God Created It All And It Is All His (Introduction to Genesis and Genesis 1:1)
When I was trying to figure out what we would next work through on Sunday Mornings a lot of different options kept going through my head. I would think and pray on this subject and as I was looking through the news one night the Book of Genesis kept going through my head.
Now, you might ask why Genesis and that would be a very good question. The reality is that all of the things that we fight about today in our society are first taught and rooted in the Book of Genesis.
Who gets to decide right and wrong?
What is a marriage? And what is God’s plan for marriage?
Is abortion wrong?
What about capital punishment?
Is homosexuality wrong?
And as I thought through the content of Genesis and prayed about what we should do, this is where we landed.
Historical Introduction
Up until about 200 years ago it was understood by everyone that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. But now every liberal seminary in the world teaches the Graff-Wellhausen Theory known as JEDP which argues that at least 4 different authors edited the Book of Genesis. Each one had a separate agenda to push.
But the people who believe this today do not believe that the Bible is God’s revelation to us. They believe that Scripture is a history of what people have believed through the ages. For us, this is not so.
As a Southern Baptist Church, we profess to believe that the Bible itself is “God’s revelation of Himself to man”. And that it is “without any mixture of error” (BFM Article I). We do not believe that Scripture is a record of what people have believed. We believe that it is God’s revelation of Himself to us and that there is no error in it. We are not reading about the history of believe. We are reading what God revealed to us.
And so, throughout the Bible the first five books are attributed to Moses. In the Book of Exodus we read that “Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord” (Exodus 24:4a). Again, in Malachi the content of these books is attributed to Moses, “Remember the law of my servant Moses” (Malachi 4:4) And our Lord, Jesus Christ, stated on different occasions that it was Moses who wrote these books (Matthew 19:1-12, Mark 12:18-27). This was obviously the view of the rest of Scripture. And with Jesus I shout loudly that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Bible. And when Moses died, at the end of the Book of Deuteronomy someone finished it and it took its place in Scripture.
So, why do they reject it? For the most part, they simply cannot believe the miracles that take place in the Scriptures. They cannot believe that God fulfilled what He said He would do and then that He did it. They reject it because it is the product of God.
So, how did Moses get this information?
This was most likely delivered to Moses by oral history. And this should not scare us. Cultures and societies had much better memories than we do today. This story of creation was passed down orally from one generation to the next. Two things should give you confidence as you consider this oral transmission. First, from a purely historical standpoint the idea of oral histories being accurate. This is nothing like the game of telephone. Over and over scholars will say that the ancient memory was much different than ours and that there was great capability to pass down large amounts of information.
Second, we as Southern Baptists believe that Scripture is the product of God. God so oversaw the writing of the Book of Genesis that it is His product and everything in it is there because He wanted it to be there and to be that way. Every bit of it is true and without error. We can trust what God has revealed to us through His servant Moses.
Introduction
Today we are begin with only Genesis 1:1. My original intention for the text this morning was to cover the entire first chapter of Genesis. I just could not do it. The implications of Genesis 1:1 are just too big and it needed to be discussed by itself this morning.
We live in a society that has abandoned any understanding of their being an authority over it. We are in Sodomy Pride Month, which is basically a parade of individuals who have banded together in rebellion against God and His morals. It was once understood that we, as creatures, are created beings and to rebel against the Creator was wrong. But today our society stands in defiance against God who created it.
And what we will see in Genesis 1:1 is that God created it all and it is all His.
I was watching a clip from the House of Representatives
“What any religious tradition describes as God’s Will is no concern of this Congress.”—Jerry Nadler
Well, someone needs to let him know that God created all things, and all things are His, even what happens in the halls of the United States Congress.
God created all things and all things are His.
God Has Always Been
Our text, the Bible itself, begins with the words, “In the beginning, God”. And we understand by this not that God was created in the beginning, but that He was already there. The last book of the Bible confirms this with great beauty.
