In the Beginning, Part 3

Turn with me in your Bible to Genesis chapter 1, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

This is our third week on this verse, we'll spend another week here, at that rate it'll take us about 120 some odd weeks to get through chapter 1.

But don't worry, we'll go a little bit more rapidly as time goes on, as you will see. But we're going to spend a little bit of time today in Genesis chapter 1, verse number 1, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Many scientists over the years have tried to attribute the creation of the universe to the theoretical process of evolution. They have led most people to believe that chance is the cause of the beginning of the universe rather than a personal and powerful God. However, science is unable to explain how the initial matter and energy came into existence.

Let me quote to you Robert Jastrow, who is an astrophysicist and former director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

He says these words, Now we see how the astronomical evidence supports the biblical view of the origin of the world. The essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same. Consider the enormousness of the problem. Science has proved that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks, what cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter and energy into the universe? And science cannot answer these questions. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream.

He has scaled the mountains of ignorance. He is about to conquer the highest peak. As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been there for centuries. End quote. Science cannot explain how everything came into existence. But we can because we know what the word of the Lord says. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. We're reminded of what the Bible says, that man is ever learning but never coming to the knowledge of the truth.

As far as we have come scientifically, we still have not come to grasp the truth of Genesis chapter 1, verse number 1. But one day, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father because in the beginning, God. There was a man by the name of Robert F. Smith, who is a member of the Western Missouri affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, who of course is no friend of the church, who said these words, for the past five years, I have closely followed creationist literature and have attended lectures and debates on related issues.

Based solely on the scientific arguments, pro and con, I have been forced to conclude that scientific creationism is not only a viable theory, but that it has achieved parity with, if not superiority over, the normative theory of biological evolution. That this should now be the case is somewhat surprising, particularly in view of what most of us were taught in primary and secondary schools. In practical terms, the past decade of intense activity by scientific creationists have left most evolutionist professors unwilling to debate the creationist professors.

Too many of the evolutionists have been publicly humiliated in such debates by their own lack of erudition and by the weaknesses of their theory." So you have even those of the world beginning to understand that evolution cannot hold a candle to what Genesis 1, verse number 1 says, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. I trust that you believe that. I trust that you understand that everything revolves around God. We began our study by looking at some preliminary questions. We moved from there to look at some powerful revelations in Genesis chapter 1, verse number 1, and that's where we want to pick up our outline today.

We begin with talking about God's eternality, that in the beginning, God. It speaks of the eternal existence of our God. We know the answer to how everything began because the Bible tells us. In the beginning, when there was nothing else, there was God. Paul would say in 1 Timothy 1, verse 17, that God is the everlasting God. Abraham would say in Genesis 21, verse number 33, that he is the eternal God. To speak of the eternality of God means to speak of his self-existence. God has always existed.

In fact, John 5, 28 says that just as the father has life in himself, even so he gave the son also to have life in himself. So we know that the father has life because he is the originator of life. The son has life. He says that he is the way, the truth, and the life. So God understands how life began because he is life. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. It speaks of the eternal existence of God, that God always is because God always was and he forever will be. So we must move on to point number two, not only God's eternality, but God's tri-unity.

God's tri-unity. In the beginning, what's it say? God, Elohim in the plural, Hebrew. That means in the beginning, God, what do you mean plural? That means it speaks of the tri-unity of God. Notice it didn't say the trinity of God.

I don't believe in the trinity. I believe in the tri-unity of God. You say, what do you mean? Well, you need to get the tape on the uniqueness of God, on God exploring his essence, which deals with the singularity and the plurality of God, dealing specifically with his tri-unity. To say that God is three and one is quite a statement. You say, wait a minute, pastor, I thought that God was one. Deuteronomy 6, 4, here, O Israel, the Lord our God is one. 1 Timothy 2, 5, there is one God. Now you're telling me that there are more than one God?

The Bible says, in the beginning, God. The Hebrew suffix im presents a singular God who is expressed as a plurality. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. That doesn't mean that God has three different forms. That does not mean that there are three gods. It simply means that one God exists in three persons who are equal in attributes, yet individual and distinct in their offices and their ministries. Understand that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were all involved in the act of creation.

Turn with me to Acts chapter 4. Acts chapter 4. After the apostles had been threatened and released, they came back to those who were having a prayer meeting, and it says in verse number 24, and when they heard this, they lifted their voices to God with one accord and said, O Lord, it is Thou who didst make the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. As they prayed to God the Father, they realized that it was He who created the heavens and the earth and all that is within them. Over in 2 Kings, I think it's 1915, it was Hezekiah who prayed to God the Father and began to articulate the fact that it was God the Father who created the heavens and the earth.

Now turn back with me to John chapter 1, verse number 1. It says this, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him, nothing came into being that has come into being. That is, Jesus Christ our Lord, John 1, 14, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. So we see where God the Son is involved in creation.

There is nothing that came into existence outside of God the Son creating it. Read Colossians chapter 1, verse number 16. Hebrews chapter 1, verse number 2 also solidifies the fact that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was involved in creating every single creature. Now turn back with me to Genesis chapter 1. We also notice that the Spirit of God was involved in creation.

