07 - The Crown Of God's Creation 2010
Genesis...The Beginnings 2010 • Sermon • Submitted
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We have seen that the beginning of all things began with God, Who created the worlds, and all that in them is, by His word. God completed His work in six 24 hour days. The six days of creation are grouped as follows:
Day 1—light
Day 2—waters beneath, waters above (sky)
Day 3—dry land, seas and plants
Day 4—sun, moon, and stars
Day 5—fish, birds
Day 6—animals, people
We also saw last time that the dinosaurs were created on the 5th and 6th days, according to whether they were land or sea creatures. And we will see this time that God crowned his work with the creation of man.
First, the creation of man marks the first variation of how God went about it. The Bible records:
Gen. 1: 26-27 “God said, Let Us [Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--Elohim] make mankind in Our image, after Our likeness…”
This is the first time that the phrase “Let there be…” is not used in the Creation process. Instead we have, “Let us make…”
One commentator writes, “To enhance the dignity of this last work and to mark the fact that man differs from the animals, scripture represents God as closely deliberating over the making of the human species.” Genesis presents God as calling the other two members of the Trinity to center all their attention on this event.
In His likeness
Next we note that man was not created like the animals. In his nature, person and personality, in his moral and spiritual capacities, in his emotions, intellect, conscience, and will, man stands apart from the brute creation.
Think about this: What animal can transmit accumulated achievements from one generation to another? What animal experiences a true sense of guilt when it does wrong or has a developed consciousness of judgment to come? What animal shows any desire to worship God? What animal has hope of immortality beyond the grave?
What beast can exercise moral judgment or show appreciation of the beauties of nature? When did we ever see a dog admiring a sunset or a horse standing breathless before the awesome sight of a mountain range?
Animals cannot read or write, act with a deliberate purpose, or set long range goals for their future. They cannot cook, sew, or use tools. They cannot speak or write. They are purely instinctual. But not man. Man stands alone.
Physically, he alone of all the creatures on the globe walks upright.
Mentally, he alone has the ability to communicate in a sophisticated manner.
Spiritually, he alone has the capacity to know the mind and will of God.
“So God created man in His own image, in the image and likeness of God He created him; male and female He created them.”—1:27
Created to fellowship with God
Man was also created as a being with whom His Maker could visit and have fellowship and communion. The Bible vividly describes the level of fellowship the first couple had enjoyed with God:
“And they (Adam and Eve) heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God…”
Apparently, the fellowship of the first couple with God had been so real that “the sound of Him walking in the garden” was normal!
The Power of Choice
We are also told that man was given the awesome power of choice, even to the point of being able to disobey his Creator.
“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and blessing and calamity you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”—2:16-17
Having prepared man’s domain for him in the first five and a half days, God now presents that same domain to him.
This incredible presentation of creation to Adam and Eve consisted of God’s CROWNING Adam in three ways:
First:
God bestowed upon Adam a posterity:
“Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply.”—1:28
From Adam and Eve the whole human race would spring. Adam is seen throughout the Bible as the federal head of the human race.
And it is here where evolution launches a critical attack on the Word of God. Evolution denies an original man from which all others have descended.
Let’s be clear: When we say evolution, we are not speaking of change and variation within species, which we all see with our own eyes, such as the development of new varieties of dogs through selective breeding.
We are referring instead to naturalistic evolution—the theory that the universe came into being billions of years ago from some primordial explosion (big bang) and that all things have slowly evolved over the eons from the simpler to the more complex, including all life forms on earth and including man himself.
The person who accepts the Genesis account believes it happened more like the slogan seen on some Christian T-shirts: “I believe in the Big Bang. God said it, and Bang! It happened.”
Blind faith in Blind Chance
Evolution consists of blind faith in blind chance over endless periods of time. Put another way: Time+Blind Chance=the universe and everything in it. Let’s consider that formula a moment and see how it holds up:
Zoologists have recorded an amazing 20,000 species of fish. Each of these species has a two-chambered heart that pumps cold blood throughout its cold body.
There are 6,000 species of reptiles. They also have cold blood, but theirs is a three-chambered heart (except for the crocodile, which has four).
The 1,000 or so different amphibians (frogs, toads, and newts) have cold blood and a three-chambered heart.
There are over 9,000 species of birds. From the massive Andean condor with its wingspan of 12 feet to the tiny hummingbird (whose heart beats 1,400 times a minute), each of those 9,000 species has a four-chambered heart (left and right atrium, left and right ventricle)—just like humans.
And the 15,000 species of mammals also have a pumping, four-chambered heart, which faithfully pumps blood throughout a series of intricate blood vessels to the rest of the body. These are interesting thoughts to ponder:
Which do you think came first—the blood or the heart—and why? Did the heart in all these different species of fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals evolve before there were blood vessels throughout their bodies? When did the blood evolve? Was it before or after the vessels evolved?
