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One, two, three, around. I'm all wired now. OK, we want to begin by, I'm going to read a number of passages following Paul's lead. And let's begin by looking at a short section in chapter 1 of John. It's a gospel, chapter 1 of John. And we'll read the first five verses. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was made. In him was life, and the light was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. And then two Hebrews. And Hebrews 11. Again, a rather short section. First couple of verses in Hebrews 11. Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, for by it the elders obtained a good testimony. By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible. So again, by faith we understand that the worlds were framed. to possibly a slightly unlikely location. Actually, before we go to that, Luke chapter 6. And this is the very end of the chapter from verse 46. But why do you call me Lord, Lord? And this is Christ during the Sermon on the Mount. He just got done speaking about the good trees and the bad trees and the fruit that they bring forth. Again, verse 46, but why do you call me Lord, Lord and do not the things which I say? Whoever comes to me and hears my saying and does them, I will show you whom he is like. He is like a man building a house who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when the floods arose, the streams beat vehemently against that house and could not shake it, for it was founded on the rock, but he who heard did nothing, but he who heard and did nothing is like a man who built a house on the earth without a foundation, against which the stream beat vehemently, and immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great." And then back to Second Kings. Second Kings chapter 19. And we have the account of Hezekiah. And Hezekiah is one who had started out good, went bad, came back. If I could summarize his life. But there's a point where he receives a letter from the Assyrians, basically saying, we're coming to destroy you. And this is what Hezekiah says in verse 14 and following. And Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messenger and read it. And Hezekiah went up to the house of the Lord and spread it before the Lord. Then Hezekiah prayed before the Lord and said, O Lord, God of Israel, the one who dwells between the cherubim, you are God, you alone. of all the kingdoms of the earth, you have made heaven and earth. And then back to Genesis chapter 1, Genesis 1 and verse 26. Then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness. Let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. God add his blessing to his word. So far we have been looking at creation. And the first thing that we looked at was that the God eternal came and he came, he was, he is, he always has been, but he created everything that we see. The entire Earth, the solar system, stars, universe. And he did so within a confinement of six days in 24-hour periods. And that creation, as glorious as it is, as it was, and as it will be, again, as long as God allows it to remain, is a temporal state. It's tremendous when we contemplate the mass of creation. And then we conclude and see from the word of God that this is going to pass. This is going to fade away. And secondly, we looked at the fact that this creator who created this does something that we're so used to. I think we forget how important it is. And that is that this creator comes and he enters the thing he created. I mean, think of painting a picture. And when I do a picture, you really don't want to see it. But think of painting a picture. And let's say you have more artistic direction like what Janie has. And then you say, you know, there's something about this picture that needs help. I'm going to jump in the picture. And that's literally the kind of picture that we have when we see that God comes and he condescends to the very thing within the thing he created. And he subjects himself, particularly when Christ comes, he subjects himself to every aspect of that creation. But that creation was created good. And that's the other thing that we often lose sight of, that when God created, it was good. There was nothing bad. He doesn't say, this one was good, this one, well, not quite. They all had the same judgment by God. upon creation. It was good. And as Jay pointed out in his message that the creator coming in was not, again, just to do a task, but it was to have this relationship with us and to draw a people to himself. And those people were being drawn to him, not because God was lonely, not because God lacked anything, but for his glory, for his own purpose. And he continues this, entering into his creation, even when so much of his creation becomes an object of his wrath. So much of his creation becomes cursed because of the declarations that he made regarding it. That if this happened, this was going to follow. And God is true, and God cannot lie. And so when he says, this is my law, and if you break my law, death. God does not have the option to say, well, I just changed my mind about that. That's why it was critical and necessary for Christ to die for us. When