Once again, I want us to define what we are talking about.
Doctrine of Creation: God created the entire universe out of nothing; it was originally very good; and He created it to glorify himself.
We are looking at creation in three parts, beginning last week with the idea of Creator God, and picking up this week with the idea of Creation: Out of Nothing.
Think of it. Out of nothing . . . something, everything!
How did God do it? Did he create each plant and animal directly, or did He use some kind of evolutionary process? How quickly did He do it? Was it 7 literal days, or was it something longer?
I. Biblical Evidence:
Read with me in Genesis Chapter 1:1-5
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. The Bible clearly requires us to believe that God created the universe out of nothing.
Psalm 33 tells us, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of His mouth . . . For He spoke and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood forth.”
In the New Testament we find a universal statement at the beginning of John’s gospel, “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 was not any thing made that was made.”
The phrases “the heavens and the earth,” “the heavens,” and “all things” are all best taken to mean the entire universe. Paul is most explicit in Colossians 1 when he specifies “all things” as being both the “visible and invisible.” Hebrews 11:3 says, “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” This is to say that they were made of the spiritual, and though this is not a slam for creation out of nothing, the strange idea that creation was created out of something invisible is likely not the authors intent here.
Why is this important?
Because God created the universe out of nothing, no matter in the universe is eternal. All that we see - mountains, rivers, stars and oceans - all came into existence when God created them. This may seem elementary, but it reminds us that God rules over the entire universe and that nothing is to be worshiped instead of God or in addition to Him. Were we to deny creation out of nothing, we would have to say that some matter is eternal like God. This would be to challenge His independence, sovereignty, and the fact that worship is due to Him alone!
Positively, the fact that God created the universe out of nothing says that it has meaning and purpose. He created for something. We should try to understand and help our children understand that purpose and use creation in ways that fit that purpose, namely, to bring glory to Himself. When creation brings us joy, we should give thanks to God who made it!
II. Role of the Trinity
One of the coolest things we can learn and communicate from creation is the insight into the Trinity that it provides us.
A. Father - God was the primary agent in initiating the act of creation, and we often only think of God the Father creating the universe. However, God the Son and God the Spirit were also active.
B. Son - The Son is often described as the one through whom creation came about, as we saw in John 1:3. Paul says there is, “one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we exist” in 1 Corinthians 8:6, and that “all things were created through Him and for Him” in Colossians 1:16. What a consistent picture of Christ as the active agent carrying out the plans of the Father.
C. Spirit - God the Spirit was also at work in creation. He is generally pictured as completing, filling and giving life to God’s creation. In Genesis 1:2 it is the Spirit who is moving over the face of the deep, indicating a preserving and sustaining governance. Job says in 33:4, “The Spirit of God has made me and the breath of the Almighty gives me life.”
It is important here that the same Hebrew word (ruach) can mean spirit, breath or wind. However, in most cases, there is very little difference in the meaning. So, even if we use the terms breath of God or wind of God, it is just a figurative way of talking about the activity of the Holy Spirit in creation. So, the Father, Son and Spirit are to be praised for the work of creation!
III. Relationship with Science
At various times in history, Christians have found themselves dissenting from the accepted findings of contemporary science. In the vast majority of these cases, sincere Christian faith and strong trust in the Bible have led scientist to the discovery of new facts about God’s universe. These discoveries have changed scientific opinion for all of subsequent history.
The lives of great believing scientist like Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boyle, Michael Faraday, James C. Maxwell, and many others testify to this truth.
On the other hand, there have been times when accepted scientific opinion has been in conflict with people’s understanding of what the Bible says.
For example, when the Italian astronomer Galileo, who again was a believer, began to teach that the earth was not the center of the universe, but revolved around the Sun, he was criticized, and eventually condemned by the Catholic Church, because they had misunderstood what the Bible taught. However, after people began to look again at what Scripture said, they realized that all of the biblical language was from the perspective of the human observer and that from that perspective gave an accurate account that did not contradict the findings of Galileo at all.
The lesson is that we should not be afraid of science. It can not contradict what is true. Science is itself a search for truth using natural means. Sometimes we may have to re-examine science and sometimes we must re-examine Scripture. What wonderful adventures both explorations are to go on with our children and grandchildren.
