Introduction to Genesis

2009 is the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150^th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work, The Origin of the Species. If you haven’t already, you will probably hear more media hype about Darwin and his wonderful theories. Do you know the original title of his book? In the first edition, Darwin called it, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin was a racist. Interestingly, Darwin was not the first to articulate survival of the fittest or any of his other theories. They are all borrowed from other mostly unknown people. Whether or not the liberal media hypes Darwin and evolution this year, his influence on science, education and religion is deep and wide. Atheist Richard Dawkins summarizes it well when he said that Darwinism has "made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist."

As we begin a new sermon series through the book of Genesis, the true book of origins, it occurs to me that Genesis could be titled similarly to Darwin’s book. We could call it, On the Origin of the Universe by Means of Divine Creation or the Preservation of a Chosen People in the Struggle for Life. That would be a completely accurate title, would it not? It is common for me to approach my messages with a bit of fear and trembling. I believe that is this from the Lord as I do not ever want to misrepresent the awesome privilege of preaching the Word of God. However, this Genesis series has me trembling more than usual, for several reasons.

The first is due to the fact that Genesis, and especially the first eleven chapters, are filled with controversy and often cause division even among believers. I want to be able to handle this section with a balance of conviction and sensitivity. Second, beyond the issue of origins, Genesis is truly the book of beginnings. It lays a foundation for all of Scripture. Its truths are deep and wide and far-reaching. To handle Genesis accurately means that we must capture its foundational nature in the Old Testament and how it continually peers into the life of Christ and the New Testament. Simply stated, it is the beginning of God’s revelation to all of mankind and I am terrified of handling it inaccurately. Can you see why I would appreciate your prayers!

One of the biggest challenges is to know where to start. How do you begin The book of beginnings? I guess we should start at the beginning, right? I took a three-day study retreat to lay out this series and during that time I read hundreds of pages of commentaries and books. I made charts, synthesized huge amounts of Biblical material and even did a little math, but the most helpful thing I did in those 3 days was to read and reread the first third of the book. There is no substitute for your own reading and study. Excluding the books that I have preached on, without a doubt, most of my Biblical knowledge has come from plain old reading of Scripture.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ^2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

^3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. ^4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. ^5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

^6 And God said, “Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.” ^7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. ^8 God called the expanse “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

^9 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. ^10 God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.

^11 Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. ^12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. ^13 And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.

^14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, ^15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. ^16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. ^17 God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, ^18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. ^19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

^20 And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.” ^21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. ^22 God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” ^23 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.

^24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. ^25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

^26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

^27 So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

^28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

^29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. ^30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.

^31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.

^2 By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested  from all his work. ^3 And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.

Why I am a Young Earth Creationist

This is the beginning of the book of beginnings. To begin, I want to jump headfirst into the most controversial part of this book with my first point: Why I am a Young Earth Creationist. But to give you an idea of where I am going, let me also give you my second point: Why Young Earth Creationism is NOT in our Statement of Faith.

I am a young earth creationist because the plain reading of the Bible is so incredibly convincing. It’s as simple as that. As I read and reread not just the first few chapters of Genesis, but the whole Bible, I am more and more convinced that God created the heavens and the earth about six thousand years ago. If you don’t believe this, we ask that you please sit in the back of the room from now on. I am kidding of course, in order to make an important point. I believe in the young earth position and I think there is very convincing evidence and enormously important reasons for believing this. If you do not presently hold this position, I really do want you to be convinced from Scripture that this is true, and I think when we are done, some of you will change your position.

R. C. Sproul, author of 60 books and founder of Ligonier Minstries, changed his position on the age of the universe last year.

For most of my teaching career, I considered the framework hypothesis to be a possibility. But I have now changed my mind. I now hold to a literal six-day creation, the fourth alternative and the traditional one. Genesis says that God created the universe and everything in it in six twenty-four–hour periods. According to the Reformation hermeneutic, the first option is to follow the plain sense of the text. One must do a great deal of hermeneutical gymnastics to escape the plain meaning of Genesis 1–2. The confession makes it a point of faith that God created the world in the space of six days.[i]

That takes a lot of courage to change your mind after fifty years of teaching and announce to the entire world, “I was wrong.”

But if you don’t hold this position, I don’t ever want to assign you to a lesser class of Christianity. As I said, my second point is Why Young Earth Creationism is NOT in our Statement of Faith. This is a very important truth, but if we thought it was a matter of eternal life and death, it would most certainly be in our statement of faith.

