Genesis 1:1 • A Very Good Place to Start

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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)

From grace to glory, we're going to go, believe this, through the Bible in a year, through the whole Genesis to Revelation in a year. And the goal is not just to get that behind us. The goal is to recognize that the Bible is this amazingly intricate miracle of God weaving together messages from writers across continents and centuries and generations with one consistent message, "I will redeem my people." It's not just a bunch of hard commands and random stories and a surprise Jesus. There is this calculated expression of God bringing a people to understanding of in their wickedness, in their guilt, they need a Redeemer until all else points to Him alone, and we are ready for that Christ to be revealed to us. We'll follow the pattern and follow the path. Today we start, borrowing a line from the sound of music, at a very good place to start,



 right at the beginning. Genesis 1-1. Now in the sound of music it says, "When you sing, you begin with do re me. When you praise, you begin in the beginning." In the beginning God did what? He created the heavens and the earth. That's where it all begins. Why is that important? Because the reality is, if you can get that verse right, not just in your head, but in your heart, virtually everything else falls into place in the rest of the Scriptures. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Let's pray together. Father, grant that the Spirit who gave the word would open our hearts to receive it. We pray in Jesus name. Amen. Three years ago the BBC science report that I read to you began this way. Why is there something rather than nothing? The admittedly controversial answer of leading physicists and cosmologists is that the entire universe from the fireball of the Big Bang to the star-studded cosmos that we now inhabit popped into existence from nothing at all. This admittedly bizarre explanation is not just another fanciful creation story. Rather the scientists say the reason this had to happen is because nothing is inherently unstable. As a result, two of the most important theories of modern science, quantum mechanics, and general relativity come to bear to say that from nothing something had to happen. Now the Atlantic magazine in its science report just a few months ago updated all of that. I'll read to you. "A newly posted physics paper has startled the physics world and thrown accepted theories into disarray. The paper by a prominent string theorist at Harvard offered a simple formula indicating which kinds of universes can exist according to string theory, which by the way is the leading candidate for a theory of everything that was advanced by Stephen Hawking who said we did not need God because we had an alternative theory of everything. But if this new formula advanced by the Harvard physicist is correct and so far it's holding up, then the cosmos must either be profoundly different than previously supposed or string theory must be wrong. The math simply deems it impossible to have the accepted picture of the universe's present-day expansion and at the same time the leading model of its explosive birth, that is the Big Bang.



 As a consequence, within three months of Stephen Hawking's death, his string theory is being unwound by the math of his own colleagues. It's not the first time that the math has not added up. So many of you in this room were not only raised on string theory and the Big Bang, but the theory that preceded it taught in this nation's classrooms up through the 1970s. That was not the Big Bang theory, that was, a number of you will know, the steady-state theory of the universe advanced by Fred Hoyle. What he said was there was not any Big Bang, the universe as we know it always was and always will be. Nothing has changed except, he noted, the universe continues to expand and the consequence was the math still would not add up. For there to be a steady-state universe and an expanding universe at the same time, there had to be new matter being created out of nothing. What Hoyle postulated, a number of you will remember this, is that hydrogen atoms are popping into existence out of nothing at the rate of one atom per century for every volume of space equal to the Empire State Building. And with just that many hydrogen atoms, the math would add up to keep a steady-state universe in place. But that wasn't sufficient math because what Hoyle noted, while that might explain matter in the universe, the energy level needed to go from hydrogen to carbon-based life forms. Who's that? That's us. The energy needed to go from mere hydrogen atoms to carbon-based life forms could not be explained by a Big Bang theory that simply had hydrogen atoms and more suddenly popping into greater existence and evolving into us. His famous example, Fred Hoyle, was the idea that a Big Bang would result in us, carbon-based life forms, was equivalent to saying a tornado going through a junkyard could assemble a Boeing 747.



 His conclusion, "Would you not say to yourself in light of these fantastic improbabilities



 that some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon-based life forms?" He wrote, "If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter without being deflected by the fear of the scientific community, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure of order must be the outcome of intelligent design." Now lest you as Christians take hope from that, recognize that Fred Hoyle, who coined the term "intelligent design,"



 remained an atheist all of his life. He did not think that intelligent design led to a creator God. Instead, he had to say something else was responsible. Hoyle, this avowed atheist, steady-state theorist, said, "For the math to work, the way to explain us was," ready? Wait for it,



 "Aliens." Now this is the leading scientist of the preceding generation. And in his 1984 book, Evolution from Space, he explained, "the notion that a living cell could be arrived by chance in a primordial organic soup is evident nonsense of a high order. A super-intellect," you like this phrase, "has monkeyed with the physics as well as with chemistry and biology. Rather than allow the math to take him to God, Hoyle said the math took him to aliens." And there was not another explanation that would do. Now you have to say, "Why go there? Why go to aliens rather than God?" And deep down we understand. Because if your understanding is, there was a creator God who made all things, including you, your life, your breath, your heart, your family, your love. Ultimately, your intellect will affect your heart, and you will believe you have a loving obligation to that creator. And any love, any love of any person or thing, automatically limits your freedoms. Because to love someone, you place their priorities above your own if you truly love them. And Hoyle, as every other person recognizes, if there truly is a creator, then that is going to limit us and our freedoms. So I want to honestly confess that to you.



