Creation Continued

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For the Scripture reading today will you turn with me to the Book of Genesis? And in order for us to gain again the perspective, I want to begin reading with the first verse of Genesis and read through the first 19 verses. The message will be related to verses 6 through 19. Reading from the first verse of the first Book of the Bible,

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 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. Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night.’ And there was evening, and there was morning—one day.

Then God said, ‘Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ And God made the expanse and separated the waters, which were below the expanse from the waters, which were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse ‘heaven.’ And there was evening, and there was morning—a second day.

Then God said, ‘Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. And God called the dry land ‘earth’, and the gathering of the waters he called ‘seas.’ And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation: plants yielding seed and fruit trees bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them on the earth.’ And it was so. And the earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed after their kind and trees bearing fruit with seed in them after their kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—a third day.

Then God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs.’ (Well you noticed that, ‘let them be for signs,’ we’ll say something about that.) And for the seasons and for days and years, and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth.’ And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He made the stars also. And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—a fourth day.”

May the LORD bless this reading of his inspired word.

This morning in our continued study of the Book of Genesis, the subject is the creation continued. We are studying the first chapter of the first Book of the Bible and looking particularly at the Mosaic account of the creation of our world. Philipp Melanchthon, one of the chief figures and also one of the most enigmatic in the founding of Protestantism said of Genesis, “There is no more beautiful and lovable little book.” Well, we must agree with Mr. Melanchthon that it is a beautiful book, but its beauty is surpassed by its importance in the divine revelation. It is the seed plot of the Bible we have been saying and it is the beginning of almost all of its important doctrines.

If we want to know the doctrine of creation, of course we go to Genesis, but if we want to know the beginnings of the doctrine of sin and the doctrine of redemption, we begin also with the Book of Genesis. Almost all of the important doctrines of the Bible are here. If we want to understand the doctrine of justification by faith, we go to the Book of Genesis for the beginnings. If we wish to know the doctrine of the death of Christ, the atonement, we begin with the Book of Genesis. If we want to know the life of faith, we go to the great illustration of the life of faith, the favorite illustration of the apostles: the story of Abraham.

Genesis is truly the seed plot of the Bible and furthermore, it is a tremendously important book. That no doubt accounts for the continuing attacks upon the Book of Genesis. In the opening verses, we have heard Moses describing the creation of the heavens and the earth and then the creation of light. The heavens and the earth have been formed and now form has come to the formlessness and emptiness of the material world with the separation of the light from darkness, but man is not yet there. The universe is still uninhabitable.

All the types of force and energy, which act and interact in the universe are now in operation, it would seem, because it appears from the record that the electromagnetic forces, the gravitational forces and the nuclear forces have been activated. The Father has created the space, mass, time, continuum. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The gravitational forces have been activated by the Holy Spirit who moved over the face of the waters and then the word, surely it must be a reference to the Lord Jesus ultimately, the second person of the blessed triune God called into being the electromagnetic forces when he spoke and light came to existence.

On the first day then, the physical universe was created and energized and made ready for further shaping and furnishing, but it might become a suitable place for the crown of creation, man. It’s not wrong to speak of man as the king of creation. That really is what he was intended to be. We will in a few verses on read, let us make man in our image according to our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over the cattle, and overall the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So, the crown of creation is man. The king’s realm must be made ready for the king and that is what we are reading about in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.

Two things are of special importance for a habitable planet, an oxygen atmosphere and a hydrosphere of liquid water. They are vital for human life and incidentally they are unique to this earth of which we are a part, so far as the present evidence goes. This need is going to be supplied by the following day of creation. We are reminded of Isaiah’s words, “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and marked off the heavens by a span, and calculated the dust of the earth by the measure, and weighed the mountains in a balance, and the hills in a pair of scales?” In the following section after that 12th verse of Isaiah, chapter 40, Isaiah asked God or Isaiah answers his own question, which is put in the mouth of God, it is he who sits above the vault of the earth and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in. What simplicity and majestic beauty characterize the Genesis cosmology.

Last weekend before I was getting to my place of designation on the way to Kansas, I was going to speak for a few days in Junction City. I frankly was not anticipating too much, spoken in Kansas only a time or two. In fact, I’m not sure I have. Yes, I have just once or twice in Wichita and I anticipated that the landscape would be flat without a tree, but where I went it was a very pretty part of Kansas, I was amazed. Some of the Kansans told me afterwards, “The way you thought it would be it is, out west,” but here it was pretty.

