An Exploration of Genesis, #7 - Life on Earth

Genesis 1:20-25 – [20] And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

[21] And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

[22] And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.

[23] And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

[24] And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

[25] And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

I have grouped Day Five with the first part of Day Six because they are similar events.  Over this period of time, God creates all the animals on the planet, once again adhering to the orderly fashion He set up.

Just as the second day of “forming” concerned creating the air and the sea, so the second day of “filling” (Day Five) is concerned with the air and the sea.  On this day, God speaks into existence all the sea animals and all the birds of the air.  He fills the sky and the ocean “abundantly” with life, so that from the very beginning untold numbers of an amazing variety of animals occupied these places

On Day Six, God does the same with the land-based creatures.  Just as the third day of “forming” was involved with the dry land, so is the third day of “filling.”  God calls into existence all the cattle, creeping thing, and beasts.  While I’m sure there is a technical distinction in these three words in the original Hebrew, the point ultimately is that everything considered a land animal was created at this time.

As I noted on Day Three regarding plants, God also calls the animals to reproduce after their own kind.  Whales give birth to whales, eagles give birth to eagles, and dogs give birth to dogs.  This does not obstruct the known fact of genetic mutations within a species, but it does rebuke the idea that, given enough time, a fish would have a lizard as one of its distant descendants.

In the case of dogs, for example, breeding practices have isolated specific genes to manufacture everything from St. Bernards to teacup poodles, and often the breeds are at such extremes that two animals both identified as dogs have been unable to breed with each other.  This has often been handed to me as evidence of evolution, but notice that all the dogs in question are still dogs.  Micro-evolution is simply genetic mutation within a species, to which Creationists have no objection.  It is observable scientific fact.  But what evolutionists are blind to is that no amount of breeding techniques will ever take the line of dogs across the gap to become cats.  Genetic mutation will never bridge the chasm between species, making macro-evolution impossible.

In fact, the closer breeds get to the edge of their species, the weaker they become, the more deformed; and the faster they die.  Genetic mutations are almost always detrimental to some degree, and become increasingly debilitating the further away from the median “kind” they stray.  It borders on insanity to claim otherwise.

But it doesn’t take powerful microscopes and computers probing the very genetic material of life to see that evolution is utterly ridiculous.  Simply take a look at the animal kingdom, which is replete with marvelous mechanisms that could never in a billion years form themselves through random mutation.

Consider the giraffe.  Evolutionists have argued that its long neck is the result of those with shorter necks dying out when food supplies at the ground level became scarce.  But there’s a problem here, and it is with the fact that when a baby giraffe is born, it can only be described as small and close to the ground.  If the food supply at a lower level were so scarce as to eliminate those giraffes with necks so short they couldn’t reach the higher food up in the trees, then that would also eliminate any and all baby giraffes, period, leaving us with no giraffes at all.

But that’s actually not why I bring up the giraffe.  With its long neck, the giraffe actually has another issue that would be fatal in any offspring that were not perfectly created by God.  When the giraffe bends over to eat food, much of it very low to the ground, the blood rushes from the base of its neck to its head.  Were it not for a special muscle that closes off key blood vessels every time the giraffe does this action, the amount of blood reaching its head would kill it.  The presence of this life-saving muscle is no mindless product of mutation.

Consider the spider.  A typical garden spider has an abdomen that generates a silky web material, and the spider has a God-given instinct to use its back legs to extract that material in strands that it lays out in a spiral pattern.  In addition, spiders spin two kinds of strands, one sticky and the other not.  Unlike flies and other food sources, the spider does not get stuck because it instinctively walks along only the non-stick strands.  It has venom for paralyzing its meal, which it had the instinct to wrap up and preserve for later.  Consider for a moment what a mess a spider would be in if any one part of this process were somewhere short of functioning perfectly, sometime millions of years ago when it was still developing.  Without the web-walking instinct, it would get caught in its own web and die.  Without the web-spinning ability, it wouldn’t be able to catch food and it would die.  Without the venom, it wouldn’t be able to keep its food from struggling back to freedom, and it would die.  Short of being created by God ready to function fully, the spider would never have made it to the present day.

