Creation, Day 4

Genesis 1:14-19

 

     Thank you for being here tonight and continuing with us in our study of Genesis chapter 1.  Let's open our Bibles to Genesis chapter 1.  We come now to day four in creation...day four.

 

     It is described in Genesis 1:14 through 19.  Let me read that portion of Scripture for you.  Genesis 1 verse 14, "And God said, 'Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years.  And let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth."  And it was so.  And God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day an the lesser light to govern the night.  He made the stars also.  And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth and to govern the day and the night and to separate the light from the darkness.  And God saw that it was good.  And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day."  So does the Bible describe the creation of all the luminaries, the stellar bodies that occupy the vast, endless space around us. 

 

     Evolution has struggled incessantly to explain all the bodies that exist in the universe, how they could have evolved out of spontaneous generation, all the trips to the moon, all the satellites sent into space, all of the orbiting paraphernalia have given absolutely no insight into how the universe, the bodies in the universe could have possibly evolved.  And that's understandable, since they didn't.

 

     Here in chapter 1 verses 14 to 19 it simply says God made them all.  When you stop to think about that it is so mind boggling I hardly know how to approach it.  I guess maybe the best way to approach it is sort of from a personal level.  When it says that God made the stars along with the sun and the moon, it is saying something about His immense power.  That simple little statement almost like an addendum at the end of verse 16, which in the Hebrew literally says, "The stars also."  He just...as if He threw them in...is so staggering as to be almost, if not beyond, comprehension.  As you learned once as a school child light travels at a 186 thousand miles a second.  Now that computes to six trillion miles in a year.  That's how far light goes in a year, six trillion miles.

 

     Now lets just stop and think about the power of God if He created all of the stellar bodies, all of the stars, by considering a beam of light moving at a 186 thousand miles a second, or six trillion miles a year, and let's begin this morning, Sunday morning, when your alarm clock went off at 6 a.m.  By the time you really got out of bed, let's give you the benefit of the doubt and say 6:08 a.m., that light beam was passing the earth and heading out toward the edge of the solar system.

 

     As you sat down to your morning coffee at 6:41 a.m., the light beam passed Jupiter.  And when I got up to preach at the second service at about 11:12 a.m., if Clayton stays within his time limit, about that time our little light beam was passing Pluto.

 

Now let's look ahead at the end of the week.  As you leave work on Friday afternoon, that little beam of light will be leaving our solar system.  Now you don't have to think about that little light again until you go to vote for the President in November of the year 2003 and after all this waiting, our beam of light has only reached the nearest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri, which is actually a conflux of several stars.  Go on to the year 2010 and our little light beam has only twenty stars behind it and our sun appears as a rather bland, yellowish star disappearing into galactic darkness.

 

     Imagine this little beam of light has been heading now into the constellation Sagittarius.  On this path it will be headed for the center of our Milky Way Galaxy.  It has to travel 32 thousand years before it will reach the center of our galaxy, that's at six trillion miles a year.  But wait, it still has another 50 thousand years to get to the other side of the Milky Way, which is our galaxy, and when it does it will leave behind about one hundred billion stars.

 

     Now remember that the Milky Way Galaxy is only an average sized galaxy.  And that as far as we know, there are at least 50 billion galaxies in the known universe.  Much of this has been determined by the use of the Hubbel telescopic cameras. 

 

     Now our little light beam has to travel another 80 thousand years at its six trillion miles per year pace to reach the Magellanic clouds, which is the closest galaxy or series of galaxies to our Milky Way.  We're now, having left this morning, 160 thousand years into the future and our light beam, still moving at the same speed of 186 thousand miles a second, faces 1.8 million years of empty space before it reaches the end of the Andromeda galaxy which is close enough to earth to be seen with the naked eye.

 

     Looking back from there at the Milky Way you would see a fuzzy elliptical patch similar to what Andromeda looks like to us on a fall evening. 

