TPW 40 Creation Days 2 Thru 4

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Does it make any sense to say, let's take what man, wicked, fallible, sinful, evil, and rebellious, comes up with about what he thinks happened in the past, and then reinterpret what
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God's word says in the light of those rebellious, evil, wicked assumptions that lead to those conclusions. Welcome to The Prodigal Witness.
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This is Pastor Patrick Hines here at Explore Tennessee, and today
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I'd like to post the next sermon in the Genesis series on Creation Days 2 -4, and there is so much in that first week of human history, it's an amazing thing to think about.
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When you preach through something like this, and you preach through the first chapter of Genesis, you can't help but be stirred in your imagination to wonder what it actually looked like to see the creation of plants, and birds, and sea creatures, and just the amazing, incredible things that were going on, the creation of the sun, and the moon, and all of that, of course.
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I can't remember if it's in this sermon or the other one, but you get that little throwaway line in Scripture, to me it's the greatest understatement ever made, and He made the stars also.
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He made the stars also, yes. You're talking about trillions, and trillions, and trillions, and trillions of stars, as an afterthought to God Almighty, who simply, oh yes,
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He made the stars too, galaxies, billions of them, each of them having hundreds of billions of stars, it's absolutely unimaginable.
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God is a being of unimaginable power and wisdom, and you see it displayed in everything that He made.
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Just wanted to say Happy Thanksgiving to everyone, you might ask, what in the world are you doing posting something on Thanksgiving?
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Well, everyone in my family is sick as a dog, except me. My poor wife, we're closing in on the due date for our 10th child, who's coming late
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December or early January. We're going to go to Cincinnati, but I do not think that all of us would have come back alive if we had tried to do that, because people are so sick, with some kind of horrible bug, and I actually went out and stopped by the church to post this real quick, but I told everyone,
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I'll go out wherever I can find that's open and find y 'all something to eat, and everyone's like, we're so sick, nothing sounds good, and two of my older children want me to make them grilled cheese sandwiches, and I'm like, man, this is just, this is not the way
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Thanksgiving's supposed to be, so. Anyway, we had, this happened to us on Christmas a couple years ago, we were,
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I was as sick as I can remember being a couple Christmases ago, but when you have 10 kids, your house becomes an incubator for the plague.
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But very thankful for doctors, you know, my dear wife, she's the sickest of all of us, and she's on an antibiotic, but if you can, please pray for us in the
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Heinz household that people will heal up from these sicknesses, and I hope that you enjoy the rest of this creation series,
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I think you will find these sermons to be highly instructive, I did an incredible amount of studying and reading and work on these sermons, and I hope that they will equip you and edify your soul about the most amazing week in the history of the world so far, the week that God created everything, so hope you enjoy this.
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Let's pray for God's blessing of our minds with understanding of His word. Father in heaven, in the name of Christ, we ask that you would anoint our minds with the spirit of enlightenment, as Paul prayed for the
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Ephesians, that you would help us to understand the things that you have revealed in your word, that we would know them correctly and rightly, and that we would be encouraged, and that we would believe the things that are true and right about you and about the origin of this world and universe, and that we would see it afresh, that it displays your glory indeed, we ask in Jesus' name, amen.
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If you'll turn in your Bibles, please, Genesis chapter 1, Genesis chapter 1, verses 6 -19 is our sermon text this morning,
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Genesis 1, verses 6 -19. Genesis 1, 6 -19.
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Genesis 1, 6 -19. This is God's word. Then God said,
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Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
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Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.
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And it was so. And God called the firmament heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day.
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Then God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place, and let dry land appear.
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And it was so. And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering together of the waters he called seas.
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And God saw that it was good. Then God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself on the earth.
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And it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind.
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And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the second day. Then God said,
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Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years.
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And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth. And it was so. Then God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night.
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He made the stars also. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness.
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And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
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May God add his blessing to the reading of his infallible word. If you were to play a game, if we all sat down in a room and we were to ask the question, if you could go back in time and witness any one event that you wanted to go see, what would you go back and see?
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There are famous battles I would love to see. There's all kinds of things like that. The Battle of Cannae between Rome and Carthage would be an incredible battle to witness.
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The Battle of Waterloo, etc. There are famous moments in history people would probably want to see, too. Things like the signing of the
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Declaration of Independence, or perhaps the discovery of the New World. But for many believers in the true
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God, I would imagine the first six days of the universe's existence would be the time you'd want to go back and see.
