We’re studying the book of Genesis and we start, of course, with Genesis 1 which is creation. Last week we looked at God created the heavens and the earth. We looked at day one where God created light. One of the things we said is here’s what happens when you start to look at creation. There is a message that goes out. That message goes out just by looking at creation. What is that message? If you’re online and you know what that message is, would you take a moment and write it in the comments? What is the message that God has for us when we look at creation? What is the message that He shares with us?
This week on Friday evening I was in my office. I looked out the window and saw a sunset happening. Friday night. Maybe you saw it. It was a magnificent sunset. Pink lines all over the sky. I quickly went out of my office and walked a little ways just so I could see the sky. As I stood out there I’m hearing this declaration of God that comes by. What is that declaration? Tell me. What is the message that God says through creation? Do you remember? “Worship me, worship me.” So when we look out at the beauty of creation we hear those words “worship me.”
The problem is we don’t know what to worship just by looking at the scriptures. Some people mistake that to be worship creation itself. Some people worship creation instead of the Creator. They misunderstand the message. That’s why we’re eager to share with people the message of Jesus Christ, the message of who God is so that they can say oh yes, I’ve been waiting for this. I know I need God. I’ve been wanting to worship Him. Now I know who He is. So people then can come and they can worship the Lord and know Him. There’s a message communicated by creation that says “worship me.”
Today we’re going to talk about a second message that comes when we understand creation. But it only comes to those who understand there’s a Creator. Some of those are Christians, believers, who know Jesus Christ personally. Some don’t know Him yet. But what they are already acknowledging is there is a Creator and they’re waiting for this next step, and that is to accept Jesus Christ into their lives and He will change their lives. The message is this: “Hold it together.” Don’t you wish you could get that message regularly? Hold it together. I need to hold it together.
But again, that message could be misunderstood, believing that I need to hold my whole life together when really God wants to hold our lives together. He’s going to say that when we get to Colossians 1:15-17. I’m going to show you that at the end of our teaching today. But in order to see that God holds our lives together, I want to go to creation and see how He holds creation together. Because if we look at creation, we understand what God is doing, it makes it easier for us to say, “Okay, God, I will give you my life. You’re obviously capable to do that. I want to give you my life.” There's some people who don’t believe that God is capable. We’re going to talk about that today.
Well let’s go to our passage in God’s word. This is day two. I’m going to take this in days. So you can see at the top it says what day we’re in. So here we are in Genesis 1:6-8 in day two. It says – And 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 that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
So on day one God created light. Not the sun and the moon yet, but He created light. Just His glory lit up everything. It was the glory of God giving us an indication of what’s yet to come. That Jesus would be the light of our life. That we can enjoy who God is. He lights up our own being.
In day two God creates the atmosphere. Now in the atmosphere is a very important part of what holds our world together. We’re going to talk about what holds the world together as God is holding it together. But He uses the atmosphere to do it.
The atmosphere is this space between the Earth’s surface out to about sixty miles. It goes up that far. That’s the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s held to the Earth by gravity. It’s made up of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen. That’s significant. It’s a very important ratio that makes up the air that we breathe and so on. If the oxygen level were greater on the Earth, things would start catching on fire and blowing up. It would be combustible. Just the right amount of chemicals in the air, gasses that exist there.
The atmosphere has several different purposes for us. One is that it keeps the water on the earth. If you’re going to have a planet that has water on it, you have to have water for life. In order for a planet to have water, you need to have a hard crust on the Earth and you need something keeping it down. The pressure keeps the water on the land or down on Earth so it doesn’t just evaporate and go out there. Yet the atmosphere is in such a delicate balance that it allows for water to come off the oceans and the lakes and streams and so on, come into the atmosphere in the form of clouds, and then dump water into other places.
This atmosphere is so strategic. The atmosphere is what allows…. What happens to sunlight when it hits the atmosphere is that the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen create this refracting affect so that the sky looks blue when you look at it. It’s the atmosphere that does that. And then at night when it’s dark, the atmosphere becomes clear so you can see past that and see all of the magnificent stars that are out there. The atmosphere is a strategic part of the world.
