Creation 1

[0:00] So what we're starting tonight is a study covering creation, which in theory is the first 11 chapters of Genesis.

[0:10] ! And although I've prepared a load of material tonight, if people start to doze off, I'll just stop and we'll carry on next time. It's probably the longest introduction I've done to one of these studies because there's quite a lot to say just leading up to where we start reading Genesis.

[0:27] The first thing to state the obvious is that the Genesis account is very much at odds with the scientific community. Who would like you to believe that God didn't create, that it all just evolved, that there was a massive Great Big Bang billions of years ago and nothing became everything through a big explosion.

[0:50] And what's really odd is the scientists who claim that creationists are being unscientific offer no explanation as to any system or method or process that's ever been seen that can make nothing explode and produce everything.

[1:12] There is just no, there's nothing they can indicate and say, well, you know, it happened like this. They just say it obviously happened because we're all here. That's kind of circular reasoning.

[1:25] So, no, it's most unscientific. And the theory of evolution is very unscientific. And I don't want to do an 11 week series on the theory of evolution. But as a Christian, what you'll come up against all the time is I can't possibly believe in creation because there is a firm belief almost everywhere that the theory of evolution is proven.

[1:47] And it isn't. It's far from proven. In fact, this is my view. I think what's been proven is that it could not possibly have happened. That's where I would put the evidence.

[1:59] I can see no pathway to evolution. And what we'll do as we go on through, we'll cherry pick examples just to this, not just tonight, but future talks.

[2:14] We'll cherry pick examples that show that God has had his hand on the whole thing from start to finish. So the universe coming into being, they say, was the Big Bang. The Bible says God created it.

[2:27] And man coming into the universe and complex animals and so on is also supposed to have just happened as a natural process of the universe doing what the universe does.

[2:38] And there is no evidence for that whatsoever. But what there is evidence of is the need for an intelligent mind behind it. There is also the age thing, because if you believe the Bible, then creation happened roughly 6,000 years ago.

[2:58] And they would have you believe that it took 14 billion years to get this far or something of that order. I'm not going to go into it tonight. I'll just mention it in passing. What is interesting is when you start to do the maths on the matter, even using their time scales and their statistics and likelihoods and mathematics, there has never been enough time for it to happen because 14 billion years is not enough time to create the incredible integrated variety of stuff that we've got.

[3:30] But just even if chemicals could evolve life and nobody's tracked down that magic ingredient life yet, you can get if you think about it, you can get like a dead fish, for example, and you can't make it live.

[3:44] Now, it's got everything it needs. It's got all the organs. It's got all the blood vessels. It's got all the scales. It's got everything it needs to be a fish. But it's dead and you can't make it live. What's that ingredient of life?

[3:56] Where did that come from? It either came from God or I've got no other answer because it certainly couldn't have evolved. Little things like when you and we at some point in the talks, we look at things like this.

[4:10] But if you think of the human eye, how did that evolve? What did animals do before they had eyes? How did they how did they see? And during those millions of years that that evolution took, how did they continue to live, feed themselves, find their prey and so on?

[4:30] Oh, well, they smelt it. Yeah. OK. So what about then the sense of smell? The thing is that complex beings like us and other I'll call them higher forms of animal.

[4:42] In fact, it's a crazy misconception because a single celled animal is more complex than a jumbo jet. I mean, it is phenomenally complex, has has microscopic engines in it that do various things.

[4:57] We'll another talk, but we'll deal with it. But it could not possibly have evolved. It had to be created by an intelligent mind. So when they say this evolutionary process didn't produce everything all at once, but it started with single celled, so-called simple animals, a single celled animal is by no means simple.

[5:18] It is incredibly complex. And so what we're up against is people who what they typically do. And I'm in the middle of a Facebook conversation with some people at the moment, and I've withdrawn from it so that I got time to write something down, which I am not blessed with a lot of spare time just at this minute.

[5:37] But the whole thing is when you suggest that something is wrong, because they put up this post that said Darwin gave us the theory of evolution, the greatest blessing to science in the last millennium or something like that.

[5:51] To which I just commented, the theory of evolution has not proved anything apart from it's wrong. Oh, you must be one of those creationists.

[6:02] And I didn't get one single line of intelligent debate. Nobody put forward a theory and asked me to comment on it. Despite me asking for them to, it was just, oh, you're just mad.

[6:15] It's been proven. Why are you even doubting it? And so on. No facts, no argument, no debate is is the norm that you get. But every now and again, somebody will go, yeah, actually, it doesn't really make sense, does it?