Consider the bee.  Such a common insect, but look at its life and functions.  A worker bee has the instinct to look for food sources in flowers.  Once it finds a new supply, it returns to the hive where it does a movement specifically designed to communicate to the other bees the direction and distance from the hive that they must fly.  And they fly there using wings that have defied science for decades.  According to everything we know about physics, the common bee shouldn’t even be able to get off the ground because of its weight, wingspan, and movement of the wings.  And we haven’t even looked at the hive itself, where bees just “happen” to create one of the strongest architectural structures known to man: Tessellating hexagons.

Consider the glaucus.  Never heard of it?  Most people haven’t.  It is somewhat fish-like in shape, but with pudgy-looking limbs like an overweight lizard.  It swims in tropical waters, especially those known to cater to the Portuguese Man o’ War.

The Man o’ War itself is a wonder, made up of four separate organisms, none of which can survive on its own so they bond and work together as a siphonophore.  The tentacles of a Man o’ War are powerful, paralyzing fish that make contact.  On humans, the sting is painful, and can leave welts; some people have an allergic reaction, and rare cases of death have been reported.

Though it takes only a gentle brush against the tentacles to set them off, the glaucus can swim up to a Man o’ War and bite a tentacle off with such skill and delicacy that the sting is not activated.  The glaucus then swallows the tentacle, and maneuvers the stingers into the tips of its limbs internally – all without setting off any reaction.  The glaucus is now armed: If a predator brushes against the glaucus, the pressure will fire the stingers which will push through the glaucus’s porous skin and sting the predator.  In all of this, the glaucus is not harmed.  Work that one out by evolution.  More importantly, show me your fossil evidence, because simply imagining what might have happened is not the same as producing the proof.

The earth is a vast catalogue of life forms that daily make a mockery of mankind’s absurd attempts to remove God from the universe.  He has filled the planet with such boundless creativity, and put in place such astounding biological mechanisms, that to deny His act of Creation is sheer folly.  Perhaps that is the reason He made such complex and interesting creatures, so that no man is without excuse when the Day of Judgment comes.

An Exploration of Genesis, #3 - Let There Be Light

Genesis 1:3-5 – [3] And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

[5] And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.  And the evening and the morning were the first day.

The first act of Creation was to create light.  God spoke, and light came into existence.  With an all-powerful God, it’s just that simple.

Amazingly, there are critics of the literal interpretation of Creation who point to this passage as a stumbling block for us literalists.  They ask, usually in a smug tone that suggests this question devastates the literal view: “Where did the light come from, since there was no sun?”  And some of them, like Rob Bell, are people who do claim to believe in an omnipotent God.

The answer is simple: I don’t know.  But having no solid answer is no hindrance to believing it is true nevertheless.  God created light without a defined source.  As an all-powerful God, He can do that kind of thing.  The light may have even radiated directly from Himself, as it will do when He brings the new Heaven and the new Earth into existence at the end of history.

Verse three also falls prey to the Word-Faith movement.  Some popular televangelists have claimed that this verse demonstrates the power of words: Just as God spoke and Creation happened, we too can simply speak and things will happen or come into existence.

The faultiness of this is so obvious it’s painful to think anyone still listens to these particular “preachers.”  The fact is not that there is power in words, but that there is power in God.  God was the one doing the speaking, and thus there was light.  No other being in the universe has that power, because no other being in the universe is God.

Wherever the light did come from, God assigned it a place to radiate out from, as it shined only on one side of the planet.  Thus He separated light from darkness, calling the bright side of the planet Day and the dark side Night.  The planet was apparently already rotating at something close to its present speed, because it experienced an evening and a morning just as we do today.

And here, too, we face yet another faulty attempt to make the Bible more “compatible” with evolution.  Compromising and liberal Christians have pointed out that the word at the end of this verse is a Hebrew word that can mean three things: A standard calendar day, an era as in “America has seen its day,” or a totally undefined period of time.

So then, in an attempt to explain rocks that read as millions of years old, some have suggested that each “day” of Creation actually lasted for a vast and undefined amount of time.  Therefore the six “days” in total could have lasted millions of years, they say.