Read Psalm 104, verse number 30. Over in Job 26, verse number 13, it states, By His Spirit He adorned the heavens. It says in verse number 2 of Genesis chapter 1, And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep. And the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. So the Spirit of God, maybe your translation says hovering over the surface of the waters. It's a word that means to flutter or to shake. It's a word that expresses the loving, caring presence of the Spirit of God.

Now note this very carefully. We'll talk more about this next week. Because the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the water, because the Spirit of God was involved in creation, because the verb demands the loving, caring presence of the Spirit of God, there is in no way, shape, or form there can be a gap between Genesis 1.1 and 1.2. No way. It's biblically inaccurate to say there is a gap between Genesis 1.1 and 1.2 as the gap theorist suggests. Why? Because the loving, caring response of the Spirit of God was there.

There was no destruction. There was no millions of years with a pre-Adamic race where animals were slaughtering and killing one another, and God had to reconstruct the earth because of what had happened at the beginning. No. The Spirit of God was there, hovering over the face of the earth. You know what? The Spirit of God's never left. He's never left. In fact, if you read over Deuteronomy chapter 32, verses 11 to 12, it likens the Lord's care for His people to that of an eagle which hovers over its young ones.

God cares for us so much that He hovers over us. He tenderly cares for us. That's the way the Spirit of God was at the time of creation, tenderly caring for the surface of the waters, for all that's there, because He's intimately involved and has always been intimately involved in the lives of us. That's good news. The triunity of God was involved in the process of creation, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. And you know He's also involved in your redemption. Turn with me over to Ephesians chapter 1.

In Ephesians chapter 1, you understand that God the Father predetermines your salvation. God the Son purchased your salvation, and God the Spirit protects your salvation. The triunity of God, three in one, three persons with distinct offices, distinct ministries, all maintaining the fact that there is one true God. It's God the Father who predetermines your salvation. It's God the Son who purchases your salvation, and it's God the Spirit who protects your salvation. Ephesians chapter 1, verse number 3, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.

Just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before Him in love, He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. God predetermined your salvation in eternity past, way before the foundations of the world were ever laid. God predetermined who would be a child of His. It says in verse number 7, in Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of His grace which He lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight.

Why? Verse number 12, to the end that we who were the first to hope in Christ should be to the praise of His glory.

It's all about God. It's all about praise and His wonderful glory. Then it says in verse number 13, in Him you also after listening to the message of the truth, the gospel of your salvation, having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise who was given as a pledge of our inheritance with a view to the redemption of God's own possession to the praise of His glory. It's all about God. You see, God the Spirit protects what God the Son purchased because God the Father predetermined all of it from the very beginning of time.

That should cause every one of us to fall on our knees and praise God and say, thank you God for choosing me. Thank you God for determining in eternity past that I can be a child of yours and that I can follow you and serve you and be conformed to your image, to be holy and blameless, to be set apart for your purposes. That should cause us to praise His glorious name. The triunity of God was involved in the process of creation, was involved in the plan of redemption that you and I might come to saving faith in Jesus Christ.

That whole aspect about the triunity of God is expressed well in J.I. Packer's book, I Want to be a Christian, when he said this, here we face the most dizzying and unfathomable truth of all, the truth of the Trinity. What should we make of it? In itself, the divine triunity is a mystery, a transcendent fact that passes our understanding. How the one eternal God is eternally both singular and plural, how Father, Son and Spirit were personally distinct yet essentially one, is more than we can know and any attempt to explain it, to dispel the mystery by reasoning as distinct from confessing it from Scripture is bound to falsify it.

Here, as elsewhere, our God is too big for His creature's little minds, end quote. That's true. The vastness of God, the greatness of God, in the beginning, God, it speaks of His eternality. It speaks of His triunity, and it also speaks of His self-sufficiency. His self-sufficiency. What do you mean by that? Where is that stated in Genesis chapter 1 verse number 1? Well, it's not. It's implied. You say, why did God create? In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Was God lonely? I mean, God had been existing from eternity past.

Who knows how long that was? Was He lonely? Was He in need of someone to worship Him? Was He in need of praise? Did He need some kind of accolade? Did He need something to validate the fact that He was God? Why did God create? Understand God's self-sufficiency. God does not need you. He wants you, but God does not need you. We need God. There are a lot of things we need, right? We need oxygen, or we can't breathe. That means we die. We need the light of the sun to warm our bodies, or we'll freeze to death.

There are a lot of things we need. Autonomous man, man who thinks he's autonomous, needs someone else. He needs a creator. God needs no one else. God needs nothing else. God is self-sufficient. In fact, I like what A.W. Pink said in his book on the attributes of God about God's self-sufficiency when he said this, God was under no constraint, no obligation, no necessity to create. That He chose to do so was purely a sovereign act on His part, caused by nothing outside Himself, determined by nothing but His own mere good pleasure, for He worketh all things after the counsel of His own good will, Ephesians 1.11.