“And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and within, and day and night they never cease to say, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!” (Revelation 4:8 ESV)
We sang a song to teach this to our children a few year’s back and we go back to it to review it from time to time. It goes something like this,
And this brings us to the point I’m trying to draw out from this text. God has always been there. There was never a time when God was not. He was, He is, and he always will be. So, when we say “In the beginning”, we are not speaking of the beginning of God. We are speaking of the beginning of something else.
The beginning marks the beginning of time. But when did time begin? Well, what is time?
If you look into the idea of time, then you know people have a hard time defining it. Look it up online and you will find a lot of discussions about whether or not time actually exists. But, time is generally defined as a sequence of existence. Well, that’s not all that clear. We do, however have a way of measuring time.
What is it that your clocks do? It measures time. Well, we measure time by the passing of days. The Earth spins on its axis one time every 24 hours. That gives us day and night. Our clocks are set to measure that rotation, or where we are in that rotation.
So, when did time begin? Well, it began when God created the Universe.
What was there before time began? There was God.
God is eternal. He has no beginning and He has no ending. That is a bit incomprehensible, but if I could comprehend God then He wouldn’t be God would He?
God is on a plane totally different than us. We and everything else are simply creatures.
There is only one thing in all the Universe that has always existed and that is God. There was no speck of dust. No speck of energy. No speck of anything, only God. It is God who would create the entirety of the Universe out of nothing, ex nihilo.
Parents, this may seem like a little thing, but it is something that we must teach our children. The very first thing that God reveals to us in His Word about Himself is that He had no beginning and created the world. Grow in your children a sense of awe and wonder. Build something with your children, then show them something like the Grand Canyon, a river, stream, or a mountain and say, “God created that out of nothing.” And before those things were there, before anything was there God existed.
What wonder this should evoke from us! Everything and everyone else I have ever laid eyes on had a beginning. But God, He did not. And in the beginning He was there.
The Universe Has Not Always Been
Ancient religions, including those that existed in Moses’s day, oftentimes believed that the Universe had always been. Many Philosophers and societies throughout the ages believed this to be the case as well. The prevailing view before Edwin Hubble and Albert Einstein looked into a telescope together and saw that the Universe was expanding, was that the Universe was itself eternal.
And here we see that Scripture speaks up to us and says, “No, it is God who has always existed and the entire Universe owes its existence to Him.”
The Universe is created, though it is inanimate it is a creature. Secularism and naturalism insists that there is no god and only what we see in the Universe. If the secularist were right then he would get to make his own law and live by it. There would be no basis for right or wrong and he would get to make every decision he wanted with no consequences. There would be nothing to differentiate us as creatures. If the secularist and naturalist were correct then all we would be is a bunch of atoms bouncing around in a walking flesh bag following our hormones and emotions wherever they led us.
As the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzche put it,
“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”[1]
If the Universe had always been and there were no God then Nietzche would be correct. If he were correct, then we are all just a bunch of atoms bouncing around following our hormones and emotions. But that is not the case. You do matter. What you do matters because there is Someone who stands outside of this world that created it all and has embedded into the Universe meaning.
Non-Christian, I know that it would be easier on your conscience if you could just do whatever you want without God in the Heavens having any claim over your life, but here is the truth of the matter. God created the world and everything in it. Everyone and everything in all of Creation, including yourself owes its existence to Him.
And beyond that, this explains everything.
The world is incredibly complex. And if our environment were to change much at all this world would be uninhabitable. Those who observe such things state that Earth exists in The Goldilocks Zone, which is not too hot and not too cold. Our place in the solar system is just right, and so life on this planet is possible.
We also know that our own bodies are incredibly complex. We now know that human beings are filled with information called DNA. This information tells our bodies what to do and when to do it. Information comes from intelligent life, not nothing. And the information that is created is incredibly complex. Consider this, there are more than 2 million working parts of the human eyeball. And all of that had to come together in order for you to see. And that is only one of your eyeballs and that’s without discussing the rest of your body.