I arrived in Kansas City and Frontier Airlines disappointed me. I had a meeting that night, Saturday night, Saturday week, and I was in Kansas City about 3’o clock and Frontier informed us they had decided that they weren’t going to run that particular plane that afternoon. So, I was rushing around calling to Junction City, it’s about 120 miles away I think, trying to figure out a way to make a meeting that night and I went over to the Hertz telephone, and as I was standing waiting for a man to finish, I heard him mention Manhattan and that was the place that I was going and so, I asked him did they have a car and he said, “yes, they’ve got a car and if you want to come with us, come on, there are three others. The two others of us that are going, three in all.” So the four of us rented the car and we drove to Manhattan, where I met the person who was to take me to Junction City.

Well it turned out, they were three Professors from Kansas State University and one of them was a Professor of Physics, and so, I had my opportunity. [Laughter] In the course of our conversation I asked him, “Is it really true that we do not have a hydrosphere on any other planet that we know of at the present time.” It turned out incidentally that this man was one of, apparently one of the real authorities in his particular sphere. As he got out of the car first, the other two Professors hastened to assure me that he was one of the outstanding physicists in this country and had been appointed a Regents’ Professor at that university and he was the only one who had that special rank as a Regents’ Professor.

But I asked him this question, and he said yes, it is true. On Mars, we do know that in some low lying looking places there appears to be some form of mist or fog, but he said if we got all of the water that we think is there together, it might be a bucketful. Then he went on to speak about some of the other planets and he said most of the others of course have certain gases upon them and he said incidentally, “If you take a trip to one or two of these, don’t take your cigarettes with you.”

It is a rather striking thing that this particular planet upon which we are is the only one that so far as we know is suitable for life as we know it. Many physicists and scientists were very disappointed when Mariner 4 found out that there was no life on Mars or it appeared that there could be no life on Mars. Well, one of the reasons perhaps is that God has only created this particular planet for life. But I’m sure of this that if we find life on one of the other heavenly bodies it will not be a testimony to the truthfulness of evolution but it will rather be a testimony to the greatness and majesty of our sovereign God.

Many interesting questions arise out of this section of the Bible that we are looking at the problem of evolution of course, the problem of the age of the earth, the problem of the age of man. Is there life on other planets? What’s the relation of the creation of organic and inorganic life to the so-called DNA molecule and the genetic code? Were the elements of the created universe created with the appearance of age? Are there one or two creation accounts in the Book of Genesis to look at another type of thing? And there are others.

Now we shall suggest some solutions to some of these difficulties but I want to say to you right at the beginning that I’m not a scientist. I know I didn’t have to tell you that but I’m just telling you anyway for those — for others who may be listening over the radio who do not know me as well as you know me. I speak only as ‘a layman’ in these matters only because of interest in them since the Bible treats of matters that concern science. I know this, that God has given us certain information, he has not given us a full and clear explanation of many other questions for which we would like a full and clear explanation at the present time. But what we have is that which is necessary for our human existence and for confidence in the sovereign majesty of our regard, for the remainder of the answers to questions that we do not have at the present time. Then we wait in confident hope and I do believe that when we get to heaven we shall discover the answers to many, many more of the questions that are very interesting for us at the present time.

But let’s look now at the creation accounts of the second, the third and the fourth days. We read in the sixth verse, then God said let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters from the waters. And God made the expanse and separated the waters, which were below the expanse from the waters, which were above the expanse and it was so. The earth was still predominantly watery in aspect. And in the midst of this, there comes another divine command, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters. Some of the waters are now to be separated from the greater mass of waters and placed above the spinning globe with a great space dividing and separating the vapors above from the waters below. The lower waters would be for living beings and the upper waters would be the firmament of atmosphere, which would provide a kind of canopy over the earth.

Now if we are to understand this as a vapor canopy and of course there is some question about this, then we could understand that there would certain benefits from this. And we also should understand that what we are talking about now according to the biblical record is not necessarily what we know now about our creation because there intervenes the great flood and the consequences of that. The Hebrew word meaning expanse or firmament is the word rachia, and it refers to an extended surface or an expanse. The New American Standard Bible is rendered rather literally, that there be an expanse in the midst of the waters. It’s a word that may be synonymous with our very common word now, space. We do read that God called this expanse heaven. In the Bible the term heaven is used in several different ways. When we look up and see the atmospheric heavens above, we use the term heaven and the Bible uses the term heaven of that. And then when we look off beyond that to the vastness of God’s creation and see the stars thousands and millions of miles away, that’s heaven too, the stellar heavens. The Bible speaks of heaven in that sense.