 

     Now if our little light beam travels a couple more millions of years it will encounter really open space.  Our little friend will now travel another 20 billion years before it reaches the edge of the known universe that we know about after over 20 billion years of travel with about 50 billion galaxies behind it with about a hundred billion stars in those 50 billion galaxies.  Psalm 8:3 says, "Our little light beam has only seen the work of God's fingers."  Or as Job put it in Job 26:14, "Behold, these are the fringes of His ways and how faint a word we hear of Him."  Pretty staggering stuff.

 

     Genesis explains all of that by saying this, "He made the stars."  Now if that's only the work of His fingers, what could His arm do?  The question is often asked, "How can such distant light reach the earth so fast in a six-day creation?  If it takes our little light beam hundreds of thousands of years to get out there, doesn't it take hundreds of thousands of years for a light from those faraway stars?  Doesn't it take hundreds of thousands of years for the light to reach us?"

 

     Well, first of all, you can file this somewhere.  God could not only make the stars out there, makes us here, but He could make all the light in between instantaneously.  It is also true that light already existed, it was created on day one according to verse 3 of Genesis and so all He had to do was put it where He wanted it. 

 

     But I really do lean, after continuing to read on the subject, to the fact as one scientist put it that at the time of creation the speed of light was possibly ten billion times faster than it is now.  Some scientists have been working to demonstrate that because of the effect of the Fall the speed of light is slower now than its ever been and its getting slower all along.  If you push it back six or seven thousand years ago, it would be ten billion times faster.

 

     And when you stop to think about this, there are only two possible ways to understand the origin of the complex solar system, and I'm not even going to get into the complexities of it.  And you get in to binary stars, stars that literally orbit each other, star systems that revolve around a solid-center mass, when you get into massive galaxies, when you get into all the complexities of these things it is absolutely staggering.  In fact, there is nothing about these stars, these galaxies, there is nothing about them that is common to all of them.  They are like fingerprints.  They are like human beings.  Every star, every set of stars, every set of binary stars, everyone of these little galaxies has the fingerprint of God upon it, unlike any other.

 

     George Wald who was formerly of Harvard and a winner of the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine acknowledged the dilemma.  He said, and I quote, this was from The Scientific American Journal, quote George Wald, "The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation.  The only alternative was to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation.  There is no third position."  He's right.  Either you believe in spontaneous generation that once there was none of this, and then spontaneously it just came into existence on it's own, or you believe in supernatural creation.  He's right.  There's no alternative.

 

     Wald, with no rationale given, went on to state his view.  "One has to contemplate...he says...the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible.  Yet, here we are as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation," end quote.

 

     He would say that the entire universe, billions upon billions of galaxies, is the product of irrational, random, spontaneous generation, something coming into existence out of nothing.  The theory that the entire universe and all that is in it is the result of some random, spontaneous process that spontaneously generated cells and spontaneously generated gases, allied themselves upward into increasing  complexity over billions of years to self-create the universe.

 

     As I've been saying all along, and as science must attest, evolution is not possible, it is impossible.  Any kind of spontaneous generation is impossible.  Any kind of upward complexity from simplicity is by chance impossible.  Evolution has never been observed.  Evolution has never been proven because it's impossible.  And there is compelling, conclusive, unarguable evidence of a vast amount in every field of science to prove the utter and total impossibility of evolution, making all belief in evolution irrational and erroneous.

 

     I've been exposed in this particular study to much more than I'm telling you about.  I find myself reading and reading and reading and reading and then just pulling out little pieces that I bring to you.  But I'm being exposed to every field of science which in the past I wasn't necessarily exposed to.  And the more and more I read, the more vast becomes the wealth of information that demonstrates beyond argument how impossible evolution is and how clearly what exists has to be the result of a supernatural mind and a supernatural act of creation.

 

     For a moment, for example, let's bring it down to a smaller level.  We go from the vastness of this amazing and immense universe to the minutest complexity of life, deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA.  This is the material that we've been talking about in the past that carries the life code for the function of every organism, DNA. 

