Genesis 1:1 - Why is there something rather than nothing?

We study through books of the Bible here at the village chapel.

And with our new year, here comes a new Bible book.

I'm so excited to get started in the book of Genesis together.

As we begin, I would love to just pray for us.

Will you bow your heads?

Lord, as we begin this new year, I pray that you'd grant to us an awareness that what we continue to need is not just the changing of a page on our calendars just so we can escape the difficulties of the last year, but Lord, the changing of our hearts to draw us back to you.

Set our sights beyond survival and all the way on to revival.

As we begin our study of Genesis, Lord, as we go back to the beginning, I pray that you will give us a new beginning in our vision of who you are and who you desire for us to become as your people.

Living for your glory, serving your purposes as your church, in your world, right now, in this particular moment in history, with all of its challenges and its opportunities.

Make us ever aware and humble about our need of you, Lord.

And keep us ever aware and rejoicing at how rich, how deep, how abundant and how amazing is your love for us, Lord.

Teach us to walk in the light of your amazing grace.

Lord, give us a clearer vision of your truth, a greater faith in your power, and a more confident assurance of your love toward us.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen and amen.

Well, folks, our English Bibles have been divided into about 1,189 chapters.

That happened somewhere back in the, I think it was the 13th century, actually.

And then somewhere along the 16th century, the verse divisions came along.

And there's about just a little over 31,000 verses in your English Bible, depending on which version of the English Bible you have.

But I love studying all of them together.

And uh we've finished Revelation, and now I love it that we've gone all the way to the other end of the Bible to Genesis.

I firmly believe if you pull a thread in Revelation, uh the Bible crinkles all the way through, all your pages crinkle all the way through to Genesis, and vice versa.

There is a thread that runs all the way through the whole thing, and it's God's story of redemption.

And uh it's it's a sweet song of salvation, and we're so glad to be able to study it together.

Well, as it relates to Genesis, and as we start any new Bible book study, we always ask what genre of literature is it?

Who's the author?

Where do we get it?

Those sorts of questions.

And of course, the older a book is, the harder it is sometimes to be able to answer those questions.

Umre is a little easier because it's manifest, it's evident in the literature itself.

And the cool thing about Genesis is it's got a variety of genres of literature in it.

There's everything, of course, from the bigats to narrative that sounds very much just like historical narrative.

There's some poetry.

And of course, our Bible is uh all 66 books, is a it's like a complete library of literature with poetry, with historical narrative, with letters that are written to individuals, letters written to a single church or a group of churches, apocalyptic literature like we just studied with the book of Revelation that talks about the end of times and all of eternity and the great hope we have in the person and work of Christ.

So Genesis is going to be really wonderful and rich from a literary standpoint.

We're really going to enjoy it.

As to authorship, uh most conservative Bible scholars attribute uh the first five books of the Old Testament to Moses.

That may or may not mean that they think he wrote all of each of those books, uh, but we'll explore that a little bit with Professor John Lennox uh when I chat with him on Friday, January 15th, online here at TVC Online, and I hope you'll join us at 6 30 p.m.

Central Time.

He's a guy that can talk about that.

I don't have a lot to contribute to those arguments.

There are some books that I'll recommend for you.

Probably next week I'll show you some of those.

But man, he has got a great book called Seven Days That Divide the World, and John Lennox will be fascinating to talk to about all of that.

So for now, though, uh turn in your Bibles with me to Genesis chapter one, and that's where we're gonna start.

And uh Genesis means origins or beginnings, and uh as another just little bit of uh background I want to give you before we read, but it it's so awesome and amazing of a book.

Why?

Because it does help us begin to deal with some of the really big questions of life that people have been asking for a long, long time, centuries.

Since there have been people on the planet, uh, we've been asking some of these kind of questions.

I'll throw them up on the screen for you.

Where why is there something rather than nothing?

And this goes back at least to the 17th and 18th century to the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Um it's a bit of a brain twister.

I realize that, especially if you haven't had any coffee this morning yet.

So I'm gonna invite you to get a cup of coffee as you're listening or watching and make sure that uh you're you're dialed in.

