By Bob Beanblossom
29 August 2016
It seems to me that we Christians get caught up in nuts and bolts when we look at creation, and lose God’s message for us.
Christians spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to understand and explain Genesis 1 and 2 in scientific terms to answer the questions and attacks of non-Christians and the doubts of confused Christians—often including ourselves.
This is not what God intended for us to do with His story of creation. The Bible is nowhere a science text book. It is never in conflict with any scientific fact (as opposed to prevailing scientific theory), nor is any scientific fact ever in conflict with it. If you can remain objective and discriminating as you watch scientific developments, you will see every field of science (again, fact, not theory) aligning more and more closely with the Word. The same goes for history as archeologists and their associated fields dig up the past and refine readings and interpretations of recovered items. But that’s another story. This is not what the popular press will relate, but that is to be expected.
The substance of God’s intent is captured in the opening statement: “In the beginning God created . . .” It speaks of three things: 1) the beginning—the first meeting point of God’s eternity with the time and space He created for man, 2) the moving and controlling force–God, and 3) the action—the creation and formation of the universe for man. It goes further back than science can conceive—a time when matter and energy began from nothing. There is no scientific discipline that can deal with ‘The Beginning.’ The limits of His statement are that the story encompasses all of “the heaven and the earth.” In other words, it is all-inclusive. There are ‘scientific’ theories about the first moments of creation—the Big Bang is the most popular at the moment—but they are really philosophy, not science. They are beyond the criteria of scientific proof. The ‘proofs’ offered are various conflicting computer simulations. Before you put your trust in them, remember that the daily weather forecasts are computer simulations.
While scientific principle is imbedded in this opening statement and those that follow, it is neither about protons, neutrons, and electrons, nor is it about suns, moons, and planets. Revelation 4:11b tells us what it is about: “Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created.” God the Creator has created all things for His pleasure. To that extent, creation is for us (but not about us) so that both we and the rest of creation can please Him. Our failure—the original sin of Adam, the first man, and the continual sins of every human since Adam—do not change the purpose or perfection of His creation.
Creation is the beginning of God’s revelation of Himself to His creation. Genesis 1 and 2 are His initial revelation. It is an Intro-level course, followed by increasing depth and breadth as we move through the Bible. Even so, the finite creature can only begin to understand the infinite Creator. The post-grad work will be on the other side of this life, and the coursework will last thru eternity future. Every Christian is being prepared here for that course. Like our early schooling, we don’t choose the courses, we just follow the curriculum laid out for us. As we mature and grow we realize that every course we have completed has prepared us for the next. Again, that preparation and growth cycle will continue thru eternity.
Some of the primary lessons are these:
1) God is in complete control. Creation is not a mandate to Him or a necessity, but a choice. He is the incomprehensible triune godhead, one in three, and three in one: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. No part of this godhead is created; all are eternally eternal in every way. This godhead has no peers. He is not the chief god. He is not one among many gods. He is Master of all—everything, everywhere, always, from eternity past thru eternity future. Beyond our comprehension. Beyond our imaginations. Beyond our ability to quantify and package.
2) God is a communicating God. He reveals Himself thru His written Word and thru our observation and understanding of nature—of the nature of nature, the essence of His power and order. His revealing Light has touched all men:
Jesus, the Word, “was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” (John 1:9)
He is available to us thru prayer, the always-open channel of personal communication with man the creature. While He hears and answers our prayers, He cannot be used to meet our desires. Our meeting point is His will. It is not just paramount, it is absolute.
3) God is the Creator, not the created. He is not in, or a part of, or the essence of anything. He remains above creation as “the author and finisher” of His works as well as our faith to believe in Him. (Hebrews 12:2) A vital concept is that ‘Neither is nature in God, nor God in nature.’ Commonalities in ancient names for God (such as the Hebrew el) with man-made gods throughout the ancient world in various languages are phenomena of human language, not an indication that He is one with the false gods. We might consider that issue some other time.
4) God creates (Hebrew bara) from nothing by His spoken word, and further makes (“Let there be . . .” and variations) from the substance of that creation. Bara interpreted as ‘create’ is always and only associated with the action of God in the Bible. Man never creates.
5) God sustains His creation as He chooses. Some things He continues to sustain, while others He allows to pass from existence. Creation in some sense is ongoing. Today we see evidence of change as some plants and animals have come and gone, even as He has given us a glimpse into the future when He will “make all things new.” (Revelation 21:5) Some of His change is cyclic: night and day, summer and winter, life and death. Some is catastrophic: species die out and are replaced, volcanoes erupt changing the landscape and weather, the earth quakes and land sinks, slides, and rises to new heights. This is God’s work. Man is His steward, not the commander, of the process. God’s will prevails in spite of man, not because of him. It is not dependent on the will or work of man.