 If you admit there's a creator, there is some limitation on your intellect and upon your doings in life. Having confessed that, let me ask you this. Why should we still delight in a creator?



 You have to ask what you sacrifice without a creator to answer that question. What if there is no creator? What if the science and math work or the aliens are your answer? Then what? If creation is not of God, there is another confinement. What is that confinement? The creation is all there is. Oh, listen, you may get ahead of the game if you're strong enough and clever enough and good-looking enough and the dice of life rolls your way. You may get ahead of the game for a while,



 but ultimately, there is a final roll of the dice.



 And the end is all there is. Or as the philosopher Albert Camus said, "There is no exit. All we have is what is. You, your life, your hopes, your family are a product of physics, biology, and chance. And that's all there is until the end."



 But what if there's a creator? What if what is pushing back the walls of confinement in this creation is a God who made all things, who is eternal and wise and caring? What if there is that God? Then what that God is saying in His Word is not simply that we are confined by this creation or our present existence, but there is a wall that is being broken down of eternity in our behalf. After all, if you accept what is said in Genesis 1.1, then you have the opportunity to receive what is said at the other end of the book, which is Revelation 21. Do you remember?



 John writes, "I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with men, and God Himself will be with His people. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, and there should be no more mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away." Why would it be reasonable to accept that there could be a new creation? Because you believe there was a creator of this creation. If it's reasonable to accept the first creation, it is reasonable to believe in the second. But if you deny the first creation, then you deny resurrection. Hope is gone. All you got is the what is for now.



 You know, I recognize that when you look at scientists and philosophers, simply having them conclude that physics and math is not all there is, does not necessarily take you to a Christian God. Anthony Flew, the great apologist for atheism of the last century, who only died within the last decade, was one who came to the reality of having argued for atheism and debates with Christians all of his adult life that his logic would no longer hold. That science and math and logic meant there had to be a God. And he confessed, "I have to undo what I've said. There has to be a God for what is to have happened." But confessing that there was a God did not mean that he was ready to confess his sin. He confessed there was a God, but not the God of the Bible.



 In order to believe in the God of the Bible, you not have to only come to the end of yourself and the end of what this creation offers. You have to want the Creator to actually be your advocate. And what the Bible is doing, just in this very first verse, is not only saying there is a Creator, but saying, "This is one that you should want." To accept this one is to put despair away. It's to break back the walls that would confine you in hopelessness. To believe this is to believe in wondrous things. What are you being called to believe? First, that God is eternal. In the beginning, God. The words that are there are not meant just to say that at some point in time, God began. But when our beginning occurred, God already was. His existence predated even the beginning. And that's not just said in Genesis 1.1. Psalm 90 in verse 2, "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever had… or ever God had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God." That's the walls of time being removed both behind this and before. From everlasting past to everlasting future, there is God. So that when God says to you and to me, "I so love the world that I gave my only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life." That promise becomes reasonable if God Himself is eternal.



 That is not just the end of time, but the beginning of time that are being pushed back so that when God says, "I'm eternal and I can make you eternal," we say, "You're the Creator." You can do that if you are eternal. He's not just eternal. He is amazingly powerful. In the beginning, God



 created. Some of you will know that's the Hebrew word "barah," which does not mean built or assembled. It means to originate, to bring out of nothing.



 And when you recognize that that's what's happening, God is not just saying, "I took some pieces and some hydrogen and some carbon and I pushed it together to make…," but actually out of nothing, I originated everything that is.



 Then you begin to have some sense of not just the eternity of God, but the power of God. We have an advantage over the ancients in being able to assess something of the magnitude of a power of the God who created the heavens and the earth. The observable universe, say our scientist, is 46



 billion light years in breadth. The unobserved universe, far larger, it is speculated. Nonetheless, if you could travel at the speed of light from our earth to the sun, speed of light, you know it right, 186,000 miles per second. If you could travel at the speed of light from the earth to the sun, it would take you eight minutes.