Others have gone on beyond that question to ask why is there this particular something instead of nothing?

Um that's a great question, too.

Why is our universe so complicated, so beautiful, so well ordered?

How is that possible?

Uh is it all reducible to a gigantic random co-location of atoms and chemicals caused by some motion that began somewhere at some time but we don't really understand?

Um but if you're truly interested in the origin of all things, of course, you've got to go back further than that and ask the question: if this all happened randomly, where did those elements come from?

Those atoms and chemicals, where did they come from in the first place?

And and where did the space, time continuum into which they exploded out into, where did that come from itself?

So there's so many questions and you have to just keep pushing back on those questions.

Other questions are, where did everything come from?

Does God exist?

What does it mean to be a human being?

What's gone wrong with the world?

We all, it's so easy to tell there's some things wrong in the world.

What's gone wrong in the world?

Why can't we find the difference between right and wrong?

Why aren't there, why isn't there some kind of consensus on those kinds of things?

Um that's a great question.

And how do we find out the difference between right and wrong?

Is there any hope of redemption for humanity?

What a great question.

And of course, that's one of the reasons we study through books of the Bible.

Because questions like this, we begin to find answers in a book like Genesis and on the redemption question.

That's that part that, you know, I pull that thread and it crinkles all the way through all the pages.

Every single book of the Bible, all 66 of them, find their fulfillment in the person and work of Jesus Christ, God's Redeemer, whom he sent into this world to save and rescue a people that God could call his own.

So these are really good questions.

Um and if you if you come to the conclusion, if you come to this conversation or this study at all with a more naturalistic, atheistic uh worldview, and you think that everything is uh everything that exists is just in the physical realm, um, we're gonna challenge that view a little bit.

I know it doesn't get challenged much uh in the world in which we live, but I think it's important.

I think the same kind of scrutiny that uh the biblical worldview is under, it's a fair thing to take uh an atheistic, naturalistic worldview and put that same scrutiny to it as well.

Um the uh French mathematician and philosopher uh Bernard de Fontenelle asked this question: Behold, a universe so immense that I'm lost in it.

I no longer know where I am.

I am just nothing at all.

Our world is terrifying in its insignificance, and you can just feel the pain in his heart and the anxiety, the angst, if you will, at his own smallness and the vastness of the creation around him.

Uh, whether you're talking about, you know, just the vastness of the city I live in, or the vastness of the state, or the nation, or the continent, uh, or the earth, and we'll do a little comparison chart uh and some photographic projected images uh on some of the sizes of some of the planets next week.

That's going to be amazing to watch.

But you can kind of feel a little bit of what Bernard de Fontenelle was uh wrestling with, can't you?

Even yourself.

I can understand why someone now sometimes that really works for us, though.

I have said before and I still believe, it's really good to be reminded of our smallness, isn't it?

Yeah.

Because the the more, the more puffed up I get, the more I think this is all about me, the more pride has set in.

And uh we'll argue here at the Village Chapel all day long that pride is at the root of all of our sin.

It's sort of that foundation stone to all sin.

It's our pride, our our wanting to be autonomous, our wanting to be apart from God, to be our own God, to have the highest place of authority in reality.

And that's really the problem.

We'll see that in the book of Genesis as well.

In the book of Genesis, we'll read about the beginning of space-time continuum, the creation of light, source of everything in the physical universe, including all that it contains, which is fascinating.

We'll read about the origin of the galaxies, the solar systems, continents and oceans, the origin of the animal kingdom, everything that crawls, walks, swims, or flies.

Um it will it will also confront, I think, which kind of explanation for all of those things and the existence of all those things and the and the coexistence of all those things.

Which explanation do you think makes the most sense out of reality that you observe?

Yeah, well, ask some questions like did it all just happen that, you know, one day uh this one very special planet emerged uh out of nothingness, you know, and that it just so happened to be 93 million miles from its sun, the precise distance to allow for carbon-based life forms to emerge with just the right combination of nitrogen and oxygen in balance at 79% to 20%, with the a leftover remain remaining 1% for variant gases.

