Creation Days 1-3: Foundations
Creation Days 1-3: Foundations and Boundaries [TRANSCRIPT]
Setting the stage at the beginning always makes sense. Everybody understands this, hopefully. And when we’re talking about the beginning of everything, well, this certainly rings true.
What happened when God began creating everything? Well, He started by laying down a foundation and then began establishing boundaries. This is not unlike what a great artist does as they set out to paint a masterpiece. They paint in the background with layered and blended colors. And then they begin determining the boundaries and confines of the major and minor elements of the work.
Let’s continue our look at God’s creative masterpiece as we investigate God’s laying the foundations and setting up boundaries in the first three days of Creation on Truth Matters.
As I’ve already stated in previous episodes, I hold firm to the belief that all that is, both seen and unseen came into being by the hand of Creator God. The Bible states it in plain and understandable fashion. We looked last week how Scripture clearly tells us that God carried out His creative work in six days.
Today on Truth Matters, I want to begin looking specifically at what Scripture tells us concerning those days of creation. In the Scriptural description, God provides an account of what He did in those six days. Today, I want to look at each of the first three days, examine what occurred and then discover what God was doing and of course why it matters.
Now, as we saw earlier, Genesis 1:1 is the introduction to everything that follows. It says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This first verse introduces the main actor of all of this, the Creator God. Then it states what He did. He created everything. The description is referred to as ex nihilo, out of nothing. This is clear by what we find in the following verses. I want you to simply understand that the verse states that God created everything out of nothing. Remember, this is an overall statement that is played out in the verses that follow.
So, let’s begin with Day 1. Genesis 1:2-5 says this:
This is like the opening lines of an intense drama, “It was a dark and stormy night.” The opening lines tells us the condition of things, “the earth was a formless and desolate emptiness.” The Hebrew words are tohu wa bohu. The first Hebrew word tohu. It points to a wasteland, a desolate place. And bohu means empty, without form. This is an empty and utterly desolate place. And darkness is everywhere. This is a place devoid of form and occupants. Nothing has form.
It also says that the “Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.” The picture is like that of a hen brooding over her chicks. Even in this dark and formless condition, God is present. This is not a Creator who steps in, does His thing and then walks away. His superintending hand is constantly over His creation. He didn’t create a mechanism and then leave the universe to develop on its own. From this point and all throughout these days, He is focused on His work and this planet in particular.
I know that such a statement bugs some people. They look across the expanse and they can’t imagine such attention for this one Earth planet. And yet, even the experts are pressed to agree that this is an immensely unique place.
And then God speaks and He says, “Let there be light”; and there was light.” Light came into being because God commanded it to be. Darkness is broken by light. God, who is describes in terms of glorious light, commands light to come into being.
Light! Of all things, why light? Light actually is something that even experts have trouble defining. It is absolutely unique in creation. It can be described both as a particle and a wave. As one writer put it,
There’s hardly anything more fantastic and mysterious in all of physics than light. It illuminates and yet is invisible. It exists in a spectrum of waves that exceeds the ability of the human eye to detect. You can’t see it until it strikes something and reflects off of it. You can’t see it and yet without it, we can’t see anything. Of course, this is where God begins. Light is foundational of all that comes afterwards. Now, I could go on and on, but you get the picture. Light is foundational in creation and the life that is to follow. And then says, “God saw that the light was good.”
And with the coming of light in the darkness, God establishes the very first boundary. It says, “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, one day.” And so, the work is proceeds, Day One is completed.
In Genesis 1:6-8 we now see what occurs on the second day.
At the beginning of this day, the earth is probably… has the appearance of a water covered planet. There seems to be no land. Once again God enters and speaks. “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters.” The word expanse is translated “firmament” in the King James Version. The word speaks of something that is spread out, flattened, spread out. He spreads out the waters “that were below the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse.” God separates the waters and from this the atmosphere is formed. “God called the expanse 'heaven'.” Understand something, this is not the result of a natural process. This is the result of the command of God.
The day ends similar to the other days, “there was evening and there was morning, a second day.” But, there’s something different though. There is no statement of, “it was good,” as with other days. Why is that? Well, it wasn’t because what God is doing wasn’t good. Perhaps it’s because it’s not yet complete. The earth is still lifeless. And so, ends day two.