And then the Bible speaks of the heaven of the heavens or the heavens where God dwelled. So all three of these uses are found for the term heaven. Most feel that here we are to think of the atmospheric heavens. It may well be that this term firmament is not to be taken too literally but is to be taken metaphorically of the vault of heaven. As we look up it looks like a vault and so we have even in the Bible the figurative use. Maybe we are not to take it too literally and just speak of it as a figure of speech for the vault of the heavens above but the sense is much the same either way.

The concept of an antediluvian water canopy incidentally is not a recent theory. This theory actually goes back many, many years. Henry Morris who has written a book called The Genesis Record, which has a number of interesting scientific things in it, has said a number of writers have visualized it as a system of rings like those of the planet Saturn, composed possibly of ice particles orbiting the earth that is. This was the way the canopy appeared before the flood. Others have described it as an orbiting shell of ice or liquid water, and some have thought of it merely as dense banks of clouds surrounding the earth possibly an analogous to the cloud cover around the planet Venus. Venus now is thought to have however carbon dioxide rather than water surrounding it. Obviously we are in the realm of speculation so far as we are concerned and of these things we can have no sure knowledge at the present state of science and at the present state of our understanding of the word of God.

The third day of creation is the creation of the land, the plants and the seas. Further form is now given to the world by the process of differentiation although the idea of fullness begins to appear and God begins to create those things such as vegetation, which will make this earth the kind of place where man can survive.

Now you’ll notice there have been several separations. So far the light has been separated from the darkness, the waters above the firmament from the waters below the firmament and now the dry land is separated from the lower waters on this third day of creation. I would assume that great movements of the landmasses must have taken place and finally the surfaces of the solid earth appeared above the waters and the waters were assembled in distinct basins, which we call seas. Whether again this is exactly as it appears today that something that I don’t know the answer to. The landmasses were arranged into continents and if the flood was universal then of course the relationships, as I mentioned, are somewhat difficult to ascertain. One thing you can see is the majesty and greatness of God and the Psalmist is not exaggerating when he says concerning God’s work of creation, he spoke and it was done, he commanded and it stood fast. Well, now since the land has arisen and there is a blanket of fertile soil that has been formed, God speaks again and vegetation comes into being.

These are tremendously complex systems we now know. Each has a marvelous informational program so created by God that through its chemical structure it can reproduce and reproduce other things specifically like itself. A magnificent organization of the chemical elements of the earth is represented in the vegetation. God says it so simply but we are discovering through the science that we know how complicated this work is that he accomplished.

The two questions that always come to the fore at this point, one is the question did God create this creation, specifically these plants and the animals with the appearance of age? In other words, did he just create them so that there they were, did someone just look out so to speak and one moment there was no camellia plant there but then there was a camellia plant full grown with some beautiful flowers upon it, perhaps? Well, now it would seem from this account that that’s the case. Scientists and some believing scientists too who still hold the theistic evolution have had difficulty with this, they have accused God of deception if that’s what he did. In other words if he created things fully grown with the appearance of age, that would fool the scientists.

Now I’ve never been very much impressed by this argument, I must confess, I cannot see how that would be deceptive to any scientist except the scientist who already had a presupposition that God could not do anything contrary to his evolutionary uniformitarianism. Now it would be deceiving to that person if he really held to that dogma but he doesn’t have to hold to that dogma and I can see actually that this might be not divine deception but a testimony to the greatness of our triune creator God.

The second question is the question of evolution, the repeated use of the expression after their time seems to make it clear that while there may be a great deal of variation within the kinds, the evolution of new kinds is precluded. Horizontal variations take place. Take the camellia plant again. There are about 3,000 known varieties of camellias and as they continue to be grown by people, new varieties are created or come to pass. I know you think I’m an expert in camellias, I am. I believe that more camellia plants have died under my care than any other individual who has attempted to grow them in Texas, but I do remember my fault of paying a great deal of attention to camellias and I listen to a lot of things that he said.

