To access the Genesis 1:1 PODCAST, click here
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ~ Genesis 1:1
An understanding of the Bible and God's redemptive plan of mankind begins with a study of the book of Genesis which is quoted more than two hundred times in the New Testament. Genesis is foundational, it tells us about the origin of the universe, the origin of man, the origin of sin and the fall of man, the origin of marriage, the origin of human government, the origin of the nation of Israel through whom the Messiah came.
The book of Genesis, written by Moses, covers 2,500 years of human history. From the Fall of man in the early chapters to the death of Joseph, we discover that Genesis has three main divisions. The first is Genesis 1-2 which is about creation. The second section is Genesis 3-11, degeneration. And then the last section, Genesis 12-50, is about regeneration. Genesis is divided into four events and four people, The four events are: Creation, The Fall, The Flood, The Tower of Babel. Then the four people are: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph.
Today's verse begins with: "In the beginning." We can't go back any further than that. And, when we tally up the time, many speculate that the earth is around 10,000 years old. Some say it is as young as 6,000 years old. And, then there are those who teach the Gap Theory which presents the earth as millions of years old. It really doesn't matter at the end of the day how old the earth is; The main thing is that God created it with its time, force, action, space, and matter. "In the beginning," that's the time. "God," that's the force. "Created," that's the action. "The heavens," that's the space. "And the earth," that's the matter.
The Bible assumes God's existence. Many try to eliminate God out of the equation but no matter how far back we go into the farthest reach of the past, we still would not have answered the question: "How did it all begin?" Until we acknowledge there must be some first uncaused cause, we will not have drawn any plausible conclusion. Many have sought to eliminate God from the beginning because as Romans 1 tells us, they did not wish to retain God in their minds. As soon as we acknowledge there is a God, we are then made accountable to Him. The so-called "theory of evolution" was invented in order to try to eliminate the God of the Bible. The goal of the evolutionists was to try to do away with universal morality and universal guilt and universal accountability. Evolution was invented to eliminate the judge and leave people free to do whatever they want without guilt and without consequences. But, it makes no sense to believe in time plus chance plus nothing. The idea that the universe was created by chance, without no ultimate creator and design and purpose is not logical.
God didn't tell us a lot about His creative process. In fact, there are only 630 words used by God to describe the origin of everything. He spent far more time talking about people like Abraham than He did creation. This merely reminds us that the purpose of Genesis isn't a biology lesson. God, the Author of all, has endeavored to show us briefly the origin of all things and then to take us quickly to reveal to us His redemptive heart.
The modern mind believes that evolution is such a done deal and such a closed case that it can't even be argued. Some of the most brilliant minds in the scientific community would say, "not so fast, my friend!" These say it is not a closed case because evolution is even more speculative today than it was when Darwin presented his "theory" to the world. In fact, Molecular biologist Michael Denton said, "The evolutionary theory is still, as it was in Darwin's time, a highly speculative hypothesis entirely without direct factual support."
One of the glaring problems Charles Darwin saw with his "evolutionary theory" was the fossil record. He knew that there were huge gaps, inexplicable by him, in the fossil record that paleontology did not agree with. But he also believed and stated that time would vindicate him. That the more we study the fossil record the more we will know that evolution is a fact. Well, in over one hundred and twenty years since Darwin's time we have discovered this not to be so. In fact, the curator of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago writes, "We are now over 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. We have fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time."
Anyone who believes in evolution has to have way more faith than the creationist because evolution teaches that over billions of years just random time and space created by nothing is responsible for this highly complex carbon life in our biosphere. The evolutionist rejects the idea that "God has placed eternity in our hearts." They reject Augustine's words, "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." They reject the words of C.S. Lewis who said, "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." And, it takes far more faith to believe in that than to believe, "In the beginning God created."