Day three dawns and the Earth is uninhabited and uninhabitable. It’s not there yet. That won’t be the case at the end of the day. Genesis 1: 9-13 says,
Now, things are really cooking. God again commands and creation responds. I like how it reads in the language. It literally reads, “God said, be gathered waters!” I can almost picture it. The voice of God commands waters to move or be still and they obey Him. Remember Jesus shouting at the seas in that boat and they obeyed Him? Here God commands and the waters to move and dry land appears. Understand? The voice of God differentiates. We’ve seen it across the three days. The first day, He divided light and darkness. The second day, He divides waters from above from waters from below. And now, on this third day He divides the land from the sea.
There are boundaries in God’s creation. It’s not a haphazard chance of “whatever happens, happens.” No. No, no. God’s well-arranged creation has lines, fences, boundaries and order. This is the Creator and this is His creation. Now a delineated foundation has been established. The Earth is ready for life. And that is exactly what happens.
Verse 11 tells it. The voiced command of God goes out. The rawness of the language expresses the power of His command. It says, “God said, sprout earth, vegetation, plants yielding seed…” You can almost imagine an explosion of the greening of the Earth. Plants and vegetation spring out of the ground already having seed within them. There’s no gradual evolutionary process here. Michael Behe describes it in light of those who desire a process and not an instant work. He says,
But note something else. “The earth produced vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their kind, trees bearing fruit with seed in them, according to their kind;” The vegetation and the plants had seeds “according to their kind.” Trees bore fruit “according to their kind.” Locked in the DNA of each of these is the prescribed boundary defined by the Creator. Oh, we can graft certain fruit trees with other fruit trees. Likewise, we can breed and design animals and shape them. But the boundaries remain. As one writer stated,
The Naturalists are locked into a deterministic system that will not allow the deviations they need or desire. No plant can decide to breed themselves into fish, even though they both may live in the water. And yet, in essence that is what they would have us believe. They only need they say, billions of years to do it. But plain sense and observation tells us otherwise. And so does the Word of God.
God completes the third day and Earth is teaming with fruitful vegetation and trees ready for what comes next. “God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.”
And so, what are to make of all this? Why does it matter? First of all, you must not read this account and miss the obvious. It is utterly amazing. What occurs over those three days is nothing short of a miracle. Do not lose sight of that. Creation is a miracle. We have barely scratched the surface of the realities underlying what is behind the events of these first three days. By the very voice of God out of nothing, the foundations of the universe are put into place. The depth of those events is beyond understanding outside of a Creator. Something from nothing? This is the God we know and we trust.
Secondly, everything in the descriptions of these verses is intentional. There are no accidents which can produce these clearly delineated processes and events described and that we know now. From the time the Earth was still formless, God is present. Every step along the way, God is directing. Every element is created and put into place with the exactitude of a genius that is our Creator God. Step by step God directs the drama according to His desire. This story is going somewhere. Never ever forget that.
And thirdly, what we see in these first days is a God and a creation that has defined boundaries. Creation is not a chaotic random series of events where anything can and will happen and good luck figuring it out. No, not at all. There is order, direction, delineations.
Now, there are those who desire a world without God. They want a life with no boundaries so they can define their own meaning of life and reality. But they cannot escape the presence of the world they exist in. This is the world that has a Creator. And this Creator distinguishes things. There is up and down and a difference. There is right and wrong and a difference. Arrogant mankind or society delude themselves to believe they can define reality absent of God. This is the tragedy of man before their Creator.
But as for those of us who know their Creator and call Him Lord, we acknowledge Him. We believe Him. As it says in Hebrews 11:6 “And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for the one who comes to God must believe that He exists, and that He proves to be One who rewards those who seek Him.”
I believe in the miracle of the creation written down for us to read. And I acknowledge the Creator who made it so. I am not against science, only the arrogance of those who see what is before them and then willfully deny the Creator. Yes, creation has boundaries put into place by the Creator. I also know that violating those boundaries has consequences. This is the reason why I was driven to begin this podcast in the first place.
God has spoken and how we respond to His revelation has significance both now and for eternity.
Truth Matters.
What happened when God began creating everything? Well, He started by laying down a foundation and then began establishing boundaries. This is not unlike what a great artist does as they set out to paint a masterpiece. They paint in the background with layered and blended colors. And then they begin determining the boundaries and confines of the major and minor elements of the work.
Let’s continue our look at God’s creative masterpiece as we investigate God’s laying the foundations and setting up boundaries in the first three days of Creation on Truth Matters.
As I’ve already stated in previous episodes, I hold firm to the belief that all that is, both seen and unseen came into being by the hand of Creator God. The Bible states it in plain and understandable fashion. We looked last week how Scripture clearly tells us that God carried out His creative work in six days.