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To be an eyewitness to the things that God was doing on these six days would be spectacular beyond imagination.
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Imagine the sound of birds flying and singing for the very first time, animals, and especially dinosaurs, and their majestic glory and strength standing upon the earth.
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What would it be like to see the great sea creatures swimming around in the water, jumping up out of the water, before the fall of man and sin?
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When you consider that there are so many places in the world today that are highly remote and yet full of unique forms of life that are found nowhere else in the entire world, it is sad to consider how many different kinds of animals have probably long been extinct that we've never seen, especially since the global flood happened.
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Think about the Galapagos Islands. When you do a Google search on Galapagos and you go down their teensy tiny little islands, and yet they are filled with animals that are found nowhere else in the entire world.
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The island of Madagascar, off the southeastern coast of Africa, has animals found nowhere else in the whole world.
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Think about Australia and all the unique forms of life that are there. The variety of animals, the variety of birds, the variety of sea creatures, the variety of everything, plants that you would have seen on the earth in its pre -fallen state before the global flood would have been spectacular.
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It would have been unbelievable, all the different things that you would have seen during that week. Even with all the animals that have long gone extinct, we still see an incredible variety of wildlife in the world even today.
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But what must it have looked like right after God for the seventh time said it was very good?
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It must have been something. It must have been truly amazing. So let us now walk through days two through four.
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We're not even going to get to all the critters yet, that's next week. But days two through four and look at the different things that God did on those three days of creation.
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A lot of very important information is revealed to us in those three days, days two through four.
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And I've given you an outline there in your bulletin with each one of those days under its own heading if you'd like to follow along that way.
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So let's go ahead and look at day number two, the creation of the great expanse to divide the waters, the creation of the great expanse to divide the waters.
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Let's look at those verses there, verses six through eight again. Then God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters.
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Thus God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.
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And it was so. And God called the firmament heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day.
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And so the waters are divided by a firmament. Now, the Hebrew word for firmament simply means expanse.
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So there's an expanse that is put in place between the waters that are on the earth and the waters that are above the earth.
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Now, this raises a question. What exactly is that talking about? What are these waters above the earth? And there's been much written about what this might have been.
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Some have thought it was a canopy of water all the way around the earth of who knows how thick it might have been.
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Others think it may have been kind of a collection of ice crystals kind of thing. Whatever it is, there was water once around the earth.
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Is that simply referring to clouds? In a sense, you could say that there is a canopy of water around the earth today.
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That's where water comes from, as you well know, through the water cycle. And technically clouds are
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H2O. They're just different forms of H2O, different forms of water. But they are the same substance.
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So you could technically call them waters. But as I said, the idea has been put forward that there was a liquid canopy of water all the way around the earth.
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And many have looked at that as perhaps the best explanation as to why it is that we find fossilized dead things in the extreme northern portions of the earth and in the extreme southern portions of the earth.
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The idea is that this canopy of water would have more evenly dispersed sunlight and would have made a lot more of the land habitable by creatures.
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And so you find gigantic elephants and big saber -toothed tigers and big plants up in the extreme northern parts of Siberia and things like that.
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So it does seem that more of the earth was habitable. Now, one of the things I did this past week was
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I read some articles about this idea of a water canopy. And Answers in Genesis' website has some articles about that.
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And there's different ideas about what this may have been. Some have argued, though, that it would be somewhat problematic to have a real thick layer of water outside there because it would have produced kind of a runaway greenhouse effect and would make the earth just way too hot.
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But whatever it was, if it was a thinner layer of water, one side point I just would mention to you, it would not have been the primary source of water for the global flood.
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Most of that came from someplace else, and we'll talk about more of that later. But I just wanted to put that out there. The idea of a canopy is something that creation scientists are still talking about and trying to hash out what it might have looked like and technically how it would have worked.
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But we can say, as I said, even today, that there really is an expanse between the waters on the earth and the layer of clouds that is around the earth in our upper atmosphere.
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So what's really being talked about on day two is the creation of the atmosphere. You have the waters on the earth, and at this point there is no dry land anywhere.
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It's just all water. Then you have an expanse, and then you have some water layer outside of that.
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God created our atmosphere. And at first glance, you might think, OK, big deal. God created an atmosphere, and that's where everything eventually is going to live.
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But why is that such a big deal? Well, the atmosphere of the earth is truly an engineering marvel.
