Alright. You got me, Don? Alright. Good evening, everybody. Good evening.
Sorry. I was couple minutes late. I had something I needed to take care of, but, hallelujah. We’re here. Right?
Amen? And, so that’s a good thing. It’s good to be in the house of the Lord tonight. For those of you who’ve joined us online tonight, I do wanna, remind you, or tell you if you didn’t know, we will be having our business meeting. And so we will sign off of our, Bible study at 07:00, to conduct our business meeting.
But we’re gonna get started on our Bible study first because we wanna make sure that we take care of that. We are beginning our study in Genesis. If you have a hard time finding books in the Bible, for this one, it’s the first book. So should be easy to find. Alright?
I’m a go ahead and open this up in the word of prayer, and then we’ll dive right in to the book of Genesis. Let’s pray. Father, we do come to you right now. We are so thankful to be in your house. God, it is a blessing.
Sometimes we have a hard week. Sometimes there are a lot of things going on, and sometimes the devil just likes to get into everything. And so, father, we like to meet together in the middle of the week and build each other up to talk about, things and to share with one another and to reconcile and to, bond together in prayer. Father, in all those things, we thank you. And I pray tonight that you just guide us as we begin this study on the first book, father, Genesis.
Thank you, and we ask it all in Jesus’ name. Amen. Alright. So before you get turned over to the book of Genesis, you can go ahead and turn there, but we’re gonna take a little bit of time to talk about, the book before we dive into it. Okay?
I think it’s important sometimes for us to get a a basis of understanding before we jump in. So the first thing is, when we come to the bible, most all of us that we when we’re studying like we are tonight, when we come to the bible, we come to the bible with a knowledge and a belief that there is a god, that god is real exactly, as it says so in his word. And so we already kinda come with that belief. Right? And so one thing I want you to understand, when you read the Bible, it does not make, like, elaborate arguments for the existence of God.
It just starts talking about God right away. There’s there’s no argument or defend or definition trying to help you believe that there is a God. It goes on the assumption that there is a god, and that’s how it starts out. And so it it does tell us that god exists, and it tells us how we can know that god exists, and it tells us a lot about what god has done and how creation began and all of those things. But it doesn’t have this opening argument for or against the existence of God.
Because the Bible is God’s word. So he’s not gonna start it out with an argument that he exists. It’s his word. He exists. So that’s where we start.
Psalms nineteen one through four says this. It says, the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utter speech and night unto night reveals knowledge. There’s no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.
And so right away, we understand that the heavens declare God. The handiwork of God declares God. The Bible tells us that we can know there is a God by what we see he has created in this world. Even someone who is not told directly about God can see the things of the world and know that there is a God. So there’s no reason to have argument for god in the beginning of the book.
We can see that. Romans one two says, for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and godhead so that they are without excuse talking about people or without excuse when they say, well, I didn’t know. They can tell by the things that are already there. And God’s word tells us that he has placed it in our heart to know that he exists. He already put that in our heart when he created this, and we look around, we can see those things.
It’s amazing when we look around the world and we can see God’s creation, and there’s no other explanation. There are people who tried forever to come up with explanations of the creations that God made, and they’ve never been able to come up with a true valid explanation. We come to the Bible believing that God is real. We also come to the bible believing, that it is the place where God has spoken to us. That’s how God has spoken to us.
We believe that, right up front. That’s how God’s has spoken to us, does speak to us. We can believe it because it’s written in second Timothy, chapter three. It says all scripture is given by the inspiration of God. It’s profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction and righteousness that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.
So, absolutely, we know scripture is given by the inspiration of God, and it’s profitable to us. It’s how God communicates with us. So most anybody that you run into in this world, if you ask them, do they know what this is? They pretty much can tell you that’s a bible. They may not know what’s in it.
