Forming & Filling the Earth pt. 2

The light from the darkness.

God called the day, 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 in 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.

And God said, Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit, in which is their seed, each according to its kind on the earth.

And it was so.

The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind.

And God saw that it was good.

And there was evening and there was morning the third day.

And God said, Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be signs and for seasons, and for days, and for years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.

And it was so.

And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night and the stars.

And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness.

And God saw that it was good.

And there was evening and there was morning the fourth day.

And God said, Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.

So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.

And God saw that it was good.

And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters and the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.

And there was evening and there was morning the fifth day.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds, livestock and creeping things, and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.

And so it was.

And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind.

And God saw that it was good.

Today is Sunday, the twenty ninth of January, two thousand and seventeen, and you know very well what that means.

It means God is still on the throne.

We go through life, we go through our weeks, and we so easily lose that most important focus.

God, who is real, who is on the throne, who is good, he's working, he's involved.

What he does, he does well, and we can trust him.

God is still on the throne, and I will never get tired of saying that.

And I trust you won't get tired of hearing it.

That shapes our thinking.

It makes us theocentric, focused on God instead of ourselves.

At least it does that for me.

Well, I'd like to have you stay where you are in Genesis chapter one.

Thank you for uh Lori for reading that for us.

We're going to continue an exposition and application of the first several chapters of the book of Genesis.

Exposition, we seek to bring what God has said to light.

Application, we seek to apply it to life.

Both are critically important.

God has revealed Himself, and we must listen and follow, but He's revealed Himself not just to satisfy our curiosity, but to transform our lives.

So when we open up the scriptures, we want to hear what God says and we want to do what it is that He wants us to do and be.

So that's real simple what we try to do.

Several weeks back we began at the very beginning, a very good place to start.

When you sing you begin, or when you read, you begin with ABC.

When you sing you begin with Do Re Mi.

And if you want to begin to understand the world around us, if you want to understand yourself, if you want to understand where we came from and where we're going to, if you want to understand why this is, not just in here, but this world is the way it is, and why we are the way we are, there's a very good place to start.

In the beginning, God.

That's exactly how the Bible begins, for good reason.

In the beginning, God.

We began last time looking at these verses, 1, chapter 1, verses 3 to 23.

And we recognize as we approach the scriptures that God speaks.

I believe God really speaks to us in various ways.

He communicates with us.

The scriptures are perhaps the most concrete way in which he communicates with us.

And when he speaks, he does not stutter and he does not mislead.

And yet what we hear when God speaks goes way beyond what we can understand.

Webb made reference to that in his comments with worship.

We know a whole lot of things that we don't understand.

I don't know if you've ever thought about that.

We know a whole bunch of things about God and about the world and what he's doing that we don't fully comprehend.

It's well above our pay grade.

We're just human beings.

Just little human beings.

And so when we begin to think that we ought to get our mind wrapping around who God is and what he's doing, we're trying to do something that is really not possible.

God has made us sufficiently like He is so that we can know Him truly and know truth about Him, but we do not fully comprehend.

As creatures, how can creatures fully comprehend the Creator?

As finite little beings, how can we fully comprehend and get our arms around the infinite?

So we have this dilemma as we approach Scripture, and we certainly have it with Genesis, the first few chapters.

Thankfully, God has not left us without some help.

He said to his disciples, Jesus said to his disciples, I'm going away, but I'm leaving another with you, the Spirit of truth, the Comforter, who will take that which is mine and will explain it to you.

The Holy Spirit is given to us, among other things, to empower us to understand more and more of what God says.

And thankfully, God has not left us on our own.

So I want to just pray and ask that God will enlighten our minds as we open His Word.

Heavenly Father, we need you.

You are way beyond us, and yet you have spoken.

So help us, Father, make appropriate sense out of that which is way beyond us.

Help us know how to correlate what we read in Scripture with what we see around us.

Help our hearts to be receptive and open to you.