What is the Theory of Evolution? Evolution really is a religion. It’s a form of a belief system, an explanatory belief system based upon the presupposition of the eternal existence of matter from which has come by nucleogenesis and ascending series of elements. Life on this planet appeared spontaneously through molecular evolution followed by organic evolution and including human evolution. It has been summarized simply as molecules to man. All life then is developed from a single simple cell through natural, uniform processes over millions of years.

An atheistic evolutionist is a person who believes it all happened by chance. A theistic evolutionist is one who believes that God guided the process, but essentially evolution is a divine activity then.

Now of course, we cannot in an hour like this when it is beyond my ability as well to set forth the evidence that some scientists believe justify the doctrine of evolution. Of course, I do not believe in the doctrine of evolution. I do not believe that it is truth, so I’m going to suggest some lines of evidence and of course it probably will be slanted a little bit because, well, my mind is pretty well made up from my own study.

From comparative anatomy, for example, it has been argued that the similarity of man to certain animals suggests a degree of relationship. If two things are so similar, there must be a common ancestry. The very fact that we look like a monkey has suggested to some that there may be some relationship to an arboreal creature. Mr. Spurgeon — this incidentally is very unscientific — and Mr. Spurgeon used to like to say since this was a real issue at his day, if it’s really true that we’ve come from monkeys then we should no longer pray “Our Father, who art in heaven but Our Father, who art up a tree.” That’s very unscientific, pardon me if you’re a scientist in the audience, it’s not intended to be a point necessarily. It is true though I think that similarity might indicate something else, it might indicate that the two have come from a common source, a great common designer and so consequently the argument from similarity is just as good an argument for creation by the one God as it is for evolution.

From embryology the biogenetic law is offered, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” by which it’s meant that the embryo passes through the same stages in its development within the womb that the human beings have gone through in their evolution from the single cell and so what we have in the birth of every individual is a kind of compression of the history of the human race, phylogeny.

Of course we know some things now that we did not know when this was made popular. We know that the characteristics of the adult are contained in the chromosomes of the first cell of the embryo. There is no chance involved as DNA has caused us to realize. Scientists used to use an argument concerning gill slits, that is the embryo when about a month old has certain folds on what is becoming its neck and since there were some or are some likenesses to the gills of a fish, the suggestion was made that since man is thought to have had his ultimate origin in water, that the gill slits are an evidence of origination through evolution. The resemblance was very superficial. The folds never function as gills nor do they have the material of gills and they gradually develop into the jaws and neck of the human being. “The gill slit argument,” one science teacher has said, “offers about as much proof that man evolved from the fish as the moon shaped face of a young Chinese is proof that he evolved from the moon. “

The argument from geology is much stronger and probably much more common today. It revolves around fossils, the remains of living matter found in the earth’s crust. Older rocks contain fossils, which are more simple, the younger rocks contain fossils that are more complex and the underlying assumption is that life could only have progressed from the simple to the complex. The dates from which the arguments are derived are from radioactive methods and there are so many unproved assumptions in such dating methods that one cannot have confidence in the results obtained by them.

Not long ago, some experiments were carried out concerning carbon C-14 dating, and it was the conviction of a scientist who teaches on one of the faculties of our Southern universities that there was no evidence at all that the earth as we know it was any older than 10,000 years old. So there is a great deal of confusion here and I suggest if you’re interested that you get some of the books on evolution and read more of the data. I’m sure you’ll have a great deal more understanding of it than I could possibly give you. I think it is important for us to remember that modern evolutionary theory is the direct product of humanism, an intellectual and cultural movement of the Middle Ages that led to the renaissance and flowered and the rationalism that produced Darwin and others. Darwin did not originate evolution.

As most of us know, the concept of a common ancestry of all varieties of living beings even from one uniform cell or from one single cell began before the time of Christ in the minds of the Greeks, so that what Darwin did was to give us a plausible explanation of things by which it might become intellectually acceptable to believe in the doctrine of evolution. It was nice to have a scientific basis for the fundamental human presupposition that man himself is sufficient for all of his needs.

Professor D.M.S. Watson has written, “Evolution is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or can be proved by logically coherent evidence but because the only alternative is creation which is clearly incredible”.

Professor L. T. Moore has said, “The more one studies paleontology, the more certain he becomes that evolution is based on faith. The only alternative is special creation which may be true but is unreasonable”.

