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CREATION DAY 4
Genesis 1:14-19
John MacArthur
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. 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, or beam of light has only reached the nearest star to our sun. 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