Did that just happen?

Do we just happen to have a ring of ozone around us?

Do we just happen to have two-thirds to one-third uh water to land mass ratio on our planet so that biological cells could just randomly form uh and and and magically contain the intelligent design information that we've come to call DNA?

Wow.

Which, by the way, if you unwound one strand of DNA from your body or from my body, just from one cell, and we got, you know, I think there's somewhere upwards of a hundred trillion cells in your body and in mine, roughly.

That's the average, okay?

But if you unwound one strand of DNA, it would be about six feet long.

You can check online.

Um, and with a hundred trillion cells, what that gives us, if you were to put them end to end, it would stretch, you would stretch, I would, my DNA would stretch for 100 trillion, no, no, 110 billion miles.

That's hundreds of trips to the sun and back.

That's amazing.

One human person.

Could intelligent life like you, like me, as you know, partially intelligent that we are, okay, could life like us have begun as a single cell in the primordial ooze?

And and could it have then somehow or another, uh, all of a sudden found another one that spontaneously emerged?

And all of a sudden, could they start joining together?

And somehow or another, over some period, long period of time, you get a tadpole that somehow over a long period of time, you get two tadpoles that mate, and that now you start to propagate a species, you know, entire group of them, and then all of a sudden they start mutating, and all of a sudden, you get a two-legged creature, and all of a sudden you get a second two-legged creature at the same time before this one dies, so that they could both, one male, one female, actually get together and procreate.

Is that possible?

Does that sound a little fantastic to you?

Did we evolve from the goo, go through the zoo, and end up with me and you?

Is that what happened?

I think it's an honest question.

I think it's worth asking.

Or is there evidence for intelligent design everywhere throughout the physical universe?

As far away as the Virgo cluster of stars, and as close as your nose, with its millions of olfactory nerve endings that work together to tell you those are hot, fresh chocolate chip cookies.

Mmm, I can smell them now.

Arno Penzius, an American physicist, radio astronomer, and 1978 Nobel laureate in physics.

Uh, he says astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life.

In the absence of an absurdly improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan.

Penzius also is credited with uh, along with a colleague of his, of discovering uh cosmic microwave background radiation.

And that's what led to sort of uh the the idea of the Big Bang Theory and the theories that the models, various models of that that have come around.

So this guy really knows what he's talking about, uh, and it's fascinating that he comes to the conclusion uh that it seems to be a plan as opposed to a random accident.

Well, my guess is that some of you are starting to think about switching to a different channel right now, perhaps having a brain cramp of some sort, and perhaps a little bit of levity might be helpful at this particular time, and so I will turn away from the philosophers and scientists for just a moment and head run to, which I need to do also often, uh, run to somebody from uh more the film and art world.

And uh it was Maria von Trapp who said, Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.

And so, in addition to making some kind of comment about the origin of all things, she also goes on to suggest her belief in some kind of moral law when she goes, uh, somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something.

That's right, okay.

If you were over 40, you could finish that song.

And uh, if you were not, look it up.

It's called The Sound of Music.

You'll really enjoy it.

It's a great song.

These subjects are indeed important subjects uh to explore because they will impact our everyday lives.

Whether or not you know it, it happens.

Um the even the mood that you're in sometimes is impacted by your view of whether or not your life has meaning and purpose and value.

And so these questions that we ask about the origin of all things, about the existence of God, about whether human life has any meaning or purpose or value, I love the way the Bible begins to help us wrestle with uh those kinds of questions.

Bertrand Russell, probably one of the most well-known uh atheists, a political activist, a Nobel laureate himself, one of the one of the, like I say, one of the 20th century's most famous atheists, said this in a moment of uh I think brutal honesty.

Unless you assume a God, the question of life's purpose is meaningless.

I can have brutal honesty there.

In other words, the idea that human life actually has a purpose is meaningless.

Why?

Well, if you're a natural atheistic philosopher and the physical universe is all that exists, you got a real hard time explaining a lot of things that are immaterial in the world that we can't find under a microscope.

Um, and we can't see in a telescope.

