I'm going to ask you to turn in your Bibles this morning to three passages of Scripture. The first in Colossians chapter 1, and then in John's Gospel chapter 1, and in Genesis chapter 1. In Colossians chapter 1, I want you to read, beginning with me in the 11th, the 12th verse. The 12th verse, Colossians 1, verse 12. The New Testament is the fulfillment of the Old. The Bible is the book about Jesus Christ. The Old Testament contains Christ. The New Testament explains Christ. The Old Testament promises Christ. The New Testament presents Christ. The Old Testament veils Christ. The New Testament unveils Christ. The Old Testament is a preview of coming attractions. The New Testament is the main feature. You must have the New Testament at hand to understand the Old and vice versa. Bring your entire Bible to this study. Colossians 1, 12. Now we are referring to the Son, Jesus Christ, in whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sin. Who is the image of the God, who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature. For by him, the Son, were all things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible. Whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers, all things were created by him and for him. And he is before all things, and by him, all things consist. John chapter 1. The Greek word logos is translated word. It means the visualization of God revealed in human form in Christ. In the beginning, then, was the word, the Christ. And the word, Christ, was with God. And the word, Christ, was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him. And without him was not anything made that was made. Genesis 1, 1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Let's read that aloud together, shall we please? In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. In Tartarus Artists, Thomas Carlyle says, the bewildered wanderer, stands peering as so many have done, hurling question after question into the civil cave of destiny, only to receive an echo. For centuries, man has asked questions. He has peered into the time cavern of eternity and has received nothing but an echo. I feel that many times scientists and theologians rush in where even angels and the Holy Spirit of God fear to tread. Sometimes we expect answers to questions which God knew we could never comprehend if he gave an answer and therefore did not bother to speak. Sometimes, you see, we must simply give God credit for knowing some things we do not know. For if we knew everything that God knew, if he had chosen to reveal every aspect and every facet of his personality and all of the answers to all of the questions that all of us ask, then we would know everything that he knows. And we would be his equal. And we could not worship him. Our religion is not called a Christian faith in faith. Sometimes we have to give God the glory. Sometimes we have to answer our questions in faith. Sometimes we are called upon to exercise our faith. To some people, the first words of the book of Genesis are literal words meaning exactly what they say. They mean that God worked like a beaver and wound up his clock in a 24 -hour period of time and created the first day and did as much as he could as quickly as possible and got it all done and patted through the night and wound up the clock again and worked 24 more literal hours the next day. There are those who believe that the book of Genesis is only a book of myth. It was only intended to be believable for fools and children. I think somewhere between the two, our God has something to say to us that is vastly more important than either of these two approaches. And that is not that he is trying to tell us exactly, scientifically, precisely how the world were created. That is not, after all, the supreme purpose of the Word of God. It is his purpose to tell us by whom the world were created. Not how he did it, but who did it. And the man that misses the point in training us and out of all the theological hair splitting that God himself is the prime creator, the author, the omega, the creator, the finisher, the originator, and the beginner of all life and all faith. The man who misses this great fruit misses all of us. All of us who have taken seriously the book of Genesis have probably adopted some kind of private interpretation and personal belief about what we believe the book of Genesis to be and to contain. I want to suggest three things as a brief background to you as we begin this series through the Word of God. We will, as you know, continue for nine months and then for the three summer months of next year I will skim the cream from the rest of the Old Testament and a year from today begin a ten -year series through the New Testament. And so as we approach all Bible study in particular, but this book in general, but all this book in particular, I would suggest three things to you. One is, read the Bible as you would any other book with the exception of the fact that you must understand it is a spiritual book that is written to a spiritually discerned people to be understood and interpreted and taught in light of the teaching of the Holy Spirit. Our Lord himself said, when he shall come, he shall guide you into all truth. When I say to read the book