6) Creation serves Him. As creation progressed, God commented that “it was good.” This is independent of the state of creation—with the fall of man and curse upon nature just ahead—and in sight for God—He declared it good, culminating in the observation that it was very good. Man is incidental to creation, an object of creation. We should take this into account as we attempt to ‘create’ life and alter lifeforms in our laboratories.
Here we will look very briefly at just the first day of creation to flesh out some of these concepts. Neither time nor space allow more. We will do this to align our understanding and application of the creation story with God’s purpose. As noted above, the creation story does include highlights of the nuts and bolts of the process, but only as the fabric in which the true story is woven, and only to the extent that He chose. It is the vehicle rather than the trip.
God made light on the first day, but there is far more here than we often understand. We are short-sighted by the magnificence of the physical, the concept of creation by His spoken word, the beginning of light, the first night and day. We wonder where the light came from, and why He seems to make the heavenly bodies later, on the fourth day. We want to understand the physical, to explain it for God. But let’s read what He really told us:
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. (Genesis 1:3-5)
Attempting to understand and explain these statements, we often go to science to ‘prove’ various untenable theories and show what God ‘really meant.’ We are caught in the snare of those who are enemies of God and His Word. We become tools for those very enemies as we leave God’s will, and push forward—with good intent, but poor choice—into the trap set before us. We have forgotten that God needs no defense or explanation. He said:
“I am the Lord and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I the Lord have created it.” (Isaiah 45:6,7a, 8c)
This approach requires that we take what He gave his people several thousand years ago for their use and our application, and translate it to current scientific data, not even recognizing that science is in perpetual change while His Word has never changed, nor will it ever change. We attempt to find, then create, ‘facts’ to make the Bible a scientific textbook that provides identifiable, quantifiable, and testable ‘facts’ and sequences of the development of the earth and life. Then we face the need to integrate the Fourth Day of creation:
14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15 and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18 and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.” (Genesis 1:14-19)
What did those refugees from Egypt know? The Patriarch Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees in the land of Sumer (south Iraq, today), according to scripture. That was the birthplace—long before him—of writing, astronomy, advanced mathematics including quadratic equations (before the Greek Euclid, who is still credited with its development), a calendar, and a numbering system on base 60 which gives us the division of a circle (360 degrees), the number pi, and so much more. That base is essential for calculations of circles and spheres. Egypt credited its math and science excellence to Ur and its close city-states, as the early Greeks credited theirs to Egypt. So, science and math were known to the Israelites of Moses’ day—if not to the common man, then at least to the educated. Remember that Moses was educated in the court of the Pharaoh, the seat of power and education. If God had intended to describe His creation in scientific terms, the target audience would have had some understanding of the details. But that is not what He chose to do. We try to interpret it on a scientific basis. They did not. Moses’ books—the Pentateuch—were their history and law as revealed to them by God.
Our attempts to extract, create, and manipulate data satisfies no one. As the cartoonist Al Capp had a character say many years ago, “We have met the enemy, and they are us.”
Gone is the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God, the God of our salvation. Gone is the all-powerful God of creation who spoke and everything came from nothing. Gone is the need for faith. Gone is the opportunity so share God’s faith, replaced by man’s faulty science. Gone is our holding to the divine inspiration of the Word.
But it doesn’t work. It never will. The only thing we succeed in doing is adding fuel to the atheistic fire attempting to torch God and His Word into oblivion. Miracles cannot be explained in scientific terms: not only creation, but all of them, including our own salvation. Dissatisfied and disillusioned, nominal Christians who rely on what others say instead of God’s Word and prayer fall by the wayside.
Let’s go back to Day 1 and take God’s approach. On that day, He established order. He used light and time to do this.
The light of that first day of creation is much more than lumens or foot candles of visible radiation reaching Earth’s surface. It is the Light of the world, Light that brings order and symmetry to the Hebrew “tohouw” and “bohouw” (“without form and void.”) Note that God said “Let there be . . .” rather than ‘God created.’ Before the tohouw and bohouw the Light already existed. It was at this point that the God the Son was given the go-ahead to prepare the world for man and man for God:
1God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, 2 hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; 3 who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, (Hebrews 1:1-3a)
We simply cannot grasp the concept of light without a physical source any more than we can understand time—including infinity—outside of our God-given reference. To us, form and numbers are as much a part of our sense of reality as words are. Without them we are adrift. Only faith in the Word make sense out of them. Both exist because both are necessary. We can quantify light and measure it, giving it values such as the amount from a source or striking an object, the quality of the light in terms of how ‘real’ colors and textures appear, and so on. Sort of. Another interesting aspect of light is that there is no standard for these measurements. Every measure of light is based upon relative, assumed, and more or less agreed upon standards. There are precise standards for electrical energy—volts, amps, resistance, power—but none for light. It simply is not quantifiable in absolute terms. You notice this when you try to specify a color, a function of light. You find that even ‘simple’ problems such as finding a white or black to match is mind boggling. Digging deeper, scientists have noticed that light has both the characteristics of waves of energy, and the characteristics of particles of matter. To understand light, we must go to the source: the Creator.