Take my feeble attempts to bring your word to life, but you, Father, bring what is necessary and right to light in the life of each of us here.

And by your grace, may we learn to apply and do that which you say.

We count on you.

We desperately need you.

You are here with us, you're involved.

So help us, open up your word, I pray.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Last time, two weeks ago, I was not here last week, we began and we got about halfway through what I had intended to get through.

Now, actually, I had about five hours worth of things that I wanted to get through, so in a mere 40 minutes, I only made partway progress.

But I want to begin where we left off and just try to wrap this section up this morning.

Just touch base on a couple of things.

We were trying to understand how we are to read the opening chapters of Genesis, how we are to approach it.

And what I tried to do was simply make as clear to you as possible how I understand these chapters to be read.

And it's really pretty simple.

I believe that what we have here, as in all of Scripture, is accurate and completely reliable.

It's not myth, it's not fantasy, it's not just a story.

It's literally true.

What God has said he did, he did.

That's just the way I approach it.

That's because I have a worldview in which there really is a real God who intervenes and comes to us and does not leave his creation and walk away, but is intimately involved in creating and to this day.

And what we read here is simply the truth.

It's not all that is true, but all that is here is true.

A lot more I could say about that.

I've tried to help you understand that the scriptures, I don't believe this section was given to us as a history text with footnotes and references.

I don't believe this passage was given to us as a science textbook.

This was given to us, although everything it says about history and everything it says about science, I believe what is here, is absolutely reliable and true.

But it's not given for those purposes.

It's given to orient us.

This is an orientation to him and to the world that he has made.

This is his world, his universe.

And he helps us see true north and helps us know the lay of the land that we can find our way home.

Because, my friends, this earth as we now know it, and we as we now are, are neither home nor who we one day will be.

We're on a journey, we're heading home.

And we have a general orientation here.

And every time the rest of the scriptures or the New Testament, the rest of the Old Testament or the New Testament refer back to Genesis, it's clear that it's seen as being factual, literally true, and vital and relevant to our lives.

So when we approach this portion of Scripture, we don't want to just get lost in various theories, although we need to understand it aright, but we also need to understand that this was meant to be relevant for our daily living.

Every time in the rest of Scripture, Genesis 1 and 2 and 3 is pointed back to it's in a practical context that has outworkings for our life.

So that's how I understand Scripture.

To me, to read the creation account in any other way or to use it for any other purpose is to misread it and misuse it.

That's why I'm trying to focus on what this was given for and how we ought to see it.

We spent some time last time talking about the relationship between the world around us and the world of science on the one hand and the scriptures and the creation account on the other hand.

Clearly, the battle lines are drawn.

We have two very different perceptions of reality, and we live in both worlds, and how do we bring these together?

Real simple, couple of thoughts.

I believe, I'm I'm my experience so far after studying the scriptures and trying to explain them for 45 plus years, uh, is I don't see any fundamental conflict.

I don't see any conflict at all between what we see around us in the natural realm, the data that is there on the one hand, and the revelation of Genesis 1, 2, 3, and 4 on the other hand.

I truly believe that all truth is God's truth.

Not all truth is in the scriptures, but all the scriptures say and contain is truth, and that we must not assume that there is a conflict, nor must we be avoiding the facts and realities of science.

We don't have to avoid or be afraid of the fossil records.

We don't have to be stay away from, I talked last time about as a young college student studying comparative anatomy this semester that I came to faith.

You have simple animals, more complex animals, and then very complex animals.

So how do we don't have to avoid those?

In fact, we will find next time and the time after that, we have a mandate to explore and learn about the created realm around us.

But we must not assume that there's a fundamental conflict because truth is truth.

The real question is: how do we know what's true?

How do we know what is truly true?

And how do we interpret the data, for example, the fossil layers?

How do we interpret that?

How do we understand the world around us?

And the point that I want to make is we always bring a worldview to it.

How do we know what we know?

Well, I know what I know in part because God has changed my life.

And I know what I know in part because when I read this book, it's not like reading any other book that is there.