Today on Truth Matters, I want to begin looking specifically at what Scripture tells us concerning those days of creation. In the Scriptural description, God provides an account of what He did in those six days. Today, I want to look at each of the first three days, examine what occurred and then discover what God was doing and of course why it matters.
Now, as we saw earlier, Genesis 1:1 is the introduction to everything that follows. It says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This first verse introduces the main actor of all of this, the Creator God. Then it states what He did. He created everything. The description is referred to as ex nihilo, out of nothing. This is clear by what we find in the following verses. I want you to simply understand that the verse states that God created everything out of nothing. Remember, this is an overall statement that is played out in the verses that follow.
So, let’s begin with Day 1. Genesis 1:2-5 says this:
And the earth was a formless and desolate emptiness, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 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, one day.
This is like the opening lines of an intense drama, “It was a dark and stormy night.” The opening lines tells us the condition of things, “the earth was a formless and desolate emptiness.” The Hebrew words are tohu wa bohu. The first Hebrew word tohu. It points to a wasteland, a desolate place. And bohu means empty, without form. This is an empty and utterly desolate place. And darkness is everywhere. This is a place devoid of form and occupants. Nothing has form.
It also says that the “Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.” The picture is like that of a hen brooding over her chicks. Even in this dark and formless condition, God is present. This is not a Creator who steps in, does His thing and then walks away. His superintending hand is constantly over His creation. He didn’t create a mechanism and then leave the universe to develop on its own. From this point and all throughout these days, He is focused on His work and this planet in particular.
I know that such a statement bugs some people. They look across the expanse and they can’t imagine such attention for this one Earth planet. And yet, even the experts are pressed to agree that this is an immensely unique place.
And then God speaks and He says, “Let there be light”; and there was light.” Light came into being because God commanded it to be. Darkness is broken by light. God, who is describes in terms of glorious light, commands light to come into being.
Light! Of all things, why light? Light actually is something that even experts have trouble defining. It is absolutely unique in creation. It can be described both as a particle and a wave. As one writer put it,
Light photons behave like particles, like tiny specks of dust, except they have no volume. The energy of a photon is concentrated in a finite space, existing at any given moment in a specific location, yet moving at a definable, measurable velocity. That’s why we speak of the speed of light. Yet, light also exhibits the characteristics of a wave, which is not a finite entity. A wave, unlike a particle, exists in no finite space; it has a variable frequency. Wave motion, unlike particle motion, involves the transfer of energy from point to point without the transfer of matter. A light wave is essentially a deformation of electric and magnetic fields. To complicate matters further, light waves can behave like particles and the particles-like photons can behave like waves.
There’s hardly anything more fantastic and mysterious in all of physics than light. It illuminates and yet is invisible. It exists in a spectrum of waves that exceeds the ability of the human eye to detect. You can’t see it until it strikes something and reflects off of it. You can’t see it and yet without it, we can’t see anything. Of course, this is where God begins. Light is foundational of all that comes afterwards. Now, I could go on and on, but you get the picture. Light is foundational in creation and the life that is to follow. And then says, “God saw that the light was good.”
And with the coming of light in the darkness, God establishes the very first boundary. It says, “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, one day.” And so, the work is proceeds, Day One is completed.
In Genesis 1:6-8 we now see what occurs on the second day.
Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” God made the expanse, and separated the waters that were below the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse; and it was so. God called the expanse “heaven.” And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.
At the beginning of this day, the earth is probably… has the appearance of a water covered planet. There seems to be no land. Once again God enters and speaks. “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters.” The word expanse is translated “firmament” in the King James Version. The word speaks of something that is spread out, flattened, spread out. He spreads out the waters “that were below the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse.” God separates the waters and from this the atmosphere is formed. “God called the expanse 'heaven'.” Understand something, this is not the result of a natural process. This is the result of the command of God.
The day ends similar to the other days, “there was evening and there was morning, a second day.” But, there’s something different though. There is no statement of, “it was good,” as with other days. Why is that? Well, it wasn’t because what God is doing wasn’t good. Perhaps it’s because it’s not yet complete. The earth is still lifeless. And so, ends day two.
Day three dawns and the Earth is uninhabited and uninhabitable. It’s not there yet. That won’t be the case at the end of the day. Genesis 1: 9-13 says,
Then God said, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so. And God called the dry land “earth,” and the gathering of the waters He called “seas”; and God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit according to their kind with seed in them”; and it was so. The earth produced vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, according to their kind; and God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.