 But if you could go from our sun to the middle of the Milky Way galaxy, that would take you 33,000 years going at light speed. That's just getting to the middle of our galaxy, which is just one galaxy of 54 galaxies in what is identified as the local group.



 Each of the galaxies in the local group, if it's like ours, has roughly 250 billion stars. And our local group is considered by scientists to be one of 10 billion groups,



 each with billions of galaxies, stars within them. So much so, we run out of the math, that those who do the math say what that means is if you were to total all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world, there are more stars than that. Some of those stars, as big as our entire solar system, even by our observation, if God did all of that,



 He is really powerful. And not just powerful, but wise. He made the heavens and the earth in such a way that they coordinate. So even the ancients could see, you know, there's seed time and harvest. There's night and day, and they just continually follow one another in progressions that we cannot manage. So that God is so wise that if you look at the universe level, the cosmological level, you recognize things are made with just the right gravitational force. If gravity



 were a little less, then you recognize what would happen is that the stars could not ignite nuclear fusion, and therefore heat and light could not be produced. But if the stars, if the gravitation of the stars were just a little more than the stars themselves would not have the structure to exist.



 And the universe, as we know it, would collapse at the planetary level. Our planet is designed just right to sustain life. If it were closer to the sun, we'd burn up. If it were further from the sun, we would freeze even more than you did this winter. If the earth were a few miles smaller in diameter, the earth would get too thin in its atmosphere to sustain our life. If the earth were just a little larger in its diameter, the atmosphere would become too dense, and the greenhouse effect would take over, burning us all up. At the personal level, even just your blood is just right. You know that. If your blood were just a little thinner, you would hemorrhage and die. If your blood had just a little more density to it, it would clot too fast, and you would die of stroke or heart attack. Even if you go down to the microscopic level, there is this just rightness of who we are and how we have been made. Our bodies have these infinitely small little machines in them, producing proteins and enzymes and acids and replenishing our bodies millions of times every day. And the one who actually helped us understand so much of that, Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, recognized that the complexity was so great that even if you were to allow five billion years of evolutionary materialism upon this earth, there would not be enough time to create the bodies as we now have them. Now, this is not an outland to scientists. This is the co-founder of DNA. But curiously, Francis Crick, who's operating at the electron microscope level, comes to the same conclusion as Fred Hoyle, who's operating at the cosmological level looking at the stars. Where did Fred Hoyle say that we had originated? Do you remember? How did we get here? Said Fred Hoyle, looked at everything. What did he say we came from? Aliens. Francis Crick, who's looking at the other end of the science scale, looking down at our DNA, he said, "Primitive life forms must have been sent here on spaceships from advanced extraterrestrial civilizations to explain life as we know it with DNA." Now, I'm not trying to make fun of anybody. These are respected, intellectual, powerful, but I want to make sure you know that if we play on a level playing field, that our conclusion that there is a creator is no less faith-based than people who say we're here because of aliens or extraterrestrials. That on a level playing field where the math doesn't add up, where every other theory that we have advanced, including the most present ones, will not explain the world as we know it. That saying that there's a creator is not less plausible, is not less reasonable. Now, I'm not saying that people will accept it. And the reason, to quote G.K. Chesterton again, is that it is often supposed that when people stop believing in God, they will believe in nothing. Alas, he said, it's far worse than that. When they stop believing in God, they will believe in anything. Aliens, spaceships. Wrote Professor Harlow Shapley of Harvard, "Some people piously proclaim, in the beginning, God. I say, in the beginning, hydrogen."



 Carl Sagan, "The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be." Now, these are people to be respected for their intellect and their contributions to our culture and science, but recognize they are saying diametrically opposite things. One is saying, "In the beginning, hydrogen just blinked in as a new creation." And then the other is saying, "No, everything is, is everything that ever was, and everything that will be." And yet we hear from them both, recognizing that their faith, that they cannot prove either conclusion, is being held to keep them from the conclusion of God. I would believe anything but that. Why? Why rule out the possibility that there could be a God? Why have the faith evasion? Because you may not recognize it's a faith evasion. Albert Einstein is reputed one time to have had a class where his students came to the conclusion that there was no God. You did not have to go with the God hypothesis anymore. And so Einstein challenged them. He said, "How much of the total knowledge of the world do you think is contained in this one class?" All of you add up all of your knowledge of all, how much of the knowledge of the world is contained in this class? And the students did their estimates and they said, "Well, we think about 5% of the total knowledge of the world is in our class," which Einstein thought might be a little prideful. But he went with it and he said, "Well, if all the knowledge that you have is 5% of all the knowledge of the world, what makes you think that God is not in the 95% that you don't know? Because if you rule out the possibility that God could be in the 95%, that is not a logical conclusion. That is a faith conclusion. That is a choice of what you choose to believe. But the Bible is pressing us a different direction. It is saying, if you acknowledge that things just didn't appear, that even by ancient understanding that God had to bring into the world and you into the world in a way that you could not yourself handle, what is that ultimately saying? Not just that God is eternal and powerful and wise, but you're learning about that God that He is incredibly caring. How do you know that? Because, he says in the beginning of the Word, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. He's telling us about Himself. He doesn't have to do that. He could hide behind the stars. He could play in another universe. But instead, he says, "I care enough about you to reveal myself to you." If God is willing to do that, it's saying something about His care for us in a way that is truly astounding. If you consider the magnitude of what we now know about the universe, then you hear the words of the psalm quite differently.