Now the atmosphere you might think that’s really big. Sixty miles? A plane usually flies at about five miles high and the reason the plane does that is because the atmosphere is getting thinner, so it can go through the atmosphere without as much friction. Sixty miles seems like a big stretch. However, if you take the sixty miles and you reference that to the radius from the center of the Earth to the outside of the Earth, it’s only about 1.5%. It’s about the thickness of an apple skin on an apple. That’s how big the atmosphere is on the earth. Just that really small. God uses the atmosphere to create this atmospheric pressure that is not so great that it blows out our ear drums but it’s enough so we can breathe air. It’s just amazing, this atmospheric pressure that God created.
Now in the passage it says He separated the waters from above from the waters below. Which leads some to believe that maybe when God first created the world that there was this water canopy around the world, kind of a greenhouse effect. This greenhouse would then allow life to grow and things would flourish. If that’s the case, maybe that’s why the first people lived over 900 years, whereas after the flood the lifespan of a person decreased rather quickly. We’ll talk more about that when we get to the flood. But the point is here God is holding all things together. If God can hold together like this, what can He do in your life? That’s really the question we’re going to ask today. The atmosphere. That’s day two. God created the atmosphere.
In day three we get God creating two things. He’s going to create the water and He’s going to create the vegetation and plants. In the first part it says in verse 9 – And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.
So now God created land or the land that was exposed because He separated land from water. Now we have mountains, we have hills, we have raised terrain, and the water is now in the seas. So God created this land and we’re going to need that for the next part of day three where we have all the vegetation. But water is very significant in order for us to have life. That’s a very important factor and as scientists are looking at other planets, they’re asking the question, if there's going to be life on another planet (if there possibly could be) they have to have water.
We know that water is essential. But water is very interesting. So I don’t know that much about science and water, so I called our resident hydrogeologist Dr. John Johnson who is here this morning. So get that. Hydro-geologist. That’s water and land. I mean God created it. Here’s a guy who studies the water and the land. That’s amazing to me that he does that. So I said to him, “Give me some interesting facts about water.”
He said this: Water is a unique liquid. One of the things that makes water so unique is that it freezes from the top down. Most other liquids freeze from the bottom up. That’s why when water freezes from the top down, what it does is it creates an insulation over the lakes and so on so the fish can still live. If water froze from the bottom up, the fish would all die. But God designed water to be this amazing ingredient as part of His creation that forms the seas and it forms the streams and it forms the rivers and lakes and so on.
Here’s another interesting thing he told me about water. You know this, but I didn’t know the ramifications of this. When water freezes it expands. Right? You know that. Well that’s why ice floats. Ice doesn’t sink in your cup because it expands. And because it expands it floats to the top of your glass. Now the fact that it expands is important for the geology because water obviously freezes inside of a crack and then as it expands it separates that and makes changes on the Earth’s surface and adjusts certain things.
It’s on this day that God created the mountains that are so huge, and the rivers and streams that come off those mountains down into the valleys where rivers are created. God created the separation between the land and the water that would be so strategic and important for later life that He’s going to create in a couple of days.
But He doesn’t stop with the water on day three. He also creates all of the vegetation. Notice it says this: And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.
The vegetation is going to be so important, of course, because it’s going to provide food for us for the other animal life in the world. This vegetation is strategic. But He didn’t just create vegetation. He created it with the ability to reproduce. And it reproduces after its kind. So that you have acorns that turn into oak trees. And you’ve got all kinds of things that are going on that God has designed and created. Fascinating what God has done. Of course this is putting all the pieces in place that are going to be necessary for the next things that are going to take place, animals and people, eventually on day six.
But one of the things that is remarkable about creation is that God’s fingerprint is on so much of it. That is just so amazing to think about.
