between religious or philosophical science or scientism and operational or empirical Now, I'm going to draw to a close for right now. I think this, one brief quote from Philip E. Johnson about how in his book Darwin on Trial, 1991, pointed out how evolutionary scientists would not allow the discussion of evidences in their classrooms if those evidences might be used to point against evolution. I quote Philip E. Johnson, the view is widespread among science professors and administrators that while freedom of inquiry and expression is in general a good thing, critical discussion of the philosophical roots of Darwinism is religion. which must be rigorously excluded from secular universities. In other words, they're saying you can't criticize scientifically because then you're religious. Let me simply add this in closing. When a power group consistently and over a long period refuses to face large segments of truth, their ship will eventually founder on the rocks of reality, and others will become guides and interpreters of reality. That is why we need Genesis today more than ever, both for our decaying secularist northern culture and for the yet underdeveloped but burgeoning Christian movements of the southern lands. For Genesis, and the rest of the Old Testament which follows it, constitute the very basis of sound thinking about all of reality, and they are the basis of a holy life and a healthy society. In a word, salvation is founded in the divine creation in what, in God's providence, happened to deform it and what will redeem it and consummate it.