But this is also easily proven false.  In the rules of Hebrew syntax, when “morning and evening” and a specific number accompany the word “day,” the only possible understanding is that of a standard 24-hour period.  Without exception, “the evening and the morning were the first day” can only mean a day, a single full rotation of the planet.  Mankind is welcome to discount the verse entirely (to their peril), but there is only one possible meaning when the rules of Hebrew are applied.  We will see the spiritual importance of this physical reality later in Genesis and again in Exodus.

A few years ago I came to the solid belief that everything God does in the physical universe is designed to reflect a spiritual truth.  The planet and the things that happen upon it give our finite minds a look into some aspect of spiritual reality that we could not otherwise grasp.  Despite having read this chapter a hundred times in my life, the thing that came to my attention for the first time while writing this devotional is the fact that God pronounces only the light to be “good.”  He does not say the same thing for the darkness.

This historical event and physical reality reflect a spiritual truth for us to notice.  We begin life stumbling around in the dark, spiritually.  We cannot find our way, we grasp for anything that gives us stability.  We are “void” spiritually.

Look at the world around us and how people are constantly grasping in this way.  Numerous religions and offshoots, yoga, psychotherapy, money, material goods; really, the list is endless.  Man wants certainty, stability, and fulfillment; and the rapid way in which our world moves from fad to fad seeking satisfaction should be a testimony to the emptiness (and danger) of groping in the dark for what we seek.

By contrast, God shines a light into that darkness, and those who are willing to turn to it will find that it is good, that walking by the light of God’s truth is a joy and comfort.  Once accepted, God’s light gives stability, comfort, and certainty.  It gives us direction on a daily basis and a long-term vision of our final destiny in eternity.

The Light is good indeed.

Firstly, let me say that this is one of the best-made documentaries that I’ve ever seen… and I love documentaries. Ben Stein’s Expelled is hilarious, hard-hitting, scary and just plain great!

Ben starts by talking about something I hold very deer, freedom. He shows quite clearly that academia in America is not free. How scientists are afraid to share their views on intelligent design. The video makes such a strong case for I.D. that it should really challenge people.

The strongest figure in the film, apart from Stein, is well-known atheist Richard Dawkins. He doesn’t come across looking very good. Neither do the many pompous evolutionist scientists! What they have to say about Intelligent Design is just amazing. Dawkins even says he is not against I.D. just against God. Amazing!

The video does a solid job of showing that the evolutionary view of how life began is just funny. I mean come on. Crystals? On the backs of crystals? Seeded on Earth by aliens?

“Most people who don’t believe in evolution are ignorant,” is one of the lines from Dawkins that really stuck with me.

This video should be mandatory watching for… everyone! I was going to say high school students, then college students, but really, everyone should watch this movie.

If you haven’t seen this video, see it now. Buy it, rent it. If it’s not at the store you go to, tell them that it should be. Give it to a friend, watch it with a friend, just be sure that you watch this video.

To quote Ben Stein, “Thank you very much gangsters!”

An Exploration of Genesis, #2 - Raw Materials

Genesis 1:2 – And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Elohim begins His act of Creation by laying out the raw materials.  The matter that would eventually become Earth was generated out of nothing, in miraculous violation of the fact that matter can neither be created nor destroyed.

At the very first, almost like a glob of clay the potter has slapped onto the worktable, the earth had no form to it at all, and it was totally empty of anything that would eventually constitute the planet we know today.  This shapeless mass was completely covered over by water in some way, and the entire thing floated through space in total darkness.

Though the picture I received when first reading this chapter years ago was that the water began as a huge global ocean, if we glance ahead to verses six through eight we get the strong impression that it was more of a thick mist surrounding the entire planet.  We will take a look at those verses in due time; I note it now for a better understanding in this verse.

The first verse introduced the reader to the uni-plural Elohim, and verse two specifically mentions one of God’s Persons, the Holy Spirit.  What His precise purpose in moving across the watery surface of the planet was is unclear here, though as we reach some verses later in this chapter I will mention a definite spiritual parallel that may shed some light on the mystery.