So I’m in a small group on Wednesday night. You’re welcome to join. It’s a small group, it’s a think tank in preparation for the sermon. Because of those people you hear more interesting things than I can think of. So one of the things that was shared this week is that there is a number sequence called the Fibonacci sequence. The Fibonacci sequence is used by mathematicians to evaluate several things. If you’ve got momentum in some kind of work that’s going on, the Fibonacci sequence is going to tell you when about it’s going to stop. So it’s a very important sequence in math. In fact some of you have heard of the Fibonacci sequence if you’ve dabbled in stocks at all. Sometimes when you’re doing stock trading there’s a Fibonacci level that you can expect maybe the stock will stop there. Or if it retraces then it will come down to another level. Because this Fibonacci sequence is significant in science, in math to understand things.
What’s fascinating is if you look at the sunflower. This is a picture of a sunflower. The seeds of the sunflower are not randomly created. They are in a pattern. That pattern that you see in a sunflower is a pattern that follows the Fibonacci sequence. The fingerprint of God is placed on a sunflower in an amazing way.
There is another picture, which you can’t see very well unfortunately, but it’s a picture of a plant. I didn’t know what plant this was, so I have an app. Remember last week I told you I have an app for that, the one about the stars in the sky. So I can put my phone up and I can see oh that’s a star. This morning I used it because when I went out before 6 a.m. to my car I saw that there was a bright something by the moon. I thought what is that? So I pulled out my phone, held it up there, and it was Mars next to the moon. I thought wow, that’s really cool that I have this app that can help me understand science. Well I have another app that helps me understand plant life. It’s called PictureThis. It’s free. You can download it. PictureThis. What I can do is I can go to any tree or any flower or any weed or anything and I can snap a picture in that app and it will tell me what the plant is.
Now I use it in particular when I’m gardening or out in my yard when I see poison ivy. The reason is some of the stuff I see out there, I can’t tell the difference whether it’s poison ivy or not. I’m asking the question, is that poison ivy? I just whip out my phone, take a picture of it and it says no it isn’t or yes it is. So I really like that.
So I used that to take a picture of this image which is an image of an aloe plant. It’s in a beautiful configuration that you can just see the fingerprint of God. It’s not random. There’s so much detail and design there. God uses in His creation just this description of who He is. When we look at creation we’re worshiping the God who is there. He holds all things together, He creates the land, and then He creates all the vegetation, both on the land and in the ocean. Amazing. That’s day three.
Well let’s go on to the next day. Let’s go on to day four. In Genesis 1:14-19 it says this. Because this is on day four He creates the sun, moon, and stars. Listen to this. And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. Now remember we already have light that God created. He didn’t create light on this day, but He created the sun, moon, and stars. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years. So the sun and the moon are used to help us understand the time. The time of day, the time of year, the time of the month. The moon and the sun help us know what the seasons are and what’s taking place. That’s their design. And it was so.
And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. It’s almost this afterthought or this extra thing God adds. And the stars I’m going to give you! He’s basically saying. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.
You know when you get to understand how big our world is, the more motivated you are to turn your life over to the Lord and say, “God, you’ve created his whole world. You’ve got this all under control. You can help me hold my life together. I need that. I want to dedicate myself to you. I want to give myself to you.”
The sun is 93 million miles away from Earth. That’s a long distance. The sun provides a lot of things for us. It provides heat and light, radiation that’s needed, vitamin D, other things that are provided as a result of the sun’s work that it does. The moon is important because it controls the tides, creates the waves, and so on that exist inside of the ocean that are important for what takes place there.
But I want to talk to you about the stars. You know they are a long way away from Earth? They are a long way away. Let me explain to you this. I think you’ll find it fascinating. I am amazed at the ingenuity of people. I’m continually amazed that people can do things.
In the ‘70s there was a decision made that NASA would send up a probe and that probe would go out and visit all of the planets and take close up pictures of them and keep going outside of our solar system. So in August of 1977 the Voyager 1 left. There are two Voyagers. I’m just going to talk about Voyager 1. Voyager 1 left, took off, and its rockets of course launched it. I have a picture of it. You can see a little bit of it. It’s a picture and here’s an actual diagram of what all the parts are on this Voyager 1. You can go home and check out the details. It’s a fascinating study of Voyager 1.