Christ died, he absorbed all of our sin. All of it. There's not one sin in the life of God's people that is not covered in that blood. We have been purged clean. We don't realize it all now because we continue to live in this world of sin. And the influence of the world of sin continually bombards us. But Christ's provision for us was so great that he has already covered every sin we will commit. Now Paul asked a famous question, what shall we do then? Shall we continue to sin that grace may abound? And the answer is very clear, no. Why? Because sin leads to death. So why would you want to continue in something that leads to death? So we have God entering his creation, and then we have The fact that, let me pull up from here, because my writing on this is horrible. That God then establishes our existence, and he has made every provision, again, for us, in terms of judgment, in terms of salvation. And we can never separate God, then, from his salvation. Duh. I mean, that's one of those duh things. You can't separate God's salvation from him. Well, Tim tried to take you one step beyond that by assignment. And that is that we can't separate the gospel from creation. That's like separating us from salvation. We're the objects of wrath. We're the creation. Our bodies are the part of this creation that God created. So how can you possibly separate God or salvation from creation? You can't. They're locked together. The Bible assumes creation and everything it says. We find creation narratives from the beginning, literally in the beginning, to the end, to Revelation, where we're told that the creation will be renewed and that there will be a new heavens and a new earth. So it will be replaced. So now we ask another question. And our question now is, is there an argument that we can give for creation? Do we have a way that we can communicate to the world that creation really did happen? But it goes a little further than that. We have to ask the question, is it sinful for a person not to accept creation six day, 24 hour? Are we really just talking about theories? Are we just talking about concepts of intrigue that we can just kind of Think about these things. And I thought Tim's illustration of getting a honey-do list and then saying to your wife, this is very poetic. And God has given us his word. And there's poetry in his word. But we have to be so careful when we call something that's clearly declared in a narrative something that is poetic. and something that we can just bend our minds in any direction in order to interpret to sort of meet our fancy. We need to be able to see truly what creation is and that it is really not an option. When I read in John 1 that all things were made through him and without him nothing was made, You can't get much clearer. That's standard logic. This is true. Since this is true, the opposite cannot be true, simply put. So we do want to see, and I'm going to attempt to make the case that we, in fact, do need to see a failure to see God's glory. in creation is sin. But the only way we fail to see his glory is when we begin to chew away at what he did accomplish and what he said he accomplished. And keep in mind, to me, one of the strongest evidences is how often did Christ correct Genesis? None, right? How often did Paul correct Genesis? How about John? Well, certainly Peter. No. It's completely assumed that that is true. It's a ground that they're standing on. And even in Hebrews 11, as I read it, It's tied to the faith verse. It's tied to the passage that Pastor Dorman quoted in Hebrews 12, I believe, regarding Jesus as the author and finisher of our faith. It's describing faith before it gets to that passage. And in the middle is by faith we understand that the creation occurred. Oh, well, that means faith is sort of like a cliff. And you come to the end of the cliff, and you don't really have anything else to think about. You're not sure. Nothing makes sense. You came to the end of logic. And so faith is a giant leap. That's my best leap, by the way. Is that what faith is? How do you get faith is the substance? What's substance? Something I can hold, something I can see, something I can realize, something that is true, something that's dependable, something that's life. Our faith is not empty. We don't commit to God in faith and all of a sudden are in outer space somewhere. We live and we walk among the land. We continue to work. And we work in faith, looking to God to bring about his will in our lives. I want to talk about science a little bit. First thing I want you to know is I wore this T-shirt. This T-shirt was given to me by my daughter. And she is into Army medical research. And the reason I wore this T-shirt is so that you know that I am not saying in any way, shape, and form that as reformed people, we are against medical research. Or that we are against people building cars and using engineering techniques in order to make them. Or that Christians shouldn't ever go into becoming computer scientists. Or whatever the category be. We're not saying that. So science. What is science? Well, when I think about what is science, I get really confused. And I go back, first of all, to the world