I don't know whether it's a good or a bad sign that the title of my message this morning ends with part one. In the beginning, part one. Genesis chapter one, we're just gonna read the first three verses and then I'm gonna ask Jerry if he would to lead us in prayer, ask the Lord's blessing on the word. Genesis chapter one. Starting at verse 1, it says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, let there be light. And there was light. What you believe about this morning's text will establish the way that you see the world, the worldview of essentially every person who walks the face of the earth is shaped by just some essential questions that we've all learned to ask ourselves. Who am I? Why am I here? What's wrong with the world? How can it be made right? Genesis 1, verse 1, the very first words of Scripture are foundational to begin to answer those kinds of worldview questions. It is a starting point guiding our pursuit of truth. If you want to know who you are, why you are who you are, and understand what is happening in the world and how it can be made right, you have to start right here. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. You have to accept that statement as a rational and literal truth. And if you do not accept this as truth, then Genesis chapter one verse two through the end of Revelation really has nothing informative to say to you. But here is truth. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Some folks have abandoned this truth in an effort to embrace or to get along with those today who reject the Bible as God's Word. Rejectors of Scripture have in fact rejected that God exists at all. They have tried to replace Him with billions and billions of years of evolutionary development. You cannot believe in a Creator God and evolutionary development and be logically consistent. You either believe God created or you have joined with those who reject His Word. Some have abandoned the truth of this text in an effort to get along with some who say that they accept the Bible, but only accept it as essentially a wise myth. There's a growing philosophy in the world today in which the Bible is revered, it is studied, it is taught and lectured on in thoughtful and insightful ways. But it is ultimately seen as man-made literature aimed at essentially helping us to reach up toward the divine, right? To grow and embrace ideal humanity. Those who accept and revere the Bible but only uphold it as some man-made wisdom myth, not as being literally true, destroy the very worldview they claim to promote. If in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth is not literally true, then none of the events of Scripture or promises of Scripture can be upheld as literally true. Are you really a sinner under the wrath of God? Is Jesus really a Savior who has come to redeem you? Do you have any literal hope for eternal life? Scripture exists as a divinely inspired message pointing us to the ultimate truth of Jesus Christ as the Savior of sinners. Anyone embracing the Bible as anything less than literally true, they will make humanity the arbiter of truth. Even biblically friendly human philosophers will point you to a hopeless end. They will point you inward as a kind of self-help guide. They will not point you to Jesus as your only hope and savior. And yet here in the text, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. We either give that statement it's due, we either agree with this statement, or essentially everything else is lost. If it is untrue, if this is only symbolic, then everything in the Bible that comes after Genesis 1-1 is on shifting sands. It is destined to crumble. This is a starting point of divine truth. In fact, without Genesis 1, we lose the basis for long-accepted and long-held traditions, even some of seemingly minor significance. For example, our seven-day week is based on the fact it's rooted in Genesis 1's account of creation. Even deeply rooted Christian truth is based on a literal understanding of creation. If Genesis 1-1 is not literally true, then we have no real basis for many of the things that we believe that flow out of this introduction. What we believe about God being a Trinity, how we interact with creation, marriage and family and human sexuality and personal identity are all based in Genesis chapter 1. The fundamental truths about humanity and sin and the fall and our need for salvation comes from a literal reading of Genesis chapter three. The origin of nations is found in Genesis 10. The origin of language is found in Genesis 11. Starting here and going forward, the word of God provides us the answers for our worldview questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What is wrong with the world? What is the way that it can be made right? Scripture says you are a special creation of God. You are made for His glory, but sin is what has gone wrong, and the hope for setting it right is Jesus. It tells us to trust the Son of God as Savior from our sins. It gives us, going forward, the expectation that He would come. It tells us the truth that He has come. And it gives us the hope that He's coming again. He will be Savior King over all those languages and nations. Almost everything we believe gets its starting point right here. Almost everything. Genesis 1.1 is the starting point for almost everything. Everything except God himself. This tells us that God is eternal. This mind-blowing opening declaration of scripture does not bother opening a debate. It asserts facts. The existence of God is not a scientific question to be debated. It is not a hypothesis to be investigated. It is not a philosophical thought that we need to ponder. It is simply a truth to be accepted. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Scripture has nothing to say about God's origin because there is nothing to say about God's origin. God has no origin story. When you abandon speculation and you open revelation, when you open the Bible to the very first words of Scripture, you are met here face to face with the reality of God's eternal existence. Moses, the man who was inspired to write these words, accepted the eternal existence of God as the basis for truth. In the next book in Scripture, in Exodus chapter three, Moses is confronted by God and told to go into Egypt and deliver his people from slavery. And it was at that moment that Moses asked a question, the answer of which, was a defining moment for Moses' own worldview. Moses said, okay, if I go, when I get there, who do I tell them sent me there? Moses asked this all powerful God essentially, who are you? And God's answer was, I am that I am. The creator God described and defined himself using what we call state of being words. In English, those words are am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been, right? I am that I am. I am that only one who is in the perpetual state of being. God is, God was, God always will be. When the eternal God revealed himself to Moses, that moment turned Moses' life upside down. It readjusted his worldview. Everything Moses was and did and hoped found a defining moment in the revelation of an eternal creator God. And so take a note for your own life from Moses. What you believe about what is eternal is either going to give purpose to your life or it is going to strip all purpose from your life. Listen, something, something has to be eternal. The Bible argues it's God. It asserts it's God. God is eternal. Modern atheists argue, essentially, we don't know. We can't know. We can't answer. Evolutionists will argue for the theory of progressive development, the evolution of the species, but when you get to the point of saying, well, it had to start somewhere, tell me about that, that's when it gets fun. They have a very difficult time agreeing on what we would call the first cause. Some you're familiar with will argue for what they call the Big Bang. That's the first cause, that essentially posits that before there was anything, nothing existed, and nothing kept getting hotter and colder, and so nothing was expanding and contracting, and it became volatile, and then nothing collided with nothing, and suddenly there was something. Life explodes out of the starting gate at that point, and we're off to the human race. Right? You can hear the announcer in the background. It's amoeba and protozoa that are taking an early lead. They're neck and neck. Now they're arms and neck. Now they're arms, legs and neck. As widely accepted as evolution is, when you get to arguments about first cause, it descends into absolute lunacy. One scientist, an atheist named Fred Hoyle, famously noted that the statistical chances of evolution evolving complex life on Earth are so outrageous, he said it would be like a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747. This becomes even more unlikely when you take it back to first cause and they say, well, there was no junkyard and there was no tornado. That can't work, and so Hoyle's solution was to reject the randomness of evolution for a hypothesis he calls panspermia, which is the idea that life on Earth was seeded here by intelligent life somewhere else in the universe. In other words, primitive life started when spaceships showed up and planted it here like a garden. I had a chemistry professor who bought into this. He actually endorsed a similar idea. He said it would be really neat if human life existed on our planet as an intergalactic penal colony. That's right, that it is a prison for outer space felons, which when you look at human culture and sin, makes more sense than a lot of options out there. the world will apparently grasp a hold of and hold to any origin story that does not deal with an eternal creator God as the first cause at the center of it. G.K. Chesterton famously said, and I'm paraphrasing here, it is assumed that when people stop believing in God, they won't believe in anything. But the reality is even worse. When people stop believing in God, they will believe anything. You see how man-made inventions answer the basic questions of who am I? Why am I here? What's wrong with the world? What can solve it? Its answers are, well, you're nothing. You are the equivalent of a statistical accident. There is no purpose. Nothing's gone wrong with the world because there was nothing ever right with the world. The solution, there probably isn't one. If there is a solution, it's gonna have to come from somewhere inside that statistical accident of a heart and mind of yours. And so Genesis asserts God as eternal and it asserts God as the creator. You can have a world started by nothing striking nothing and making something. continuing in development over time by chance and luck, but that is a world where there is no meaning, where there is no solution to the emptiness of life, there's no creator, there's no one to answer to, there's no right or wrong, there's no hope, there's no meaning, or you can have the creator God as the first cause, as the uncaused cause of all things. Essentially, you can believe that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And then through that foundational truth, through obedience to your creator, you will find meaning. Jeremiah 22, 17 says, ah, Lord God, behold, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. There is nothing too hard for you. Isaiah 44 verse 24 says, the Lord, your Redeemer, who formed you from the womb, I am the Lord who makes all things, who stretches