But here was their desire. We want to check out all the planets. So they set this in motion. Once it passed the atmosphere and it’s out in space, all those rockets are gone now, it’s just this thing moving through. As it passed by Saturn it catapulted or slingshot a little faster. And then it goes passed Jupiter and it slingshots a little faster. It passes all of the planets, takes pictures of all of them. Even took some pictures of Earth after it passed the last planet, after it got past Neptune. Do you know how far away Neptune is from Earth? It is between 3-4 billion miles away. Now this Voyager 1 passed Neptune in 1990. So that’s pretty fast, from ’77-’90. It goes past the last planet. It’s still broadcasting today. Remember it passed the last planet at 3-4 billion miles. It is presently at 14 billion miles away. That is so far away.
Now when they got to about 4 billion miles, after it passed the solar system, they decided to turn off the cameras. Why? Not just because the battery issue and not being able to send the pictures back, but because there’s nothing to take pictures of. It’s all black. There is nothing between that and the next solar system that it’s heading toward. So it’s moving in that direction at a speed of 11 miles per second. It’s moving very fast. I am so impressed with the ingenuity of humanity that they could create this thing to go so far and so quickly.
Do you know it will stop broadcasting (because it’s going to run out of battery and power) in 2025. In five years it’s done. Then it becomes this thing that’s moving through space at this huge rate. It will continue to move. It is going to the next solar system, the next star. That is where it’s on its way to.
This is what’s so interesting to me. On this Voyager 1 there is what’s called the Golden Record. It is a gold-plated copper record with a playing machine with instructions of how to turn it on. And if you do turn it on then you can see pictures of Earth and you can hear sounds of Earth and in 55 languages from Earth there’s this greeting. Go online and you can hear. It’s one of these “we come in peace” kind of greetings. So that if anybody finds this and is able to turn it on, they can hear about us on Earth and we want to learn from you or maybe you’d like to learn from us.
Here’s the problem. Do you know how long it’s going to take for this Voyager 1 to get to the next solar system? To get to the next star (that God created, remember), this star that He created for us, after the sun, the very next sun, it’s going to take 40,000 years to get there. Forty thousand years at its current speed to get to the next solar system or some star that may have planets around it. And maybe it will land somewhere and people will find out that there’s an Earth. I just can’t imagine all of that. But in the ‘70s they were thinking like this. So they sent it away.
You know, I am so impressed with the ingenuity of people. But I can’t believe the vastness of God. Forty thousand years to get to the next star? Do you know what that means? That when it says that God created the stars, He created them with the appearance of age. That’s what He did. And one of the principles of creation you’re going to…we’ll talk about this as we go on. That God created everything with the appearance of age. When He created the star. Alpha Centauri is the next star at 4.75 light years away. He created not only the star, but He created the light that comes from the star so that we could see it. There are so many stars in the world, in the universe. And each one He created with the light coming toward us. When you get a picture of how big God is, I think He might be able to handle your problems. God is so vast, so big. So amazing what God wants to do and can do in our lives.
This idea of God created creation with age is going to be important as you’re looking at science because you’re going to see that God created an adult man and a woman. When He created them, He created them with an appearance of age. That principle is going to be important. Because if you’re a scientist and you don’t believe in God then you’ve got to start with a tree or a rock or geology or something and you’ve got to try to guess where it all started. Our world appears to be billions of years old. The problem is that not taking into account that God created our world with the appearance of age.
Wow. God is so big. Day four God created all those things.
We’ve got to stop there with day four because I want to be sure to talk to you about this verse in Colossians 1. So we’re going to pick up the creation story more next week as we continue into day five and day six when God created the animals and then people.
But in Colossians 1 we’re reflecting back on creation and how it took place and what’s going on. This is where we’re going to draw our application today about creation and how it impacts our lives. Paul is saying this about creation. He’s saying – The Son (that is God the Son) is the image of the invisible God. In other words we get to see Jesus and He’s how we recognize who God is. He is the visible image of God, the firstborn over all creation. He is the one who is in charge. The firstborn son would be the one in charge. He is the firstborn over all creation.