 

     Now let me just tell you a little bit about DNA.  DNA exists in every single cell...did you get that?...in every single cell.  Now just to make that come right down to where you are, just take a look at your body, you have in your body one hundred or so trillion cells.  Every one of those cells has a little strip, an actual...actual material, physical strip of DNA.  It is a copy of coded information and its coiled up, it's in a coil in every single cell in every living organism, including you.

 

     Now you have 46 segments in that little coil.  Twenty-three of those came from your father and twenty-three of those came from your mother to make the 46.  The combination then of your father and your mother's DNA and giving you 23 of each made the 46, the uniquely formed to determine what you look like, much of your personality and abilities.  And precisely and explicitly that little coil determines exactly how every single cell in your body is to function throughout your entire life.  That little cell operates off that little coil and the code on that coil.

    

     Now let's get a little wild here.  If the 46 segments of DNA in one of your cells, and every one of your cells has the same 46 little...little DNA components, let's just uncoil them.  If we just took one little cell and got the little coil DNA strip and stretched it out, it would be seven-feet long.  It would be really thin.  It would be so thin, I'm told, we couldn't see it under an electron microscope.  But if it were stretched out it would be seven-feet long.  That's in every one of your hundred trillion cells.  It would be so thin that the details of it couldn't be seen.  However, listen to this, if all the DNA in your body, lets just take all of it and stretch it out and connect it together, it would stretch from here to the moon one half million times.  Pretty incredible you are, huh?  If all this very densely coded information were placed in typewritten form, if it was just typed out in you, just for you, it would fill the Grand Canyon 50 times.  That's how fearfully and wonderfully you are made, Psalm 139:4 says.

 

     So, if you...if you want numbers, I give you numbers.  You can go to the farthest, most vast complexity of the universe, or you can look into the smallest complexity of the cells within the human body and all you're going to see is the hand of an intelligent and powerful creator.

 

     Now let's take something in between.  We've been real big and real small.  Let's take something not so big, not so small, your brain.  I'm not going to get personal about what size you might have, but let's talk about your brain.  There are so many things I could say about the brain...the study of the brain is...is truly an amazing, amazing study.  Your brain has one...about one hundred thousand billion electrical connections.  Did you get that?  One hundred thousand billion of them, ten to the fourteenth power.  In fact, your brain has more electrical connections than all the electrical appliances in the...on the face of the earth.  Yet your brain with its hundred thousand billion electrical connections fits in a quart jar and operates for 70 years on ten watts of power, fueled largely by cheeseburgers and French fries.

 

     Why to be an evolutionist is the height of stupidity, is it not?  Well, enough about your brain lest we get more personal.  The only reasonable view is that the universe was created by God, more powerful, more complex and more intelligent than we could ever, ever imagine.  And we don't have to imagine.  We don't have to wonder how He did it because He told us how He did it.  We have the account. 

 

     I read source, after source, after source, after source of evolutionary scientists trying to explain how the universe evolved into existence.  It's useless and hopeless.  We don't need that explanation. Six days God made it and in one day He filled the universe with all the stars, suns and moons.

 

     Now let's go back to the text.  The creation is introduced in verse 1 with an overview statement, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," that's the summary statement.  And as I told you weeks ago, in that statement you have everything that is knowable categorized.  Herbert Spencer died in 1903, he said that all that is knowable in the universe can be summed up in five categories: time, force, action, space and matter.  I mean, he was heralded as a brilliant genius, as a great scientist for having discovered the five categories of the knowable...time, force, action, space and matter.  Everything that exists can fit into that.  And that was a great discovery.  That's exactly what it says in the first verse of the Bible, In the beginning...that's time; God...that's force; created...that's action; the heavens...that's space; the earth...that's matter.  It's all in that verse.

 

     What it's saying in verse 1 is simply the overview.  God made the heavens and the earth as we know them now.  Then starting in verse 2 it begins to describe how He did that.  He did that in the six-day process.  That process is described from chapter 1 verse 2 down to chapter 2 verse 3.  And that's the section we're looking at in Genesis.  This is then the generations of the heavens and the earth, the creation of the heavens and the earth, the story of the heavens and the earth being created. 