What this verse says is thus laid out quite simply.  But given Christianity’s cowardice in the face of pro-evolution pseudo-scientists, the first two verses of Genesis have received quite tortuous treatment to make them fit in with the big words and fancy talk of the Bible’s secular opponents.

Evolutionists claim that the earth is billions of years old, and are very good at dragging out specific findings that seem to back up their point while hiding or ignoring the tidal wave of contrary evidence.  In presenting their case and talking circles around the atrophied Christianity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientists caused Christians to go hunting for some place in the Bible that could be reinterpreted to allow for an extremely old age of the earth.  They found it between verse one and verse two.

The pieces of the argument go something like this: First, that word “and” at the start of verse two could also be “now” when translated from the Hebrew.  And a “now” implies a “then,” suggesting (but only if you are desperate to appease evolutionists) that God actually made a Creation before Creation.  He whipped out the planet Earth, with plant life and animal life and maybe it was a place where even the angels were visible and walked around and so on.  This “pre-Creation” could have lasted for billions of years.

The pre-Creation then came under God’s judgment for some reason; perhaps the fall of Satan took place during this time, tarnishing the work of God.  In punishment, almost like a frustrated potter mashing his wet clay pot back into a lump and starting over, God took the pre-Creation and wreaked a righteous havoc upon it.  And “now” it became the formless and empty mass of verse two.  Thus Christians could agree with the assertion that certain rocks and fossils were indeed millions of years old without discarding their faith.

The specifics of the hypothesis vary from person to person, but this is the general gist.  Sometimes called the Creation-Reconstruction view, it is more commonly known as the Gap Theory, as it proposes an enormous and unspecified gap of time between the end of verse one and the beginning of verse two.

To further back up this view, its proponents turn to Isaiah 45:18, which reads: “For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the Lord; and there is none else.”

The key phrase in defense of the Gap Theory is that “he created it not in vain.”  The word “vain” here is the Hebrew word for “empty” or “a waste land.”  In a rush to make Creation and evolution compatible, Gap Theorists point to this apparent problem: Genesis says the earth spent some time in an empty state, an unformed wasteland.  But Isaiah says that God did no such thing.

Clearly we misunderstand Genesis 1:2 and it only makes theological sense to assume that God first created a not-so-void planet and then it became void because of judgment and punishment.  Even conservative author William MacDonald advocates a form of this viewpoint in his Believer’s Bible Commentary, as an indicator of how influential this idea has become.

Ignoring the Gap Theory itself for a moment, Isaiah does not contradict a plain understanding of Genesis.  It does not violate Isaiah to say that God brought into existence the raw materials for the universe and then took six days to work that lump into a finished planet.  Yes, He created it “to be inhabited,” so certainly if history ended with verse two, then the Gap Theorists would have an argument because an empty mass of unfinished Creation would be floating around to no good purpose.  (But then neither would the Gap Theorists nor Isaiah ever have existed to argue about it.)

No one walks into a potter’s shop, sees the potter put a glob of clay on the wheel, and accuses him of creating an ugly and useless object.  It is understood that the potter is not done, that he will proceed to mold those materials with care into something beautiful; and thus even that first step is a beautiful one in the hands of a master potter.

Clearly it is one thing to create something and leave it unfinished and useless.  Speaking to this idea, Isaiah points out that the Creation project as a whole was not an empty and vain endeavor.  But it is another thing entirely for the first phase of Creation, the laying out of the raw materials, to be formless and empty temporarily as God works on it.  We do not contradict Isaiah when we apply a simple and literal understanding to verse two.

If someone insists on a planet that is billions of years old, a much easier interpretation would be to assume that once God brought into being the glob of matter that would become planet Earth, He let it sit there for millions of years before moving on to verse three.  But this is still grasping at straws.

In short, the Gap Theory is totally unsubstantiated hypothesis that is not necessary to square the Bible with Science.  Science, or what is really only pseudo-science, is the one that needs to square with the Bible: The Truth need not do any kowtowing to God-hating liars who play sleight-of-hand with the physical evidence in order to con the population into denying Creation.