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It is truly one of the most amazing things that God made in all the universe, is the atmosphere that we live in.
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In fact, it's so marvelous that there are times you can stand outside and it doesn't look like there's any wind at all.
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I was looking at my trees the last couple of days and just complete stillness. And think about how difficult it would be to achieve that on a ball like the earth that's going thousands of miles an hour around the sun and that's rotating at the same time.
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And yet God has balanced things so well and has put things in just the right place that we have relative calm and peace on our planet.
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When you think about all the other planets in our solar system, they're a catastrophe for life.
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In fact, just by way of comparison, you go one planet out to Mars or one planet towards the sun with Venus.
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For years and years and years, people wondered what kinds of life we might one day find on Mars. In fact, when they first started launching probes to Mars to get us to go in orbit around Mars and take pictures, they were hopeful that they'd be able to get close enough to actually see things like deer and things like that running around.
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And yet what they have discovered is that these planets are so completely inhospitable to life. There's probably never been any life whatsoever.
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Of course, we have no reason to believe there would be anyway, because God only tells us he put life on Earth. But what about Mars?
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Well, Mars is about a third the size of the Earth. Its atmosphere is one one -hundredth of the thickness of the
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Earth, and most of the gas in that atmosphere is carbon dioxide. Also, it's 250 degrees
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Fahrenheit in the day and negative 250 degrees at night. It's not someplace you would want to go, ever.
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And Venus is even worse. Venus's atmosphere is over 150 times thicker than the
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Earth's. In fact, the whole planet is enshrouded with clouds. And for years, the Russians tried to land something on the surface of Venus, and over and over again, their probes would implode on themselves before they even got to the bottom, before they even hit the ground.
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And when they finally did get a probe to land on the surface of Venus, they were able to get one picture back before the thing melted.
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They discovered that the average surface temperature on Venus is about 800 degrees Fahrenheit. That's hot enough to melt lead.
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Also, it rains sulfuric acid all day, every day, and lightning strikes over a hundred times more often on Venus than it does here.
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So when you're planning your next vacation, Mars and Venus are not places you want to go. If you stepped off of a spaceship onto the surface of Venus, you would immediately be crushed by the weight of the atmosphere, and you would catch on fire, too, because it's 800 degrees
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Fahrenheit. So the atmosphere on the Earth is perfect. It's wonderful.
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When you feel the moderate breeze, when you feel the gentle sunlight, when it cools you off and there's a breeze, you know, 5, 10, 20 miles an hour, that is a miracle, because every other planet in the solar system and all of their moons are a nightmare to consider, and yet God has created this expanse.
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When it says he created an expanse to divide the waters from the waters, it is just right for us to be able to live here and be comfortable and be happy.
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That atmosphere is so finely tuned in terms of its gas, in terms of the other things that are in it, and I don't understand all of the scientific data, but it allows just enough heat out to keep us from getting too hot, and it keeps just enough heat in to keep us from freezing to death.
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And it also does so in such a way that the swing between night and day is only about 30 or 40 degrees, usually, whereas on Mars it's a 500 degree shift every day.
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So you've got to have your wetsuit in 18 layers at night, and you would have to have every air conditioner on Earth to keep you cool during the day, and yet God has created this place just for us, and it's just perfect for us.
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The atmosphere is an engineering marvel, it's a miracle, the way that God created us. I watched a video this past week by an atheist,
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I really need to quit doing that, it's not good for you, by a fellow named Neil deGrasse
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Tyson, and I think he's an astrophysicist, and it was called Stupid Design. And he talks about everything wrong with the human body, and how our eyes are all slowly but surely we're all going blind, and talk about birth defects, and talk about how the vast majority of the universe no one could ever live in, and it's all stupidly designed, and our bodies are falling apart, and it's a mess, and everything else.
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And I was sitting there listening to this going, Neil, Dr. Tyson, have you ever heard of sin? Why is everything the mess that it is?
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Because we messed it up. It wasn't like that originally. It wasn't the big mess that it is now.
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We didn't have hurricanes, and tsunamis, and tornadoes. And he talked about all the people that have been killed in these tsunamis.
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This place isn't designed for us. If there's a God, He doesn't care about us at all. My friends,
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I share that with you just to point something out. At the highest levels of academia, we are dealing with people who know absolutely nothing about the
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Bible. Who know nothing about the Christian faith. At all. And will criticize us as if, well, you're saying that this
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God is so good, look at the mess everything is, look at our bodies, they're all messed up and diseased and falling apart. They don't even have a category for sin.