And I come to this with an understanding that there is more to reality than what I see in a microscope or peer at through a telescope.

And if we limit ourselves only to that which we can observe and touch and feel and manipulate, we're missing another part of reality.

So the question is, how do we know what we know?

And if we exclude the supernatural, then by definition we come to certain places, but the scriptures assume the supernatural.

Science is a method of inquiry, the scientific method is a method of inquiry based upon systematic observations, measurement, experiment, and the formulation of a hypothesis to make sense of what we see.

That's what I learned as a biology pre-med major.

Science, the scientific method.

We analyze, we explore, we gather information, we correlate, and we we come up with a theory, our best understanding of how this all fits together.

That's true science.

I have no problem with true science.

What I have a problem with has often been described as scientism, and that's not a word that I made up.

Um and actually uh I turned to that source of all true knowledge outside of the scriptures, Wikipedia.

And uh there's a wonderful article on scientism there.

Look it up if you're you're interested.

Simple, clear, uh, accurate um uh article on scientism.

Scientism, and this is summarizing what is said there, is a belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method.

That's significant.

You have a method, and scientism believes this is the way that you come to knowledge and truth.

Um, the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview to the exclusion of other worldviews.

No, I get that.

That's a belief system.

That's a belief system.

I have a different, another belief system that doesn't say only that which I can measure and touch is real and true, and a basis on which to build my life, my understanding of reality, but we have something else.

There is a supernatural, there is a there's a whole nother worldview in which God is central, God is involved, God works, God communicates, and and it's a whole different worldview.

So the conflict, and I'll just leave it at this, I could go on for hours, and you wouldn't still be here by the time I was done.

I don't think the conflict is between science and the scriptures, but a worldview that takes the scientific method and extrapolates from that to all truth, and then says any other conclusions you come to are naive, foolish, ignorant, and really rather childish.

That's a belief system.

All right.

Let's move forward.

Um there are days in creation.

We've read the account morning and evening the first day, morning and evening the second day, morning and evening the third day, and so forth.

Um Exodus 20, verse 11 says, In six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the seas, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.

Exodus 20:11

Days.

Now, how do we define these days of creation?

Um it some of you are old enough to remember the controversy with Bill Clinton when he went before the nation and said, Well, now it all depends on what the meaning of is is in terms of his immoral behavior and what he had done.

It depends on what the meaning of is is.

And scratch my head and say, huh?

And in a sense, um this passage stands or falls on the meaning of day.

Now, we think we know what day means.

Is that what the word day means in this passage?

Um where I land on this is that these are literal 24 hour days.

And we'll we'll go into that.

But what I want to say is although virtually all Bible scholars recognize that the vast majority of times that the word day was used in the Old or the New Testament, it was referring to a 24-hour day with a morning and the evening.

But that's not the only way the word is used.

And what I want to suggest is there are respected Bible-believing scholars, God-honoring, scripture-loving, Christ-exalting men and women of God who come to various different points of view.

And I want to give respect to them, but I land on a 24-hour day.

There's several ways we can see it.

I want to just give you an overview of it because you will encounter this.

And as you read this passage, the most natural way of reading it is a day is a day.

Maybe it's not, but I see no reason to think it's anything other than that.

So, first of three understandings of it that I want to just touch on a 24-hour day.

So six days, 144 hours.

In 144 literal hours, God created the world.

That's what the passage seems to say.

No credible Bible scholar will deny that the word, the Hebrew word yom, normally means anything other than a day, the way we use the term day.

Now, there are some other uses of it.

And we find this particularly in some of the prophetic writings, where it talks about in that day this or that will happen, and they're almost all messianic passages in which the messianic era that they were looking forward to was coming.

And in that time, in that day, in that period, this and that will happen.

And it is used that way, the same word yom, where it's clearly not just a 24-hour day.

We use the word day very similarly.

We normally mean a 24-hour day, but we might talk about in that day, or let's just say in the colonial period, in Washington's day there were 13 colonies.