Man can make light through chemical, electrical, and mechanical means. But man cannot make dark. There is no source of dark. He can only remove light or cast a shadow and call that dark. God, in Genesis 1:2b told us that in the beginning the world was dark. He created that. He retains the key to making darkness.
The light of Day 1 is the Light of God, Himself. In Him and thru Him and on His authority, God the Son, the Living Word—who would one day be born Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah of fallen man–was made the Agent of God the Father. See Hebrews 1:1-3, and John 1:1-5. This was not a point source of light in ‘outer space,’ nor was it a chemical or physical glow from a cooling planet. It was the Light of God the Creator. Man has been privileged to see very small manifestations of this Light: Moses on the mountain (Exodus 24:15-18), the three disciples at Jesus transfiguration (Matthew 17:1-2). But only the world transitioning from chaos to order on that first day has ever seen that Light in that level of intensity. Creation reacted, as it must: it was forever changed from formless and void to order, subject to ‘laws of nature’ established by the Creator as both the necessary foundation for the creature, but also as an example of God’s will for that creature: in tune with His laws, acknowledging absolute dependence upon Him, and worshiping the Master of the universe.
As the Light shone on God’s command, He saw “that it was good.”(Genesis 1:4a) As He “divided the light from the darkness,” (Genesis 1:4b), He began to create order from the formless void. The undefinable non-order of darkness became the order of light and time.
Time was required. God created the stars, including our sun, the planets and the moons as spheres. They could have been any shape He chose, but the sphere works as no other shape to produce regular and symmetrical days and seasons as the planets and moons rotate on their axis and at the same time circle their master. Natural laws—hierarchical laws–established by Him create stable days, months, and years while slight variations produce seasons and ages. The Earth’s rotation approximates a 24-hour day, the Moon’s path produces about a 30-day month, and the earth’s circuit of the Sun gives us just over a 365-day year. The differences challenge man’s creativity. Still, time is a mystery. Based upon experimental evidence, we have defined in earth-terms the distance light travels in a year as about 186 thousand miles or 300 million meters. Einstein’s famous formula of Relativity holds the speed of light as a constant—a number that does not change. But more recent experiments show that the speed of light—that is time—is variable. We already knew that light changes with speed. This, even as Einstein’s theory holds in its own sphere of calculations. The theory of time exists—in verifiable terms—in two separate contradictory realms. I believe that our God enjoys the consternation of man as he makes one ‘final’ determination after another, each in turn falling down like dominoes in a row. Again, man’s ego falls before the God of the Universe.
For common purposes—when we accept and understand the parameters–time is a constant with very precise parameters. Our clocks and watches are accurate to amazing tolerances today. The precision and repetition of the factors that are time are essential for modern computers to function. One factor often overlooked is that our measure of time is based solely on the relationship between Earth, our Sun, and our Moon. Outside of Earth, our time has absolutely no meaning. The relationships are not valid. Time on Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the further reaches of the universe is different. God established our time for us on this world and this world alone. In space, our fixed time becomes relative, even a convention instead of an absolute.
The combination of light and time completed the requirements for Day and the other cycles to follow on subsequent days. Here, if you will allow, we can see the first glimpse of the marriage relationship as time and light are united. Rising out of darkness and chaos, God was beginning the preparations for man, the creature intended to please and worship God, to supervise and husband creation, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with others who would do the same.
But it was not to be. The perfect creation would not long last in the hands of man. The will to choose given to man would allow his failure to honor the Creator. Ego would override servitude. Man, like Lucifer before him, would choose self as his god. As we attempt to explain the miraculous, Adam attempted to put self above his Creator. Both are sin. God knew it already. The plan to provide a Savior was already completed. Man would fail his Maker, but his Maker would never fail him. Jesus the Creator would become Jesus the Savior, but at great cost.
Day One of creation. A day like none other ever was or will be. It was the day that God created order out of chaos so that man might have order in his life, that he might praise and worship his Creator, and man might take the Light of that very first day and:
“Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16)
There was a warning, too:
“Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness.” (Luke 1:35)
We have been given the written Word that we might always remember the source of our Light, which is of Him, not ourselves:
Jesus “was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” (John 1:9)
Yet, not every man will receive the Light:
“And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” (John 3:19)
The first day of creation. The day that God set the world in order. The beginning of the process that led to the creation of man. The day that started all days. God said of it, “It was good.” Can he say that of us?