And so that's why I love having a book like Genesis to study, a book like our Bible, that where God has revealed some things to us that we can't discover on our own.

But that requires, of course, that I acknowledge that I need outside help to understand or learn things.

Uh, and pride, my pride often gets in the way in that uh consideration.

So this becomes real important though.

Think about it.

If you were growing up and you were going for uh several decades to school in a school which was teaching you over and over and over and over again that the physical universe is all there is, and that you would therefore come to the conclusion that your life has no meaning, no purpose, and no value, into a culture that for decades has taught its young that there's no such thing as truth, true truth.

They'd suggest to you that truth is what you want it to be.

You create your own truth, just as they'll say, you create your own reality, you create your own identity.

And I would suggest to us, if you would be open to thinking about this, that that's a burden too great to bear for any one of us, myself included.

I don't have the strength, the knowledge, I don't have the wisdom, I don't have the soul tenacity to be able to carry that burden of deciding what it means to be a human person, or of deciding what's true or false, what's right or what's wrong, any more than I do have to make a decision to be the final word on what's beautiful or what's good.

Um so the when we long to for the true and the good and the beautiful in this world, we have to at least be honest, at least as honest as Bertrand Russell was, and say that for there to be some sense of purpose and meaning in life, that means there has to be something beyond who we are and beyond this physical universe.

And the sum total of what we believe about these kinds of things is typically called our worldview.

And at the center of it is the and what holds it all together is our noetic structure.

And so every little bit of something that you believe makes up your worldview.

That's the way you view the world.

That's the easiest way to describe what a worldview is.

But like an uncertain teenager, I think a lot of people go through life with an adolescent worldview, not stopping down to actually think about these things.

They prefer to just not, I don't want to have anything to do with that, it's just too big, I can't really deal with that.

I don't I don't have the education, I don't have the, I don't have the, I don't, I don't want to handle that right now.

My life's too complicated, whatever.

And we don't want to think about that stuff.

But I'm suggesting to you today that one of the reasons the Bible begins with all of that is because it is foundational.

It's at the center of the web of our noetic structure, if you will, and it's really good news.

Because the burden, what this what this book says is the burden isn't on you.

The burden isn't on me.

The Bible specifically, the book of Genesis, speaks to us with clarity and offers certainty about where we came from, why we're here, the meaning of life, and what we can ultimately hope for.

Genesis takes us back to the beginning and to the beginner, to the designer and the creator of everything that exists.

Genesis reveals God's plans and purposes for the world in which we live and even for human life itself.

Genesis offers us a pathway to a new beginning by looking back to the beginning.

It opens up the way forward, helping us to know who we are, why we're here, how we got here, and by learning what we were created for in the first place.

Let's take a look then after all of that.

Sorry, that was a long intro, wasn't it?

Let's take a look at Genesis chapter 1.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

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

All right, that's where I'm going to stop today.

I don't think I have.

I mean, I'm telling you, we could go for two weeks just on that verse alone.

And so I'm very excited about it.

And I'll we'll get to verses two and following next week.

But again, Genesis, not about a comprehensive scientific explanation for the origin of all things, not about offering us a precision model for the creation event, complete with formulas on how you can form your own star cluster, your solar system, you can, you know, form a moon or a mountain range or a unicorn or a giraffe.

No, none of that.

We don't get those plans laid out for us.

There's no sequential timetable that satisfies all curiosity about method, sequence, and process.

And it certainly doesn't provide us with a crystal clear solution for all possible gap theories and all the questions that we might have about the process, like I said.

No, as a matter of fact, what this Genesis creation account is all about is it's not an explanation of how God created everything.

It's a declaration that God created everything.

And that's what we have in Genesis 1:1.

Genesis 1:1

If you believe there was a beginning of created order, then you've got to push back until you come to something or someone that began that created order.

Something or someone who's always been there and who became the uncaused causal agent of everything that exists in the space-time physical universe.

I would suggest to you that that someone or something is what we call God.

And that's why I look at Genesis 1.1 and I go, all right.

There it is.

And it's interesting to me that the Bible never seeks to prove the existence of God, it assumes the existence of God from the first verse and on forward.