I mean, everybody understands.

That's not just talking about a 24-hour period, it's talking about the time period of George Washington.

So we use the word that way.

The question is, is that the way this passage is to be understood?

It's a possible explanation, but it's something that only occasionally, and typically in messianic passages talking about the future time of Messiah coming, or we'll say in that day, and it's clearly more than a 24-hour period.

I see absolutely no indication in Genesis 1 that the days here must be taken in some other way.

I really believe that when he says a day, especially when he says a day with a morning and an evening, it's pretty hard to understand that in any other way.

Now, modern science tells us that that's ludicrous, uh, that's impossible.

We know that the world was created in billions and formed and shaped in billions and billions of years, and so the Bible must be wrong or it must be misleading.

Uh, to think otherwise is naive.

And that's where the world view that the only interpretation of the data around us is this particular interpretation.

That's a worldview, it's a belief system.

My belief system assumes that what God says when he's talking about this or anything else is true and is understandable.

And for me at least, these are 24-hour days.

I'm not going to die on that point.

Um, but thankfully that is the heritage of this church.

That's certainly what I believe.

It's not the only way of approaching it, but it's the predominant view, or at least it was up until about 100 years ago, when science told us it's not possible, and so there's other ways of looking at it.

The burden of proof here lies with someone who's going to assume that these aren't 24-hour days.

There has to be a compelling reason.

And I'm ready to listen to that reason, and I've listened and listened and listened, and I don't see any compelling reason.

Now there are other ways of viewing it.

I want to just touch on two.

One is the day-age idea, that these are the day is referring to an age or an epoch of great length.

Perhaps we could put millions and billions of years into each of these days.

And in this way, Genesis seems, if you interpret these as long periods of time, they could be periods of time of millions or billions of years.

And the attempt is to enfold our scientific understanding and to wed it to the biblical account of creation.

The difficulty is our scientific understanding or scientism's understanding and a biblical understanding of reality don't live together very well.

Some of you may remember, you may know the group, actually a cult, Christian Science.

The problem with the Christian science movement is it's neither Christian nor scientific.

And that's what we quickly get to when we try to simply enfold what we think the assured truths of science are with Scripture.

You get something that does poor service to either.

So just making these into long epic times or periods is neither satisfying scientifically nor biblically.

And I won't take the time to explain that, but it's another way that that is viewed.

Thirdly, finally, a day is often understand in this context as a literary figure of speech, non-literal.

It's a figurative, a literary device that God used to accommodate himself to our limitations.

How else could he explain it besides using terms that we know?

Well, I get that, I understand that.

And I've already said at the beginning, we know a whole lot more things than we understand.

The question is, is God simply, knowing that this is not the way it really happened, is he accommodating himself to our limitations?

I know evangelical Bible-believing scholars, good men, good pastors, good professors who take this point of view.

The trouble for me is I just, I have no problem whatsoever believing in six, seven, twenty four-hour days.

The passage makes sense.

It works that way.

Why would I do gymnastics to come up with something to satisfy a worldview that is far from the worldview of Scripture?

Why would I do that?

To me, it does injustice to the text.

Something I think I said last time is that if you can understand the words of Scripture in their plain and normal sense, then why would we seek any other sense?

And be careful lest you get nonsense.

And now that's a cute saying, but I think there's a great bit of truth to that.

If you can interpret, this is a principle of Bible interpretation.

If you can take it the way those words normally are used and meant, if that makes good sense, then unless there's a compelling reason to take it in some other way.

Now we know there are figures of speech, but we understand how figures of speech work.

The mountains clap their hands.

We know that that's not what mountains do, but that's a figure of speech.

And so, I mean, the scientists use figures of speech all the time.

They said, Well, I got up at sunrise this morning.

Do you realize the sun does not rise?

That's phenomenological language.

That's the way it appears to us.

And yet no scientist is going to be embarrassed to say the sun rose this morning.

We know that there's that kind of language.