They may never have read it. They may even say, I don’t believe it, but they can tell you it’s a bible. And if you start to ask them some questions, many of them know things about this bible even though they’ve never studied it, they’ve never read it, and they’ve never been taught it. They’ve heard things. They’ve been, around it.
There have been things, so they know that’s what this is. The bible is even still in print. The Bible still outsells most all other publications in the world. Even though you can get it online, on your phone, on everything else in print, it still outsells almost every other publication in the world. So we come to the bible believing that God is real.
There is a God. We believe it’s a place where God speaks to us. We can study God. But what we can’t do is we can’t take him and put him under a microscope, peel back layers, look at him, test him in a laboratory. We can know him by what he chooses to reveal to us.
We can know him by what he chooses to reveal to us. I tell people all the time about studying God’s word. Read it. Well, I read the whole thing. Good.
Do it again. Wow. I already read the whole thing. Just do it again and tell me what you think. And most anybody that does that will say, you know, I saw so many things this time.
I didn’t see the first time when I started reading through God’s word. Why? Because he chose to reveal it to you that time where he did not the first time. God chooses to reveal pieces of himself to us as we can handle it and as we need it. Even if you’re dating a person.
Right? You go out on a first date with a person, you don’t know everything about that person. You only get to see what they show you. They hold things back. They don’t give you everything up front.
This is just the first date. We’re just kinda, you know, getting to know each other. I’ll show you more as we go along. Even when you get married, you’ve been married for as long as miss Joanne and brother Demar were, there probably were still things that weren’t always evident because people just don’t always reveal everything. The whole point is that God gives us what we need when we need it.
He shows us what who he is and tells us about himself and reveals things to us when it’s profitable for us and useful for us when we can learn from it and we can use it in our life. The Bible is definitely much more than a book. Don said tonight, it was funny because, we I knew what I was gonna be talking about. And miss Gail came in, and, he said, oh, you got a book in that box or something like that? She said, yeah.
There’s a Bible. He said, oh, you got 66 books in there. And I thought that was funny because the bible is much more than a book. It’s a collection of books. It’s 66 books.
66 books that have been written in different literary forms over different periods of time. Some give historical accounts. Others are poetic. Some are prophetic. All these different things, and they’re all put together to come together for one book for us to study.
Bound together in one thing for us to study. Somebody says, well, how do you know that the Bible is true? Well, here’s one thing that I can tell you. From the very front cover where it says holy Bible, all the way back to the back where it says genuine bonded leather, all in between there, it talks about God. How do you what do you mean talks about?
God talks about a lot of things. Yes. The underlying theme is God, and it talks about Jesus from Genesis to Revelation. All of these books go together. If you start reading these books and you start looking at everything, one reflects another, they all go together.
Listen. Some of them were written four hundred years apart, and yet they still talk about the other book. They still reflect it. They still go together. How could any man get a collection of books over all those different forms and put them all together over that many years written by so many different people in so many different ways.
The Bible’s written in three different languages. The Bible’s written in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, and yet it still all comes together. How could a man do that? The answer is he couldn’t, not without God’s direction. And so God’s direction has given him that, and we can take the bible, and we can take it literal.
Some people say, well, you know, the bible’s not really literal. You you don’t take it literally for what it says. Yes. You do. The bible is literal.
Yes. There are things in the bible that you can understand that, they may be metaphors. People speak in metaphors all the time. People talk about that, but the reality is it’s literal. Some argue, even in Genesis, we’re gonna talk about this.
There are some people that argue the seven days to create the the world. Right? There are some that will argue those seven days are not seven twenty four hour periods. They don’t know how many how long it is. Could be thousands of years each day.
They don’t know. Others will argue. That’s not what it says. It says the morning and the evening of the first day indicating a twenty four hour period. I fall in that category.
But there are people that argue about that because they say, well, it’s not literal. Well, yeah. Most of the Bible is actually literal. There are metaphors. There are things that we need to learn, and there are things that teach us other truths, but most of it, we can take it literal.