as you would by any other book, I mean to start at the beginning, not to practice eisegesis, that is to read into it what is not there, because our God made a lot of us to be everyday common people. He never intended that only the theologians would comprehend the word of God. It was written in common language for common people, and he knew that we would have to accept it at faith value. So do it like that. Don't read the book. Don't approach it expecting it to say a lot of things it does not say with a note of suspicion of now what is he really trying to tell us. Read it in faith believing with an open mind and of the guidance of the Holy Spirit. And then remember that God gave some men in the Old Testament and the New the God -given ability to not only look into the future and prophesy what would happen, but also the unique ability to look into the past and tell us what did happen. Now Moses was not around when the book of Genesis was written. Peter was not going to be around when he told us that one day the heavens and the earth would pass away and dissolve and melt with a fervent heat, but atomic pianists carrying a chain reaction that will set off an atomic holocaust now know that he was right, and that one day the heavens and the earth will pass away, and they fear this. And Peter was not around when that happened, but God gave him the ability to know that it would have happened. I don't know how David ever said there was an empty spot in the northern skies, or Isaiah said he set it upon the circle of the earth, when they didn't even know in those days that it was circular. They thought it was flat and they never saw a telescope, but God gave them the ability to look in the future. Now in the very same way he has given some the ability to look in the past. And lest you think that Moses writings are all fairy stories, I would remind you that the ten steps in the order of creation are now the ten steps by which scientists affirm that life was originated and created on this earth. Now understand that I said the ten steps in the order of creation affirmed today by science are the ten steps listed in the Bible that Moses said they were created in order. Exactly. Now how did he guess the order? If you put a group of pennies in your pocket, numbered one to ten, and pull one blindly from your pocket, you have one chance of ten of getting number one. If you put it back and start again, you have one chance in a hundred of getting one and then two. And if you start again, you have one chance in ten thousand of getting one and then two and then three. And you have one chance in ten thousand of getting one and then three all the way to ten. He could not have guessed. The chances of that happening were as remote as the fact that the Houston Oilers would beat the Dallas Cowboys last night. That would have been a wild guess. But the age of miracles has not passed. Now, we know that to have these in order, someone, someplace, had to tell him, and it was our God. And the third thing I want you to remember is that science affirms today over and over with continued understanding and revelation where the Word of God has always been. Let me tell you one little story, which I hope will serve as a proof to strengthen your faith as you do not cross the Bible intellectually off to begin with, but look at it with the honesty that it may be the Word of God and there just may be something in there for you. Dr. Howard Hill, the president of the great organization in Greenbelt, Maryland, where they test all of the motors and the engines that send the rockets into space, where all the IBM computers scan history in the past and the future, setting dates and determining plots for our astronauts to ride and for all of our vehicles to go into orbit, tells the story that a few months ago they were attempting to determine the exact placement of the moon and the sun and the stars in years to come, for the next hundred years and the next thousand years, to prepare all of the future space shots. Now, in attempting to determine where they would be, they had to know where they had been, and they ran their computers back across the ages to as much time as they could understand and know, and a red light came on the machine and they discovered that there was something wrong, and when they called in the IBM computer repairman, they said there's nothing wrong. The information you have fed in to the machine does not g -haul with the finished product for some other reason than a mechanical error. And going back carefully and discussing and investigating all of their study, they found out that the machine was showing them that there was a missing day in time. There was something wrong somewhere. There was a 24 -hour period left out from today to the beginning of creation. One of the scientists just happened to be a Sunday school teacher in a little church, and he remembered something about Joshua commanding the sun to stand still. And they went back and they found the story in the book of Joshua where Joshua, to defeat the enemies of God, needed more daylight. And the Bible says they caused the sun to stand still for about a day. They pinpointed the day and fed the information into the computer, and it registered that