The question is, is that what we find here?

And I would just say, if you can understand it and take these words in the normal way, I'm going to take them in the normal way.

And I've studied enough to know that all of the other theories for me just aren't compelling.

I'm not saying this is the way it has to be.

I'm not saying other ways of looking at it are heretical and sub-Christian.

I'm just saying to me, it's really pretty simple.

The seven days were seven days, 144 hours.

Does that make total sense to me?

No.

Does God make total sense to me?

No.

Does what God does make total sense to me?

No.

Oh well, I'm just a finite person.

So do I have to stand in judgment of the scriptures because I don't understand how they correlate?

I'd say that's that's not a necessary approach.

All right, let's move on to the question of how we're to read this.

And we're gonna stay at a 30,000-foot view.

We're not gonna take each verse and work it through.

I think I mentioned before Scott Sondrill, I don't think he's here today, spent several years with a men's Bible study going through these.

We're gonna take 10 or 11 weeks.

So, in this passage, we'll return to more of a verse-by-verse thing next time, but I want to just look at how we are to read this?

How does this chapter unfold?

What's the sequence of events and the flow of thought?

And especially what's the relationship between the six days of creation in Genesis 1:3 through 31 and Genesis 1, verses 1 and 2.

Genesis 1:3–31 Genesis 1:1

Is there a discontinuity?

Is there a break?

Is there a gap, or is this passage to be understood in the context of continuity?

So let me try to make sense out of that.

It determines how we read this passage.

So the idea, and it's called the gap theory, and it's a theory, just as I mean, it's a best, it's the best efforts that many people have, and it makes the most sense to them of explaining the biblical data.

I get that.

I'm not opposed to that.

I just don't land there.

But the idea is to pose a period of time, uh, actually would be a lengthy period of time, uh, between verse 1 and verse 2 of the opening words of Genesis.

So in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Stop.

Insert a whole bunch of other things, some cataclysm that we don't understand a whole lot about, and the end result of that cataclysm, verse 2, is that the earth was then without form and void, darkness over it, and the assumption is there's something wrong with that, there's something broken about that.

How could God make something that is dark and formless and empty?

That's below, that's beneath God somehow or another.

Well, I get how you could say that, but we'll we'll get to another way of looking at it.

Oftentimes in verse 2, the verb, uh the earth was without form and void.

That was is understood, it became formless and void.

In fact, there's some translations that have taken that.

So you had this original creation in verse 1, some cataclysm uh, and then a recreation.

So, in this understanding of this way of reading the passage, the six days of creation are understood to be a recreation after some cataclysm catastrophe, maybe Satan's fall, maybe a whole bunch of things.

And and it could be.

It's possible.

But quite frankly, when you study the details of the text, for me at least, it doesn't fit the real Hebrew grammar there.

It's not the most compelling interpretation.

But I just I'm not saying mine is perfect, I'm just saying I don't land with the idea of a gap here.

Uh that's discontinuity.

What I would suggest is continuity.

That from verse 1 through verse 31, we have a continuous process of God bringing about the creation of the physical world.

Verse 1 is an introductory summary statement.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

And then we see how this unfolded.

And the picture that helps me is to think of a potter forming a beautiful vase.

And what he first does is he takes some clay and he puts it on the potter's wheel, and it's formless, shapeless, it's not what it will be.

And then he works it.

The wheel spins and he uses his hands and fingers and creates a beautiful vase and maybe puts ornamentation paints around it or makes it fancy or fills it with various things.

That's just the way a pot gets made.

And I think that's just the way God chose.

He could have done it other ways, but there was this lump of clay, as it were, without shape.

It didn't have all that it would have.

It was formless, it wasn't full yet.

And then he starts to form and shape and fill.

And that's how I read all of this.

It comes, it starts with one one and it goes to the crescendo of the creation of man.

We touched on that because we stopped at verse 25.

Um, but we'll pick that up next week and we will see the fact that the creation of man was the high point of creation as it's relayed to us in Genesis.