In order that we all have a remedial understanding of what our culture might present to our children and grandchildren as options to the biblical explanation of the origin of the universe, I want to give 2 quick examples of views that seem clearly inconsistent with Scripture.
A. Secular Theory - For the sake of time, I want to just mention here that any purely secular theories of the origin of the universe would be unacceptable for those who believe in Scripture. By secular I just mean any theory that does not see an infinite-personal God as responsible for creating the universe by intelligent design.
Thus, the “Big Bang” theory (in an uncaused cause form where God is excluded), or any other theories that hold that matter always existed, would be out-of-hand inconsistent with the teaching of Scripture that God created the universe out-of-nothing, for His own glory.
B. Theistic Evolution - Ever since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, some Christians have proposed theories trying to reconcile the Bible to Darwin’s theory. This most often takes the form of living organisms coming about by the process of evolution presented by Darwin but that God guided that process so that the result was just what He wanted.
This view is called Theistic Evolution, because it advocates belief in God and in Darwinian Macro-evolution. Now, I would love to get into the technicalities with you, but for now, it must simply be clear that an examination of Scripture reveals that theistic evolution is at odds with the biblical account of creation.
Conflicts like God’s purpose, verses evolutionary randomness lie at the heart of a fundamental difference, as we see in Genesis 1:24-25, And God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds." And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
Theistic evolution also seems inconsistent with God’s creative word bringing immediate response, and God’s present active role in creating and forming every living thing.
Most importantly, the special creation of Adam and Eve is a strong reason to break with theistic evolution, as we will see more clearly next week.
C. Common Ground - Now I need to build some bridges here. Darwinian Macro-evolution is not the same thing as Micro-evolution, which teaches that small developments within species do occur over time in order for a species to adapt to different environments. There are innumerable examples of such micro-evolving, like mosquitoes becoming immune to insecticides, or human beings growing taller, and no one denies that exist. However, this is not the sense in which evolution is meant when discussing theories of creation and evolution, because they in no way prove either point!
I need to also say that there are some places where there is room for disagreement among those of us who believe in the absolute truthfulness of Scripture. Some of these are the possibility that God created a grown-up universe in which everything was old as Adam and Eve were created adults, the possibility of a break in time between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 or between 1:2 and 1:3, or the possibility that the flood affected the geological data greatly.
The point is that in both our knowledge of the natural world and our understanding of Scripture, we are limited and imperfect. However, we can approach both with great confidence that when the facts are rightly understood, there is no final conflict.
IV. God’s Purpose in Creation
We learned last week that God did not need to create the universe. If He created it out of nothing, why did He do that, and why did he choose to do it the way He did?
We will see next week that it is clear that God created people for His own glory, for He speaks of His sons and daughters as those “whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made” in Isaiah 43:7. But it is not just human beings that God created for this purpose.
A. His Glory - The entire creation is intended to show God’s glory.
Even the inanimate creation, the stars and sun and moon and sky, testify to God’s greatness. Psalm 19 says, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge."
The song of heavenly worship in Revelation 4 connects God’s creation of all things with the fact that He is worthy to receive glory from them, "Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created."
What does creation show about God?
Primarily that His great power and wisdom are far above anything that could be imagined by any creature. One glance at the sun or starts convinces us of God’s infinite power. Even a brief inspection of a single leaf, or the wonder of a human hand convinces us of God’s great wisdom.
Who could make all of this? Who could create it out of nothing? Who could sustain it day after day for endless years? When we meditate on it, we are to give glory to God.
The creation shows His great wisdom and power, and ultimately it shows all of His other attributes as well. It seems God created the universe to take delight in his creation, for as creation shows forth various aspects of God’s character, to that extent He does take delight in it.
B. His Delight - If God created the universe to show His glory, then we would expect the universe would fulfill that purpose.
In fact, when God finished His work of creation, He did take delight in it. At the end of each stage, God saw that what He had done was good. Then at the end of the six days of creation, Genesis 1:31 says, “God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good.”
God delighted in it just as He had purposed to do!
C. Our Delight - This explains why we take spontaneous delight in all sorts of creative activities. People with artistic, musical or literary skill enjoy creating things and seeing, hearing, or pondering their creative work. God has so made us that we enjoy imitating, in a lesser way, His creative activity, and one of the amazing things about us that separate us from the rest of creation is our ability to create new things.