that was the day, but it was still not quite right. It was only 23 hours and 20 minutes. There were still 40 hours missing out of time. And so another red light came on, and they began to try to find this day, and realizing that perhaps the Word of God had something to say to them on that point as well, they began to read from Genesis all through the Old Testament, and they discovered that Hezekiah on his deathbed, recorded in 2 Kings, was visited by the prophet Isaiah. And Isaiah said to him, you're going to live a long time, and Hezekiah said, I don't believe it, I'm going to die. He said, give me a sign. Isaiah said, if I make the sun to go forward, will you believe me? And he said, no, because the sun goes forward of its own. Make the sun to go backward. The Bible records in 2 Kings that he said, make the sun to go backward 10 degrees, and he did so. Look, 10 degrees is 40 minutes. Science perpetually affirms the Word of God. Yesterday's science books are cold potatoes today. Always changing, always catching up, but young men and women, the Word of God changeth not. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but he that doeth the will of God, like the Word of God, says our Lord, endureth forever. In the Word of God, in the book of Genesis, we find the grand opening statement that refutes every philosophy, every false philosophy. Philosophy is good, it is important, but the apostle Paul wrote, writing, said these words, Beware, lest any man spoil you through philosophy, after the teachings of men and not after the rudiments of Christ. And I urge you to remember that you can be spoiled, that you need to make everything that you learn to square and parallel with the Word of God. And you will find that it can be done so. In the book, the fibrotic unity of the scriptures, all of the supposed discrepancies and imagined errors of the Word of God have been unified and harmonized because sometimes, because of the difficulty of the grammatical vehicle with which we have to speak, when the Spirit of God takes a watermelon of truth and tries to squeeze it into a peanut of a word that we have to comprehend what He is trying to say, there are difficulties which are obvious but which can be resolved. I like the way the book of Genesis opens. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. A child can understand it. A scientist can understand it. In one grand sweep, He says it so beautifully and He refutes every false philosophy and error. He refutes materialism and says that God is the creator of all life. He refutes modernism that would deify man and humanize God. He refutes animism and He refutes humanism and makes God the supreme God. It is so simple. It is so all -inclusive. How could it be said? How could one have done it better? So simply, so inclusively, in the beginning, simply, God created the heavens and the earth. Now when I take this scripture apart, I find the answer to some important questions. They are simply, when, who, how, what, and why. Number one, in the beginning. When was the earth created? It was created in the beginning. Now we need to understand that the looseness of the words and the terms that are used when God does not give us the answer to everything is because God was not keeping score. For God did not exist in the empirical realm. He existed in the realm of eternity. Someone said to me once, Why did God not create the world sooner? Sooner than what? In eternity there is no sooner or later. There is no yesterday and today. There is no four o 'clock and eight o 'clock. There was, you see, no time until our God stepped into the realm of life and the first time he created something that lived, that was alive, that vibrated and pulsated, the first time life was created, our God began to keep score. We were not around. He existed and exists in a realm, a dimension, that we could never comprehend and so he just did not waste a great deal of time trying to explain to us how long it took because we could not comprehend it anyway. In the beginning, God existed in eternity and he did not keep score. There was no time. Time began when the first life appeared, when God created that first life on the earth. Eternity could not be measured with time, but our God, praise his name, stepped from the realm of eternity into time through the redemptive work of Jesus Christ that one day we might go from time into eternity. In the beginning. That's when. In the beginning of what? In the beginning of nothing. You say, I can't comprehend that. Neither can you comprehend something that does not end, and yet we know that as a reality. For if you were to go beyond the stars and the heavens and go farther and farther into oblivion, where would you stop? Where does space end? Space cannot end. What's up there? Is there an ocean? Is there a brick wall? How far can you go? What's on the other side of the ocean? What holds? You see, there's no end to it. Time cannot end. Space cannot end. And our God, who has always existed in that realm into which we shall ultimately yet one day exist because we go from time into eternity, has always been like that. And as it is impossible for us to comprehend how something can have no ending, so God knew it would be impossible for us to