[6:28] But I have shifted my view on the whole subject because I used to say, look, it doesn't matter what people believe. It's not going to get in the way of them getting saved. Actually, it does get in the way of people getting saved.

[6:41] And therefore, it's I would raise its level of importance. I had a boss when I worked in the civil service and I was sharing the gospel with him over lunch. And he said, oh, I just can't believe I can't believe the Christian the Christian religion, as he put it.

[6:56] And I said, why not? And he said, because I can't believe the earth's only 6,000 years old. And I said, why not? He said, I just can't. I said, yeah, but why not? What's the evidence that stops you from believing that?

[7:10] I just can't believe it. So the fact that the church has caved in to these arguments has done untold damage to the spreading of the gospel.

[7:22] Because if you turn to Christ and then you're then confronted with creationist beliefs, you're made out to be a fool. And there are some extremely talented scientists who believe in the theory of God's creation.

[7:40] They are in a minority, but they do exist. People with PhDs and letters after their name. And then there's the likes of me who's just an amateur scientist. So that's...

[7:50] So that's... He said, the universe, he knows an atheist, the universe does look design. Yes. And he said, if somebody had to do that, it would have to have been a higher power for being.

[8:03] However, I don't believe that. Yeah. So let's start with, where did the book get its title? This is just a brief overview.

[8:18] But Genesis is not the Hebrew title of the book. And it's a Hebrew book originally. And traditionally, what Hebrews do when they're titling a book is they use the first word or sometimes the first phrase, I think.

[8:32] And the first word of Genesis is Bereshit. And Bereshit means the beginning. That's all it means. So when you read in the first line of your Bible, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

[8:46] In the beginning is one word, Bereshit. So the Hebrews have always called it Bereshit. And then after an awful lot of time had gone by, about 150 to 200 years before Christ, the Bible was translated into Greek, known as the Septuagint.

[9:06] Septuagint. I'm not sure how it relates to 70. Is it 70? It's 70. Yeah, but it's 70. Yeah, it is. And it was 70 people that translated it.

[9:18] Right. So 70 translators translated this book from Hebrew into Greek, about 200, maybe 150 years before Christ. And what they realized when they were looking for a title is in Genesis chapter one, chapter five, first book.

[9:37] Just in case anybody listening online has never had a Bible. If you have trouble finding Genesis, you could be a lost cause because it's the very first book. But in chapter five and verse one, the Hebrew translation says this, this is the book of the generations of Adam.

[9:54] In the day when God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. So this is the book of the generations of Adam. So what they did was they called it the book of generations, which is Genesios.

[10:08] And then about 400 AD, give or take a few years, it was then translated into Latin, which is, of course, why the Roman Catholics and people of that day, you know, all the Bibles were written in Latin.

[10:21] And if you were found, if you were found having one in your household, you probably get executed or severely punished. But when they translated it into Latin, they simply added the Latin word book, Liba.

[10:34] So it became Liba Genesios, the book of Genesis. And the English transliteration of Genesios was Genesis. So that's how we finished up with a book called Genesis.

[10:45] Genesis. And it is the book of Genesis is the alternative to the theory of evolution. And up to now, people on both sides of the argument would say it's the only alternative.

[11:01] In other words, what they say is, if evolution is proved not to be true, the only other possibility as an intelligent, creating mind, therefore, there must be a God. Even those who come to that conclusion don't always conclude that Jesus is the right God.

[11:17] But there is a bridge to cross between everything happened through natural processes and it just happened to, you know, a God with an intelligent mind created it.

[11:30] And it leads to all sorts of discussion and debate or more to the point, I suppose, argument, because if there if there wasn't a period of billions of years, then there's some explaining to do.

[11:43] And I believe it's all explicable. We'll get to some of it as we go through. And in particular, if any of you've got particular questions, we'll tackle those. The one I'm scared of is distant starlight, because the best physicists on the planet don't know the answer to that.

[12:01] And yet they are beginning to find that there is an answer. They've got partial answers to that. And by distant starlight, I mean, if if a planet is five is a billion light years away, then in theory, that light from that planet has taken a billion years to get here.

[12:20] So how can it have all been created 6000 years ago? You can understand why that's a difficult question to answer. What has to do with the expansion of the universe? Yeah, and lots that there are lots of ingredients and we won't try and deal with it tonight, but we will deal with it if you want to.

[12:36] This book tells us what God said he did. That in itself is a bold statement that many people will argue with. Well, how do you know? How do you know that that's. Because it was written by Moses and lots of people argue with that.