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Neil needs to go to catechism class and learn about sin, and the fall, and what that did, and the way
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God has decreed, and working out His plan. That's why I share it with you. You're talking to a culture now that doesn't even know about Adam, never heard of Noah, never heard of Moses, and doesn't know almost anything about the
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Bible at all. It's always a little troubling to listen to a rebel sinner mocking
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God for the terrible things that happen in the world and calling it stupid design. When it is those very sinners, it is us who perpetuate the problem of evil in our culture and in this world.
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It is soul -stirring and amazing to consider that those who are the cause of evil in the world have the audacity to look at the effects of their own sin and their own rebellion and call it stupid design on God's part.
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May God open that man's eyes. May God open this culture's eyes to see that the evil that we see around us may be laid firmly and only at our doorstep.
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We're the ones who brought it here. Yes, was it part of God's plan? You bet it was. It was to glorify His justice and His grace, but we are the ones responsible for the effects of sin in this world.
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And so the atmosphere, it's not stupidly designed. It's perfectly designed so that we can live here and be happy, so that we can enjoy the beauty of the creation that's all around us.
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Cursed as it is by our sin and because of the consequence to our sin and rebellion, but it's still an engineering marvel.
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It's a miracle we should praise God for every day. That the atmosphere on earth is what it is, that it's not like it is on Mars or Venus, that it's just right for us.
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Let's look at day three now. Day three, the creation of dry land, the seas and vegetation. Then God said, let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear.
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And it was so. And God called the dry land earth and the gathering together of the waters he called seas.
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And God saw that it was good. Remember at this point there was just water covering the whole earth and then there was the expanse and then there was the water canopy of the water layer of some kind outside of that.
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At this point there was no land anywhere on the earth when God first created the atmosphere, the expanse.
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The word here for dry land is the same Hebrew word that's used to describe the land that the people of Israel walked on when they passed through the
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Red Sea. It was dry land. It wasn't covered with sludge or mud or moss or anything like that. It was dry land filled with all the different things, all the different nutrients and veins of gold and everything else that God put into the ground for us to mine out and use and to take dominion over.
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God drew this up out of the water and put it there and gathered the waters into one place.
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Now one of the questions that comes up here in the text certainly suggests this was this one gigantic landmass known scientifically as Pangaea.
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Well, it certainly seems to be in this passage. The only difficulty here is the use of the plural word. Seas says that the waters were gathered together into one place.
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Initially it says there, but in verse 10 he says, God called the dry land earth and the gathering together of the waters he called seas.
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Henry Morris, I think, does a really good job of explaining what this is probably talking about are the different basins located around the world that were the major repositories of water.
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There were multiple fees, but at this particular point there was just one massive body of water and probably one gigantic landmass or something really close to that.
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So the dry land appears, it comes up out of the water and it's dry land, a big, huge, massive dry land.
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It's important to note that at this particular point on the third day, there is nothing walking around or growing on this dry land yet.
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It is just that, dry land. There's no grass or anything, there's no trees, there's nothing crawling around yet, nothing in the water either.
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God is still building and getting the stage ready for us to come here. So one of the things
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I wanted to point out here is, it's very interesting to me that day three actually sounds very much like Egyptian creation mythology.
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Now, it's important to recognize it's mythology, but Egypt is one of the oldest civilizations that we know of that exists, that we know about its history.
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And certainly it would have been very, very close to the time of the flood. Egypt's beginning would have been very shortly after the flood of Noah.
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And certainly Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth would have told their descendants what they knew about the flood that had happened in the ark and whatever it was they knew about creation.
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And the Egyptian myth of creation is that in the beginning there was darkness and water. And that what happened was, out of this water arose a big mound of dry land, which sounds a lot like day three.
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And that mound of dry land that came up out of the water came up in the shape of a pyramid.
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And that's why they built those pyramids. They believe that that mimics the creation event. And they thought if they were buried inside of something like that, they could resurrect their spirit and then join with the gods and things like that.
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And obviously the myth of Egyptian creation descends from there in a falsehood. But often the ancient records of old civilizations, you find accounts of creation that are somewhat similar to what we have in Genesis.
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And you also find accounts of the global flood. Almost every ancient civilization has a flood story or narrative of some kind.
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Many look at such similarities and say, see, Christianity is just borrowing from these other ancient myths and legends about creation.