This also explains why we take delight in other kinds of creative activity: cooking, decorating, gardening, wood working, problem solving, invention and industrial production. Even children enjoy coloring pictures or building tall towers out of blocks.
In all of these activities, we reflect in small measure the creative activity of God, we should use them to teach about how God is creative and how it gave Him joy to create the universe out of nothing!
We should delight in it and give Him thanks!
D. Our Worship - The doctrine of creation has many applications for us.
It makes us realize that the material universe is good in itself, for God created it good and wants us to use it in ways pleasing to Him.
God intends that we partake of its fruit with thanksgiving, as the early Christians understood in Acts 2:46 when they “partook of food with glad and generous hearts.”
We should be teaching our children and grandchildren to give thanksgiving to God and trust in His provisions. God intends us to wholeheartedly enjoy creative activities (artistic, musical, athletic, domestic, literary, mechanical, etc.) with an attitude of thanksgiving that our creator enables us to imitate Him in our creativity. God intends that we have a healthy appreciation for creation that reminds us of its goodness and the blessings that come to us through it.
This should encourage young believers to do scientific and technological research to discover more of the goodness of God’s abundant creation, because God wants us all to understand that such research glorifies God, for it enables us to discover how incredibly wise, powerful and skillful God was in His work of creation, as Psalm 11 says, “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who have pleasure in them.”
The doctrine of creation also reminds us that God is sovereign over the universe He created.
He made it all, and He is Lord of it. We owe all that we are and have to Him. We have great confidence that He will defeat all of His enemies and will be manifested as sovereign King to be worshiped forever.
In addition, the incredible size of the universe and the amazing complexity of every created thing will, if our hearts are right, draw us continually to worship and praise Him for His greatness!
Take these Stones Home
Doctrine of Creation: God created the entire universe out of nothing; it was originally very good; and He created it to glorify himself.
I. Biblical Evidence
Read Genesis 1:1-5 as a family and talk about the difference between creation out of nothing and making something out of stuff. Maybe bake a cake with your children and show them how we need ingredients to make things and God did not.
II. Role of the Trinity
Worship together by praising the Father, Son and Spirit for the different ways they participate in creation.
Maybe act out the roles of the Trinity in creation by having the Dads read the “And God Said” statements in Genesis 1, the Moms read the “And it was So” statements in Genesis 1 and have the children act out (like charades) what is happening.
III. Relationship with Science
Talk with your children and grandchildren about how science reveals who God is and how many great scientist were believers in God. Maybe read biographies with them of some great Christian Scientist.
Here are a few recommended titles:
Men of Science Men of God: Great Scientists of the Past Who Believed the Bible by Henry M. Morris
Children:
Isaac Newton, Sower Series By: John Hudson Tiner
Robert Boyle, Sower Series By: John Hudson Tiner
Johannes Kepler, Sower Series By: John H. Tiner
Along Came Galileo By: Jeanne Bendick
Teens:
Scientists Of Faith by Dan Graves
Scientists Who Believe: 21 Tell Their Own Stories by Eric C. Barrett
Galileo Galilei - Biography of the Father of Science
Isaac Newton: Giants of Science By: Kathleen Krull
Michael Faraday: Physics and Faith by Colin A. Russell
IV. God’s Purpose in Creation
Look at the moon and the stars (maybe through a telescope) and discuss how they display God’s glory, and how He delights in His creation.
Participate in some creative activity together and talk about how we are joining God in delighting in creation by being creative (try playing music, writing a story, cooking, decorating, gardening, wood working, coloring, or building a tall tower out of blocks).
At the end of any of these activities, take time to thank God for creation and worship Him!
Primarily that His great power and wisdom are far above anything that could be imagined by any creature. One glance at the sun or starts convinces us of God’s infinite power. Even a brief inspection of a single leaf, or the wonder of a human hand convinces us of God’s great wisdom.
Who could make all of this? Who could create it out of nothing? Who could sustain it day after day for endless years? When we meditate on it, we are to give glory to God.
The creation shows His great wisdom and power, and ultimately it shows all of His other attributes as well. It seems God created the universe to take delight in his creation, for as creation shows forth various aspects of God’s character, to that extent He does take delight in it.