[12:51] But let's suppose it's right. It was written by Moses. Well, if it's written by Moses about 14 to 1600 years after Noah's flood. Then how do we know what he wrote about Noah's flood and about the people who lived before him was correct and all of that.

[13:10] We'll go into all of that at some point. So it's written by Moses along with the rest of the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch is the first five books. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

[13:23] All of those books were written by Moses. How do we know? We know because Jesus said so. And we'll look at that in a moment. Back in the 18th century.

[13:33] Now, nobody thought anybody else wrote Genesis other than Moses until the 1800s or the late 1700s.

[13:44] And people started to say these this group of people called the higher critics and they gave themselves that name. It shows you where their pride was at the time. They called themselves the higher critics.

[13:56] But what they were claiming to do, they first of all claim there's no way Moses could have written these books. Couldn't have been the work of one man and couldn't have been written.

[14:13] When they claimed it was written. So they came up with this idea that there were four documents. And before we go any further, it's worth saying they've never once produced any of these documents.

[14:26] They don't exist. But it's a bit like the theory of black holes. We assume they exist, but we've never seen one. You know, we assume that dark matter exists, but we've never seen any.

[14:37] Well, you wouldn't, would you? Because it's dark. But they claim it exists, but haven't managed to prove it. So this group of scholars, self-appointed higher critics, claim that these documents must exist, from which Moses then got his information.

[14:56] In fact, they go further into error than that, because they then say, actually, most of it must have been written in about 400 to 600 AD. So there's, yeah.

[15:09] So they're claiming. Yeah. Yeah. And it's all just to cast doubt on the word of God as being truly the word of God. Time is not an issue to God.

[15:21] He lives outside time. And time spreads out before him like a timeline. And he can put his finger on any point of it. And it says in Isaiah 42, I think, I am the Lord who can tell you the beginning from the end or the end from the beginning.

[15:35] Actually, I can tell you the end from the beginning. In other words, he knows how it all pans out. So it's not an issue to him to tell you what's going to happen. Hence, again, I'm flipping to things that we're not even going to look at tonight.

[15:49] But the prophets named through God the King Cyrus. And they said that Cyrus would come and basically bless the Jews.

[16:01] And Cyrus was named 150 years before he was born. Because that's not a problem to God. I'm going to put this man on the throne called Cyrus and he's going to bless you.

[16:12] So these documents have never been produced. And they suggest things that we can also prove aren't true. But just to finish telling you where these documents come from, they worked out how I'm not sure.

[16:30] They worked out that the ones who use the title Jehovah, which is the one that you find a lot in Genesis, were Yavists. Because they use Yahweh a lot. The ones who use Elohim for God are the Elohists.

[16:47] The writers of Deuteronomy are known as the Deuteronomists. That gives you the D. And the Priestly Code, which is apparently in a document that nobody's ever found and doesn't actually exist, is known as P.

[17:03] That's how they got these J-E-D-P. Sorry, not 4th century AD. 4th and 8th centuries BC, they reckon that this was written instead of 1400 to 1600 BC.

[17:16] So a long way out on that. Now, Mark 12, 26. God speaks of himself. Or rather, Jesus speaks about God the Father.

[17:28] But regarding the fact that the dead rise again, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the burning bush, how God spoke to him saying, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.

[17:43] He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. So Jesus said that the book of Moses was a true record of history, if you like, for want of a better way of putting it.

[17:56] Luke, if you turn to Acts 3, I've only cherry-picked a few verses here. So in German, it seems to remember that some of the older Bibles call the first fine books of the Bible the first book of Moses, second book of Moses, third book of Moses, fourth book of Moses.

[18:12] Yes, I've heard that before. Yeah, they're sometimes referred to as the books of Moses. In Acts 3, Acts was written by Luke, who also wrote Luke's gospel.

[18:25] In Acts chapter 3, Moses said, The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brethren. To him you shall give heed to everything he says to you.

[18:35] So Luke, when he wrote Acts, is speaking about Moses talking about God prophesying about Jesus through Moses, if you follow that.

[18:49] Now, you always know when you're on a kind of sticky wicket with some of these so-called higher critics, because they don't just ignore other people's opinions, they ignore Jesus's opinions.

[18:59] And if you have a true Christian belief, Jesus was God incarnate, God in human flesh. So you're basically calling God a liar or disagreeing with God, which is actually a bit pointless.

[19:11] On the conversation in the road to Emmaus, Jesus says to these men on the road, it says of his conversation with these men on the road to Emmaus, and he told them everything concerning himself from the scriptures beginning at Moses and the prophets.