When the Bible tells us of God, it’s right, it’s true, and it reveals to us the nature and the heart and the mind of God as much as we can comprehend. We can’t always comprehend everything. That’s why I say, keep reading it. My grandpa, every night, he went to bed. He would open up his Bible.
It was about four times the size of this one. Man, if he’d hit somebody with that thing. He’d open that big old Bible every night, and he would read before he went to sleep. And I asked him when I was a young kid, I said, how long is it gonna take you to finish that book? He said, oh, I’ve read this thing through dozens and dozens of times.
And I said, well, why did you keep reading it if you finished it already? He said, because every time I read it, God shows me something new. He read it dozens dozens of times. I’ll tell people, keep reading it. The same scripture that you read over and over may tell you many things.
Sometimes those teachings of scripture have a different application wherever you are in your life. You learn differently. You saw it this way when you were in your twenties, but in your forties, you see it another way. You see a different perspective. There are a lot of things.
So study it. We need to learn it. We need to keep doing that. We believe the Bible is not a book of science, yet it does touch science. It’s it speaks of the truth.
If the Bible is false in regard to science and other things that we can prove, then how can we regard it as reliable when we cannot objectively prove many of the things that are there? Only way we prove them is through faith, through walks in life, through those things. If it doesn’t prove science, then how can we say it’s true? Science in its purest form absolutely agrees with scripture. It proves the bible in its purest form, But people try to take it out of context and take it away from the bible when it can’t be.
So even though it’s not a science book, it has science in it. Even though it’s not a love book, it has love in it. Even though it’s not poetry, it has poetry in it. Even though it’s not a book of laws, it has laws in it. It has all of that in there that God gives us as we need it.
We know that the Bible is true, and we believe that the Bible that we have, that you hold in your hands tonight, if you have it with you, is a reliable duplicate. Now hang in there with me. It’s a reliable duplicate. Why I say duplicate? It’s not the original scrolls.
This is not the original scrolls. We have a lot of the original scrolls. We don’t have everything, but we have a lot of the original scrolls, and we can take those scrolls and we put them against the Bible. And as best that it could be duplicated, it’s been duplicated in the modern Bible that we have in our hand. So we can still believe that.
It’s as as perfect as we can have it based on what we have. The Dead Sea Scrolls have been discovered, and they’ve been taken care of. There’s all kinds of ancient manuscripts and testaments that come together to prove the things that are written in this book, so we can trust it. The Bible would be incomplete or maybe not even comprehensible if it were not for the book of Genesis. Genesis starts everything out.
Genesis shows us how it all began. Genesis explains to us what it’s all about. And, listen, if you didn’t understand this, almost all of the important doctrines and teachings in Genesis, in the Bible have their foundation in Genesis. Genesis gives the foundation for these doctrines. Sin, redemption, justification, the promise of Messiah and Jesus Christ, the personhood of God, the kingdom of God, the universe, the solar system, life, man, marriage, good, evil, language, government, culture, nations, religion, all that you can find in Genesis.
That’s a lot. It’s precisely because people have abandoned the truth of Genesis that society is so messed up today. If they followed Genesis in the beginning, society wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today. John chapter five says, Jesus spoke of the importance of believing what Moses wrote. This is what Jesus said.
For if you believed Moses, you would believe in me. Wow. How about that? So, according to the New Testament, Moses wrote the book of Genesis. Now here’s the thing.
Moses wasn’t alive during most of the book of Genesis. How did he write that? How did he get all that information? Well, there are indications where records began and end, and all the parts of Genesis. There are passages and phrases such as this is the history.
This is the book. This is the genealogy. And so all of this was given to Moses through God by other places where he found it written down. Other things, God just gave him directly to write down, and Moses was able to comprise the book of Genesis. And so he was able to put it all together based off those things.