 

     Day one, on day one God made the material.  We could say on day one He created the space, the time and the matter.  On day one He created a universe that was unformed and uninhabitable.  And then created light, as it indicates to us in verses 2 through 5.  There was darkness over the surface of the deep that covered the earth.  The Spirit of God was hovering there.  God said let there be light, and there was light.  God separated the light from the darkness.  So on day one He created the material out of which the final shape of the heaven and the earth would be made, and He created light.

 

     On day two He separated the waters that covered the surface of the earth and took some waters above and left some below on the earth, verses 6 through 8 talk about that.  And in the middle He created the expanse that we know as heaven.  He called, verse 8, the expanse heaven.  He left some water on earth.  He sent some water above, to exactly where we don't know, but at whatever point that water went to, in the middle is the heaven of heavens which is the place of all of the stellar bodies, the luminaries which He created on day four.

 

     Then on day three we noted in verses 9 to 13 He separated the dry land from the water on the earth, creating then seas and land.  And then two kinds of growing things, trees which produce fruit that has seed, and plants which have their seed in themselves. 

 

     So day one, the material to shape His universe into its final form and light.  Day two, He creates the expanse of heaven between the waters above and the waters below.  Day three He separates the dry land from the water which He gathers into seas and creates the trees and the plants.  That brings us to day four.

 

     Now we go back from the earth into heaven and He populates this vast expanse of heaven with the luminaries.  That corresponds to day one.  On day one He created light.  On day four He created the lights that become the means by which light is transmitted.  He attaches the light to stellar bodies.  On day two He created the water below and kind of matching up with that on day five He created the fish for that water.  On day two He also created the heavens above, and on day five He created the birds to fly in that heaven.  On day three He created the land and the plants and trees, and on day six paralleling that, He created man and land animals, would live on those plants and live on the dry land.  So there's a wonderful parallel. 

 

     Day one light, and then the parallel day four, that being the lights.  Day two, the water and the heavens.  And on day five, the fish for the water, the birds for the heaven.  Day three, the dry land and the plants.  And day six paralleling that, man and the animals.  And so there are six days of creation that are wonderfully balanced.  There's a parallelism there, as we noted.

 

     We come then to day four.  In day four, as verse 14 says, God created lights.  Go back to verse 3 and you'll read, "Then God said, 'Let there be light.'"  Then look at verse 14, "Then God said, 'Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens.'"

 

     Now I want to remind you again of what is so very important to keep stating.  All of this flow of creation is introduced with this little phrase "then God said," verse 3, verse 6, verse 11, verse 14, verse 20, verse 24, verse 26 and verse 29...always the mode of creation, always the means of creation, "Then God said."  That is to say there is no process, there is no time...time adds nothing to this.  Millions of years, billions of years, thousands of years add nothing to this, this is not some process that God initiated, this is something that God completed.  God simply said it and it came into existence.  As I said long ago in the study, there's nothing in the text, there's nothing exegetical that leads to any other conclusion than what we've always called "divine fiat creation."  He literally speaks it in to existence.  I read you this morning Psalm 33, I read it again, verses 6 to 9, "By the Word of the Lord the heavens were made.  And by the breath of His mouth all their hosts," that is all the stars, moons, suns and comets and everything else that's there.  It was all made because God spoke it into existence.  Verse 9, "He spoke and it was done.  He commanded and it stood fast."

 

     In other words, it didn't change.  It didn't alter.  It didn't develop.  It didn't wane.  He spoke it into existence and that's the way it stayed, exactly the way He spoke it into existence.  The moon, the sun, the stars, the galaxies, the billions upon billions of galaxies, everything that is in space, all of the material that is there, all the gases that are there, all the components, all the atoms that are there, everything that is there is there exactly the way it was when God made it.  And the complexity of it literally staggers me.  You look up and you think stars are in the same place all the time.  They're not.  They're moving so relatively slowly to the viewpoint of earth that they appear to be in the same place all the time.  We can actually chart our courses by them because they don't appear to be moving.  But the fact is they are moving.  Our own sun is taking our entire solar system and dragging it from one end of the universe to the other in an orbit that is huge.  In fact the whole Milky Way galaxy is in an orbit that scientists calculate takes 225 million years to complete.  And everything else is in corresponding orbits.  The whole thing is incredible and it all is doing now exactly what God designed it to do and created it to do in a simple word...then God said let there be...and there was.  That's it. 