[19:28] So Jesus repeatedly said, and there are lots of other verses we could choose, but Jesus definitely said it was Moses that wrote Genesis.

[19:40] And the Torah itself says it was written by Moses, and we'll come across that as we study it. But Genesis itself claims it was written by Moses. So in every respect, if you don't think creation is true and you don't think Genesis is true, you may as well set fire to a Bible, because what we're saying is what's in there is not true.

[20:03] Now, I do understand that some have an issue believing that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. In other words, there are no mistakes in it. It is God's word, especially as we don't deal with the original.

[20:15] We only deal with translations, and translations are, they're prone to error. There are a few translations we could deal with where it's obvious that the translator was a Calvinist, or the translator was an Arminianist, and they've kind of put their bent on the translation to lead you in a particular direction.

[20:35] So the English Bible isn't faultless, and you have to go back to the original languages to find out where the mistakes are. But in its original autographs, the word of God is perfect and claims to be perfect.

[20:48] The Genesis account is confirmed throughout the Bible. We've just touched on that. You know, Jesus, in answer to the gender issue, there's a scripture that says, do you not know that in the beginning God created them male and female?

[21:00] Gender issues all solved there. He only created two. He didn't create 70-odd. What have they got up to now? About 105, isn't it? If you turn to Psalm 102, we will get to Genesis, I promise.

[21:14] Psalm 102. But it's as well to set a bit of background. Psalm 102 and verse 25 says, Of old you founded the earth.

[21:25] So this is the Psalmist singing to God, and he sings to God, Of old you founded the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. That's a simple statement, but whoever wrote that Psalm believed that the work was founded by God, and it was the work of his hands.

[21:44] In Romans 18, what we read is that we are left without excuse because of the creation work that God did. You've only got to look at the creation around you.

[21:56] It's no wonder that Satan is so hell-bent on getting people to accept the theory of evolution, because when you look at the handiwork of God's hands, you look at it and wonder, you think, this couldn't have just happened because, I mean, to think it happened, to think it happened through the Big Bang, it's two analogies I'd like to use.

[22:16] One is, it's like throwing a hand grenade into a mucky child's bedroom, and the hand grenade explosion tidies the room. Or the other one is, imagine, because for this to happen is actually more likely than evolution, right?

[22:37] But if you drove several rogue tankers of coloured paint into the Sistine Chapel and threw a bomb in after it, and the explosion painted that wonderful picture on the ceiling, that is more likely than evolution.

[22:55] And we know how unlikely that is. It's never going to happen, is it? But statistically, and we'll get to statistics in a future talk, I'm not going to go mad on them, but just enough to make you go, yeah, it's very foolish to think that this whole thing just created itself.

[23:11] Anyway, Isaiah 40, verses 20 and 21. So, he who is too impoverished for such an offering, selects a tree that does not rot.

[23:22] He seeks out for himself a skilful craftsman to prepare an idol that will not totter. So he's talking about people who make idols. Do you not know? Have you not heard?

[23:33] Has it not been declared to you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth. Now, the word circle is, in English, you'd spell it C-H-U-G-H, and I pronounce that in Hebrew, something like hugh.

[23:52] But it means, and this is in a time when lots of people believed the earth was flat, but it's the Hebrew word for a sphere. All right? He who sits above the sphere of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.

[24:12] So, whoever wrote Isaiah, believe it or not, they argue about that too. But Isaiah, speaking on God's behalf, clearly believed that God is the one who sits above it all, and controls it all, and created it all.

[24:28] Job 26, verse 7, speaking of God. He stretches out the north over empty space and hangs the earth on nothing.

[24:40] Now, if you're a Hindu, you won't believe that the earth is hung on nothing. You'll believe that the earth is born on the shoulders of a very strong man who's riding an elephant, which in turn is on the back of a big turtle swimming in a massive sea.

[24:57] The thing is, though, we know that's not true. Is it true that the earth is hanging in space on nothing? Yes. Yeah. We know that's true.

[25:09] The Bible is way ahead of its time. You'll find all sorts of things in the Bible. We won't look at it now, but you'll find the water cycle in the Bible. You know, the sun heating up the lakes, sending up steam, making cloud rain down on the mountains and returning.

[25:23] That whole thing is in the Bible for people to find. We didn't find out about it until about 200 years ago. So all of these things tell us that they give us a hint that what we're going to find as we go through is that if you believe the Bible and you work out believing the Bible, I would therefore expect to find this.

[25:46] That's what we'll find. If you believe the theory of evolution, you won't find what you expect to find. Scientists, atheist scientists, have recently discovered and been amazed by the fact that the earth is positioned in the Milky Way galaxy in a place that will give us the best view of the galaxy.