When Ryan was about eleven years old, he was on a field trip at the ice caves in the Kickapoo Valley Reserve. He was having a conversation with a teacher from one of the local public schools about the age of the universe. He asked her opinion about the age of the universe and she responded with the typical, “scientists say it is about 15 billion years old” dogma. Then the teacher asked Ryan, “So how old do you think the universe is?” Ryan confidently replied, “I don’t think, I know the earth is six thousand years old.” J  I don’t think Ryan could have answered any of her follow-up questions, has she pried further, but I hope we can all attain the same level of child like confidence in the Word of God.

I believe that a plain and careful reading of the Bible leads to a date of creation approximately six-thousand years ago. There are many parts of Scripture which lead me to this conclusion, but the two most important are the literal twenty-four hour periods in chapter one and the evidence from the lists of genealogies in chapters five through eleven. But young earth creationists are not alone in this belief. Almost everyone who is an evangelical and believes in the inerrancy and inspiration of Scripture also believes that chapter one describes 6 literal, 24 hour days and a straight reading of the genealogies. The difference is that many who understand the plain reading of the Bible come to the conclusion that the universe was created abut 15 billion years ago, NOT because of Scripture, but because of science. In other words, if science and the Bible seem to be in conflict, many people choose to give the nod to science. Here are several good quotes that I gleaned from Tim Chaffey’s book, Young Earth Creationism on Trial.

“It is apparent that the most straightforward understanding of Genesis, without regard to the hermeneutical considerations suggested by science, is that God created the heavens and the earth in six solar days, that man was created on the sixth day, and that death and chaos entered the world after the fall of Adam and Eve, and that all fossils were the result of the catastrophic deluge that spared only Noah’s family and the animals therewith.”[ii] 

This man believes that the universe was created billions of years ago, but he arrived at that conclusion from evolutionary science, not from the Bible. Furthermore, this man is a professor at Wheaton College. Unfortunately, I have found that the majority of professors at Christian colleges hold to an old earth position. I am not suggesting that you should send your kids only to a young earth Christian college, but all parents should be aware of this inherent bias even at Christian schools.

“From a superficial reading, the impression received is that that entire creative process took place in six twenty-four hour days. If this was the true intent of the Hebrew author, (a questionable deduction, as will be presently shown), this seems to run counter to modern scientific research, which indicates that the planet earth was created several billion years ago.”[iii]

The man who wrote this is one of the most brilliant evangelical scholars who has ever lived. He spent most of his teaching career at my alma mater, Trinity Seminary. Dr. Gleason Archer was an expert at Semitic languages. His gift with languages was so supreme that he learned to speak Icelandic because his dentist grew up in Iceland! Compared to him, I have the intellectual capacity of a slug. My neural synapses fire so slowly you can measure them with a sundial, yet I have no problem stating that he is dead wrong on this issue.

This is a side note, but can we agree not to be intimidated by advanced degrees attached to a person’s last name? If educational attainment were of primary importance, then not only would we not believe in divine creation, we also would not believe in any miracles, the deity of Christ, the resurrection, heaven, hell, salvation and the second coming of Christ. The majority of Christian clergy do not believe these things and most of them have advanced degrees in theology. Please do not misunderstand—I am not knocking education one bit. I believe that Christians should “study to show themselves approved.” We should be reading our Bibles, reading books and studying with all our might.

I have little patience for the person who says, “I’m not much of a reader.” Do you realize how you are taking for granted one of the greatest gifts a human can have—the ability to read? Nearly a billion people in the world are trapped in illiteracy and will never be able to read their own name, let alone the word of God. Yet we have the audacity to say, “I’m not much of a reader!” I can relate to you, because I used to be you. I don’t have a single memory of my parents reading to me. I only read what was absolutely required for me to read in school, and even some of that I did not read. I was the poster boy for the people who say, “I’m not much of a reader!” I realize that some people are genuinely slower readers, other may have dyslexia, but none of these are excuses for not studying. Train yourself to read more. Listen to books on tape. Download sermons and conference tapes. We should read and study diligently and though we should respect people with high intellect and advanced degrees, we do not need to be intimidated by them.

Do you see the problem with Dr. Archer’s statement? Look at it again. If the Bible and science and going to conflict, Dr. Archer is more than glad to let science set the agenda. This next quote is one of the worst. “No interpretation of Genesis is more mature than the science that guides it.”[iv] It is like these men are pouring the Bible through a filter called “science” and whatever makes it out the other end is fine with them.

Let me give you three more brief quotes, all from people who are either old earth creationists or who don’t take a firm position.