 

     Let there be lights, verse 14...let there be lights.  Often called luminaries.  And the lights were to divide.  Back in verse 4, light was to divide.  God separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light day, the darkness He called night.  There was evening there was morning, one day.  So at the very outset when He created light, before there was a moon, before there were stars, before there was sun, there was light.  It wasn't attached to any of those celestial bodies, but there was light.  God created light.  Light is not created by stars.  light is not created by the sun.  Light is simply created by God and attached to those luminaries.  God said, "Let there be lights," and lights, luminaries, celestial bodies shining were to divide, verse 18 says, to separate the light from the darkness, just the same purpose that the original creation of light had intended to accomplish.   And so, we have the creation of light in verse 1 which identifies day and night, and the evening and the morning, and the first solar day, 24-hour day and it's now that same light for that same purpose attached to these heavenly bodies...the sun, the moon and the stars that are identified down in verse 16.

 

     Now notice again in verse 14 "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens," so we know that when God created the lights they were to be placed into this expanse that is between the waters below and the waters above, wherever those waters went...the heaven of heavens is between them.  Now the creation of light on day four does produce an important issue because light was already shining.  And I've referred to this a couple of times, I want to make sure you're clear on it.

    

     People always say, "Well you can't have light shining all over the place without any stars, without any sun, without any moon because the light that we know comes from those sources.  And they say if there wasn't any sun there couldn't be any plants on day three.  How could God create plants on day three and a sun on day four?  Because photosynthesis which is critical to the life of plants doesn't exist apart from the sun.  And so this doesn't make any sense."  And critics depreciate the text of Scripture on that basis.  But this is really silly.  This is trivial.  There was light already on day one.  And where there is light there is heat.  And where there is light and heat there is photosynthesis.  The requisite conditions for plant life to survive on day three were already in existence because light was already there doing what light always does.  It just hadn't been specifically attached to these stellar bodies.  It is evident to all of us, should be evident, that stars and the sun are not the creators of light, God is the creator of light.  He happens to use them as radiating bearers of light that was already there before them and without them. 

    

     So, God took the light He had already created and attached it to the luminaries He made on day four.

     By the way, I thought this was interesting.  John Calvin, great Reformer, wrote in his commentary on Genesis this brief statement:  "The only difference is this, that the light was before dispersed but now proceeds from lucid bodies which in serving this purpose obeyed the command of God."

 

     Long before any space travel, John Calvin knew the text of Scripture, had it right.  Light existed and it was at this point simply connected to these bodies.

 

     Now, follow along because this is very important as we look at the text.  This account of the creation of the lights defines their purpose in three functions...three functions.  They're very clear.  Number one function, verse 14, "To separate the day from the night."  Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night.  And each of these three functions is introduced by the phrase "Let there be...or...Let them."

 

     The first function, to separate the day from the night.  So we can say if you're making a little outline, the first function of these was to separate...to separate.  Now in order to separate one thing from another, in order to mark a distinction between two things, those two things must already be in existence.  Darkness already was in existence.  We know that back in verse 1.  Light came into existence, also on day one, so it was already in existence.  This affirms that day existed without the sun and night existed without the moon and without the stars.  Again the sun is not the cause of daylight because there had already been three periods of daylight and three periods of dark before day four.  God created these bearers of light and gave to them the task of separation.  And now from our standpoint, it is the sun that brings us the light in the day, it is the sun that brings us the light at night along with the stars.  The first purpose then of these luminaries was to separate the day from the night.

 

     Secondly...or to create a day, as we know it, a 24-hour day.  The second thing was to dominate.  First to separate, secondly to dominate.  Follow in the text.  And it says in verse 14, "And let them...and there's that let them again, indicating a second category...let them be for signs."  What kind of signs?  "For seasons, and for