of philosophy. Because you know where science came from? Philosophy. What does philosophy do? What does it mean? Philoso, or philo, is, a Greek word. It's the word that doesn't mean what agapia means. But it means love. It's that friendship love, that kinship love. And philosophy is simply love of knowledge. So my goal as a philosopher is to pile up and heap up as much as I possibly can. And somehow in the end, being a philosopher, I gained something. Not sure what, but I have a lot of knowledge. And I really love it. And it assumes of something about knowledge, doesn't it? It assumes that I am going to love it, whatever it is that I know. Whatever it is that I grow in, I'm going to love it. Well, one of the first philosophers that ever came about, as far as looking back and trying to recognize who was the first philosopher, is a guy by the name of Thales. And he lived 624, 546 BC. Now, that would happen to be before Malachi, but not much more. His grandchildren, if he had any of them, probably saw Malachi walk by. Possibly. Why? Because this guy Thales lived and went to school, or was associated with the school, a Milesian school. And do you know where that school is? Or was? It's not there now, I don't believe. It would be really hard to find it, I'm sure. Ephesus, did you ever hear of that place? There's those Ephesians that lived there? Right next door. So even though we're going back quite a bit of time, we have an association here. Well, Thales had an interesting theory. He decided in his thinking, philosophically, and what happens when you enter the philosophical world is that you kind of close the door to the divine world. And you look at what's in front of you. And you make judgments based on what's in front of you. And he was looking for what is the one universal truth in life? What is the holy grail of thought? And he thought, and he thought, and he thought. And we have no idea how long he thought before he came up with this. History gets a little blurred when you're talking about that far back. About 2,500 years. Yeah, 2,500 years. And he said, he looked around and he said, you know that grass is growing. It's really green. And it just rained. And he goes over here, and he looks, and he sees this lake. And this lake has all these big trees growing up around it. And there's fish in there, and there's animals in there. And they're going there, and they're drinking. And he said, hmm, that's interesting. I'm going to write that down. I'm going to think about it more. And then he looked, and he looked, and he looked, and he said, you know what? I've discovered the universal truth. Life comes from water. Thank you. I'll go home now. And there's other philosophers that immediately followed him. And some of them went out, and they saw a forest burning. And the forest burned down completely. And they came back several months later, and here's all these green shoots popping up all over. And they said, the universal is fire. So let's stay with that guy with the water and jump about, let's say, 1,700 years ahead. And you come across a guy by the name of Thomas Aquinas. Now, he was an Italian feller. And he was in the Roman Catholic Church. And he did a lot of thinking. And he took all this strain of philosophers, and he was looking at these philosophers and thinking, man, they really got something going here. We're really missing something. And he possibly looked at Romans 1 a little bit, but he came to a brilliant conclusion in his own mind, and that was that If I look at these things philosophically, I don't close the gate to God. I open it. I can find out all about God from nature. I don't need the scripture. I only need, I mean, it's nice to have it. His view of the church was probably you had to be in church. But as we looked at nature, we could grow and understand God better. We could grow and understand ourselves better. And he set in motion what eventually became an official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church in Trent, although it was already well accepted way before that. And that is that we, in fact, can learn of God through nature. We don't really need revelation. Well, that somewhat kind of created a lot of problems. Because immediately following his period, you have the Enlightenment period, and you have scientists developing as a occupation. Now, one of the interesting things all the way up to the time of the Reformation is if you were a carpenter, you were a carpenter and you stayed put. If you were somebody who cut trees, that was your occupation. If you studied science and you were a mathematician, that's what you would do. You wouldn't go over into all of these realms. Then they made a change where they became liberal minded. as in the United States. We have liberal arts. So now, instead of being pigeonholed, you had to know everything. So many of the universities were structured around multidiscipline. And that whole thing continued to expand. And science, though, there became this little war with science then. And with the theologian. And it broke off again. And they went in as many ways in their own way. And you had somebody by the name of Darwin who came up in 1859. He wrote a