 "When I look at the heavens, Lord, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man, that you are mindful of Him? Who am I, that the God of millions of superclusters of stars and galaxies pays attention to me? More than that." He comes, he says, "Let me tell you about myself." That is an expression of a remarkable amount of care and attention, if we will but see it. B.B. Warfield, the theologian, said that in creation, we have a beautiful window placed before us. And you have a choice simply to look at the window and see, "Why look at that leaded glass? Oh, look at that beveled edge and just admire the window." Or you can look through the window at what it was designed to reveal. Christians ought to be doing both. We ought to be saying, "Look at all that God is revealing by science and math, the physics and the biology, the wonder of who we are and the way the stars have formed." We ought to just be in awe of what our science reveals to us. But not just stop there. I'm just going to admire the science. What is the science meant to reveal? What is it pointing to? Who had to arrange all that when our math doesn't work with any other explanation? We are dealing with a God who says, "I'm going to show myself to you. I'm going to reveal myself to you." And that's the best gift of all. We sing it, you know, "I am so thankful my Father in heaven tells of His love in the book He has given wonderful things in the Bible I see. This is the dearest that Jesus loves me."



 Who is me? Not the Creator. I learn I need a Creator. I could not arrange one Adam. I could not bring myself into existence. I learn about myself that I need a Creator. I learn that I need the Creator's care. I hit a wall at some point in my existence unless God breaks down the walls.



 But it's not just at the end of life. I recognize that my weakness, not just of body, but of will and purpose and conscience, constantly puts me in a position that I can't just depend upon random chance for my family, for my hope, for myself. I begin to recognize I need a God who not just created me. I need a God who cares for me. And what God is doing when He says, "In the beginning I created you and everything around you." God is saying, "I'm a person and you're a person that needs His care." God, I need some help. He says, "I'm the Creator. I can do that." God, I need some forgiveness. He says, "I'm the Creator. I can give you a new start."



 God, I need the past not to burden my heart or damage the people I love. He says, "I can give you a clean slate. I'm the Creator. I can do that." How, Lord? "Well, I sent my Son to the earth and He paid the penalty for your sin and He died." But that wasn't the end of the story. He rose again to show that the penalty had been paid. And when the penalty was paid, He lived with God and He lives for us. How can that be? Because God says, "I'm the Creator and I can do that." But God, I need your help not just in the past. I need it every day. I need you to nourish me and provide for me against my weakness and my sin and my uncertainty. I'm the Creator, says God. I can do that. And God, when I get to the end of life, I need to know that's not hopeless and that's not the end, that you'll let me see loved ones again, that there's an eternity that's not just bound by my own physical and spiritual constraints. And God says, "I'm the Creator and I can do that." We're about to celebrate it right now. You recognize that what we are doing when we participate in this Lord's Supper is we are receiving a message from the Savior. "I came for you and I died for you." We're going to say it. We're going to say, "In these elements, we do show forth the Lord's death." And then we add another phrase, "Until He comes." He's coming? I thought He died. Yes. But He's the Creator. And He can live a new life. And He can bring us to new life. And we celebrate it by nourishing ourselves with the truth of who He is and what He has done. And when our hearts give up on us and when our hearts despair with what the world offers, we turn to God and say, "God, will you help me?" And He says, "I'm the Creator. I can do that. And God, will you ever come to be with me again?"



 He says, "I come to make a new world for you with your sin passed and your weakness and your disease and your tears all gone. I'm the Creator. And I can do that." Praise God. Even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly, we pray. You're the Creator. And you can do that.



 Father, we praise You that You have not just given us the big picture. You've shown us Your heart.



 Thank You for Jesus who gave Himself and did not only die, but received Your creative power to live again in our behalf, calls us to Himself away from our sin and our shame to let us know that You who make things new out of nothing can look at people like us and say, "I can make you new." And provide a new world and a new hope for You. "I'm the Creator. And I can do that." Praise God. We thank You, Creator, for our hope. In Jesus' name, amen.