Professor Harrison Brown, geo-chemist of Cal Institute in California said in 1953, “Latest research seems to indicate that the known universe is all of one piece created all at one time as indicated in the Book of Genesis. It may also be admitted that other satellites of our Sun would not be suitable home sites for human beings. We would freeze, burn or suffocate in most instances.” I think we can see that lying back of the contingence of many of our scientists is some presupposition, which governs reaction to the evidence that they are thinking about.

What are the problems of evolution? Well evolution we know violates the laws of thermodynamics. Let’s take the second law for example, “Energy tends toward entropy.” In other words every system tends to move from order to disorder. Now that may seem to be very complicated and I’m going to give you a very simple illustration, which is probably not scientific, but I think you’ll get the point. Tomorrow morning some of you will clean up your house after the weekend. I have a pastor friend who says that he always calls on Monday because he doesn’t have to spend much time. He knocks on the door and the wife appears in her cleaning garment and he says, oh, I’m sorry and she says, yes, come back some other time and he says that he has made his call but it hasn’t taken very long to do it. But we all know that by Friday if we do nothing, the house is a mess again. That’s the second law of thermodynamics according to household, the experience. So that energy tends toward entropy, complete disorganization, we clean it up again and it is not long before the second law of thermodynamics is at work again. Some peoples’ homes stay on a continuous state of disarrangement and disorganization — but it’s an increasing thing, constantly getting worse and worse. So all systems are running down.

Now to affirm that living substance finally from one single cell came to be a human being is in complete violation of this law of thermodynamics and the first law as well. If all systems move toward disorder then life cannot evolve from simple orders. How can a clock run down if it’s never been wound up, and how can it be wound up if there is no one to wind it up?

Genetic laws argue against evolution. For the sake of time, I’ll ask you to read our study and finally there are the two insurmountable obstacles to evolution, the origin of life and the origin of matter. The probability of a self-reproducing state is zero and time and chance cannot be invoked to modify the situation. Just this week, I was reading a paper by a scientist in which she affirmed that assuming that we have matter, the chance of a human cell actually coming into existence, as we know it, is ten to the power of 243, and two scientists working with a computer in one of the eastern universities affirmed that when they tried that on their computers, the computer answered it is impossible.

In other words what we are saying is time is not a cause. Just because we have two million years or five million years does not mean that something that cannot occur will occur. If that were true, given two million or five million years then the IRS would become popular or New York City would become solvent. Harold Stassen would have been elected President of the United States or Charlie Brown would win a baseball game given two million or five million years or Believers Chapel might become a movement church or something like that.

The origin of matter is the other problem. Evolutionists can offer in support of the eternity of matter only their speculation, but that is a substitute faith. So that instead of being science, science has now become religion. It’s another faith based upon a world view of naturalism.

The creation model is a pre-supposition of faith based upon a world view of theism and divine revelation and these two models, these two world views compete and it is only God in the final analysis who through the work of the Holy Spirit in efficacious grace convince the heart of an individual. The human mind and heart of the truth of the creation doctrine. Professor Edward McCready of Sewanee said a few years back, “The biblical story of the creation has new and striking evidence on its side, modern study indicates that all known elements in the universe came into existence practically at one time within half an hour or so.” Before that time there could have been no chemical elements at all. Professor Delpero, a geologist said a few years ago, “If I were in 40 lines to sum up the most authentic acquisitions of geology, I would copy the text of Genesis, the history of the creation of the world as seen by Moses.” In the final analysis, it’s a test or a conflict between two world views. And it is only through the Holy Spirit that we may have conviction concerning the truthfulness of the divine record.

The fourth day of creation is the creation of the sun, the moon, and the stars and evidently this was in order that there might be a definite polemic thrust against the idea of the worship of heavenly bodies. Sun worship, moon worship are all refuted by these words from Moses in verse 14 through verse 19. On the first day he had energized the universe. On the second day he had made the primeval hydrosphere and atmosphere. On the third day he made the earth’s crust and also that part of the earth’s crusts, the waters where the living organisms live. And now on the fourth day he makes the astrosphere, the heavenly sphere, the realm of the stars and the planets.

