How the World was Created - Genesis - December 14th, 2025 (Sermon Transcript)

Well, if you have a Bible, go ahead and open to Genesis chapter 1. If you don't have a Bible, the passage is on the sermon handout. There are Bibles below the seats as well.

This morning, we're continuing our series through Genesis. And last week, we started with the first two verses, and I'm just going to read them again for us quickly. You may have heard these before.

They're pretty iconic. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

What an incredible beginning. I think it's important to note, like we talked about last week, that it all starts with God, the eternal, infinite, all-powerful, perfectly good creator of everything.

The Bible is not really ultimately about us and what we're supposed to do. It's really about God and what he has already done. And this week, our focus will be on how God created and what God created.

Over the centuries, many people have offered different interpretations of the book of Genesis. We talked a bit about this last week, but I think it's really important.

So it's really important to emphasize and clarify how we're going to be approaching the book of Genesis. So let me say it again. As we go through the book of Genesis, we're going to interpret it the way that Jesus did.

We're going to interpret it the way that Jesus did. When Jesus talked about the book of Genesis, he talked about the people in Genesis as if they were real people.

He talked about the events in Genesis as if they were real events, exactly as they're described in the book of Genesis. And we, after all, are followers of Jesus. And Jesus was and is and always will be infallible.

He makes no mistakes ever. And so if anybody knows how to read Genesis correctly, it's him. And he reads it as a straightforward historical narrative, a straightforward literal account of a series of historical events.

So that's how we're going to read it. I remember sitting in one of my Old Testament classes when I was doing my undergraduate work in biblical studies, and the professor was this guy named Dr. Boyd.

And the saying amongst the students was, avoid Boyd. That is, if at all possible, avoid taking his classes because he's really, really hard. And turns out that was true.

He was really hard, somewhat dull. He was one of those brilliant professors who did not know how to speak to people who were less intelligent and less educated than he was.

I also remember him doing these PowerPoint presentations in every class, and he would always pick a color theme that was just absolutely inexplicable and unjustifiable.

Like, like he would do maroon slides, like maroon background with bright red lettering. And it was like, so it was like barely visible or dark blue with light blue lettering on the slides. And you're sitting there thinking, why did he do that?

And then you look and he'd have the same like color scheme for his polo shirts. So you'd have like a dark blue polo shirt with a light blue undershirt. So obviously a kind of a quirky guy.

And very difficult at times to understand. But thankfully I managed to understand and remember a few things.

One time he shared about a research project he had worked on where he got together with a bunch of scholars and scientists and they built a computer program to analyze the book of Genesis.

They wanted to figure out definitively what is the genre of Genesis. So that it could be correctly interpreted. For any text, you have to understand the genre.

Is it some kind of poetry? Some kind of mythology? Is it a metaphor or is it actual history?

So these scholars built a program to analyze the vocabulary, the grammar, the syntax, all the relevant features of the book. And the program input data from thousands of ancient texts.

All kinds of poetry and mythology and history from that era, from that location in the world. And after the computer ran the analysis, they found a perfect match.

According to the data, the Book of Genesis, with 96 percent certainty, is historical narrative, just like Jesus thought it was.

This, what we are reading, what we are studying, is the straightforward, literal truth about how the universe came into being.

5:35

God Spoke

So let's read it together now. Please stand for the reading of God's word. I'll read the text for us.

Genesis chapter 1, verses 3 through 10. And God said, let there be light. And there was light.

And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.

And there was evening, and there was morning, the first day. And God said, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters. And let it separate the waters from the waters.

And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse heaven.

And there was evening, and there was morning, the second day. And God said, let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place. And let the dry land appear.

And it was so. God called the dry land earth. And the waters that were gathered together, He called seas.

And God saw that it was good. This is the word of the Lord. Please be seated and join me as I pray for us.

Lord, as we approach your word, I pray that you'd give us faith to believe it, wisdom to understand it, wisdom to apply it to our lives. Help us Lord to believe it, to treasure it, to remember it, and to live in accordance with it. This is truth.

This is reality. So God, I pray that you would help us to encounter you through this truth. I pray in the name of Jesus.

Amen. When it comes to the question of how God created, you can see in the text that the answer is very simple. He spoke.

Notice how each paragraph begins with the same words, and God said, verse 3, verse 6, verse 9, and God said. First, he separates the night from the day by creating light to dispel darkness.

Then he separates the waters above from the waters below to create the heavens and the earth. And then he separates the waters on earth in order to create dry land.