[26:05] God expresses when we read the creation account, which we are going to read over the coming weeks, he brought the animals to the man for the man to name.

[26:18] He made it all for man to enjoy. He made it all as a blessing for man. Of course, science doesn't consider such a thing. So he's even given us the best view of the galaxy that we're in.

[26:31] And as I put there in the middle, this is one reason why the idea of evolution, and I'm aware that there are several definitions of the word evolution, so I should define my terms. By evolution, I mean this whole idea that everything came from nothing in a Big Bang and that complex animals came about from non-living chemicals.

[26:52] So, you know, you had nothing and then you had chemicals and then you had live chemicals. And then you went from simple to more complex to very complex animals.

[27:04] All of that, that whole idea is evil for one reason and one or two reasons. The first is that it actually means that the earth is just a big accident and there's nothing significant about it.

[27:17] It takes away this whole idea that the God that loves you prepared the place for you to live. He gave it as a gift to mankind, including all the animals. I kind of have an aversion to people who hate animals because you come across them now and go, is it all the time, you know?

[27:34] And I think God gave us nature. And the other reason it's evil is it says that man is just another animal. And if man, according to the Bible, man is created in the image of God, we'll get to that probably next week.

[27:50] If man is created in the image of God, to suggest that nothing special about man, it's blasphemous. It's awful. You get all the problems about killing babies, killing people.

[28:02] Yeah. Because if you're an animal, you can put yourself down to it. Yeah. And yes, if you understand that life belongs to God, you wouldn't dare to terminate a fetus in the womb.

[28:17] You wouldn't dare. Only a lack of understanding that I'm not saying people do it vindictively. They often don't. But we've had over the years, we've had young women who've got saved and who then reflect on what they've done.

[28:33] And it takes them a long time to get over it. It's also the background for that whole idea that, you know, we're all evolved and we're still evolving.

[28:43] And as a free thinking white man, I must be a bit more evolved than that black man over there. And it's where racism comes from. I mean, Hitler persecuted the Jews because he said they were an inferior race.

[28:56] What he didn't realize is there is only one race that everyone that we bump into in the street, at home or abroad, we are related to.

[29:08] Right the way back to Noah, we are related. So we cannot separate them out and say, well, that's a different race. Persecute them because they're not as evolved as we are, effectively.

[29:19] It's a hideous thing. He also saw the Aryans as a superior race, which I think is really crazy because he wasn't an Aryan. He was dark haired, brown eyed.

[29:31] But we are all one race. And so whatever color, shape, size of person you bump into, you all at some point were in the loins of Adam and subsequent to that in the loins of Noah.

[29:48] We've we've all got a common great, great, great, great, great. I can't remember how many great granddad. Wherever we are in the world. Right. Now we get to Genesis.

[30:00] So we're going to look at the first five verses if we get through them. And if we don't, we'll carry on where we left off next week. And I want to start with this. So in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth in Hebrews.

[30:13] Sorry, in Hebrew, in the Hebrew language. There is an amazing mathematical pattern of sevens in this word. If you if you don't know this and if you do, just bear with me.

[30:24] But the Hebrew language doesn't have a separate numerical system. The Hebrew language uses its letters as numbers. So the letter A alpha is also the number one. And I don't know it well enough to be able to tell you what all the others are.

[30:39] But if you want to know, ask Linda, because she used to live in Israel. And I don't know if she still does, but she did speak Hebrew. But the reason it's a significant thing about the pattern of sevens.

[30:50] And there was this guy called Ivan Panin, who's a mathematician, who stumbled across the fact that in every single book of the Bible, Old and New Testament, there is a pattern.

[31:00] It's called the heptatic principle. There is a pattern of number sevens. And seven is the number of divine completion. And it pays not to go overboard on this because you can find yourself in some interesting cul-de-sacs.

[31:14] But in this in this one sentence, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. There are seven words in Hebrew and the number of letters are 28, which is seven times four.

[31:27] The first three Hebrew words translated in the beginning, God created contain 14 letters, which is seven times two. And the last four Hebrew words, the heavens and the earth, have 14 letters as well.

[31:41] So there's seven again. The fourth and fifth words have seven letters. The sixth and seventh words have seven letters. Three key words, God, heaven and earth, have 14 letters, which is seven times two.

[31:54] The number of letters in the four remaining words also is seven times two. You see what I mean? God has put his signature on the Bible by completely filling it with patterns of sevens.