It's all building towards that.

God is working intentionally to form and fill a world that is perfectly designed for us.

Now, sin came into the picture, and we know there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

But the if there is a discontinuity, the discontinuity is in Genesis 3 when sin enters, my thinking, rather than uh between verse 1 and verse 2.

So here's a way of picturing it.

I can't remember who I stole this from.

Um everything I have I got from somebody else, by the way.

I hopefully don't have any original thoughts.

If I have original thoughts, say, Walt, would you please shut up?

My task here is not to have uh fascinating original thoughts.

Okay.

So the six days of creation, as I think about this way of understanding the continuity, there's day one, two, three, four, five, six.

It begins with that which was without form and was void or empty.

And in days one, two, and three, there is a progressive shaping and forming.

First light, then the firmament or the expanse is the ESV with the sky and the seas.

Day three, the fertile earth with dry land and vegetation.

There is this formation.

And then in days four, five, and six, there is a filling this, a making it more complete, ultimately as a perfect place for man's habitation.

Now, what's interesting is you have the forming on the first three days, the filling on the second three days, but day one and day four are correlated, day two and day five, day three and day six.

You have light being created on day one, and then the light is, the lights in the sky are formed.

Uh that's that's given, it's given a fullness to it.

It's given further definition.

Day two, the firmament of the skies and the seas.

Day five, they are filled with birds and fish.

Day three, the fertile earth with dry land and vegetation.

Day six, the inhabitants, uh, the land animals and human beings.

This is portrayed in a with beautiful symmetry, uh, great skill with which this is put together.

This is not some simplistic uh document that came around.

God led Moses, assuming that he was the writer of these early chapters.

God led him in this way, and the end result shows progression, continuity, progress, crescendo, purpose, design, because that's who God is.

God is a one, one who works with intent and design and purpose.

He does it in the created realm, he does it in our lives as well.

That's something that we learn from God.

Um we'll touch more on this when when we look at the nature of man.

Um, let me just then, this is real quick, this has been 30,000 foot, we haven't dealt with a lot of details, but I'd like to say there's a few things that I take away from Genesis 1, from these verses, of spiritual significance to me.

And I don't want to skip by those.

The goal of Genesis 1 is not to win arguments with other points of view.

The goal of Genesis 1 is to see who God is and to live our lives in accordance with that reality.

That's what it's for.

So, what are we to do with this?

Well, I have about four things that I'd like to suggest.

First of all, the scriptures make it clear that there are important truths to be gleaned from nature and from the creation that tell us about the creator.

The heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament or expanse shows forth his handiwork.

In the creation, that's Psalm 19, first half of Psalm 19, the natural realm displays the creative splendor and glory of God.

When you look through a microscope, what you see is awesome.

The structure of an amoeba, the structure of a cell.

Um you look through a telescope, and with a Hubble telescope, what we see out there, all of which God created, blows our minds and causes us to say, wow, God, you are amazing.

If you can't be amazed when you look through a telescope or look through a microscope, then you're not seeing it as there being a creator with intent and design and purpose to glorify Himself.

I have a vivid memory a number of years back.

Jane and I and my sister were in Holland.

She'd come to visit us, and we sat in a cafe looking out over the Atlantic Ocean as the sun went down, and the cafe was abuzz with a bunch of people talking.

And as the sun began to drop and touch the horizon and then go under it, the most amazing thing happened.

All of the hubbub just gradually went quiet.

And people just stared, stared at a sunset.

For non-believers, there is awe in creation.

For us, how much more?

Because we know something of the God who created that beautiful, beautiful sunset.

So we learn truths about God.

Romans 1, 19 and 20 says there are invisible attributes of God that we see in creation.

Talks specifically about his eternal power and his divine nature being clearly seen in that which is made.

That which is made, that which is created, reveals to us something of the character of God.

In Acts 17, verse 24, Paul was speaking to a group of pagan philosophers, and he makes the point that God gives life and breath and meaning to all men, and that God is not far from you, he said to non-believers.