And after all that is complete, the message we get from Genesis is after all that is complete, the earth is finally habitable. It's then ready for the next few days of creation where God makes the plants and animals and finally makes Adam and Eve.

And all of this begins with the word of God. It all begins with the word of God. It does not begin with pre-existing materials.

Any materials that God is working with in our text this morning were made out of nothing by God in verses 1 through 2. And then he begins dividing and separating and adding to the things that he has made.

But it does not begin with pre-existing materials. When you and I create something, we have to start with pre-existing materials like wood or stone or fabrics or machines or computers.

We create as human beings, as creatures, as finite beings, we create by reorganizing what already exists. But God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing. So the universe, what this means is that the universe did not exist eternally alongside God.

The universe is not part of God. The universe does not emanate from God. It's important to understand these things because they eliminate many potential errors.

Some people believe that the universe is eternal, but Genesis teaches that all of space and all of time had a definite beginning. These things did not exist before God spoke them into existence.

This definite beginning is also confirmed by modern physics. There's a ton of remarkable evidence showing that the universe had a definite beginning.

I saw a video just yesterday with a very famous, renowned physicist named Brian Cox, who is not a Christian.

And yet, in this video, he admits that the evidence says the universe had a beginning, and if the universe has a beginning, it begs the question, who caused it to begin? It throws the doors wide open to God.

And Cox explains, in this video, how Einstein, in developing his general theory of relativity, did not want the universe to have a beginning because he did not want to believe there was a God.

And so, as much as he could, he tried to avoid it, and yet his theory demanded it. And there is a ton of other evidence that demands the same conclusion. Everything that exists had a beginning, a definite beginning.

There is, for example, the red shift that we observe when we look at the stars first discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929. Anybody ever heard the name Hubble? Like the Hubble Space Telescope?

Hubble was the one who first noted that when you observe the stars, the galaxies around us, there's a red tint to it, which indicates that they are moving away from us. Everything that we look at is moving away from us.

And he rightly concluded, and this has been verified countless times since, that the universe therefore must be expanding. And it couldn't have been expanding forever because it already would have died out by now if it had been expanding forever.

If it's expanding, that means you could rewind, hit the rewind button on time and go back as it contracts and contracts and contracts to a definite beginning of space and time.

So a ton of evidence from modern physics supports what the Bible is teaching here. All of space, all of time had a definite beginning out of nothing. And we know that God caused it to begin to exist.

And yet, contrary to modern physics, the universe is not random. The universe did not pop into existence out of nothing for no reason without a cause. Light did not appear by accident.

The oceans did not form by chance. You are not here by accident. You are not here by accident.

We see in Genesis that God creates intentionally. Everything he makes is on purpose, including us. So if you are made on purpose, you have to ask, what is my purpose?

Everything that is made intentionally, purposefully by God has a purpose. And so we need to get clear about what our purpose is. Everything, according to Genesis, came into being by the creative power of the word of God.

When you put all of this together, you get a picture of what theologians call divine aseity, divine aseity. It's one of the attributes of God. What it means is that there's nothing bigger than God.

There's nothing greater than God. There's nothing more fundamental than God. There's nothing equally as big as God.

There's nothing equally as great as God. There's nothing equally as fundamental with God. There's simply nothing comparable to God.

As one scholar puts it, God is the sole ultimate reality in the universe. God is the sole ultimate reality in the universe. He reigns supreme over everything because God is responsible for the creation of everything.

Do you understand what this means? Do you realize the significance of this? We worship a God who created light by simply speaking a word.

So when he gives a commandment, he is the kind of being who should be obeyed without a second thought. When he makes a promise, he's the kind of being who should be trusted. When he decides to act, there is nothing he cannot do.

If God wants you to get the job, you'll get the job. If God wants your tumor to disappear, your tumor will disappear. It doesn't matter what the doctor says.

It doesn't matter what the statistical probability is. It doesn't matter how cells normally behave. If God speaks, it is done.

So many times, we find ourselves not believing that, don't we? We become sad or stressed or hopeless or despondent because we think there's no way out. There's no way to fix things.

We look at situations in our lives and we think, well, this would have to happen and that would have to happen. It's just never going to work. But if God is real, if God is who Genesis says he is, there is no obstacle he cannot overcome.

If he can speak the oceans into existence, then he can fix your life. No problem. That's the power of the Word of God.