And everything around us, including ourselves, if everything around us, including ourselves, is a result of random, meaningless occurrences apart from the work of a creating God, then it says something about who I am and where I am the whole universe are going. If that’s the case, then the only dignity or honor we bestow upon men is pure sentimentality because we don’t have any more significance than the amoeba. We have no more significance than that if everything around us is a result of random meaningless occurrences. The world tries to teach us that everything that happened in the creation of the world and the creation of life was random and meaningless, and it just accidentally occurred. Here’s the thing.
There’s a story saying that one day students in a great physics professor class, someone like Albert Einstein, said they had decided there was no god. The professor asked them how much of all the knowledge in the world they had among themselves collectively as a class. So the class decided to discuss it for a while. They discussed it for a while. They talked about it, and they came up with an estimate.
They decided they estimated that in that class that they probably had 5% of all human knowledge among themselves. The professor thought their estimate was a little generous. Probably, they didn’t have that much, but he asked them, is it possible that God exists in the 95% of what you don’t know? Now think about that. If they’re so sure about the things they know, but are there things they don’t know?
Yep. Is it possible God exists in what you don’t know? Absolutely. It’s possible completely in what we don’t know. So that’s a little background I wanted to go through tonight to just kinda share with you about our study in Genesis.
We’re not gonna be able to get into a whole lot tonight. We’re going into Genesis chapter one verse one. That’s all we’re gonna cover tonight. Verse one. If you remember, I told you that our study on Genesis is probably gonna take more than a year, because it will be as much as I can give you in the time that we have.
So in the beginning, that’s a big statement. In the beginning. In the beginning, anybody know how John one one starts? In the beginning. It’s different word.
In the beginning. In the beginning, in Genesis is talking about in the beginning of the world. In the beginning in John is talking about the beginning of the existence of God, which there never really was a beginning. John says in the beginning was the word, and the word was God, and the word was with God. From the very moment that anything was, that was God.
In Genesis, in the beginning of the world, that’s what he’s talking about. In the beginning of creation, Not the beginning of God. God existed long before that, but in the beginning of creation. And so when we look at that, it’s a little bit different. In the beginning, God.
That word for God in the beginning, God is Elohim. Elohim in that particular verse is a plural word. Now we know we talk about this and we go through in the study of Genesis, and it talks about in, some places, it talks about, they were pleased, things like that. And so we know that it’s talking about the godhead, all three. In this, it says in the beginning, god, that word god was Elohim.
Elohim is a plural form joined together. And so what we see here is in the beginning, God, that God, Elohim, clearly talks about the father, the son, and the holy spirit. In the beginning, right from the start of the world, from the very beginning, there was a triune God. God didn’t look down and see his creation and go, they messed everything up. Let me make Jesus and send him down there and do all of this.
No. From the very beginning, God, plural, Elohim, plural, was all three together. In the beginning, God, the godhead, created, Oh, created. That’s a nice word. Created.
Creation in its strict sense is producing something out of nothing. Can man create? I can build a house that wasn’t there before. Right? But I had to use wood to build the house.
But where did I get the wood? There was a tree that produced the wood. Where did the tree come from? I didn’t make the tree, So I didn’t create anything. I took something, and I built it, but I didn’t create it in the sense of creating something out of nothing.
The closest that a man and woman can get to creating something is a child out of their, sexual intercourse that they have as a couple. That’s as close as we can get. And still, that’s not something out of nothing because god already put in the man and in the woman the things that they needed to create that child. They call it procreation. It’s not really a creation because it was already inside you for that to happen.
So we cannot create. Only God can create. I I told a joke one time about, you know, a man said he could do what God could do, and, you know, he could do all these things. And he said, you know, you created a person out of dirt, and the man scooped up some dirt and started, you know, trying to create the person and all that. And God said, hold on.
Wait a minute. First, you gotta make your own dirt. So the whole point is God created from nothing. There was nothing, and he created it all. So in the beginning, God, the plurality, the the the Godhead, the three in one, created out of nothing, not something.