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But the reality is this, please hear this, is that those who live in those ancient civilizations, the actual events themselves would have been in the living memory of the people.
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They would have remembered some of these things. But the fact that it was enshrouded with layers of legend and myth points out the need for a written, inspired, and fallible account to be a corrector to those things.
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So when you see similarities, don't think, ah, Christianity is borrowing. No, it's the people remembered some of those things, some of the things that they had heard that had been passed down from Noah and his three sons through the centuries.
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That's why a written account was needed to correct such legends and such mythology. This is also why, please hear this point, this is very important,
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I really want you to hear this. This is also why it is so insulting to our God when we take man's fallible dating techniques based upon man's fallible assumptions and man's partial and fallible observations of the world today and then try to reinterpret the clear and straightforward, inspired, infallible account of these things that we have in the
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Bible. When you think about man, what is man? Man's a rebel sinner against God.
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Man is evil and wicked. Man is always looking for an excuse, a reason to justify his rebellion and his sin.
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God has given us a written account, an infallible record of history, what he did in the past.
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Does it make any sense to say, let's take what man, wicked, fallible, sinful, evil, and rebellious comes up with about what he thinks happened in the past and then reinterpret what
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God's word says in the light of those rebellious, evil, wicked assumptions that lead to those conclusions. It is an insult to our
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God. We must start with just the opposite starting point, that what God says is true, what
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God says is infallible. We start with his revelation and whatever man says must be held accountable to that word and held underneath that word, subordinate to its authority.
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So very important that we apply Romans 3 verse 4. Paul said, let
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God be true, but every man a liar. In one of the debates I watched between Ken Ham and Hugh Ross, Hugh Ross said on national television, he said,
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I don't begin with the assumption that all these scientists are these evil people, they're all rebel sinners against God, they don't really care about the truth.
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And then the camera goes over to Ken Ham and says, I do. The Bible says that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately evil.
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Who can understand it? There is none who seeks after God. There is none righteous. No, not one. That's where all fallible, sinful, evil, unbelieving men start from in their rebellion against God.
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It's vital that we start in the same place. Did dry land arise out of water long ago?
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Yes, on the third day of the existence of the creation it did. But as the Egyptian myth then goes on, did the sun god
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Ra then appear upon the top of that mount of creation and then spawn all these other gods? No, there is no sun god named
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Ra. That's part of the result of man's idolatrous tendency toward falsehood and myth -making. If there is any source of information about the origin and purpose of man and the universe we should be skeptical of, man is that source.
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I want to encourage you, I don't care how much people mock or pat you on the head or talk condescendingly to you, you need to start with the word of God, with the
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Bible. Let God be true and every man a liar. Every man a liar.
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The text goes on verses 11 -13 about vegetation. This is a very important part of scripture for us to understand.
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Verse 11 -13 of Genesis 1. Then God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself on the earth and it was so.
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And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind and the tree that yields fruit whose seed is in itself according to its kind and God saw that it was good.
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So the evening and the morning were the third day. Now it's important to notice here in this passage that both the dry land and the vegetation were not created out of nothing.
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The verb bara that is used when God calls something into existence out of nothing is not used there.
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Here you have God forming things out of stuff that's already been made. God is forming, not creating here.
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It says, remember Genesis 1 verse 2, that the earth was without form and void.
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God had created all the materials, but they had their as yet without form. Here he's giving form to them by creating grass, the herb, the fruit trees and the seeds and so on and so forth.
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With the formation of dry land and vegetation, you have God giving form to that which was before formless.
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Notice here that God has given the remarkable ability of self -replication to plants.
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They, as the text says, yield seed according to their kind. The Hebrew term that's translated here is grass.
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Here is serving as a generic name for all vegetation, which is composed of two primary categories in the text.
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You have plants and fruit trees. That's really it. Plants and fruit trees.
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And a special point of application to us here is this. Please hear me. What God just did here was, he just created the menu for us and animals.
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Jump down in your Bible to verses 29 and 30 of Genesis 1. And God said,
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See, I have given you every herb that yields seed, which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed.
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To you it shall be for food. Also to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth in which there is life,
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I have given every green herb for food. And it was so. We were all vegetarians, and so were all of the animals.
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Nature, red in tooth and claw, was not part of God's very good creation.
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Animals did not eat each other, and we didn't eat animals. We all ate the plants and the fruit trees.