So pray accordingly. Read accordingly. Here we see the incredible power of the Word of God, simply speaking everything into existence.

And then listen to this from Jesus in Mark 7.13. In Mark 7.13, Jesus is having a discussion with the Jewish leaders, and he's calling them out on some stuff.

He says, Thus making void the Word of God by your tradition that you have handed down, and many such things you do. But notice what he calls it.

Thus making void, he doesn't say the Old Testament, he doesn't say the Law of Moses, he doesn't say the Law and Prophets, he says, Thus making void the Word of God by your tradition.

You see, Jesus is saying that the Old Testament is the literal words of God. There's another passage where Jesus quotes from the Book of Genesis, and he's quoting from a portion of Genesis written by Moses.

But he doesn't say, As Moses said, when he quotes it, he says, As the Creator said. As the Creator said, and then he quotes from Genesis. Jesus viewed the Old Testament as the literal words of God.

So think about what this means. God created the universe by speaking a word, and the Bible is also the Word of God. Your Bible is just as much the Word of God as verse 3 and verse 6 and verse 9.

When God said, Let there be light, his word went forth with power, and the Gospel of Matthew, for example, has that same power. Philippians has that same power, and so does James and Jude and all the other books of the New Testament.

The Book of Jonah has that same power. The Book of Nahum and Habakkuk, all of them, they all contain the words of God. The infinitely powerful, creatively powerful words of God.

So why don't we read it? Why do so many Christians just let it sit there collecting dust on their shelves? The creation account reminds us of what the Word of God can do.

So read it, speak it, memorize it, study it, savor it. If you're not reading the Word of God, you're not going to experience the power of God in your life. Let me say that again.

If you're not reading the Word of God, you're not going to experience the power of God in your life. God creates by His Word.

He created light, He created water, He created oceans, He creates new hearts and new minds for His people, He creates love for Him and a love for His people, He creates a desire to do what is right, and the power to do what is right, He creates

wisdom and righteousness and love and hope and peace, He creates all of these things by His Word. And He can do it like that. He can do it in a moment, He can do it in an hour.

How many testimonies have you heard from people whose lives have been changed drastically, completely changed in a moment by the power of God? He can free people from 20 years of addiction just like that.

He can change everything in a moment or an hour or a day.

19:32

Six Literal Days

In our passage, we see God doing His magnificently powerful creative work day by day. That's how God created these things in single 24-hour days.

As it says in verse 5, and there was evening and there was morning, the first day, verse 8, and there was evening and there was morning, the second day, and so on, all the way through the six days of creation.

Now, let me tell you why these should be understood as actual days, instead of epochs or ages or some kind of metaphor.

Obviously, if you pay attention to the world around us, modern science teaches that the universe came into being over millions and billions of years, not in six days, like the Bible says that it does.

And so many Christians have then gone back to the book of Genesis and said, well, obviously, scientists have discovered that all this stuff took millions and billions of years.

So maybe when it says day in Genesis, it really means age or epoch or something like that. So maybe we should interpret it that way. But we shouldn't.

Let me tell you why. First of all, the word yom translated day here, it usually means day in the normal sense of the word. It can mean other things, but it usually means day.

And when it's accompanied by a number, like the first day and the second day and so on, when the Hebrew word yom is used like that, it always means a literal 24 hour day. We have hundreds of examples of that throughout the Old Testament.

It means a literal 24 hour day every single time. It's accompanied by some sort of number, like second day or 40 days or seven days. It's also important to note the use of evening and morning.

And we see that refrain throughout these three days of creation. There was evening and there was morning the first day. There was evening, there was morning the second day.

Days have an evening and a morning. Epochs do not. Ages do not.

Billions of years do not. There are Hebrew words that Moses could have used to describe ages or epochs or even billions of years. He easily could have said that, but he didn't, because that's not what he meant.

So why do we doubt it? In light of all of this evidence, why do so many Christians struggle to believe that creation took place in six days? I think there are two main reasons, and both of them, in my opinion, are bad reasons.

The first reason is because of the loud and bold and ubiquitous claims of modern science. Modern science claims that Genesis is just wrong. They say the universe came into existence uncaused around 20 billion years ago, and they specify uncaused.

Even though science cannot prove that, that's not a scientific claim at all. That's a philosophical or a theological claim, but they throw it in there and they pretend like it's science, and many people believe them.

And so people think Genesis has to be wrong. If scientists keep saying this, and if they keep saying that they're certain about it, that all this stuff took millions and billions of years, Genesis can't be read literally.

