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Creation: God Makes CREATION: GOD MAKES Mark Driscoll & Dr. Gerry Breshears CREATION: GOD MAKES In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. GENESIS 1:1 hen I was a little boy, before my four siblings were born, my Wdad worked out of town a lot. My parents were married at a young age, and birthed me when they were just over twenty years old. To pay the bills, my hardworking construction worker dad had to sometimes take some jobs out of town, sleep in his truck, and send the money to me and my mom. For fun, my mom would load me up in an old Chevy car and take me up to the mountains to explore God’s creation. She often told me, “Marky we need a Jeep.” Many years later, as we started to have five kids of our own, the seed planted in my imagination by my mom came to mind and so I bought a Jeep. Today, I am driving my second Jeep around Scottsdale, Arizona where we live and minister. During the winters, the weather is spectacular with big blue skies, warm sunny weather, and jaw dropping sunsets exploding with color. It is life-changing to have the top off the Jeep all winter to enjoy God’s creation, and take the Jeep up into the mountains to find hidden places of beauty that God created for us to explore and enjoy. Since moving to the desert, my life has drastically changed. For most of my life, I suffered from a bad case of Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.). The wet, cold dark winters took a serious physical toll every year. My doctor said that no medication would help and that I simply needed to be outside enjoying God’s creation under the light of the sun and my body would heal itself by God’s design. Since relocating to the desert and driving around all winter in the Jeep with the top off, my health has been completely transformed. My wife Grace likes to joke that I am solar powered as I enjoy the healthiest and most enjoyable season of my life. I have learned in a very personal and practical way that God made this world as a gift for us to live in and, apart from enjoying God’s creation, it is nearly impossible to be healthy. According to the Scriptures, creation is a gift from a loving Creator God. From the bodies we inhabit, the air we breathe, the sun we bask in, the food we eat, the flowers we pick, the water we drink, the ground we walk upon, and the pets we love, to the 1 DOCTRINE pleasures we enjoy and destinations we visit on vacation, life is filled with good gifts for us to steward and enjoy. As we now learn about creation, the main goal is to learn to love the Creator. WHAT HAVE CHRISTIANS HISTORICALLY BELIEVED ABOUT CREATION? Christians have always believed in creation. There was little debate over the nature or date of creation until the last couple of centuries. However, science began gaining credibility through the great advances in the so-called Age of Reason (also called The Enlightenment or Modernism) developed in the eighteenth century. Science increasingly became identified with the physical-centered, naturalistic worldview that stood in direct opposition to the spirit- centered, theistic worldview of the Bible. What was presented as scientific evidence became a weapon used by opponents of Christianity to attack the biblical worldview with great cultural success. Unfortunately, many Christians began to accommodate themselves to naturalism and rationalism. Classic Christian liberalism began to dominate the church in Europe in the nineteenth century and in America going into the twentieth century. A group of biblical Christian scholars published a series of books called “The Fundamentals” in an attempt to define and defend biblical Christianity against this widespread compromise with liberalism. As the debates developed, controversies about the date and nature of creation arose among biblical Christians. Fundamentalism became defensive and suspicious of compromise and the controversies often became acrimonious and remain so today as even secondary and tertiary issues are warred over. Thankfully, even this creation controversy can be yet another gift to us from God, compelling us to more deeply ponder his creative works and thereby grow to more clearly savor his Word, see his grace, and sing his praises. Before turning to the opening pages of Genesis where creation commences, a few prefatory comments are in order. First, there is no conflict between Christianity and experimental science. This is because the Christian worldview, which believes that 2 CREATION: GOD MAKES God created the world with natural “laws” and orderliness, is what undergirds the entire scientific enterprise. For example, inductive reasoning and the scientific method are based on the assumption of the regularity of the laws of nature. This means that scientists assume that water will boil tomorrow under the identical conditions that it does today. Without this kind of regularity, we could not learn from experience, including the experiences of scientific testing. This also helps to explain why, in cultures where creation is said to be an illusion or disorderly chaos because it was not created by an orderly God, the sciences have not historically flourished; indeed, the scientific method depends upon the kind of underlying worldview that a creating and providentially ruling God of the Bible provides. Second, there is total conflict between Christianity and scientific naturalism, the belief that all phenomena can be explained in terms of presently operating natural causes and laws. The only true knowledge is that which comes through observable experiments. This negates even the possibility of the supernatural or miraculous as, by definition, those are not repeatable and controllable events. When natural science is the arbiter of all truth claims, religion becomes superstition and God, spirit, and choice are omitted from discussion.1 Third, the Bible in general, and the book of Genesis in particular, was not written with the intention of being a scientific textbook. Rather, it is a theological narrative written to reveal the God of creation, which means its emphasis is on God and His relationship with humanity and not on creation. Genesis is far more concerned with the questions of who made creation and why He made creation than exactly when and how He did. Therefore, as Galileo said, “The Holy Ghost intended to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” This explains why the lengthiest treatise of creation in all of Scripture, Genesis 1 and 2, is only a few pages of our Bible. It is as if the story of Scripture opens with the panoramic view of creation and then the camera quickly focuses in on the creation of our first parents and the history that ensues. Fourth, one’s view of the date or exact details of creation should not be the litmus test for Christian faithfulness. Within Christian theology there are open- and closed-handed issues. Biblical 3 DOCTRINE authority is a closed-handed issue. Christians receive what the Bible actually teaches as truth from God to be believed and obeyed. Regarding creation, a Bible-believing Christian must reject such things as the atheistic evolutionists’ claims that there is no God and that creation is not a gift but rather an epic purposeless accident. Nevertheless, Bible-believing Christians can and do disagree over the open-handed issues, such as exactly how God made the heavens and the earth, whether the six days of Genesis 1-2 are literal twenty-four-hour days, and the age of the earth. These sorts of issues must remain in the open hand as these are not about the Who but instead the how of creation. WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY ABOUT CREATION? The first book of the Bible, Genesis, takes its name from its first words, “In the beginning,” as genesis means “beginning.” The book of Genesis in general, Genesis 1-3 in particular, records the beginning of creation and human history. Moses penned Genesis in roughly 1400 BC as the first of a five-part book called the Pentateuch, meaning “book in five parts”. The Genesis account of creation was likely directly revealed to Moses by the same Holy Spirit who was present in Genesis 1:2, since Moses was not present for the creation event. Genesis is not an exhaustive treatment of early history but rather a theologically selective telling of history that focuses on God and mankind while omitting such things as the creation of angels or the fall of Satan and demons in heaven. The first line of Genesis says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”a The two subsequent chapters of the Bible are devoted to speaking about creation. Brilliantly, the Bible opens with the one true, eternal God as both the author and subject of history and Scripture. Consequently, everything else in history and Scripture is dependent upon God and is only good when functioning according to His intentions for it from creation. Only in the last century has evidence forced the natural sciences reluctantly to agree with what Scripture has always taught: the ___________________________ a Gen. 1:1 4 CREATION: GOD MAKES universe had a beginning. It is an amazing testimony to the truth of Scripture. The scientific consensus that the universe had always been pretty much as it currently is (Steady State) was so strong that Einstein overrode the implications of his theory of general relativity and added a cosmological constant to make them consistent with the prevailing view. The opening phrase “In the beginning” speaks of an inauguration of a history, a space and a time when the Lord worked.
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