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Well, not the tree, the fruit that came off the fruit trees. We didn't actually eat trees. We ate the fruit that came off the fruit trees.
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And yet, in the old earth perspective of creationism that's out there today, you have animals not only dying by the millions before the end of creation week, you have myriads and myriads of animals becoming extinct before the end of creation week.
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You have dinosaurs completely gone 65 million years before the end of day six, which is allegedly, you know, some odd billion years long.
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You have animals living and dying, destroying each other, eating each other. And truly, here's where we're really going to have to deal with some mockery.
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But if we're going to hold to what the scriptures say, we believe that human beings and dinosaurs were here at the same time.
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We have to believe that. If we hold to what the Bible teaches, because God made all the land animals and us on the same day.
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We were here with the dinosaurs. And more on that later when we get to that section of Genesis.
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But here at the end of day three, you have the dry land brought out of the water and self -replicating plants and fruit trees are formed by God on day three.
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And that was what we were going to eat. Remember what God told Adam in the garden? You can eat from every tree in the garden.
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You know, he didn't say you can eat various and sundry animals. It was you eat the fruit of the trees in the garden.
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And that's what we were before the fall happened. We weren't originally created to eat animals.
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Nothing was originally created to die. The horrifying, awful, terrible suffering of animals is not part of God's good creation.
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My dear mother, we used to always watch those nature programs, you know, when I was a little kid and they'd show, you know, the big bad wolf chasing the baby antelope or whatever.
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And you're just cheering and hoping that poor little thing gets away and the wolf or whatever big animal would get it. And my mother would turn away.
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I just couldn't. I just I just can't believe that God would create it to be this way at the time. I didn't really know.
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But it's wonderful to see God made us vegetarians and animals are vegetarians. But all that's changed since the fall came into the world.
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It is not sinful to eat animals. Please do not misunderstand what I'm saying. Animals are tastes pretty good.
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I'm not saying you shouldn't shouldn't eat them. In fact, God commanded Peter, remember Acts chapter 11, when he he lifts the dietary restrictions, he tells
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Peter, kill, kill and eat. And so animals there are there for our dominion. We're not supposed to abuse or mistreat them, but they are there to be a food source for us.
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But that was not part of the original creation. And that's an important point, because in the other theories of Earth origins that are sadly dominant in the church, you have not only animals eating and killing each other, you have animals going extinct before the end of creation, before the end of the creation week is over.
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All right, let's move on to day for day for the creation of the sun, moon and stars. Verse 14, then
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God said, let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night and let them be for signs and seasons and for days and years and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth.
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And it was so very important phrase that you'll see why in a minute. Verse 16, then God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night.
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He made the stars also. There's a there's the biggest understatement in the Bible. He made the stars also.
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Verse 17, God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth and to rule over the day and over the night and to divide the light from the darkness.
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And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the fourth day. So day four is the day that God creates the sun, the moon and the stars.
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And one of the very common arguments made against the young earth six day creationist position is what is known as the distance starlight problem.
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Simply stated, it is this. We know that there are stars that we can see that are millions of light years away from the earth, and yet we can see them.
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I just wrote real quick. What is a light year? Well, a light year is the distance that a beam of light can travel in a year.
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And life's going pretty fast. Life's going about one hundred and eighty six thousand miles per second. And if you do the calculation, a light year, one light year is five trillion, eight hundred sixty five billion, six hundred ninety six million miles.
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And the proponents of an older say, we know that there are there are stars that we can see that are millions of light years away from us.
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And they'll say six thousand years is not enough time for the light to get here, because if it takes the light that long to get here, we wouldn't be able to see those things just yet.
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Now, one as an aside, I learned this from Jason Lyle, who is an astrophysicist, not because I'm an astrophysicist.
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He has pointed out in some of his lectures on this topic that the distant starlight problem is actually a problem for the older perspective as well, because the claim is that we can see galaxies and other sources of light that are over seventy eight billion light years away.
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And yet the current estimate for the age of the universe is somewhere between 15 and 25 billion years old.
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How do you like that for a billion years? And yet we can see things that are farther away than that.
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And so it's a problem for both sides, really. But I'm going to argue based on the texture. It's not a problem for us at all, because the
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Bible tells us why God created them in the first place. That's right in the text. If you haven't noticed it, I'll point it out here in just a second.
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Look at verses 15 to 17 again, we get the reason for which God created all this stuff out in space in the first place, verse 15, and let them be for lights and the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth.