Acts 17:24

God is not far from you.

In other words, God is involved.

This is his world, and there's signs of him all around.

There's signs of God all around.

And that natural revelation of God is not sufficient in and of itself.

It requires more.

It requires ultimately to know about Christ.

Nobody ever comes to salvation only by looking at a sunset or peering through a telescope.

There's data about God, but it's insufficient to establish and bring to us that relationship with God.

So natural revelation is sufficient for us to know about God, insufficient for us to know God.

But there's things, important things to be learned.

Second of all, Well, and I think I touched on this last week.

God forms and fills his creation.

God is at work.

God is at work accomplishing his purposes.

And so we spent 144 hours, the potter and the wheel, don't take the potter and the wheel literally, but uh shaping and and and ornamenting and filling that which he created.

He had a purpose.

There's purposefulness in it, there's design, there's intentionality, there's a crescendo.

And that's true with you and me.

God has purposes.

He is working in our lives slowly but surely over time.

And as a believer, we've made a, if you're a believer, you've made a major step of coming into having a supernatural worldview.

But God continues to work with us, continues to form you and me, continues to shape us.

He doesn't give up on us any more than he gave up on creation.

And that is a source of great encouragement and comfort.

There was a time in which God looked at all of his creation and he said, Good, good, good, good, good, very good.

It's what I wanted.

And there will be a time where we are met by our Savior and He says, Yeah, good, good, yeah, not so good, good, good.

Now you are who you were intended to be.

The same principle, and that gives hope and encouragement.

Thirdly, creation helps you know who you are and find your rightful place in God's universe.

You are not the center point of reality.

The world does not revolve around you.

You're just a little speck, the highest living speck around man, but you're just a part of a larger creation.

And there's so much that we, I said this at the beginning, we're not going to be able to understand and get our minds around.

I often think of the account in the book of Job, where at the end of his time he'd gone through all of these horrible trials, and Job was finally fed up and frustrated, and he says, God, why?

I don't understand what you're doing.

God lets Job whine and complain a little while.

And he says, Job, who do you think you are?

Were you there when I created the universe?

Were you there when I set the stars in space?

Were you there when I created Leviathan?

Who are you to question me?

You're just you.

He said, Job, know your place.

We don't like that.

But boy, do we need it.

And the creation account helps us see our rightful place in God's universe.

And finally, the Lord is intimately and personally involved in every atom of the universe and of every cell of every living being.

He is not distant, he is not far, he's involved, he's drawn near, Emmanuel, God with us, and God is continuing, and he's working in our lives into every atom and every cell, including your cells, including your cells, when the production of cells has gone haywire, which is in essence what cancer is, an uncontrolled multiplication of cells.

God is not apart from that.

God is intimately involved in that.

What about when my mind blew up with a cerebral hemorrhage?

As I was being stuffed in the helicopter to go have brain surgery, I focused on the fact that God, you know all about this, you care about it, you're involved, you're in my head, and that's good enough for me.

And there's great comfort and faith, and it builds our faith.

God is able, God is good, God is in control, God is still on the throne, God can be trusted.

Yes, today is January 29th, 2017, and our God is in control.

He's still on the throne.

And that builds our faith and puts us in the right perspective to deal with life and to deal with God.

The creation account just reinforces that in a million different ways.

A lot of other takeaways, but those are very practical for me.

I'm going to stop.

And I'd like to pronounce the benediction.

The benediction, by the way, is intended to be some parting thoughts as we leave here, some takeaways.

So what I would say is now, my friends, go in the world in peace.

Have courage.

Hold on to that which is good and honor all men.

Strengthen the faint-hearted, support the weak, help the suffering, comfort the grieving, restore the wandering, and share the gospel.

And may the grace and the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with us.

Deliver me.

Salvation's not for the wicked, but they don't seek your work.

Revive me, let me see your word, revive me, according to your loving kindness, revive me, oh Lord, you give me understanding, according to your word.