book. And that book basically claimed that there's a continuum. And the continuum is always continuing. And this idea of God spoke and it was doesn't wash anymore. So he took the philosophy, and with supposedly an initial goal of proving God, opening the door, he re-shut the door. And many of those after him shut the door. And they redefined timeline. And they said, no, this thing of creation did not occur when it did, but it took thousands, thousands, thousands, millions, millions, billions, whatever years to occur. Much of that timeline, if you read it, sometimes it's amazing how absurd it is. Because there are times where, particularly shortly after Darwin, they would take a dog and say, you know, the dog became a horse. Well, we don't have anything in between there. And I'm not saying he said that. This is an example. The dog became a horse, and then Or actually, it was the little horse became the big horse. And then they say, well, it must have taken at least a million years for that to occur. Because all those little changes need to happen in order for the dog to become the horse or, again, the little horse to become the big horse. So you had this stretch of time. And then when the geologists got involved, it even further became stretched. So it was almost like a default to the scientists. When all else fails, it took more time. It took more time. It took more time. So we come into our current world, or closer to at least the previous century and this century, and we see this issue of time all around us and constantly nagging at us. And but the truth is, it's not about how many bones we can find. It's not about how many fossils we can find, or pieces of pottery, or any other evidence. And it's not about where man has gone, which is looking at things with either a microscope or a macroscope. And that would be the Hubble Space Telescope. telescope, looking at the vastness of everything. What do we gain in those things? And we see all kinds of things today. There's all kinds of evidence, in a sense, that's put forth in front of us. And people have become consumed by these things. They're consumed with figuring out the time. It's the biggest question facing science. Well, there was another fellow that came along in this past century who really messed things up, a guy by the name of Einstein. And he started looking at time. And he said, time is relative. And the classic picture that he did was you have two trains that are running side by side on a railroad track. They're both going 100 mile an hour, probably 50 mile an hour for Einstein, but 100 mile an hour. And you have somebody sitting in this train, and you have somebody sitting in this train. And when I look over and I see the other person, they're not moving. because I'm looking at them from my picture, from my place. Well, it went from looking at it that way, which is really interesting, because now it's kind of interesting that we talk about creation being a 24-hour period in six days. Well, what's relative to that? And you see, there's no end to the questions that then begin to flow. There's no point of reality that means anything. And actually, Einstein really expanded that thinking in terms of a thing called special relativity, time dilation, dialectic relativity, and all of these other things. And one of them is, Time travel, okay? If you, the closer you approach the speed of light, according to Einstein, what happens? Time slows down. So if you have one person that's sitting here and you have another person who potentially goes at the speed of, near the speed of light, because nobody can really travel the speed of light, but the closest they can to the speed of light, Without hitting any inertia, what's that mean? They can never turn around. Because as soon as you turn, you're creating inertia. So you can't turn around, but you've got to come back. So now you get even more confused. And then you find out that you have things like wormholes, where time begins to be literally sucked into a hole. And the universe itself becomes warped. And now you can go and do hole traveling. You go into a hole here and you come out there. There's a whole series on that. It's called Stargate, right? That's the basis of Stargate. And then you go back and you read the word of God. And your head goes, what? And this points to something. It really directs us to something. And this message is really not very difficult, I hope. As we live in this world, and as we face these types of thinkers, how do we communicate creation to them. How do we defeat the argument? With the fist, that's one. No, no, that's not what you're supposed to do. How do we do that? When we go and sit in a college classroom and the professor's ranting and raving about all of these things, how do you digest them? You have to at least memorize them and repeat them on a test. We know that. But how do you deal with that? How do you think about that? How do you relate to it? How do you explain, excuse me, professor, but I think you're in sin. I discovered that's not a good way to do it. God gave us a coping skill. No, it's more than a coping skill. God gave us a place. No, it's more than a place. It's a gathering. God gave