The Truth About How the World Began

Gen 1:1-5

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was* on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day. NKJV

[In the beginning God] - Matter is not eternal. It could not make itself and then make life all by random chance and accident. Life forms on the earth, including human life, are not eternal. Yet, the heavens and earth are before us and we have intelligent life able to observe it and study it. Life cannot come from non-life, and that all by random chance. Intelligence and moral consciousness does not come from non-intelligence and no sense of right and wrong. If there was ever a time when there was absolutely nothing, including God, that is what would be right now, NOTHING. Since matter does not have eternal quality, and something cannot create itself from nothing, then the Bible gives the only logical conclusion - God. God, all-wise and eternal One, CREATED the heavens and the earth.

At some point in timelessness God brought time, space, and the materials together in a formless mass. The earth God wanted to form from the formless mass of materials, including waters, was waiting for God to take action upon it. God was "hovering over" the face of the waters, as the Spirit later "hovered" over the virgin Mary to create a seed in her without the aid of a man (Luke 1:30-31,35). In Mary God was going to bring forth the true Light of the world, Jesus Christ (John 1:1-9). In Mary, God was going to bring forth the One who would bring light into our understanding and recreate our dark hearts and lives (2 Cor.5:17). We can say that the first creation event was only a shadow of the greater creation of new creatures in Christ that God had in mind from before the foundation of the world (Eph.1:4).

There is no statement as to how long the earth was in the void and formless state when God began to take action upon it. But, the first day of His action upon the formless mass was a day of creating light and separating light from darkness. How fast was the "speed of light" that day? Perhaps faster by far than the present speed. How fast does a man grow? At today's rate it would take 15-20 years to grow a man, but God was not growing a man, He was creating a man. He was not growing some plants from seed. He was creating plants with seed within as a procreation method after the initial Supernatural creation. So, when it comes to beginnings, all present rates of development and growth have no application to ANYTHING at the beginning. So, how fast and far-reaching was the light God made on the first day? We have no way of knowing. But, it was faster than the rate we see light traveling today. What about those stars whose light is just reaching us today? God created variety of star sizes, star potential, and distances with different lengths of light streams. Just as there were instantly full-grown trees and younger trees that were ready to replace the olds made in older form, there were stars built with light already to be seen on earth, and others with eventual light distances that were in route to be seen in different places of the universe. All stars were not placed so that their light reaches man at the same moment. Some were hurled instantly away from man's visibility and then given a steady time-speed of light to reach different parts of the universe and earth-visibility at different times.

In revealing to Moses what He(God) did "in the beginning", God revealed that the "days" of which He spoke were the common kind of evening-morning days that Israel was familiar with. He did not trick Moses or Israel, but gave historic information that they could understand. They did not and could not understand God to be saying that these six "evening-morning DAYS" were actually six billion-year long "evening-morning days". Revelation from God about His creative work is far better than limited man trying to extrapolate from present processes what happened by using all-natural natural processes. The modern scientific method is usually good for studying present processes, but is useless in trying to extrapolate from present processes to all-natural origins. It simply cannot do so. The conclusions will always be in error. Why? Because GOD was the process and modern science precludes God as not a valid process within the modern scientific method. God cannot be studied and observed with the human senses that uses human tools to study what has been made, but can't study WHO made it and how fast it took Him. Trying to get a believer in God and His revelation to accept all-natural-theory of origins and all-natural-extrapolated conclusions about origins is useless. To the believer in God and His revelation the all-natural approach is good for studying natural things and natural processes as we know them now, but is totally inadequate for explaining origins of the universe, life, and man. The natural process simply was not involved "in the beginning when GOD created the heavens and the earth". It is like trying to explain the resurrection of Jesus using all-natural assumptions and telling the student that he cannot bring God into the equation, and he must use only the all-natural-scientific method. The explanation will always be inferior and WRONG. The truth will not be in an approach that predetermines to exclude God and pre-determines that all explanations will be all-natural or none at all.

God created order out of disorder. The natural processes we observe sees order break down in time. Only a beginning that empowered the world with replacing and renewing birth while death takes out and breaks down the old is before us now. We cannot extrapolate an eternal continuum into the infinite past. Theistic evolutionists think they can ride along with the naturalist until it is just too uncomfortable anymore to keep riding with them. They know there is some point in which they must say "God", but they want it to be all-natural until that mysterious point. They want to be able to keep moving the goal line behind them as all-naturalists come up with more that they think they can explain with all-natural processes. They want to be very flexible with that goal-line behind us where the field of time starts, and they don't care how much bending and distorting of the owner's manual it takes to get along with the all-naturalist. This simply is not good thinking, and is certainly not God's story on the matter. You either allow God to give His Supernatural testimony and allow it priority over all-natural human opinion or you surrender the very premise of God entirely. There is no logical place for the theist to bend the creation story so that it fits the naturalist's theory of Evolution. Theistic-Evolutionists simply believe man more than they believe God. Adam did not come from a race of almost human-looking animals. There is no place you can bend the creation story and still bring Adam into existence by all-natural processes. The theistic evolutionist does not know the scriptures, nor the power of God. He compromises the revelation of God because of his total trust and faith in the Naturalist of the all-natural-scientific processes. God actually CREATED everything in six days just like He said. The all-naturalist says, "lets' study the instantly created universe and human life as if it came through natural processes". It is as foolish as trying to explain a watch, and the only rule allowed to explain the watch is without human wisdom and power and allowing only non-human natural processes to be used in the explanation. The premise is wrong and the conclusion will be set-up to be wrong. Even though he uses the "scientific method" (which is good for most things we observe in the present, but not the distant past), his analysis and study will only lead into deeper time errors as he determines to ignore and disallow the Divine Testimony to "taint" his "objective" study that is confined to all-natural explanations.