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And it was so. Now, look at the very last sentence of verse 16. He made the stars also in verse 17.
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God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth.
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You know now now reverse back to verse 14. God said, let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night.
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Let them be for signs and seasons and for days and years. So here's my question.
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God, if God created all these things out in space and the stars that are so far away, he says in the passage to give light on the earth.
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And it was so not eventually to give light on the earth, but he created them to give light on the earth and that they would function for two things to be for signs and seasons and for days and years.
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Now, here's the question. To be for signs and seasons, days and years for who? For us.
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How can they be for signs and seasons and days and years if we can't see them? The point is, is
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God able to create distant stars and distant galaxies and distant whatever all else is out there with the light already in transit, already shining on the earth?
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Of course. God does not become subject to the physical laws that govern the things that he creates right after he creates them.
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And so often it's that seems to be the mindset that dominates the other perspective as if God created a universe or created a galaxy real far away or a star real far away from the earth.
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And he really wants the light to be shining here for us. And he has to go, man, it takes 78 million years for the light to get here.
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That's going to take forever. Or can God put it there and stretch the light, have it already in transit? That's what
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Henry Morris and the creation scientists have been pointing out for years. What does the text say? Why did he create those things?
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To give light on the earth. And it was so. You can already see them.
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But by the time the day is over, the light is already being given on the earth. Very, very important.
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God is able to do that, to create the heavenly bodies with the light already shining here.
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And so God is able to create the universe already mature. Now, here's an argument that if you ever get into a discussion with someone who really knows the other side, you're going to hear this argument.
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So you need to know how to respond to it. The astronomers who argue for an old order of creation will say, if the earth is young,
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God has lied to us. If the earth is young, you're saying you are saying that God is a liar because everything looks so old.
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Now, initially, you know, wait a minute. They're saying based upon the calculations we have made, those things are that far away.
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And it took the light that many millions of years to get here. There is no way everything could be that young.
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And if you're saying it's that young, then God has deceived us. And there's actually a very simple response to this.
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If you had met Adam seven days after he was created and said, hey,
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Adam, how's it going? I'm so -and -so. Nice to meet you. Adam, how old are you? What would be his answer?
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I'm seven days old. But he looks what? Probably about 30. He was created as a full grown man.
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Does it make any sense that you could then turn to God and say, he deceived me because he's only seven days old, but he looks like he's 30.
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No, the point is God is able to create a universe that is already mature. And they'll say they will respond to us and say, no, no, no.
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You're saying God created with the appearance of age and God is tricking us. No, no, it's not what the appearance of age.
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In fact, the universe looks young and creation scientists have been doing research for years and years and years to point out all the reasons why it looks young.
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God is not tricking us at all or deceiving us. God is able to spread things out and put them exactly where he wants them so that they are mature when he's done creating them so that they do what he wants them to do when he's done creating them.
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And it's important that we look at what the scriptures say about the purposes for which God created those heavenly lights.
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They were to give light upon the earth and to be for signs and seasons, days and years for us so that we could see them so that we would know when are we supposed to plant the cross again?
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Well, these constellations, they're pretty stable. The earth is tilted and it goes around and they learned that the stars are in certain positions at certain times of year.
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It was for our benefit. Why? God loves us. That's why he put those things up there so that we would know when to plant, when to harvest, when the year was coming to a conclusion, when the different times were for us.
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Not so that we could look at current rates of movement and current rates of different changes and try to figure out how old everything is.
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That's not why they're there. Now, you might respond, hey, but you've been telling us everything's young.
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Yeah, it's young, not because of calculations I've done based upon what I see now, but because based upon the exegesis of the word of God, we know it's not old.
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It's not based upon looking at how fast things are moving right now and then doing the calculations backwards. God is able to create a universe that is mature.
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He is able to create Adam as a full grown man. And as I said, if you had seen him right when he was created,
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God's not deceiving you. He simply wanted to create a full grown man. The object, the purpose is not for us to figure out how old he is based on natural processes today.
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And God is not tricking us at all. It's not the appearance of age. It's simply mature.
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God creates the universe, mature, the way he wanted it when he was done. Just remember that when you hear that phrase, you're saying that God just made it look like everything was old and you're
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God's deceiving us. No, you've missed the point for which God made those things. God made those things for us not to figure out how old they all are, but he made them for our benefit and he made them mature and already functioning.