us something that we can fight this like nobody's business. It's called the church. That's what God has established for us. The church is our refuge. It is our place where we are brought back to our senses. regardless of what's been dumped on us, regardless of what's been argued, when we go into the temple, it's all clear. When we worship God and give him the glory that is due his name, we're brought back to reality, our true reality. We can find little devices and ways that we can argue with people who hold these, again, some of them based on facts, some of them conjecture, some of them imagination. There's a guy by the name of Tyson, Neil deGrasse Tyson. And I looked it up, and he's going to be speaking in Massachusetts this weekend. at a price of $117 a ticket. And he's a famous scientist. And he did a little series on TV about traveling in outer space and how can we find life on another planet. And he came up with some theories. And he said, well, first of all, we know that out in outer space there are stars. And we can see the stars. And we think that there's some planets going around these stars. But we can't see the planets. Nothing that we have is capable of seeing that planet. But we can see a dot. And that's when this planet orbit goes in front of that sun. Now I can see a dot. Why? Because it's black, it's a shadow, and the sun's right behind it. And based on that, I can determine that that planet is about the same as the Earth in mass and weight. Well, they found a star that's not the closest star, but it's pretty close, and they found a dot. And then he said, It's a little bigger. It's probably about like that. And the mass would be, oh, almost twice as much gravity than Earth. But we think there might be water on it. He must have read Dales. Because if you can find a planet that's got water on, what are you going to find? Life. Aliens, even. So he summarized somehow that it's likely that it has water because when we look at this far side, when we count the dots and how long it takes to get in front of there, we can figure out how big this orbit is. And if we can figure that out, we find out that this thing is actually pretty close to the Earth and our sun. And so it's very likely it's got water. And if it's twice the, it has, so it's got water, it can have life, and it probably has animals on it. And because of the gravity, the animal probably looks something like this, okay? And he had a picture. I mean, at least he could have put an eye over here or something, but no. Short, stubby legs, and it walks like this. And he showed pictures of it. Real pictures of this animal that's on this planet, that's out in the sun, that has a dot going in front of the sun. Scientific fact, that animal must be there. OK? That's where this stuff goes. And we take that in. And then what do we do with it? First of all, we put it on hold. And then we go back into the house of the Lord and we worship God. And we read his word and we listen to his word and we understand that all scripture All scripture is given by inspiration of God. It's profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. That man, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped. Thoroughly equipped. When we pull out our swords to go battle, We need to be reminded of what Christ did in the garden. When the apostles said, we need swords. We're taking over Rome. Jesus said, how many do you have? He said, two. He said, that's enough. We're fully equipped. We have a far greater sword here. But the word of God On its own is a testimony. The word of God teaches us, right? It is our authority that we rest on. But what does this authority demand? Worship. God doesn't ask the question, do you understand me? Come and worship. God says, worship, and you understand. It's in worship that we are given understanding. When we let go of ourselves and see God as a total and only focus of our life. And again, I've been in jobs where I was talking to Paul about it this morning, or last night, I can't remember. where I have been steeped in work, where all I had was numbers and technical stuff floating around my head and legal questions being asked of me. And oh, by the way, sign this. And I've come home. And Janie says, here's my honey-do list. And I say, it looks like poetry. You know, and you just, and I've had whole weeks go like that. And I just, I'm begging you to see, there is no greater relief from all that than being brought back into the house of the Lord. To being brought back and to see the Holy One of Israel. And understand, not salvation, Yes, we want to understand that. God wants us to understand that. But that's not the goal of worship. The goal of worship is to know God. The goal of worship is to acknowledge God for everything he is, for everyone who he saved, for everyone he will judge, as Ken Henko talked about that. So we come in and we worship God. And we need to be mindful of that. We need to think about what it means to worship God. Is it important? Is there a preparation we should be thinking about when we come to worship God? Are we doing anything that is distracting to others when they're worshiping God? Am I mindful of those things? And we need to