out the heavens all alone, who spreads abroad the earth by myself. Even the end of scripture, Revelation 4.11, it says, you are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power for you created all things and for your will they exist and were created. The word of God asserts that God himself is the creator of all things and he did it for his pleasure. He did it according to his own will and he did it for his own glory. That does not mean that God was somehow missing something when He created the world. He lacked nothing. He needed nothing. God was and is complete in Himself. And yet, creation demonstrates the glory of God. Psalm 19 verse 1 says, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows His handiwork. creation declares God's glory. In fact, Isaiah 43.7 even says that humanity was made and formed for the glory of God, though we fall woefully short of it. We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God. So the Bible does tell us that God created. Scripture also tells us how God created. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth is actually a clear statement about how God created. The word created in verse one here is the Hebrew word bara, which means to create something new. It is only ever applied to the creative acts of God himself to create something new. Some of y'all are pretty creative. I would make a distinction and argue, you're not creative, you're crafty. When we take art supplies and we turn them into a cool scrapbook or something like that, that's crafting. If any of you guys have ever, in your youth, took one of those little plastic models of a car and you assembled them with rubber cement, Once you got your fingers apart again, you could look at it and be pleased what it is you had put together, but you were not being creative. You were assembling parts that were sent to you. And if you were like me, you assembled them in the wrong ways, right? But the pieces, you put the pieces together, but you didn't make the pieces yourself. God is not limited to crafting, to making things, using other things. God alone can create. Barah, this word for create means to create something new. Literally to create something from nothing. In fact, verse 3 tells us specifically how God accomplished this creative act. Verse 3 says, God said, let there be light. And there was light. Again, I wanna remind you how your view of the text impacts your worldview in every other area. We've seen these opening verses describe an eternal, powerful, creative God, and going forward in scripture, we are told to expect that to continue. The hope of every Christian is the return of the Lord in glory, the one who died for our sins and rose from death to defeat sin for us and is coming back for us. And by the way, If you don't believe the literal truthfulness of these texts about what God has done, then you don't have a basis for believing in the literal truthfulness of the expectation of what God will do someday. Just like Genesis describes an eternal, powerful, creative God, Revelation declares Jesus as God, returning in glory as the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the always existent One who is eternal, who says, I will make all things new. And He's not limited to remodeling this fallen world. The all-powerful God who spoke the world into existence can make from nothing a new heaven and new earth someday. And in that day, the Creator God will be the recreator. He will set all things right. Yet if He will set all things right, that implies there are some things wrong, doesn't it? And so let's consider what's next. God is eternal, God is creator, and God is wise. A reading of Genesis chapter one through chapter three makes it evident where the world went wrong. And it wasn't with God's creative acts. God created wisely. He created well. He established order. It was all good. In fact, on each day of creation, it shows how that God creates and then God declares. He makes all things well and he declares that all those things are good. That was his plan from the beginning. Look again at verse two. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Okay, there is a lot of confusion about how to understand Genesis chapter one, verse two. It's explaining, you know, Some people read it and say, well, is it explaining that God didn't actually create from nothing? Because it says that there's an earth that was without form, that is shapeless, it was void, it was empty. So does this mean that God took this formless, empty planet and he made something of it? I don't think that's the understanding of this verse. The best understanding of verses one and two is that there was initially an eternity past, nothing other than God himself, and God, for his own purposes, made everything. And he began in verse one by making the heavens and the earth, but the initial stage of earth's creation was shapeless and empty and so God continues in that creative act in verse two and he's gonna give it shape and he's gonna make it habitable and he's going to fill it with life. We can sometimes get caught up in trying to preach what the Bible doesn't say. That's called exegeting the white spaces. There's nowhere that's more true than between Genesis chapter 1 verse 1 and verse 2. Some folks want to put millions or billions of years in there between verses 1 and 2. C.I. Schofield's study Bible popularized what's called the gap theory, that there is a large gap between verses 1 and 2, and it's an effort to make the Bible fit with modern thought and the expectation of scientists, right? When evolution was widely accepted as billions and billions of years of developing life as we know it, right? And we have this fossil record of things on earth that