comprehend something which had no beginning. So he didn't bother to keep scoring, give us a lot of answers to some questions that we might not have been supposed to ask all along. Moses asked God who he was. God said, I am. I am what? I am. I am that I am. There are no degrees. There are no have -beens or will -beens with the omnipotent character of an eternal God. It is not even verbally color -ex to say he is. It is impossible in our limited language to comprehend the greatness of God's eternality. He just am. He always am. He always am going to be. He am. He said, that isn't good English. Well, God knew that we would get tied up with such ridiculous little things as that ain't good English. And so he just said, don't you worry about it. I am in the beginning answers the question of when. The second question that is answered here is the question of who. If one can understand the beautiful Hebraic language, we would be able to see that almost breaking every rule of proper and at least ordinary use of the Hebrew, every word and the placement thereof in the opening grand sweep of Genesis 1 -1 is a word that stands by itself. This word God is oftentimes interpreted God. It is the Hebrew honorific majestic plural implying quality more than quantity. Now, I think that the Spirit of God was foreshadowing through Moses something that he did not yet comprehend that was ultimately yet to come. That our God is a trinity. Three in one, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who were, as they always do, through the Word of God and the Spirit of God, cooperate to bring about life. But Moses didn't understand that. But he used this honorific plural, which suggests more than one in quality, not in quantity. In the beginning, God, or the gods, as some say, which he was inferring but not really stating, is as though I said to Ben Loring, Ben, you're the greatest. I do not really mean, in a quantitative comparison basis, you are greater than several others. I speak of a quality of his life that just says, man, you're something else. You're just the greatest. Now, Moses was saying something like that with this word that he used for God. In the beginning, God. God created the heavens and the earth. And the Bible tells us, then, later on, that a part of the Trinity, a part of the God, the God, by the Son, Jesus Christ, all things were created. Now, we see all through the Word of God that it is the work of the Son to do creation. The world, the flowers, the heavens, the earth, even mankind. All things are created by him, and all things by him consist. Our Father has given the creative work to the Son. By the Word of God, be, and it became. Now, the Bible tells us always, as we shall see tonight, and I cannot tell you how vastly in relationship to all of this series will be Genesis 1 -2, and its cohesiveness with Genesis 1 -1. It is a must for us to come tonight. We find that the Spirit of God did the recreative work. As he always moves in cold lives and void and cold situations and brings life from which there is death. And so, the Word of God tells us that it was by the Son that the Father did the work of creation. I submit to you that the alternates to the possibility that it was God who did the creating work are absolutely ridiculous. All human thought has boiled itself down to four possibilities. There are four possibilities of how the world came into existence. That it was created by a man, it was created by a machine, it was created by chance, or it was recreated by God. Now, the first two are absolutely ridiculous, and the third is almost as ridiculous. A student asked Aristotle, sir, what chance is there that the world was created by chance? And he said, young man, there is no chance at all. While you and I have been speaking, our world has been on a thousand mile, a minute journey, a second journey around the sun, and a 565 ,000 mile orb that so properly placed in its relationship to the sun that dropped a half a degree of one half of one degree would cause a gravitational pull of our earth into the sun that by the time it had gone less than three seconds toward its journey into the sun, it would be dissolved. This earth that so properly balanced on its axis and related to the moon, if it were a degree farther or less, would drop into oblivion or pass into obscurity with such tidal waves and coldness with no life, no seasons, on the earth another Pleistocene age, in all probability, all of these things say every scientist and every professor and every individual who disbelieves the Word of God ultimately just happened. Now read every theory and every philosophy on creation that is in opposition to the creative revelation of the Word of God and you have one word, chance. It just happened. One day some gases got together, some meteorites or some planets stuck together, some gases began to twirl and cool and boom, it just happened. That in reality is the heart, the crux of the whole matter. It just happened. I have a watch that has only 12 parts in this watch. I know not one screw, not one piece of battery, not one inch of metal could have moved one inched by itself and jumped into any other hole. And yet this world, they tell us outside of God, the only possible possibility is