If it was before, what was it that carried blood to the heart, if there were no vessels? Did the heart beat before the blood evolved? Why was it beating if there was no blood to pump? If it wasn’t beating, why did it start when it had no awareness of blood?
If the blood vessels evolved before there was blood, why did they evolve if there was no such thing as blood? And if the blood evolved before the heart evolved, what was it that caused it to circulate around the body?
The incredible human body (and the bodies of all the other creatures) consists of so many amazingly interdependent parts: a heart, lungs (to oxygenate the blood), kidneys (to filter wastes from the blood), blood vessels, arteries, blood, skin (to protect it all), and so on.
The intricate codependence of just the respiratory system and the circulatory system—not to mention all the other bodily systems—is difficult to explain. And all of this happened with Time + Blind Chance?
Or, consider the human eye. Man has never developed a camera lens anywhere near the inconceivable intricacy of the human eye.
The human eye is an amazing interrelated system of about forty individual subsystems, including cells that look like tiny rods, which handle the black and white vision.
The other 7 million are cone shaped and allow us to see in color. The retina cells receive light impressions, which are then translated into electric pulses and sent directly to the brain through the optic nerve.
A special section of the brain called the visual cortex interprets the pulses as color, contrast, depth, etc., which then allows us to see “pictures” of our world.
Incredibly, the eye, optic nerve, and visual cortex are totally separate and distinct subsystems. Yet together they capture, deliver, and interpret up to 1.5 million pulse messages per millisecond!
Think about that for a moment. It would take dozens of computers programmed perfectly and operating together flawlessly to even get close to performing this task.
The eye is an example of what is referred to as “irreducible complexity.” It would be statistically impossible for random processes, operating through gradual mechanisms of genetic mutations and natural selection, to be able to create forty separate subsystems when they provide no advantage to the whole until the very last state of development.
Ask yourself how the lens, the retina, the optic nerve, and all the other parts that play a role in seeing not only appeared from nothing, but evolved into interrelated and working parts!
Evolutionist Robert Jastrow acknowledges that highly trained scientists could not have improved upon “blind chance”:
The eye appears to have been designed; no designer of telescopes could have done better. How could this marvelous instrument have evolved by chance, through a succession of random events?
Many people in Darwin’s day agreed with theologian William Pauley, who commented, “There cannot be a design without a designer.” Even Charles Darwin admitted the incredible complexity of the eye in On The Origin of Species:
“To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”
Such a viewpoint is flatly ruled out by the very first verse of the Bible—Genesis 1:1. Instead of the impersonal hand of evolution with its unending ages of time and blind chance, we have the simple and majestic statement that God created all things.
The Scriptures are meaningless without Genesis 1
If we cut Genesis 1 from the Bible, you must also tear out Romans 5, which treats Adam as an undeniable historical fact.
“When Adam sinned, sin entered the world.
Adam’s sin brought death, so death spread to everyone, for everyone sinned.
Still, everyone died—from the time of Adam to the time of Moses—even those who did not disobey an explicit commandment of God, as Adam did…
For the sin of this one man, Adam, brought death to many…
For Adam’s sin led to condemnation, but God’s free gift leads to our being made right with God, even though we are guilty of many sins.
For the sin of this one man, Adam, caused death to rule over many…
Yes, Adam’s one sin brings condemnation for everyone, but Christ’s one act of righteousness brings a right relationship with God and new life for everyone.
Because one person disobeyed God, many became sinners. But because one other person obeyed God, many will be made righteous.”—vs. 12-19
Clearly, if there were no Adam then the Bible is false, Romans 5 is only a myth, and we have no salvation!
If there were no Adam, then Jesus was sadly mistaken. He said, “Haven't you read that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female?”—Matt. 19:4
And if Jesus was wrong, then He was not the Son of God.
But the fact is that God began with Adam and declares that the human race sprang from him.
Next:
God crowned Adam with a position.
“Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.”—1:28
God gave Adam the position of mastery over His creation. And it has been so ever since. Despite the impairment of his potential from the Fall, man has nevertheless been a mover of mountains, a builder of dams, a digger of mines, and a conqueror of the planet. He has subdued the earth.
“So God created man in His own image, in the image and likeness of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
And finally:
God crowned Adam with a possession.
29 Then God said, "Look! I have given you every seed-bearing plant throughout the earth and all the fruit trees for your food.30 And I have given every green plant as food for all the wild animals, the birds in the sky, and the small animals that scurry along the ground—everything that has life.”—1: 29-30
It is inconceivable for us to fully imagine what Eden was like before the Fall. In all its pristine beauty, unspoiled and untainted. The purest oxygen ever breathed, a world utterly untouched by evil or corruption, God gave to Adam an indescribable possession.
“Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good! And evening passed and morning came, marking the sixth day.”—1:31
NEXT TIME: The Fall: God’s Rest Interrupted