Real quickly, you’ve heard of the big bang theory. Right? Big bang says some space matter was flying around, and it happened to accidentally smash together. And this big explosion caused life. Right?
And my question is always, where did the stuff come from that smashed together? How did it get there in the first place? If I I can believe that something there was an explosion. Life was created because god spoke and it happened. That’s what the scripture says.
I would expect it to be spectacular, but where did the stuff come that was that was all flying around? Where did it come from? If you don’t think god created, then where did that come from? Nobody has an answer to that. Science can never figure that out.
They don’t know where it came from. They they try to come up with ideas about this and that, but it all goes back to it came from something. And god created from nothing. That’s the very sense of producing something from nothing. That’s what creation is.
The whole point in all of this is he created something out of nothing. In the beginning, God created what did he create? The heavens and the earth. The normal phrase in the Bible for the universe, is what we see. So we call it the universe, the heaven and the earth.
Well, here’s the thing. To the Hebrew, this consisted of our planet and the atmosphere surrounding our planet in which he beheld the sun, moon, and stars. But it’s more than that. When it says he created the heavens and the earth, he created the entirety of all that we know and the things we don’t know all was created at that point. It wasn’t just the earth and the heavens around the earth.
It was the heavens was everything that we have found so far and the things we know is still out there, but we haven’t found it yet. He created all of that. That’s how big God created when he spoke and created the heavens and the earth. So when we put all that together and we think about it in the beginning, in the beginning of the world, God, the plurality, the father, son, the holy spirit, created out of nothing the heaven, all of the universe, and everything we know and don’t know, and the earth that we know and we live on. God created every bit of this.
So he created it. Hebrews said, our planet, the atmosphere, and all those things around it, but it’s so much more than that. They didn’t know anymore at that time. There’s even more than that. The creation of the Earth was created and the heavens.
Now the heavens, when we think about the heavens, the heavens that he’s talking about are the heavens, around the earth, the space around the earth, the atmosphere, the stratosphere, even space around it. It’s not actually talking about that he created heaven as we call heaven, sometimes referred to as the third heaven in scripture. That was there. That’s where God lived already. When he created, he created everything below that.
Everything that exists below that. Okay? So when it says the heavens and the earth, that’s what we think about. He created everything as far as we’ve ever experienced and more when he created by speaking. And that’s how he created the heaven and the earth in the beginning.
Now when we look at all this and we see all of this and we put it all together, I I hope that you understand and realize how amazing the book of Genesis really, really is because it gives us the very basis for all of that. There there’s, lots of things in the bible in Genesis that we can, look at and see through science what it’s talking about. There are things that we can look at in Genesis and see life. There are things we can look at through Genesis and see their existence of God. We can see all of that stuff.
And so it’s gonna take a long time to get through it. So in the very beginning, God, the triune God, created out of nothing, the heavens, everything that we’ve ever found and the things we still haven’t found yet, and the earth. Why you say the things we still haven’t found yet? Because man has not gotten the ability to see past our solar system, into there’s still space that we have not been able to explore. There’s still stuff there.
We know there are things there. It’s still out there. We hadn’t seen it yet. So, obviously, it’s more than we could even really comprehend. And that’s just the first verse.
So it’s pretty incredible when we get started in the book of Genesis. We’ll try to cover, you know, a few more verses next week. We’ll try to do more than one verse, but, we will get into more than just the one verse next week. I hope that you’re excited about this study, this book of Genesis and the study. It is it is a basis that we need to really get back to.
When we get back to this and we get all the way back to the beginnings and we see how God intended things from the very beginning, it can change your life. And it’ll help you get back to where you need to be, not only in your walk, but also as you walk in this world. And so I hope that you, read ahead. Read ahead, study it, and, we’ll get back together next week, and we’ll dig into some more, of the book of Genesis. So if you joined us online tonight, thank you so much for being here.
Look forward to digging into verse two and beyond next week. For tonight, God bless, and good night.