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And that's what the text of scripture says, to give light upon the earth so that the light's already shining here at the end of that day.
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So that's the great catastrophic mistake that so many will make is they'll look at the rates with which things are moving today and try to do reverse calculations saying it therefore must be this old or that old.
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And that's a great error. We can't do that. That's not why God created those things. The stars and lights in the heavens have a very clear purpose that are spelled out in scripture for us to be for signs and seasons for days and years.
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They are not there for us to try to figure out how old they are based upon our observations. We believe how old they are based upon what
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God has told us in his word, in the Bible, because God made them mature.
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So that's what God did on creation day four. He created the sun, the moon, and the stars to divide the light, the day from the night and the greater light to rule the day, the sun and the lesser light to rule the night, the moon.
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And then he made the stars also, as I said, that's one of the great understatements because God created trillions and trillions of stars and billions of galaxies and distances that are unimaginable to us all by simply making them by his, by the word of his power.
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So let's walk back through in summary, these, these three days, creation day two, God creates the great expanse to divide the waters from the waters.
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God creates our atmosphere just right for all the living things that will soon be occupying it.
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Creation day three, God creates dry land, the seas and vegetation. He creates all the food sources for all the animals and for human beings.
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And then day four, the sun, the moon, and the stars. And then days five and six, he's going to be making the sea creatures.
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And then finally all the land creatures and then us. And then we, as we get into that, we're going to look at the institution of marriage, the command to be fruitful, multiply, and the subduing of the earth, taking dominion over the earth task that God has given to us.
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It all comes back to Genesis. The whole reason why we're here and all the basic institutions that we find on earth today.
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But God's creative genius is being displayed and his glory is being made known on these days of creation. But Adam and Eve are still not here yet.
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What a moment it must have been when Adam opened his eyes for the first time and saw not only God, but the glory of the unfallen great expanse to divide the waters from the waters and the dry land, the seas and all the vegetation, the sun, the moon and the stars and the other things we're going to read about on days five and six that God created.
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This is our history. This is where it all came from and where we came from. We are not our own.
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We are the special creation of a being of unimaginable power, might and wisdom. And in closing for this morning's sermon,
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I'd just like to read the first stanza of our closing hymn to you. Oh, Lord, my
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God, when I an awesome wonder, consider all the worlds my hands have made. I see the stars.
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I hear the rolling thunder, my power throughout the universe displayed. Then sings my soul, my savior,
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God, to thee. How great thou art. How great thou art. Then sings my soul, my savior,
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God, to thee. How great thou art. How great thou art. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we marvel at the incredible genius of your creation and the obvious goodness of your creation towards us, that this atmosphere is just the right thickness to put enough pressure upon us that we can live here safely, that the sun keeps us warm, but it doesn't shine too long or too brightly to make us too warm, that we don't get too cold at night, that you create a dry land that is stable for us to live on, to build our homes on.
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You give us water to drink. You give us food to eat. It's amazing to consider the things that your hands have made, the sun and the moon and the way they all function together with the earth to keep us stable and safe.
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And yet we also know and recognize that creation groans, longing for the revealing of the sons of God because the creation itself will be redeemed and will be loosed from its bondage and decay that has been subjected to because of the fall into sin.
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And yet it still reflects your glory and we see it everywhere all around us. We look forward to seeing your glory in its fullness in the day that we enter heavenly glory and see you face to face.
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Father, may we have hearts that believe and stand upon what your word says. May we reject as false and as fables and myths the ideas of sinful men who reject your word, whose starting point is the sufficiency of man and his mind to understand the world.
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Help us to see what scripture says about this, that our foolish hearts have been darkened by sin, that professing to be wise, we've become fools.
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We've changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man and birds and four -footed animals and creeping things.
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Is that really who we want to trust? Tell us where we came from and how things are the way they are or forgive your church for betraying the simple teaching of your holy word and may all of us be called back to it again and again and stand upon the sufficiency and clarity of what you have said to us and we ask in Jesus name.
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Amen. This is
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Pastor Patrick Hines of Brittle Heights Presbyterian Church located at 108 Brittle Heights Road in Kingsport, Tennessee and you've been listening to the
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Protestant Witness Podcast. Please feel free to join us for worship any Sunday morning at 11 a .m sharp where we open the word of God together, sing his praises, and rejoice in the gospel of our risen
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Lord. You can find us on the web at www .brittlewellheightspca .org
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and may the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.