[32:13] And so when you read, if we could read in Hebrew and we could do the sums as we read, we would realize that God's handprint is all over this scripture.

[32:26] And I'm not going to put any more importance on it than that, because there are people who go into numerology and they create all sorts of rabbit runs to run down. Some of which work, but some don't.

[32:37] But the point is God's handprint is on it by the fact that he's filled it with sevens. And it starts in the beginning, which means at the beginning of time.

[32:50] Now, depending on which translation you've got, the first word should be bereshith. But some translations, I think the old King James, or rather it's, I think it's strong as reshith.

[33:02] But it means the same thing. It means the very beginning of time, at the very beginning of time, when it all started. So the statement is going to go on to speak of something that took place at the same time as time itself began, which gives us a little scientific theory, which the late Stephen Hawking was in agreement with, and it baffled him somewhat, that time had a beginning, because there is a prevalent view that the universe is eternal.

[33:32] It's always been there. And Stephen Hawking worked out, without using his Bible, that if it had always been there, by now it would be stone cold. There'd be no heat left in it, and therefore nothing would be able to live.

[33:47] So it must have had a beginning because life is not yet extinct, which is a strange way to work it out, I suppose. But there we go. So it's going to speak about something that took place at the same time that time started.

[33:58] And it doesn't say God created time, but it says in the beginning, which is, you know, at the very start of time, this is what happened. Now, of course, in John 1, verses 1 to 5, keep your finger in Genesis and just have a look there.

[34:13] In John 1, what we get in the first five verses is this statement. And, you know, sometimes you can read things in Scripture and you accept them, even though you don't quite understand them.

[34:26] I mean, there's understanding and understanding, isn't there? You can understand things at different levels. I would say the level at which I understand this is quite shallow. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

[34:41] He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and apart from him, nothing came into being that has come into being. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

[34:55] The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. Now, that passage, to me, appears to predate Genesis 1 because it speaks of in the beginning, not the beginning of the earth, but in the beginning of eternity, whenever that is.

[35:13] Technically, eternity doesn't have a beginning. So however far back you can go, right back then, in the beginning was the Word, which is a Word for Jesus, the living Word.

[35:26] And he was with God right at the very beginning, before the earth was ever even thought of. And all things came into being through him. So when we read of creation as we go forward, we're talking about Jesus being the creator.

[35:39] God the Son, the middle person of the Trinity, being the creator. And in him was life, and we were talking earlier on about where did the ingredient of life come from? Well, it came from Jesus.

[35:50] And in the Gospels, he shows that he is the source of life. When he raises Lazarus from the dead, for example, or Jairus' daughter, he is the source of life.

[36:03] And it says here, he was the light of men, and light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. Jesus is referred in many places in the Scriptures as the light of the world.

[36:16] And we have to be careful how we use that Scripture to describe when God created light. Because he created light before he created the sun and before he created the stars. So what was the light that was then?

[36:28] Was it Jesus himself? The answer I can confidently say is, I don't know. We have to be careful because most of the places where Jesus is referred to as the light of the world are clearly metaphorical.

[36:44] They're not intended to be taken literally. But one does wonder where the light came from. So in the beginning, he uses the word for created is the word bara.

[36:54] And it's not the only word that is used for created, as we will find out as we carry on. But wherever the word bara is used, it is used when God creates something out of nothing.

[37:08] In other words, no pre-existing materials. So when God creates man, he uses a different word because he's using pre-existing materials.

[37:20] He's taken the dust of the earth and he's made man from the dust of the earth. In other words, there were pre-existing materials. But when he created the heaven and the earth, bara, there was no pre-existing material.

[37:35] He spoke it into being. Pre-existing material didn't exist. And God spoke it into being. And of course, many Christians would say, that must have been the Big Bang.

[37:46] The thing is, we don't know. There may have been a Big Bang, but it wasn't 14 billion years ago.

[37:58] It was 6,000 years ago, roughly. So when it says he created the heaven and the earth, the word used is bara. He created it from nothing. Not only did he create the earth, but he created the heavens.

[38:11] And it's a plural word. The heavens, not the heaven. And if you've got an old King James, it'll say the heaven. But it's a plural word. Why is that important?

[38:22] Well, we know that we've got earth's atmosphere. Heaven simply means sky in the context here. We've got the sky that we can see, clouds floating in it and airplanes flying through it and so on.

[38:34] We also know that beyond the earth's atmosphere is outer space. So there's a second heaven. And Paul talks about being taken to the third heaven. And you can read that in 2 Corinthians 12, verse 2.