Genesis and the entire Bible refutes atheism, and it refutes "all-naturalism". It refutes the all-natural scientific method for studying origins. It basically says to mankind that you can study the universe, but the present that you are in now is not the key to all of the past. The natural processes you observe now had a supernatural beginning and you cannot study the Creator or His power or wisdom using only human wisdom and a pre-commitment to only accept natural explanations for the things seen. That method of study is only good for history back to the time of Adam, and only good for things seen, but no good for things not seen. Further back than that your method will be entirely flawed and your conclusions wrong. "Let God be true and every man a liar"(Rom.3:4). Only God can tell us how it really came together, and He tells it in perspective of His Supernatural power, and does not tell it as though He was limited to all-natural processes. The creation is no more natural in origin than Jesus' resurrection has a natural explanation. All theory of man that commits to all-naturalism will of necessity be in error.

Before God acted upon the formless and uninhabited mass of water and pre-planetary materials, he put energy, light into the dark mix of materials and then separated the light into a divided area from the dark areas. The Light was God's energy empowering the materials of the formless mass to have the beginnings of it's own energy and light. Now part of the formless mass was glowing with the fire of energy and that part of the mass was separated into a separate area from the dark matter, each ready to be further formed by the mighty power and wisdom of God. The light He called "day". The dark He called "night". God did this so that mankind would later have an adequate language with which to describe the days and nights, the evening and mornings of their world experience. It was a unique day one. It was not measured by the light of sun shining upon a rotating earth. It was measured by God separating out the energy mass from the dark mass and the dark mass having motion that caught the light on one side but did not catch it on it's far side until it turns around with evening and morning rotation. At this point the energy mass is not yet formed into a sun and stars for seasons and measuring months. It is still a radiant mass shining upon another mass that is rotating. The separating of glowing light mass from other non-illumined material and letting the illumined material to shine on one side of the non-illumined matter with rotating motion gave an evening-morning, first day.

God did this by His power. God told us that this is how He did it, and he let us know to measure it in terms of the evening-morning days that we know. Were the days actually long ages? At the time of creation, the eternal God was preparing the stage for man and the stage for the Messianic Redeemer king. God was relating these seven days with evenings and mornings experience that man could relate to. Man could understand day one in terms of time with illumined energy shining upon a rotating mass that has evening and morning, day and night experience in rotating sequence. Did it need to spin at the 24 hour rate on day one? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows? But, at some point within these seven days plant-life and earth-life is going to need the 24 hour spin. It cannot be allowed thousands of years of dark awaiting thousands of years of light in slow rotation. It would need immediate balance of night and day. There is no reason to think that God did not measure his activity equally to a 24 hour program of evening-morning days as we know them. There is good reason to believe that the beginning was so unique, totally involved with God's activity and wisdom, and once accomplished would not need that same measure of activity from day to day afterwards. Adam would not need years of sunlight while the other side of the earth gets years of darkness. It is nothing for God to measure His work in measured time and doing day one in the same amount of time as the days that depended upon the shapened sun, moon and stars.

The truth about how the world began cannot be discovered in a science class that is already predetermined to examine things using only natural explanations. The heavens and the earth did not evolve naturally. It was created in 6 evening-morning measured days. After that it had natural processes that would be dependable and predictable. Man can study the past, and he can theorize about origins in an all-natural program of thought and examination, but once he gets back to the first man, Adam, his natural explanations will be totally erroneous. In the beginning GOD created the heavens and the earth. That is the TRUTH about how the world began. Naturalists can be very smart, but God has made foolish the wisdom of this world (Rom.1:20-22; 1 Cor.1:18-29). His ways are past finding out. Every theory that imagines a natural beginning and determines to explain all things naturally will make a huge mistake in the calculations of pre-Adamic time. God's word is truth. He was there. He knows what He did and He knew how to relate to man how much time He took to prepare an earth for man. They were six evening-morning days as we know them now. Moses wrote this after the fact, and he wrote this by aid of God's revealing these things in terms that Israel and all others could know how to measure their own seventh day of rest. God knew how to tell the truth and it was impossible for God to lie or be deceived. God said it and God is far wiser than even our smartest men. The Bible simply does not have room for the time-program of the General Theory of Evolution. The Bible is right, and it is right even if men choose to ignore it and take up all-natural explanations. They may not know that they are wrong, but they are. God did what He did in ways "past finding out", and He let us in on the fact that He measured His creative work in terms of six evening-morning days, using his power in rapid speed to bring about a fully matured and operational world for man to have what he needs. Nobody ever thought otherwise until the 1800's when man started schooling themselves to start looking through the lenses of Naturalism and accept only what human wisdom could explain in all-natural terms. Man has again professed to be wise and have largely become fools.

Terry W. Benton

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