come as God has prescribed. But in so doing, this is not a legal straitjacket. It's what God requires because he is who he is, because he is true. because he is holy, because he is without sin, and because he has made a way for the sinner to come and give him praise. I don't think we comprehend yet, nor do I anticipate and comprehending that in the near future. how significant it is that God, when we wretched, blind, naked sinners come before him, according to his word, we can actually not only have this worship of God, but we commune with God. And we commune with one another. And that's the second point regarding the church. When I'm faced with a trial, when I'm faced with that person, I can't figure out how to answer their questions. We have a church. We have people who are a like mind. And we need to be engaged with one another. And we need to let each other know, hey, I'm not making it through this. I'm struggling with this. We need to give counsel. We need to pray for one another. We need to guard one another. So in conclusion, we read a passage from Genesis about dominion. The people of God are to have dominion. not discovery. Our goal in life is not to find some new thing for the sake of finding some new thing. That's philosophy. Do we discover things yet? Do we do research yet? But our goal in life is not to discover. Our goal in life is to fulfill God's command to have dominion. to care for the planet as he's given it to us. Our thoughts are regarding God's created order and seeing that created order in the order that he created it. And it's not in chaos. Francis Schaeffer used to have a little saying how the evolutionists basically believed in chaos plus time plus chance. Don't be caught up in that. There's a created order. All things are to be done for God's glory and not man's reputation. When somebody's paying $127 or $17, whatever the hundred was, to hear him give a speech about how nothing really matters, it's a sad commentary, especially when it's about his reputation. And you look at the website, and there's no question about whose reputation it is, OK? It's about reigning with God and for God. We are to, that song we've sung recently, onward Christian soldiers. We are to go forward and we reign with God and for God. We well do that in his kingdom. But we don't war for power. There's a complete humility in this. The only way we reign is when we consider ourselves, as Paul did, dead, and reckon ourselves dead. Then we reign. It's not self-centered in any sense. And finally, it is about the church and not the world. Philosophy looks at the world. Scientists often fall into simply looking at the world. And they think the world is everything. The church is everything. Because it's brought about by God's creation. God is the builder of the church. God is the sustainer of the church. We will see the world's influence in the church all the time. We will see very sad situations in the church all the time. When that happens, we go back to God's word and we say, as Israel did often, well, what did that book say again? Would somebody please read it? Oh, that's what it is. OK, we got it now. We're always bringing ourselves back to that correction. We're not the perfect church, but we are God's church. And he is sustaining us and carrying us through. And he has given us many gifts, even within the church. And if I expand on that, we'll be here the rest of the day. So again, the whole notion. of how do I confront those who would make these kind of arguments. First step, give them a cup of water. It is about what we do. Give them the respect they're due. Be kind, but speak truth. not yours, God's. We point at things. We never have to point at ourselves. Isn't this Christian life wonderful? All we have to do is direct them to the one who saves. All we have to do is direct them to the one that they need to worship. Do you invite a reprobate to a church? You bet you do. How do they hear? Scripture says, how do they hear if there's not a preacher? Well, how do they hear without a church? It's God's means. It's God's method. It's how we confront every principality and argument by God's word. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, again, we thank you for your care. We thank you for your word. We thank you that we do not need to be confused, regardless of how confused those are around us. But we need to speak the truth. But more so, we need to show care, the same care that you have shown us. We love because you loved us first. And you have showed us. And you have given us so many clear demonstrations of what we ought to do. Lord, we pray that you would grant us your spirit to encourage us in those things. Thank you for the fellowship of the saints that we have here. We pray your blessing on the remainder of our day and this evening's teaching as well. And again, we give you thanks and praise in Christ's name. Amen. For the closing hymn, we want to sing The Church's One Foundation. And I lost my number. 347? Is that right? 347.
Creation Part 4
Sermon ID | 71172116549 |
Duration | 56:41 |
Date | |
Category | Conference |
Bible Text | Genesis 2 |
Language | English |
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