[38:46] So there are at least three. What we don't know is whether there are even more than three. I have no idea. But he created a plurality of heavens. It makes me think this.

[38:57] And this is not out of the Bible. So feel free to ignore it. When we die and go to heaven, where is that? I mean, everybody refers to heaven as up. Is it the third heaven where Paul went?

[39:10] Possibly. Probably. Or do we just change dimensions? In 1 Corinthians 15, verses 50 to 58, it says you'll be changed in a moment in the twinkling of an eye.

[39:23] It'll be done. Now that, to me, is more likely that there's another dimension that I suddenly find I'm in. But I don't know. I'm only guessing. Harmless guessing.

[39:35] As I say, it's not in the Bible. So ignore it if you wish. In the same way, so from no pre-existing materials, he created the Earth, which is Eretz, which is this planetary body upon which we live.

[39:50] And interestingly, back in 1973, this man called Brandon Carter, who was an Australian-born physicist and an atheist, he talked about what he called the anthropic principle.

[40:02] And the anthropic principle is that when this Earth was created, it was created fit for life. And they've never found another planet that was created fit for life. But there are so many, and I haven't bothered to list them because it's not what tonight's study is about.

[40:18] But if you look at a list of aspects of life on Earth, where if they were adjusted just slightly, life could not exist on Earth. There are loads of them.

[40:29] If we were something like 5% closer to the sun, we would all die. If we were 5% further away, we would all freeze. If gravity, if the force of gravity was different by a very small amount, we would either float up or collapse.

[40:47] There are so many very, very fine-tuned elements of the planet and its atmosphere that permit life. And this atheist spotted it.

[41:01] The moon being where it is, everything about it, change, fiddle with it, and life on Earth ceases. It sounds as if it's precariously balanced, but in Hebrews it says that God holds all things together by the word of his power.

[41:17] So it's perfectly secure, as it is, and it'll stay perfectly secure until the day that God produces the new heaven and the new Earth.

[41:29] But he observed, this atheist observed, that the Earth is fine-tuned for life. Now, if it's fine-tuned for life, anything that's fine-tuned needs a tuner.

[41:40] You know, if you get those of us in the room who are old enough to remember the old radios, we're like, and to get it just right needed a tuner.

[41:52] It never, ever tuned itself. And when he made the Earth at the beginning of time, he fine-tuned it so that he could put life on it and it would survive.

[42:06] In fact, not just survive, but live well. Garden of Eden was, you know, I wish we had that now. It couldn't be too hot. It couldn't be too cold. It needed just the right amount of gravity.

[42:16] It needed the life-sustaining chemical we know as water, which is a miraculous chemical in and of itself, because it's the only chemical that, when you freeze it, it becomes less dense.

[42:32] If water was like every other chemical, rivers would freeze from the bottom up and fish would die. Nothing would survive. But at a certain point in the process of freezing, water becomes less dense and it floats, which leaves the animal life underneath it able to live.

[42:49] If water was different, then aquatic life would not exist on Earth. It was like any of the other chemicals. So all of that God took into account when he spoke the Earth into being on day one.

[43:03] And we'll get to days when we progress, because that's the other thing they say. Oh, couldn't have been real days, not 24-hour days. I look at what God has done and I think, what took you so long?

[43:18] You could have done it in a minute if you'd wanted to. So then we read, the Earth, in verse 2, the Earth was formless and void and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.

[43:33] That's verse 2. So we've got this planet that is void and formless, or formless and void. In Hebrew, those words are tohu vabohu, which simply means empty and having no form.

[43:49] That's all it means. There is a whole group of people, which I'm not going to go into in depth tonight, because it would take an hour of its own if you went into it. But what they say is, oh, this enables us.

[44:01] So between verse 1 and verse 2, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Done. Heavens and the earth. Done. Then between verse 1 and 2 is this massive void of time.

[44:14] Because, in fact, what many of them say is during that massive void of time, there was another flood and a whole other world populated by angels and people and everything else.

[44:29] And it all failed. And so it became, when it says the earth was formless and void, a potential other translation is it became formless and void.

[44:40] But in this context, that doesn't work. So what they say is it became formless and void. And then the next bits, darkness was over the surface of the deep and the spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.

[44:56] And then there was a recreation. When you hear that, they're basically trying to find a way to mold the theory of evolution into the Christian faith.

[45:08] And whenever we try to take God's word and manipulate it to fit man's word, we always come unstuck. Because God's word is true. Here it just says, this planet had been created and it was wet and empty.

[45:20] That's what it says. Formless and void. No land. No formations on it. Just a big, wet planet. And the spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.