Now, things are really cooking. God again commands and creation responds. I like how it reads in the language. It literally reads, “God said, be gathered waters!” I can almost picture it. The voice of God commands waters to move or be still and they obey Him. Remember Jesus shouting at the seas in that boat and they obeyed Him? Here God commands and the waters to move and dry land appears. Understand? The voice of God differentiates. We’ve seen it across the three days. The first day, He divided light and darkness. The second day, He divides waters from above from waters from below. And now, on this third day He divides the land from the sea.
There are boundaries in God’s creation. It’s not a haphazard chance of “whatever happens, happens.” No. No, no. God’s well-arranged creation has lines, fences, boundaries and order. This is the Creator and this is His creation. Now a delineated foundation has been established. The Earth is ready for life. And that is exactly what happens.
Verse 11 tells it. The voiced command of God goes out. The rawness of the language expresses the power of His command. It says, “God said, sprout earth, vegetation, plants yielding seed…” You can almost imagine an explosion of the greening of the Earth. Plants and vegetation spring out of the ground already having seed within them. There’s no gradual evolutionary process here. Michael Behe describes it in light of those who desire a process and not an instant work. He says,
Evolution can deal only with systems that are already working. By definition, that which does not function simply cannot evolve. It is therefore impossible for inanimate matter to produce biological systems by evolution.
In simple terms, life doesn’t come from non-life. Raw mud doesn’t produce vegetation with seeds already present. By the voice of the Creator, He speaks “and it was so.” It reminds me again of the Lord feeding a multitude of people with fish that never swam, with wheat that never grew. This is the Creator.But note something else. “The earth produced vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their kind, trees bearing fruit with seed in them, according to their kind;” The vegetation and the plants had seeds “according to their kind.” Trees bore fruit “according to their kind.” Locked in the DNA of each of these is the prescribed boundary defined by the Creator. Oh, we can graft certain fruit trees with other fruit trees. Likewise, we can breed and design animals and shape them. But the boundaries remain. As one writer stated,
There is no known process by which a plant or any combination of plants lacking the higher facilities of intelligent life could ever produce animal offspring.
The Naturalists are locked into a deterministic system that will not allow the deviations they need or desire. No plant can decide to breed themselves into fish, even though they both may live in the water. And yet, in essence that is what they would have us believe. They only need they say, billions of years to do it. But plain sense and observation tells us otherwise. And so does the Word of God.
God completes the third day and Earth is teaming with fruitful vegetation and trees ready for what comes next. “God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.”
And so, what are to make of all this? Why does it matter? First of all, you must not read this account and miss the obvious. It is utterly amazing. What occurs over those three days is nothing short of a miracle. Do not lose sight of that. Creation is a miracle. We have barely scratched the surface of the realities underlying what is behind the events of these first three days. By the very voice of God out of nothing, the foundations of the universe are put into place. The depth of those events is beyond understanding outside of a Creator. Something from nothing? This is the God we know and we trust.
Secondly, everything in the descriptions of these verses is intentional. There are no accidents which can produce these clearly delineated processes and events described and that we know now. From the time the Earth was still formless, God is present. Every step along the way, God is directing. Every element is created and put into place with the exactitude of a genius that is our Creator God. Step by step God directs the drama according to His desire. This story is going somewhere. Never ever forget that.
And thirdly, what we see in these first days is a God and a creation that has defined boundaries. Creation is not a chaotic random series of events where anything can and will happen and good luck figuring it out. No, not at all. There is order, direction, delineations.
Now, there are those who desire a world without God. They want a life with no boundaries so they can define their own meaning of life and reality. But they cannot escape the presence of the world they exist in. This is the world that has a Creator. And this Creator distinguishes things. There is up and down and a difference. There is right and wrong and a difference. Arrogant mankind or society delude themselves to believe they can define reality absent of God. This is the tragedy of man before their Creator.
But as for those of us who know their Creator and call Him Lord, we acknowledge Him. We believe Him. As it says in Hebrews 11:6 “And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for the one who comes to God must believe that He exists, and that He proves to be One who rewards those who seek Him.”
I believe in the miracle of the creation written down for us to read. And I acknowledge the Creator who made it so. I am not against science, only the arrogance of those who see what is before them and then willfully deny the Creator. Yes, creation has boundaries put into place by the Creator. I also know that violating those boundaries has consequences. This is the reason why I was driven to begin this podcast in the first place.
God has spoken and how we respond to His revelation has significance both now and for eternity.
Truth Matters.
Posted in Truth Matters - with Emilio Lartigue
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