that it just happened. Whence came the gases, whence came the planets, whence came those bodies that caused the earth? You say, but preacher, the law of cause and effect relates to God too. The law of cause and effect is a natural God and our God created the laws. And a God that created the laws is not always necessarily bound by the laws operating within the realm of the laws, but superimposing greater laws upon the laws he has originally created. We have the degree of the miraculous and our God is a miracle working God. He is not the product of them. They are the product of him. What chance that it was created by chance? There is no chance at all. And I submit to you, the man who believes the Bible, who believes God created the heavens and the earth has logic and reason and sense on his side. Every other theory and philosophy has nothing but blind chance. And that the chances that this world and its orb, this world and its journey about the sun and its balance of seasons and all of the perfection, that the chance that all of these things just happened, that there was an explosion or the blind product of chance that just occurred, are far less possible than they are that one day down at the local printing factory, there was an explosion and boom, I'll jump to complete unabridged dictionary with every word in place. It just happened. I submit to you that the burden of proof is not on the word of God. That reason and common sense and order and cause and effect are all recorded there and the only other possibility of chance bears all of the burden of proof. Now the third word that is answered is how. The Hebrew word is bara, created, meaning literally something from nothing. No thing that is, a thing that does not exist. And the proofs and the possibilities, there are so many Aristotle called it, the cosmological proof and said man has but to look back through the ages and ask whence came this. Socrates called it, Socrates called it, the present proof and said, how can it be that I see the order around me, the balance, the present without an originative cause? Plato looked in the future and said, Plato looked in the future and called it, the teleological proof and said, where does man go? What is the ultimate goal, what is the ultimate goal, the ultimate purpose without God? Hanson called it, Hanson called it, the ontological proof and said, how can it be that man's highest thought, the thought of God can be unreal? And Immanuel Kant called it the moral proof and asked the question, how can it be that there is moral conscience existing in the universe without an original moral legislator? St. Augustine said, St. Augustine said, why is it that man finds no rest until he finds it in God? St. Paul calls it the witness of the spirit and says, his spirit bears witness with my spirit. I have never seen love and yet I know that I love. I have never seen hunger nor have you, I have never seen pain nor have you, yet I know when I am hungry, I know when I love and I know when I hurt. How do I know God? I just know God. You can know God. The witness of the spirit. If you'll allow me to move into the realm of the greats, the Aristotles and the Plato's, I would like to suggest to you that I personally call it the experimental proof. I've tried him and he's real. I was preaching a meeting for all of the churches in Terrell, Texas. and one of the homes for mentally disturbed young people was there. They brought 60 on one particular night, and eight of them came forward and had a conversion experience to give their heart and life to Jesus Christ. The man who was charged with their spiritual responsibility, their chaplain, called me toward the weekend, and he said, The preacher, the psychologist that examines them every Friday morning, reported to us that there was a marked, unexplained, and immediate change that had taken place in the lives of those eight young people. He could not understand it. They called their parents. They called them. They called us. Well, I can understand it. I've been there. You can understand it as well. The fourth question is this. What? What did our God create? They tell us that light goes 186 ,000 miles a second, and that from rim to rim of our own galaxy, of which there may be thousands more we know nothing about, we have a 200 ,000 -year light year span. They say that there may be from 25 ,000 to 50 ,000 other universes and galaxies, that is, that we are now just believing to may exist. And in the farthest corner where man has never gone, where the telescopic eye can discover the great star of Betelgeuse exists 27 million times bigger than our own sun. And our sun is a million and a half times bigger than our earth. Is it any wonder that the psalmist asked the question, what is man that thou knowest him, the son of man that thou visitest him? Is it any wonder the songwriter wrote, oh, Lord, my God, when I an awesome wonder, consider all the worlds thy hands have made. I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, thy power throughout all the universe displayed. Then sings my soul, thy Savior God, to thee, how great thou art, how very, very great thou art. Oh, what he has created. Does that raise another question in your mind? It does mine. It is the fifth one which is answered in Genesis 1 -1. Why? Look at it again. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Comprehending the greatness of space, why does God even mention the earth? Has that ever occurred to you? Did you ever wonder why he adds, why the earth? A speck of dust to swim in one remote corner of God's great galaxy of universes. Why the earth? Why even mention something as remote and insignificant as the earth? What is our God trying to say? There must be something he's trying to tell us. I believe it is simply this. The earth, the Bible is not a book about the heavens. The Bible is a book about the earth. The Bible is not basically a book of science. It's a book of theology. The Bible is not a book about how go the heavens. It is a book about how to go to heaven. Now, I begin to comprehend it when I turn back yonder to John 3 -16 and see that he says, God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Now, those words, only begotten, speak something to me. Our God has only one son. Did you ever know anybody who had just one child that wasn't just crazy about that child? Now, God had only one son. He created of all the places one very special place by the son, for the son. Like a rich man showering gifts on a son, lavishly giving him everything that he wants. The Bible says the heavens declare the glory of God. The firmaments declare his handiwork. You see, the heavens and the earth are for the Christ. The son is the honored member of the Trinity. The father has put all things into his hands. He created the earth by him and for him to rule upon, to reign upon, to honor him, to be his. The Holy Spirit came to honor Christ. When he comes, he shall not speak of himself. He shall speak of me. The Bible is a book about the son. Creation was by the son. The earth was for the son, Jesus Christ. He is the special member of the Trinity, whom the Father and the Holy Spirit and all of the angels adore and worship. The earth was for the sun. Now I remember reading something about God in Christ brought many on to adoption. Many into the family of God. I began to see why the earth is so important. God wanted his son to have some brothers and sisters. He wanted us to be a joint heir with Christ. Calvary scheme, redemption's eternal story was that through the blood of Christ the son might have those that were his brothers and sisters to honor him, to love him, to worship him, to be one with him. And it was on the earth. Not the moon, not the stars on the earth. God's earth created by the sun, for the sun. The creativity, the creation that God was going to bring into existence to have honor and relationship and love and unity and oneness with the sun would exist. It was to the earth that God would place his finest and choiceless creation. So we begin to see why the earth is so important. Now are ye sons of God. Beloved, it does not yet appear what we shall be. We know this, when we shall see him, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. God never made anything imperfect. The world was created perfect. Man was created perfect. The flowers were created perfect. And only after outside interference, only after it was touched, only after it was spoiled, only after sin did it fall. The Bible says that there will be a new heaven and a new earth. The will of God, you see, being deferred, not ultimately being rejected, being detained. It will ultimately be done. And this world will know Christ. It will love him. All who willingly bow the knee and receive him, the Bible says, are made joint heirs with Jesus Christ, sons of the living God. That's what this earth is all about. That's what creation is all about. That's what religion is all about. God had a son, only one. He was special. He made a special place for him. He made a special creature to be joint heirs and brothers and sisters with him. And then, when sin spoiled it, that same son loved you and I so very much that he came from heaven to die on the cross to provide for our redemption, to give us oneness with Jesus Christ. And you can know him. You can fulfill the wonderful plan that God has for your life today by hooking up your life with Jesus Christ. By faith you can be born into the family of God. You can be a brother of Christ, a son of God, because he stepped from eternity to time, can live in time, a son of God, and again and inevitably and endlessly in eternity, a child of God, a joint heir of Jesus Christ, a child of the King. Let us bow our heads together and pray. Our Heavenly Father, we pray in Jesus' precious name that not one of us shall go away without Jesus Christ. We sing this is my Father's world and we know that in a beautiful sense that is so true. But we could more accurately sing this is the Son's world created by him and for him. And oh Lord, we know that when men and women have the Son Jesus Christ in their hearts, their lives are transformed, things are changed, and life really begins to begin. May not one go away without him. May heaven come down our souls to greed and glory crown the mercy seat as the eternal Spirit of God shall draw unto redemption many who will become by faith in the crucified one sons of the living God. For we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.