It’s really very simple: The earth is not billions of years old.  At the furthest possible stretch of interpretation, the Bible presents a planet no older than ten thousand years.  In fact, its age is most likely somewhere between a mere six thousand and seven thousand years.  But the evidence in favor of that reality is certainly not going to be trumpeted by those who do not want to believe in God.  (Nor is it my purpose in these simple devotionals to dive into a lengthy discussion of the evidence, though I may touch on some of it in the future.  Many fine researchers have done a much better job of presenting entire books on the subject.)

I will close today’s thoughts with an interesting prophecy.  Second Peter 3:5 mentions evolutionists before evolutionists ever existed: “For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water.”

Long before Darwin ever existed, long before anyone presumed a Big Bang, long before “scientists” would present the idea that this planet began as a searing-hot fireball, the Holy Spirit enabled Peter to write about these people.  They would deny that the planet was created, and that it was created covered with water; and indeed within the past century they have made that denial loud and clear.

But the glorious Truth is that God created the planet, God owns it, God is in charge, and God has a plan.  As we face a world full of panicked people who have no hope but their own weak attempts at peace and paradise on a crumbling rock, may the knowledge of God as the powerful Creator be an encouragement to us.

An Exploration of Genesis, #1 - Ten Simple Words

Genesis 1:1 – In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The Bible is nothing less than the entire history of mankind told from God’s spiritual perspective.  Other history books focus on the rise and fall of civilizations, countries and their governments, cultural advances, warfare and conquest.  Though the Bible contains some such historical information where relevant, its ultimate focus is God and His workings.

While the sixty-six documents that comprise the Bible may often seem disparate in their subject matter, in reality they all contribute to one big picture.  That picture is of God’s creating a dominion to rule over, Satan’s attempts to usurp God’s authority in that dominion and lead a rebellion, the on-going spiritual war between God’s subjects and Satan’s subjects, God’s final conquering and defeat of all opponents, and God’s handing of the universe over to His Son Jesus Christ as an inheritance.

A look at the organization of the Bible reveals two major sections, the Old Testament and the New Testament.  Without spending pages explaining this, basically the Old Testament is the history of man’s fall away from God, and the New Testament is the record of God’s rescue of man.  This is definitely a layman’s simplification, but my purpose here is simply to introduce the framework of the Bible so that my study in Genesis has a basic context.

The book of Genesis, then, is the beginning of the spiritual history of the universe.  It is the first book of the Old Testament, and the first book of the Pentateuch, a grouping of five books that detail the early history of the Israeli people, the Jews.  The book is assumed to be penned by Moses, though who exactly put the words on parchment can never be proven and ultimately doesn’t matter; the message came from God (II Timothy 3:16) and He has preserved the message through history for us today.  So let’s get into it.

A full and complete understanding of any subject in the Bible would, if pursued as deeply as possible, ultimately come back to the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis; for it is in these ten simple words that the whole of human history and God’s perfect plan find their foundation.  This verse is the cornerstone upon which the whole Bible is built, and all true wisdom and knowledge flows out from the truth presented here.  Or to put it this way: If you want to know the full reason why the thousandth domino fell, your search will eventually bring you back to the very first domino and the entity who pushed it over.

And so begins God’s account of the universe: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”  These words are the overview of everything that follows in the next two chapters; they are to chapter one what a heading is to a body of text.  And they are ten of the most powerful and devastating words in literature, though we will barely skim their surface in this brief devotional.

The first three words establish the inauguration of time as we know it.  Before the beginning there was simply God, who needs no calculation of time because He is outside of it.  Mankind is stuck moving forward with the turning of the planet, the ticking of the clock.  But God is not affected or limited by the forward motion of the time continuum; He created it.

The fourth word, “God,” introduces us to the awesome Creator of the universe.  In the original Hebrew text, this word is “Elohim,” which is a plural noun; so in one sense it would not be incorrect to translate the word as “gods,” which does happen elsewhere in the Old Testament.  But according to Hebrew linguists, its use here is in a decidedly singular structure.  It is a “uni-plural,” hinting at the Trinitarian nature of God that is revealed more fully elsewhere in the Bible.