[45:33] And the word moving has several potential meanings, hovering or vibrating over the waters, which I find fascinating because every single life form has its resonance, has its frequency.

[45:48] We are all vibrating all the time. And the whole of the planet does that. I mean, we don't realize it. But when we take up an occupation, as I used to, like surfing, I used to go canoe surfing.

[46:04] It had its own rhythm. And every seventh wave was a bigger wave than all the others. And that was very dependable until you get to the 49th wave, which was even bigger than the first seven.

[46:14] Yeah. God's pattern is written throughout his creation. God was vibrating over the waters or hovering.

[46:26] And then God said, let there be light. And light is a phenomenal substance. And I call it a substance because it's weird.

[46:40] Normally you identify a substance because it has particles. And light does have particles, but they're not quite the same as normal substance particles. And light also behaves like an electromagnetic wave, which doesn't have particles.

[46:56] But it's not quite the same as any other electromagnetic wave. So you've got this substance that's utterly remarkable, much of which we can see.

[47:07] The reason we can see each other in this room is because we have a light that's in the right frequency for us to see. And you are the color of your skin and everything else is producing a frequency that my eyes can see.

[47:23] But light also has loads of invisible qualities. I went for an x-ray. Now, x-ray is a form of light. But it can look right through my skin and see my bones.

[47:37] You've got when you cook something in the microwave, it's being cooked by light. Because that particular frequency of light agitates the particles in the food and makes them get hot.

[47:48] So we have this spectrum of light, the middle bit of which we can see, but either end of which we can't see. But it's still there and it still functions. So it has this mysterious quality that we still don't understand.

[48:08] Scientists have only got so far with their understanding of light. Light does weird things when it travels. It can bend. Obviously, we know it can reflect off things.

[48:19] But if you travel at the speed of light, you lose mass. You get smaller. Nobody knows why, but we do.

[48:30] And one scientist, one physicist put forward that if you were to travel for six months away from the Earth at the speed of light and then come back, I think they said a thousand years would have gone past while you were gone.

[48:43] Now, I don't know if it's true. I don't know how they would prove it. But that's a scientist claim, an atheist claim, not a Christian claim. So God says, let there be light.

[48:55] And he didn't just say, let there be light. But actually, in the Hebrew, he said, light be. Or in fact, I think it's written the other way around in Hebrew. It's be light. In other words, he told the light to be.

[49:06] So it's not so much as we usually read in an English translation, let there be light, as if it's a, OK, I'll allow it kind of statement. It's more a command.

[49:17] Light be. And light was. Or light became. So he's made the planet. It's wet and formless.

[49:29] And the first thing he introduces is light. And if you think about it, nothing can live without light. You can't see where you're going. But in addition to that, I mean, plants, which are the food for the subsequent life he's going to create, photosynthesize.

[49:44] So they need sunlight. And then light is very important. There are some people that suggest that the very makeup of animals or anything organic is all kind of held together by forms of light.

[49:59] And that wouldn't surprise me. But I can't prove it. So I'll just throw it out there as something that some people say. And it says, and God saw that the light was good.

[50:10] So we've gone to verse three. 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. So what you have there, very simply put, is rotation of the earth.

[50:27] We've now got not only a wet, empty planet, but it has light and dark and it rotates. And we know it rotates because it says, God called the light day and the darkness he called night.

[50:44] And there was evening and there was morning one day or the first day. The Hebrew day starts in the evening at 6 p.m. Or sundown. But it starts in the evening and it progresses through the night, through the next day.

[50:59] And it finishes sundown the next evening. There was evening. There was morning one day. We must remember at this point, there's no stars. There is no sun.

[51:11] But there is light. And that light, we're not even sure what that light is doing except creating a day and a night on this planet.

[51:22] And the day and the night means that the earth must have been rotating. So wherever that light source was, it was rotating past it so that you got a day and a night. So you have rotation produced at this point.

[51:35] In the absence of the sun, there would have been no temperature control. So life, if God had put life on the earth before the sun was there or before light was there, there would have been nothing to warm the place, would there?

[51:49] And later on, he does create the heavenly bodies before he creates animals. But there would probably be no temperature control. There'd be no photosynthesis. There'd be nothing. So all of this had to be in place before the rest.

[52:01] When you read theory of evolution, you find that things are in the wrong order. They leave you with questions like, so how did the plants live then? So I think that's a good start.

[52:13] And you may have just gone, yeah, Ray knew that. Or you might have questions. So if you've got questions, ask them. If you think about questions over the next week, write them down and ask them when you come.