In the first day he said let there be light, but in the fourth day he said let there be lights, the light bearers, the generators of light. God created the light, these are the light bearers. And no doubt he created them with also their light trails in transit. We did not have to wait for a billion years or so for the light to arrive in this universe where we live. So the universe was created as a fully grown universe. Well, the consequences are stated in versus 16 through 19. You’ll notice as you read through this that Moses’ description is unashamedly geocentric, that he writes from the standpoint of the earth. He speaks, for example, of the greater light and the lesser light and then he also speaks of them as being great lights in verse 16 “God made two great lights” but they are not great lights when compared with other parts of God’s universe, but he is speaking about them from the standpoint of the earth. Now it would be unwarranted for him to describe the sun and moon as great lights, if he is thinking about the creation as a whole. But he is supremely warranted in calling them great lights in the light of redemption because it is here that redemption has occurred, here the activity of God centers and for us, the sun and the moon are great lights.

He speaks of the signs and the astrologists have made a great deal over that. I wish I had time to talk about that but so far as we can tell that statement in the verse 14 does not have anything to do with modern astrology. It is not true that the heavens influence bodies down here on the earth and that we are to look to the sign under which we have been born. Much of our life is governed by this. Many people read the horoscopes, many of them plan their lives that way, many programs on television are under the control of individuals who examine their horoscopes not only to plan their work but also to plan for those who work with them. Some research has been done in this, some rather amazing. Professor Gibson Reeves of the University of Southern California who is an astronomer has studied astrology and said there is nothing to it. He said really it ought to be the study not of scientists such as astronomers but of the social scientists and the study ought to be why is it that so many people are mesmerized by this, which is really nothing. Joan Rivers said that she was born under the sign the sign she was born under was “This way to the maternity ward.” [Laughter]

Well, our time is up I do want to close, I am sorry that we have been rather different in the exposition of the word today but many people are troubled by evolution and wonder if there is anything not only to evolution but if there is any thing in the Scriptures that bears upon the question. The Psalmist reflecting on the works and the word of God sang, the heavens are telling the glory of God and their expanse is declaring the work of his hands. It’s true, the works of God’s creative hands were down to his awesome glory and the massive beauty of his creation shouts abroad his omnipotence. Isn’t it a striking fact that in the word of God we have man provided for even before he is created. God is taking care of him, providing this universe, providing all of the life of the universe, filling it with all of the things that will serve man.

Our Lord Jesus when he spoke about the birds not worrying about how they should be cared for was looking at this creation as the product of God and the factors within it that worked for the benefit of man. But there is something else here, he has done this for a purpose. This creation that he has made is for the purpose of something that goes far beyond what we see in the skies. The creation is evidence of it and the ages of time finally tell their story in the offering up of the Son of God as the redeeming sacrifice for fallen man. The glory of the creation is only the stage for the greater glory of the manifestation of the attributes of our great God and the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus.

It is there that we see all of the manifestations of the kind of God that we have. In other words, creation has been accomplished in order that there might be a stage upon which the covenantal program might be worked out. And God might be seen in his justice and he might be seen also in his grace and in his mercy. How foolish it is to miss the glory of the first creation, the majestic testimony to the greatness and omnipotence of our God, but oh, how fatal it is to miss the testimony of the work of the Son of God to the grace and mercy and glory of a God who redeems lost sinners. That is a fatal mistake.

If you are here this morning and you have thought about the creation, this magnificent display of the power of God. Well of course it is wonderful if you have come to realize how great He is, but it is an incomplete rejoicing until you have rejoiced in him who made it possible for the Son of God to die upon the cross crying out “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me” having become the sin sacrifice for sinners. And if you are here this morning without Christ we invite you as an ambassador of the Lord Jesus to respond to the ministry of the Holy Spirit as He testifies to the glory of the Son of God the Creator, and Redeemer of sinners. May God show you your sins, your need of repentance in faith, and may you come believing in the Lord Jesus onto everlasting life. Then you will know the true greatness, the fullest greatness of our great Creator, Redeemer God. May we stand for the benediction?

[Prayer] Father, we turn to Thee with thanksgiving and praise. How great Thou art. How great Thou art. Great in creation, even greater in redemption. We thank Thee for the Holy Spirit who has revealed to us our sin and our need and we praise Thee for the redemptive sacrifice that makes it possible for us to call Thee our father to think that this great creator is our father. We want to praise Thee and worship Thee and O God we do desire that if there is to be some in this audience who have not yet come to know Him but they may through the Holy Spirit perceive their own sin and need of redemption and flee at this moment to the blood that was shed for hope for eternal life throughout all the ages of the future. Oh, God through the Holy Spirit, glorify Thy name in redemption. May grace, mercy and peace go with us.

For Jesus’ sake. Amen.