have died and been fossilized. The gap theory is the view that God created a fully functional earth with all kinds of animals, including dinosaurs and other creatures we know from the fossil record. And then the theory goes that something happens after verse one to destroy that earth completely. Some speculate it's the fall of Satan to earth. So that the earth became without form and void and then God started all over. So verse one was creation, verse two is a recreation, billions and billions of years later. And that accounts for the fossil record and things like that. Let me assure you, anywhere the Bible disagrees with modern thought, it is modern thought that needs to change. This verse serves as yet another example. You cannot fiddle with the facts of Genesis and have the rest of the Bible make sense. The Apostle Paul says in Romans 5, verse 12, that it is because of sin that death entered into the world. He's talking about the fall in Genesis 3, a couple of chapters after this, when Adam and Eve rebelled against God. to insert billions of years between verses one and two for the development of the fossil record, when you hear the word fossil, think about dead things, is putting billions of years of death before the entrance of sin into the world. This is a massive problem for a theological consistency of Scripture. How can death be the consequence of sin if death pre-exists sin? Right? If we have death in chapter 1, and sin doesn't come until chapter 3. Couldn't that mean we could address our sin problem and it still wouldn't solve our death problem? If we separate these issues, how does Jesus' victory over death in the grave assure us His victory over sin? You know what solves this problem? Just taking the creation account at face value. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. We've seen God is eternal. God is creator. God is wise. And finally, God is relational. And it doesn't necessarily... appear obvious to us all through this text, Moses does something very interesting in the Hebrew language. He uses a common word for God, the word El, but he uses a masculine plural form of the word, Elohim, right? And that's interesting because throughout the text, Moses also uses singular male pronouns for God. He uses he. So for example, look at verse five. God, Elohim, masculine plural, called the light day and the darkness he, masculine singular, called night. It's evident Moses is trying to present a creator God as singular and plural. There is a oneness and a manyness about Him. When God speaks to Himself in this chapter down in verse 26, He says to Himself, let us make man in our image after our likeness. And it's this image of God that's the basis for humanity being created in multiple ways. Verse 27, it's male and female. We are made to have relationships because God himself is relational. And I want you to think about this for a moment. Before God created the world, before God created the world, before he made humans, at the point when God was entirely alone and with himself, was God relational? Yes, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit lived in perfect harmony in relationship with one another. In fact, in John 17 verse 24, God the Son is going to pray to the Father and basically say, you loved me even before creation. In our text in verse two, it is the Holy Spirit of God that is hovering over the top of the waters of the preformed earth. He's ready to execute the divine creative plan. Father, Son, and Spirit distinct from one another, yet perfectly and permanently united with one another. And then the foundation for all human relationships is found in this relationship that God has with himself. In fact, many of the folks today who say that they embrace the Bible but see it as a set of, you know, it's just wisdom myths, the part of the Bible that they want to hold to be true are the parts that essentially they see as saying, be nice to each other. Okay, why? Do it because God said so? Is that a good enough answer if God is not literally real and creation didn't literally happen this way? Why do we need to embrace being nice to each other? Is it because being kind to our fellow man is the height of human achievement? If that's so, who says so? The basis for human relationships begins here in Genesis one and it unfolds through the rest of scripture and here is the basis, the foundation. It is that the creator God who exists eternally in perfect relation to himself has created us to live in relationship to him and to one another. He's created us and commanded us Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength and love your neighbor as yourself. That's the story that begins to unfold in Genesis chapter one, verse one. And as we continue reading, we'll find the eternal, creative, wise, relational God was willing to condescend to humanity, to walk with his creatures, Adam and Eve, in the twilight, in the cool of the day, in the Garden of Eden. He was relational with them. Even after humanity rebelled against him, This Creator God was so determined to reconcile and have a relationship that He promised a Redeemer to rescue them from their sins. Ultimately, that promise is fulfilled when the Creator God comes in the flesh, entering humanity in the person of Jesus Christ, God the Son, who lived a perfect sinless life, who died on behalf of sinners, who rose from the grave, reconciling us to his Father, so we have a restored relationship with him. Who are you? Why are you here? What's wrong with this world? How can it be made right? You find the answers to those questions by starting here and believing what it says. And then follow the revelation of God forward to Jesus. And when you find Him, you find all your answers.