For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, (then he says this) visible and invisible. My group this week helped me understand this in ways that I never understood before. When I think about this visible and invisible I used to think what He’s talking about is the visible things we see here like sawdust and invisible things we can’t see like wind or molecules or things that are too small to see. But then the passage reveals something more. It's not just the physical creation things. It’s the invisible things of life. Notice he says – whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities. Those are not things that you physically touch. Those are concepts. Those are relationships. God has designed all the relationships. He’s created everything, even things you can’t even see. God has created it all.
It says – all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. That means that the molecules that have the atoms running around, He holds them together. It’s the atmosphere that’s around our Earth, He holds it together. And He holds us together. I need God to hold me together. That’s the message.
If we know there’s a Creator, what Colossians is saying is every time you look at creation you can say, “God, hold me together. I need you in my life. I want you to control me. I want to give myself to you.” So when you understand that God is the one who holds all things together and He wants to do that in your life, you can understand why Jesus comes now in the Sermon on the Mount and He says don’t worry about anything because your Father takes care of the flowers in the field. He takes care of the birds that fly. He takes care of all of those things. If your heavenly Father takes care of those things, can’t He take care of you as well? He holds you together. That’s why Jesus says – Come to me, all you who are weak and heavy burdened, and I will give you rest. Because I hold you together. There’s just this amazing relationship we have with the God of the universe that He wants to hold us together.
And we make a decision. We make a decision to trust Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior and say, “I need that in my life. I’m running around in my life and I’m not doing too good of a job at this.” Or we’re saying, “I am doing a good job of this, but it sure is making a mess of my heart. I need God to hold me together.” And He wants to do that. That’s why when Jesus talks about creating life He says – I have come to give you life, so you can have it abundantly. Abundant life. He holds us together so we can experience what He has for us. God has so much to offer us and to give us that He calls salvation a new creation. Old things are passed away; behold, all things become new. We need that new creation in our lives. Amen?
God wants to do this great work in our lives. He wants to give us something special. He wants to help us hold it together. God is the one who holds together a relationship between a parent and a child. He’s the one who holds a relationship between a husband and a wife. God’s the one who knows and holds together the issues about finances or how a car operates. Do you believe that God understands how a car operates? Do you think God understands how computers operate? I love talking to kids and ask them that question.
Your God is so big. Forty thousand years to the next star at the current rate of Voyager 1. I’m going God is so big. When I get a picture of how big God is, then I recognize that, yes, He understands my complex situation. He understands my life, the challenges I face. He loves me. He offers me a life, an abundant life. It starts when I come to Him and I say, “God, I want you to hold me together. I want you to take my life. I want you to work this miracle inside of me.” God wants to do that in your heart and my heart today.
I trust that God will speak to you in the midst of this. I just want you to think every time you get out in creation you hear that first message “worship me” and the next message you hear is “I want to help you hold it together.” If you’re ever discouraged, if you’re ever despairing, you need to just look out at creation and say, “Wow, God made those things. He wants to hold me together.” Then you want to go to God’s word and you want to see what that looks like and what it means. Because God’s word amplifies this because you don’t know a lot of creation. You just get this declaration, this message that says “worship me, hold it together.” And then when you come to God’s word, you learn more about how He does that in you and what He wants to do inside of your heart. That’s the beauty of God and His creation.
I can hardly wait to get to the next message God’s going to share next week when we talk about God as creator of man and woman next week.
Would you stand with me and let’s pray together as we begin some more worship time.
Heavenly Father, I thank you for your word in our lives. Lord, we are humbled by our weakness. Sometimes we think we can do great things and amazing things, but then we are just met with the edge of what we can do, recognizing that you are so vast and so big. We need you in our lives. We humbly come before you and praise you and ask for your grace to deal with the difficulties we’re experiencing right now. We know you’re big enough to do that, Lord. We’re asking you to work. Do miracles in our lives, we ask. In Jesus’ name, amen.