If we're gonna believe it at all, it has to be taken metaphorically so that it can fit with modern science. But what if God just created everything in a mature state? What if God just created everything with an appearance of age?

For example, if you look at the creation account, you can see that God did not create Adam as an embryo. When Adam was created, he was created as a full grown man, say 25 year old man.

And so he appeared to be 25 years old when in reality he was one day old. And so perhaps God created lights in the oceans, in the earth in the same way. He created them mature.

So when scientists study them today, they may appear to be millions or billions of years old when in reality they are only thousands of years old.

That's one good possibility that preserves a literal reading of Genesis, and it fits really well with some theories of modern science. But what if modern science is just wrong? What if it's just incorrect?

What if their methods for measuring dates are not as accurate as they think they are? What if their theories aren't as proven as they think they are? Here's the truth that many scientists do not want you to know.

There are many, many brilliant, well credentialed scientists who disagree with evolutionary theory in modern cosmology. The truth is that evolution has not been proven.

Often when you say that it hasn't been proven, then you'll get yelled at or people will call you names, or they'll just say it louder, like, no, it has been proven. But the truth is, there are many scientists who disagree with it.

There is no universal consensus. Take Dr. James Tuer, for example.

James Tuer is an organic chemist at Rice University, and he has published more papers in his field than probably any other scientists on Earth. Over 800 papers. He's one of the most cited scientists on the planet.

He holds more than 120 patents. He was named one of the most 50 influential scientists in the world today. And he believes the book of Genesis.

Because he understands the science, he knows that life cannot spontaneously arise from non-life. And there are hundreds of scientists like him all over the world. People like Dr.

Russell Humphreys, who has a PhD in Physics from LSU. Dr. Jason Lyle, PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Colorado.

Dr. Andrew Snelling, PhD in Geology from the University of Sydney. More and more, scientists are coming to doubt or just plain deny theories like the Big Bang Theory or the Darwinian Theory of Evolution.

Scientists may have called people names for doubting these theories 10 or 20 years ago, but many of them have now changed their minds. I've read some of their works.

There is a massive movement in modern science where they are admitting that all of these theories that are in conflict with the Book of Genesis, they're admitting that they don't add up, they don't work, they don't explain consciousness, the

timelines don't work. There is no mechanism for life to come from non-life. So scientists are changing their minds about all of these theories.

Why should we reinterpret Genesis to fit with so many of these theories that so many scientists don't even believe? Well, we shouldn't. We should not reinterpret Genesis to fit with these theories.

That would be a foolish thing to do. It also creates a very dangerous precedent. If you can turn Genesis into a metaphor, you can turn anything in the Bible into a metaphor.

And that may be why some people do it. They prefer to take the Bible metaphorically because it gives them a certain kind of freedom. You can just go to the Bible to find what you want.

If the Bible is metaphorical, if it's just an allegory, if it's just a myth, if it's just nice stories with moral lessons, then you just browse through it, find some inspiration or encouragement.

It doesn't matter exactly what the words say or mean, as long as you find something you like that's nice and helpful. So if that's the way that you view the Bible, it doesn't really matter what it means. It just matters what it means to you.

You can read the Bible or you can just like scroll Instagram and look for inspirational quotes. It's the same thing. If that's how you read the Bible, you can reinterpret or mythologize any of the parts of it that you don't like.

So for example, if you don't like what the Bible says about the roles of men and women, if it offends your feminist sensibilities, you can just say, well, that part, you know, that part, I love the Bible, I'm a Christian, but that part is not, that's

not like universal truth from God. You've got to look at the big picture. Paul just wrote that part because that's what they believed in in their culture. But ultimately, the Bible is about equality.

And you just got to look at the big picture. And if you don't like what the Bible says about homosexuality or adultery or gender or lying or the nation of Israel, you can just use the same tactics to evade whatever truth you don't want to believe.

You say, oh, why take that part metaphorically? But here's the problem. If that's how you approach the Bible, the Bible is no longer the authority.

You are. You decide what's really true. The Bible no longer has the power to challenge you or change you or correct you.

The Bible is just there to tell you what you want to hear and what you already believe. And for many people, that all starts with the Book of Genesis. People want Genesis to tell them what they already believe.

And that's a dangerous game to play. Instead, we can just take the Word of God for what it is. The Word of God.

The true, infallible, authoritative, glorious, beautiful Word of God. We can believe it and embrace it, and we will find that it is beautiful and good.