And I would suggest that the other thing that Genesis 1 is going to reveal to you, and this is just such a beautiful thing.

We'll get to this next week and the week following.

Just a little bit more.

But the deepest longing of your heart and my heart is to be in a loving relationship.

And that that's really part of the imprint that's been left on us, as Genesis 1.1 will teach us, as we were created Imago Dei, in the image of God.

Part of what that means is that we live to be in loving relationship.

And that's so important for you.

That's so important for me.

Even the hardest of hearts, yours or mine, when we have grown old, cold, and crusty in our hearts, we're really desiring to know and to be known, to love and to be loved.

And the highest form of that I would suggest to you is that God knows you fully.

There's nothing you can hide from him.

He knows you better than you know yourself.

He knows me better than I know myself.

And the beautiful thing is that while God knows you fully, he also loves you completely.

That's the great news we get from the very beginning, all the way through to the last chapter of the book of Revelation, all through our Bibles.

That's that little thread, that great story of redemption that runs all the way through it.

Well, Jonathan Edwards is an 18th-century American philosophical theologian, brilliant mind.

And in the end for which God made the world, Jonathan Edwards says this if we are attempting to determine the goal of the universe, we behold around us, we should consult the architect who built it.

It should be our priority to listen to him and rely on what he has told us about the design and astonishing fabric of his creation.

Yeah, I think that's really great.

That is awesome.

And then, quoting from John Lennox, Professor Lennox's book, Seven Days That Divide the World, he said the book of Genesis is foundational for the rest of the Bible.

Its opening chapter does something of incalculable importance.

It lays down the basis of a biblical worldview.

It gives us, it gives to us humans a meta-narrative, a big story into which our lives can be fitted and from which they can derive meaning, purpose, and value.

Ah, that's such great news, isn't it?

Well, we all have our presuppositions when we come to a book like this.

And even as we approach life in general, we all have presuppositions in our worldview.

We've embraced, accepted things sometimes passively, that have been handed down to us or pushed upon us.

We've been influenced and formed by all of the voices that speak into our lives, whether those are entertainment voices or educational voices or whether they're news sources, whatever it might be, those are the voices that are informing us and influencing our worldview and shaping and forming our presuppositions.

I'll be honest with you and tell you that I have presuppositions.

I have selected and chosen as many of them, and my presuppositions as I possibly can from the biblical narrative, the biblical record.

Why?

Because it's God's word to us.

It's what God has revealed to us, so much of which we would never be able to discover on our own.

And so I trust Him.

That's one of the reasons we study through books of the Bible here at the Village Chapel and have a high view of Scripture.

We know our need.

What are your presuppositions as you come to the book of Genesis?

And I hope you'll read along with us and study along with us, and perhaps even share this with some of your friends and invite them to come and join us on the journey through the book of Genesis.

I'll close with this quote from G.K.

Chesterton.

Men can always be blind to a thing so long as it is big enough.

And ladies and gentlemen, there's nothing bigger than the story of the beginning.

The story that we're reading here in the book of Genesis.

Let me assure you, the rest of what takes place in the Bible is quite reasonable.

If you can find here in Genesis 1.1 something that you can believe, that there was a beginning and a beginner, and that the beginner was God, a being that we should call God.

If you believe that, there's so much about your Bible that I want to encourage you to read in light of Genesis 1.1.

It's a great beginning verse, as I said.

I hope Genesis will arouse your curiosity, revisit those same big questions that we had up on the screen earlier.

And to revisit those with the idea in mind that God is speaking to us, that we're not left alone in a cold, in an empty, just merely physical universe, but that God is speaking and continues to speak to us through his word.

And that the fact that you and I ask questions is actually his gift to us.

Especially, I think that when he gives us these questions, the question, what, when, where, why, I think those questions are all given to us as a gift to lead us to ask the question, who?

And the answer, of course, is God.

He leads us right back to himself.

Yeah, that's really, really powerful.

Well, read ahead, and I think you're just gonna enjoy, as I say, this journey through Genesis together.

May the Lord be with us as we study his word together.