So a great and mighty uni-plural God initiated the time continuum by doing what?  By creating.  The word here is “bara,” which is only ever used of God’s act of creating.  While we use the English word to say someone “created” a new invention or piece of artwork, no human being could ever hope to “bara” anything.  Only God can truly create, bringing things into existence out of nothing.

And what did He create?  The heaven mentioned here is not the Heaven that is God’s residence mentioned elsewhere.  Instead, it refers to the atmosphere of the planet, and possibly outer space.  Either meaning is an acceptable interpretation, and indeed the Hebrew word may refer simply to all of space, from our atmosphere to the furthest reaches of the universe.  And since it is true that God created both, there is no real argument.

He also created the Earth, all the solid mass that is our planet.  By extension, this verse can refer to all solid matter, the “earth” of other planets as well, since it all came into being by His power.

On one hand, these ten words are indeed simple.  There is no lack of clarity; the facts are laid out without ornamentation.  But the ramifications of these ten words affect everything else in the Bible, indeed everything else we believe.  Though I will not explore the details here, this verse lays the foundation for the Bible’s view of mankind, of the consequences of sin, and even of the purpose for Jesus Christ’s crucifixion.  Ultimately, everything depends on that first domino.

While this verse certainly has a pivotal role in the construction of Christian theology, it is also potent in its destruction of false beliefs.  In his book The Genesis Record, Henry Morris lists seven major schools of thought shot down by the first ten words of the Bible:

Genesis 1:1 refutes atheism, because the universe was created by a God.

It refutes pantheism, for God is transcendent from that which He created.

It refutes polytheism, for one God created all things.

It refutes materialism, for matter had a beginning.

It refutes dualism, because God was alone when He created.

It refutes humanism, because God, not man, is the ultimate reality.

And it refutes evolutionism, because God created all things.

Despite its pivotal role in theology, the Doctrine of Creation is increasingly ignored or even derided by religious institutions for various reasons, including fear of clashing with and being ridiculed by Science.  As the heady intellects of the past two centuries began making evolution sound ever more plausible in scientific terms, unprepared Christians abandoned the belief in a literal Creation in droves.

But even before our so-called enlightened modern era, a literal Creation has rarely been the popular interpretation even within religious circles.  During the Reformation, the Church of England as a body subscribed to the belief that while Creation did happen, the rendering in Genesis should be viewed with some poetic license.  Even many of the translators of the King James Version subscribed to this way of thinking, being devoted Anglicans.

Certainly I do believe that what we read in Genesis should be taken literally.  Given what the Bible says about God’s omnipotence, there is no reason not to assume that these first chapters mean exactly what they say; and the more poetic license one ascribes to these verses the shakier one makes the entire theological structure.

Without the first chapter of Genesis, we would have absolutely no sure way of knowing how the universe began.  Science cannot inform us, though the secular preachers of evolutionary biology and geology are certainly good storytellers, extrapolating billions of years of pre-history out of their biased research into a pathetically small pile of evidence.

But while modern evolutionary thought remains entirely hypothetical because true Science cannot touch the unobserved past, for this same reason it should be noted that Science will never prove Creation either.  Creation, in scientific terms, is a Catastrophic event, not to mention a miraculous one, that was not observed and will not be repeated.  Certainly there is such a preponderance of evidence in favor of Creation that the blindness of evolutionists becomes more laughable the harder they try to deny God and prove the efficacy of real and imagined natural processes, but neither school of thought can ever be solidly established using Science.  And any scientist on either side who claims otherwise has lost sight of the Scientific Method and its limitations.

So it is entirely in keeping with the Bible’s themes to point out that Creation must be taken in faith.  Either believe it or don’t.  There is no proving or disproving it using scientific means.  It was a singular moment in time, a special act of God, and we would know nothing about those first six days if He had not chosen to tell us.

But He did choose to tell us, because it is important to know where we came from, so that we can then learn that we are not now as God would have us to be, so that we can then learn that God has provided a plan to restore that order.  These ten words are a vital beginning if we are to understand the ending.