30:27

Worship the Creator

Let me show you a little bit of the beauty and goodness that we see radiating through these first few verses. Just a little bit, and then we'll be done. The first thing that God creates is light.

It says, let there be light. And later in the Bible, light is described as life-giving, truth-giving, gladdening, and pure.

The scholar Derek Kidner points out just how fitting it is for light to be the first thing that God creates in Genesis, because if you go back to verse 2, it says that the world is without form and void. It is chaotic and dark.

So God introduces life-giving, truth-giving, gladdening, pure light. That is the first step in God's glorious creation of the world. And it's a good first step.

In verse 4, it says that God saw that the light was good. In verse 10, it says that God views his creation as good. So let me ask you this.

Do you view God's creation as good? Do you marvel at it and treasure it and enjoy it? As Christians, we should be the first people to savor and enjoy God's good creation.

And yet, at the same time, we can recognize that God's good creation is not how God meant it to be. There's almost a tension here, right? We read the book of Genesis, and God's creating the world, and he's like, it's good, it's good, it's good.

And then you look outside, and you're like, gosh, this world's messed up.

All these people hating each other and killing each other and leaving trash everywhere, and there's hurricanes and all kinds of natural disasters, and like, God said this is good, but it doesn't seem good. And you might feel a tension.

But the tension is resolved when you remember that God sent Jesus into the world to redeem and restore us, and not just us, but the Bible says, the whole creation.

God sent Jesus to redeem and restore the whole creation so that it could be how he always intended it to be. So that's part of the hope of the gospel, as that Jesus doesn't just come to fix us in our broken lives. He came to fix the entire universe.

But it all starts with us. It all starts with him restoring the creation one person at a time. So the creation is good.

Even though it's struggling right now, God's gonna fix it and restore it. So again, Christians should be the first people to savor and enjoy God's good creation. But there's a difference between enjoying and appreciating.

There's a difference between that and worshiping. I talked to a pastor I know who has a church down the road in Petaluma, and he's spent a bunch of time trying to get to know the non-religious people in the area.

So he interacted with a lot of non-Christians and had a lot of long conversations with them and how they view the world.

And there are many, many people in Sonoma County who would say that they're not religious, they don't go to church, they don't identify with any religion. But this pastor found something very interesting.

They may reject Christianity, they may reject traditional religions, but they absolutely have a religion. It's called climate change. That's their religion.

Truly, this pastor has spent hours talking to people and found that's it. That's what they believe in. That's what they're hoping in.

That's what they're working for. That's where they get their moral values. That's where they get their view of the world.

Climate change. They are committed. They're passionate.

They have faith in it. And why do people get so passionate about climate change and environmental causes? Well, they're protecting the earth.

They're protecting creation. And yet, they love creation, but they have no interest in or love for their creator. They love the creation, but they don't love God.

That's the fundamental error made by humans since the very beginning. The Apostle Paul wrote about this in Romans 1.25. He said, They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.

Worshiped and served the creation rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. That's what it always comes down to. You can worship the Creator God, or you can reject him and worship the things that he created instead.

You can worship the stars through astronomy. You can worship the rocks with crystals. You can worship the earth like ancient pagans.

Or, you can worship yourself like so many people do today. You can believe in yourself. You can prioritize yourself.

You can exalt yourself. You can love yourself. You can worship yourself.

But the book of Genesis was written to show that God reigns supreme over all creation, and He is the only proper object of our worship.

When the book of Genesis was written, it was very common for people to worship the gods of the sea, the gods of the forest, to worship the gods of the fields, and most supreme amongst their gods. I forget their names at the moment.

But those cultures around the Israelites at this time, the biggest and most powerful gods were the gods of the heavens. And yet, what does it say here in Genesis? That God made the heavens.

That he reigned supreme even over the most powerful gods of the ancient peoples. Jesus said that the first and greatest commandment is to love God. To love God.

To glorify God. The Bible talks everywhere about glorifying God. And what we see in the book of Genesis is that God is glorious.

And he is worthy of our love. He's worthy of all of our admiration and affection and honor and praise. So as we read Genesis, let it exalt God for us.

I know we all have problems. I know we all have things that we're dealing with, and God cares about those things. And God has a lot of wisdom to help us deal with things.

In our lives, but sometimes what we need is to think less about our problems and to think more about God. To think less about ourselves and to think more about Him. He is worthy of all of our attention, all of our honor, all of our praise.