B. His Delight - If God created the universe to show His glory, then we would expect the universe would fulfill that purpose.
In fact, when God finished His work of creation, He did take delight in it. At the end of each stage, God saw that what He had done was good. Then at the end of the six days of creation, Genesis 1:31 says, “God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good.”
God delighted in it just as He had purposed to do!
C. Our Delight - This explains why we take spontaneous delight in all sorts of creative activities. People with artistic, musical or literary skill enjoy creating things and seeing, hearing, or pondering their creative work. God has so made us that we enjoy imitating, in a lesser way, His creative activity, and one of the amazing things about us that separate us from the rest of creation is our ability to create new things.
This also explains why we take delight in other kinds of creative activity: cooking, decorating, gardening, wood working, problem solving, invention and industrial production. Even children enjoy coloring pictures or building tall towers out of blocks.
In all of these activities, we reflect in small measure the creative activity of God, we should use them to teach about how God is creative and how it gave Him joy to create the universe out of nothing!
We should delight in it and give Him thanks!
D. Our Worship - The doctrine of creation has many applications for us.
It makes us realize that the material universe is good in itself, for God created it good and wants us to use it in ways pleasing to Him.
God intends that we partake of its fruit with thanksgiving, as the early Christians understood in Acts 2:46 when they “partook of food with glad and generous hearts.”
We should be teaching our children and grandchildren to give thanksgiving to God and trust in His provisions. God intends us to wholeheartedly enjoy creative activities (artistic, musical, athletic, domestic, literary, mechanical, etc.) with an attitude of thanksgiving that our creator enables us to imitate Him in our creativity. God intends that we have a healthy appreciation for creation that reminds us of its goodness and the blessings that come to us through it.
This should encourage young believers to do scientific and technological research to discover more of the goodness of God’s abundant creation, because God wants us all to understand that such research glorifies God, for it enables us to discover how incredibly wise, powerful and skillful God was in His work of creation, as Psalm 11 says, “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who have pleasure in them.”
The doctrine of creation also reminds us that God is sovereign over the universe He created.
He made it all, and He is Lord of it. We owe all that we are and have to Him. We have great confidence that He will defeat all of His enemies and will be manifested as sovereign King to be worshiped forever.
In addition, the incredible size of the universe and the amazing complexity of every created thing will, if our hearts are right, draw us continually to worship and praise Him for His greatness!
Take these Stones Home
Doctrine of Creation: God created the entire universe out of nothing; it was originally very good; and He created it to glorify himself.
I. Biblical Evidence
Read Genesis 1:1-5 as a family and talk about the difference between creation out of nothing and making something out of stuff. Maybe bake a cake with your children and show them how we need ingredients to make things and God did not.
II. Role of the Trinity
Worship together by praising the Father, Son and Spirit for the different ways they participate in creation.
Maybe act out the roles of the Trinity in creation by having the Dads read the “And God Said” statements in Genesis 1, the Moms read the “And it was So” statements in Genesis 1 and have the children act out (like charades) what is happening.
III. Relationship with Science
Talk with your children and grandchildren about how science reveals who God is and how many great scientist were believers in God. Maybe read biographies with them of some great Christian Scientist.
Here are a few recommended titles:
Men of Science Men of God: Great Scientists of the Past Who Believed the Bible by Henry M. Morris
Children:
Isaac Newton, Sower Series By: John Hudson Tiner
Robert Boyle, Sower Series By: John Hudson Tiner
Johannes Kepler, Sower Series By: John H. Tiner
Along Came Galileo By: Jeanne Bendick
Teens:
Scientists Of Faith by Dan Graves
Scientists Who Believe: 21 Tell Their Own Stories by Eric C. Barrett
Galileo Galilei - Biography of the Father of Science
Isaac Newton: Giants of Science By: Kathleen Krull
Michael Faraday: Physics and Faith by Colin A. Russell
IV. God’s Purpose in Creation
Look at the moon and the stars (maybe through a telescope) and discuss how they display God’s glory, and how He delights in His creation.
Participate in some creative activity together and talk about how we are joining God in delighting in creation by being creative (try playing music, writing a story, cooking, decorating, gardening, wood working, coloring, or building a tall tower out of blocks).
At the end of any of these activities, take time to thank God for creation and worship Him!
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