These facts baffle scientists today. I was reading Richard Dawkin’s book The God Delusion when I realized just how desperate this prominent atheist was to find an answer to such things. He proposed two things to try and figure these things out without God as the explanation. The first one was that the multiverse exists in real life and not just in DC Comics. As simply as I can explain it The Multiverse Theory is that there are many or an infinite number of universes that all exist right now. One of them got it right, and so we exist. And the other one, which I believe I found online while reading the book was Richard Dawkins proposing that we were made by aliens. The last one made me chuckle. .
Mankind can be stubbornly rebellious and will look far and wide to try and find something that doesn’t rule over them. But that will not do. We have a Creator. You have a Creator. And this Creator makes demands of you. And this Creator has told us what is right and what is wrong.
Christian, I do not believe that you need to keep up with he latest scientific developments or read the latest scientific research. I do believe observing the world to be a good thing and what we find when these things are seen well is that God created all things and He did a beautiful job of it.
Parents, teach your kids about Creation. And teach them about God’s creation of them. Help them to understand the immensity of God by going outside and taking a look at God’s creation. Help them to appreciate the immensity of the Creator and His intelligence as you look at the glorious way God created them.
Go outside and stand in awe of God. He made all things. Think through the wonders of our complexity.
God Created Everything, It’s All His
Here is where we get to the point of it all. God is the Creator of all things and therefore, it is all His. Every creature, every beast, every bird in the world are all His (Psalm 50:10) and He can do with them whatever He wants to do. It is God who rules over all things. He is without peer or competitor. If anything exists, then it exists because He created it. Everything owes its existence to God.
God gets to define what everything is. It is His. He gets to do that. It is God who defines what it means to be a human, to be a man, to be a woman. It is God who defines what marriage is? It is God who defines what the family is?
And God has every right to say what is right and what is wrong. And He does do that. God defines sin and tells us what it is. And God has every right to judge us according to His standard. And we have found that all of us have fallen short of God’s standard and have earned for ourselves God’s perfect justice. That is what Paul meant when he said, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23 ESV)
God created the world and everything in it. And as we will see later, man rebelled against God. Man disobeyed God and it has placed us in this horrible situation. We have earned for ourselves God’s righteous judgment against sin. But God did not leave us in that situation. God sent His Son to make a way for us to be brought back into fellowship with Him. Jesus Christ lived a perfect life on behalf of those who would believe and died as the punishment for sin for all who would believe. And those who turn from ruling their own lives and trust in Christ can be brought back into fellowship with God. That is our response to this message of what Christ has done on our behalf: repentance and faith.
And this is the only way of salvation, which is also God’s prerogative. Creatures rebelled against their Creator. It is God who gets to decide whether a person can be saved from their punishment and how they will be saved from it. Criminals do not get to make that decision.
And as creatures, we are to live by the truth. Because God exists there is a standard of truth. Truth is that which accords with reality, which is ultimately God. We are not walking flesh bags created by nothing. We are creatures and so is everything else. Life is in Him. Truth is in Him. And everything that accords with Him is true. I can know right and wrong because God created the world.
Christian, we live under the authority of God who rules over all. We make it our aim to glorify and honor Him. We understand that it is God who tells us what we are and are not supposed to do. And we also understand that we should not trust the lies that this world attempts to tell us about God and His Creation. God created us in His image, as we will see in a few weeks. He created us male and female. He created us to marry and have children. He created us to worship Him. We do not live by lies, we live by truth which is found ultimately in Him under His authority.
Parents, teach your children that they all live under authority. Teach them to live under your authority. And teach them that your authority is derived from God. You are in authority over them because God has put you there. And as you do so teach them that it is God who has all authority over all things.
Husbands, lead your families, and do so lovingly. Teach your family what it means to be a loving caring Father. Teach them what loving authority looks like. And teach to them by your words and actions what it means to be a loving authority.
Church, let us always teach that it is God who has authority over all things. In all matters.
Conclusion
Our society is broken up into two groups of people. Those who believe the message of Genesis 1:1, and those who either don’t care or disagree. But Genesis 1:1 is a declaration of God’s authority over all things. God created it all and it is all His.
R. Dwain Minor
[1] Paraphrase from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by Walter Kaufmann, Penguin Books, 1966, p. 195).