That He did create was simply for His manifestative glory. God is no gainer even from our worship. He was in no need of that external glory of His grace, which arises from His redeemed, for He is glorious enough in Himself without that. What was it that moved Him to predestinate His elect to the praise of the glory of His grace? It was, as Ephesians 1-5 tells us, according to the good pleasure of His will. The force of this is that it is impossible to bring the Almighty under obligations to the creature.

God gains nothing from us. God didn't have to create you. God chose to create you and me, to express the kind intention of His will. He chose to do that for the praise of His glory. He didn't have to. But Pink makes it very clear, God can't be coerced. God cannot be manipulated. God cannot be intimidated. God says, vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.

You can't defend God. God needs no defense. God cannot be coerced into doing something for you that should help change your prayer life. We pray and try to manipulate God to do things for us. God doesn't work that way. There's nothing inside Him that is greater or that would move Him to change. There is nothing outside Him more powerful than He is that would cause Him to change His mind or change His actions. Why? Because God is self-sufficient. We're not like that, are we? We are easily changed, aren't we?

We can be coerced. We can be manipulated. We can be caused to change our mind. I'm reminded of the fact that for years my wife has been asking me for a dog. For years. Honey, we've got to have a dog. Now, for those of you who know me, we had three dogs when we first got married.

We since have gotten rid of all those dogs. For those of you who have continued to be with us, you know that we went from dogs to cats and we have two cats. My wife and my kids have always asked for a dog. It's pretty hard as a father in the house when it's seven to one. It's hard to stand strong. It's hard to be forceful. When you've got the little eyes of your girls falling down on their hands and knees pleading with their daddy, oh please, daddy, give us a dog. My wife pleading, oh honey, please give us a dog.

Well, I gave in this past week. So we've got a dog now. I've got a dog. I've got two cats. I've gone through fish. I've gone through turtle. We've got Noah's Ark in our house. We've got every animal you could ever imagine in our house. We can be manipulated. We can be coerced into changing our mind, but God can't because he's just not that way. There's nothing more powerful than he is that can cause him to change because God is self-sufficient. He doesn't need you. You say, well, wait a minute. He does need me.

He needs me to preach the gospel. He said, go into all the world and preach the gospel. How shall I hear without a preacher? He needs me to preach. No, he doesn't. He chooses to use you. You say, well, he needs me to populate the earth. He told Adam and Eve, be fruitful and multiply. He told Noah's family, be fruitful and multiply. Without them doing that, he needed them to multiply the earth or we would not be here today. No, he doesn't. He chooses to use you, which is the joy of salvation, that the self-sufficient God who cannot be manipulated, who cannot be intimidated, the self-existent God, the sustaining one chooses to pause for a moment, to choose you, to be used in a mighty way, to represent him.

Folks, that's the joy of salvation, to know that Jesus Christ, my Lord, the self-sufficient God of the universe, would somehow choose me, one who was rebelled against him, one who has sinned against him, one who longs for autonomy, one who would swear his own independence and God says, no, you're not.

You are dependent. You need me. I don't need you, but you need me. So important. Remember in Acts 17, when Paul went to Athens and began to preach there at the Areopagus about all those people with the statue to the unknown God, they had thousands of statues, but there was one to the unknown God and Paul began to preach to them because they needed to know the truth. General revelation wasn't enough. They had to have the specific truth of God's holy word, and what does it say in Acts 17, verse number 26, in God we move and have our being.

It's all about God, the self-sufficient one. In God we're able to move. In God we're able to live and exist. It's God, as he goes on to say before that in Acts 17, who determines all the habitation, all the boundaries of all the countries of the world. Do you know that no country has ever built their own boundaries, that God has always established them from the very beginning of time? God removes kings, he sets up kings. He does it all. You can do whatever you want. You can say whatever you want.

You can believe whatever you want, but the Bible says God does it all. In him we move and have our being. In him we move and we exist. Without God, there's nothing. With God, there is everything. As we close our time together today, I wonder if you know the self-sufficiency of God. If you are still struggling to find some kind of meaning in life, are you still trying to live independent of God, trying to do your own thing, be your own person? It's never going to happen, because you need the Lord God of the universe to direct your paths.

Remember what the psalmist said, Psalm 23, Shannon read it earlier at the beginning of her service. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Listen very carefully. The Lord is not a shepherd, he is my shepherd. If he's your shepherd, and you still want something, something's drastically wrong with your relationship with God. What problems are you facing? What difficulties are you encountering? God says, I'm the self-sufficient one.

I don't need you, but I sure do want you, and because I want you, let me tell you what I can do for you.

I can erase your sins, I can take them all away, I can cast them into the depths of the sea, I can clothe you with my righteousness, I can make you a child of mine, and I can develop you into the supreme workmanship of my life, and that's what I want for you. Do you have that? I trust that you do. If you don't, let us introduce you to Jesus Christ, the one who is eternal, the one who is self-existent, the one who is self-sufficient, the one who is three-in-one, the God of all creation. Let's pray together.