“The burden of proof, however, is on those who do not attribute to yom in Gen. 1 its normal and most common interpretation, especially when yom is always described as being composed of an evening and a morning”[v]

“There can be little doubt that here “day” has its basic sense of a 24-hour period.”[vi]

“At present, consideration of the power of God’s creative word and the immediacy with which it seems to bring response, the fact that “evening and morning’ and the numbering of days still suggest twenty-four hour days, and the fact that God would seem to have no purpose for delaying the creation of man for thousands or even millions of years seem to me to be strong considerations in favor of the twenty-four hour day position.”[vii]

Despite their confident assertions about the plain reading of Genesis, none of these men hold confidently to a young earth because of their bias toward science. What would happen if we let science determine our other beliefs? Is it scientifically possible to take five loaves of bread and two fish and feed 5-20 thousand people? Is it scientifically possible to feed millions of people in the desert for forty years from bread that fell from the sky, or to divide the Red Sea, or the Jordan River, or for chariots of fire to take a man to heaven, or to raise the dead? If we allowed this kind of thing to happen, we would quickly run out of things to believe in and our Bible would be chopped to pieces.

I mentioned that the genealogies are also very persuasive. Let me make some guesses as to what you know about the genealogies in Genesis. Some of you have never read them. Most of you think they are very boring, like reading the long list of families in Numbers. Many of you think that there must be large gaps in the genealogies, perhaps multiple generations or even hundreds of years between them. One thing that leads us to this conclusion is the genealogy in Matthew. This genealogy clearly was intended to skip some generations and there is no argument about this fact. But the genealogies in Genesis do not skip generations. If you read them carefully they give the exact age of the father when the son was born and the exact age of that son when he becomes a father of the next in line. It all adds up perfectly. In fact, here is another quote form an old earth proponent.

“Another suggestion is that the genealogy is not intended to be complete, that generations have been omitted, and therefore it should not be used for chronological purposes. However, the Hebrew gives no hint that there were larger gaps between father and son in this genealogy”[viii]

A familiar piece of Bible trivia is to ask, who was the oldest man to ever live? The answer is Methuselah who lived to be 969 years old. Did you know that according to the genealogies, Methuselah died in the year of the flood? I have a chart in back that I developed that shows how all this fits together.

A common tactic of those who hold to an old earth position is to distort the facts. I realize that this can be true of people on both sides of the issue. Kent Hovind was a young earth creationist who held to a lot of wild ideas and is now serving ten years in a federal prison for tax evasion. The best scholars and scientists debunked his teachings long before the government caught up with him. But I do see this distortion of young earth views all the time. The most recent example appeared in the May copy of Christianity Today. The author was attempting to paint St. Augustine as an old earth creationist who would have supported billions of years of theistic evolution. The author writes,

“Taken together, the two Genesis Creation accounts declare that God made the world instantaneously, while envisaging that the various kinds of living things would make their appearance gradually over time—as they were meant to by their Creator.” And the previous paragraph, “Rather, God must be thought of as creating in that very first moment the potencies for all the kinds of living things to come later, including humanity.”[ix]

Now compare this to Augustine’s own words on the topic.

“Let us, then, omit the conjectures of men who know not what they say, when they speak of the origin of the human race…They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning, by the sacred writings, we find that not 6,000 years have yet passed.”[x]

Does anyone think the author fairly represented Augustine?

Why YEC is NOT in our Statement of Faith

If holding to a young earth creation is so important, then why is it not a part of our statement of faith? Tim Chaffey has spoken at our church several times and most of you remember that he was the pastor of Viroqua Bible Church for a few years. When they put together their statement of faith, they literally took our statement of faith and added young earth creationism to it. I think you know that I hold Tim in very high regard and I am indebted to him for helping me in this area, but this is where Tim and I part company.

You may remember the circle of certainty that helps determine the level of “certainty” with which you will hold a particular belief. Simply stated, even though I have a firm conviction in young earth creationism, I am not willing to die for it. For me, absolutes are “to die for” kind of beliefs and as important as this topic is, it does not belong in the center-most circle.

While YEC s not in our statement of faith and we do not use it as a test for fellowship or membership, I personally would have a problem choosing an elder who does not hold to a YEC position. I am not certain that I would automatically exclude them, but I would want a very thorough discussion as to why they held a different belief. The problem with the old earth position is the way the Scriptures are handled.

Let me offer a final quote.

“Therefore, with respect to the length of days in Genesis 1, the possibility must be left open that God has chosen not to give us enough information to come to a clear decision on this question, and the real test of faithfulness to him may be the degree to which we can act charitably toward those who in good conscience and full belief in God’s Word hold to a different position on this matter.”^[xi]

While I disagree with the first half of this sentence, I wholeheartedly support the second half. We should live together in full unity and not allow this important topic to cause division.

By the way, we will have at least one Q&A type message where I try my best to answer your questions. Please make note of questions—first, try to answer them yourself and if you still feel it is worthwhile to submit a question, please do so.

Rich Maurer

May 10, 2009