The Gospel in Genesis No.1 A Good Work Spoilt

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said let there be light. And there was light. God saw the light that it was good.

God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light day and the darkness he called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so.

And God called the firmament heaven and the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place and let the dry land appear. And it was so.

And God called the dry land earth and the gathering together of the waters called he seas. And God saw that it was good. And God said let the earth bring forth grass the herb yielding seed and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind whose seed is in itself upon the earth.

And it was so. And the earth brought forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind and the tree yielding fruit whose seed was in itself after his kind. And God saw that it was good.

And the evening and the morning were the third day. And God said let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.

And it was so. And God made two great lights the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also.

And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth and to rule over the day and over the night and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

And God said let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales and every living creature that moveth which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind and every winged fowl after his kind. And God saw that it was good.

And God blessed them saying be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. And God said let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind cattle and creeping thing and beast of the earth after his kind.

And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth after his kind and cattle after their kind and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind. And God saw that it was good.

And God said let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God created he him, male and female created he them.

And God blessed them. And God said unto them be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said behold I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth.

And every tree in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth and to every fowl of the air and to everything that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is life I have given every green herb for meat. And it was so.

And God saw everything that he had made. And behold it was very good. Genesis chapter 1 and verse 31.

God saw all that he had made and it was very good. Genesis chapter 3 and verse 17. Halfway through that verse God speaking.

Cursed is the ground because of you. God saw all that he had made and it was very good. Cursed is the ground because of you.

Father we ask for your help as we come around your word this evening. This is no mere academic exercise in which we involve ourselves. The opening up of your word and the declaration of your gospel are the pinnacles of the Himalayan range, spiritual heights.

We just ask oh Lord that we may scale them well this night and respond to the view as we see something of the greatness and the grandeur of our God. His mercy and compassion in retrieving believers who confess their sins to himself. Amen.

If you do me the honor Sunday by Sunday of reading our church bulletin you'll be aware that both in the morning and in the evening during these autumn months I'm going through a new series. And at night I want to be looking into, in a selective fashion or else it would take us about five years, certain incidents in the book of Genesis. Now immediately there will be some people who if they heard that in the center of Worthing a sort of redundant school teacher decides to speak to particularly younger, though not exclusively, friends on a Sunday evening from the mythological book of Genesis they would shake their heads and wonder why on earth the preacher decided to lead off from that book.

What has Genesis to say to the disco generation of the 1980s? And indeed why is one so infantile in belief as to come to Genesis and make the conclusions that there are certain things here that can help young and old people in the complexity of modern life? Well, let me say this. Our concern is to introduce men and women to the God of the Bible. The Bible cannot be fully enjoyed and appreciated without some knowledge of the contents of the first book.

What is more, and here my critics would be not only shaking their heads they would be ringing up grailing, well, I believe that Genesis is not full of myth. I believe it's full of history. And I accept the first three chapters of the book of Genesis as being historical and accurate.

I believe it by faith, but I believe to some extent I can justify my position logically over against any other viewpoint. I want to say three or four things this evening as I bring to you my introductory study entitled The Gospel in Genesis, and this one specifically called A Good Work Spoiled. The four or five things that I want to share with you, conclusions that I have made.

First of all, God literally made this world. Secondly, God made this world perfect. Thirdly, man was the summit of God's creation, his best work.

Fourthly, sin spoiled what God had so grandly designed. Fifthly, the universe is going to be remade. Now if we get through that loud in 25 or 30 minutes it will demonstrate at least that miracles are not past.

First of all, God literally made this world. I think that one of the most glorious statements in the Bible is the first verse of Genesis chapter one. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

It doesn't say in the beginning chance. It doesn't say in the beginning hydrogen. It doesn't say in the beginning monkeys.

It says in the beginning God, and that is a fathomless statement. It is immediately superior to, and to quote Malcolm Muggeridge, preferable to, the idea of Professor Hoyle, that the universe started with a big bang, the result of a fluke coming together of atoms and what have you. The Bible right at the commencement of the record of God's word tells us this, that basic to the whole of creation, basic to the heavens and the earth, as we would call it the universe, but the Jews didn't have a word for universe, there is God.

Not impersonal forces, not chance, but God, and the God who will be revealed later on as you read through the Bible as a personal God. I think that one of the most lovely events in the last 15 years or so, or is it further back than that, the years go by so quickly, was when those American astronauts heading towards the moon read from Genesis one. It seems somehow terribly appropriate to hear from outer space those tremendous words that tell us that behind the phenomena of matter, of creation, there is God.

And God, the Bible says, made this world in six days. And that immediately creates problems for some people. When you start to think in terms of days, doesn't it really mean periods? Shouldn't we dip into the 1971 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and there see the great geological eras of the world spelled out and see if we can't squeeze Genesis somehow or other conveniently into that theory so that we've got no contradiction between the Encyclopedia Britannica and the book of Genesis? Well, let the Encyclopedia Britannica have its contradictions.

I believe that when the Bible said that God made the world in six days, it means precisely that. I know there are those who will say that the word day there is not definable. And to some extent, I might agree.

Were it not for the fact that when Moses is given the 10 commandments by God in the 20th chapter of the book of Exodus and in the 8th verse, you find the divinely given decree, remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. And then it goes on to justify why we are to remember the Lord's day. Verse 11, Exodus 20, for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them.

But he rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Whatever difficulties there might be and possibilities of other explanations for Genesis 1 taking it on its own, when you get to Exodus 20, it's pretty obvious that God speaking to Moses is conveying the thought of what is to be done in a 24-hour period.

God rested on the seventh day. Therefore, that day is holy. And one might be inclined to deduce from scripture that when Moses wrote Genesis inspired by the Spirit of God and he made reference to a day, he got a fair idea of what a day represented.

Well, you say, that does leave us with a number of problems. And of course, I'm quite prepared to accept that. After all, you read your biology books and your history books at school, assuming you go there, or your magazines at your Darby and Joan club, and you find reference to the world being terribly, terribly old.

And how on earth does this fit in with the idea of God creating the heavens and the earth in six days? Well, I think quite a number of things need to be said about some of the textbooks that are circulating in Worthing schools, but that's too big a subject. Notoriously, textbooks are out of date. But passing that aside for a moment, are there not occasions in the Bible when there is a superficial appearance of age given to certain things? A superficial appearance of age.

Let's, for example, think about that wine which was produced as a result of the miraculous activity of the Lord Jesus at Cana of Galilee. The whole process of fermenting the wine, it was all encapsulated into seconds. A miracle happened.

What about the feeding of the 5,000? How those barley loaves suddenly appeared, they didn't even go through the planting of the seed, the germination, the harvesting, the baking, all of a sudden compressed into moments. Because Jesus Christ is so determined, things came into existence that had an appearance of age. And is there any difficulty in accepting the fact that God, if he's so determined, could create a world with the appearance of an age, which perhaps goes back further than our own somewhat inadequate methods of dating fossils and rocks and so on indicate? The Bible categorically states that God creates the heavens and the earth.

And if it says he did it in six days, then I'm quite happy to stand by the Bible and wait eventually for carbon dating processes to be corrected and for people to acknowledge that if God wants to build in a concept of age into things, then he can, as I shall give you another classic example later on. And of course, there are those who believe, though I'm not too sure that I go along with the idea that between the first verse and the second verse of Genesis 1, there was an undefined period, another creation before this known as the gap theory. But we'll leave that one alone this evening.

The first declaration that I make from scripture is that God literally made the world. And whether you accept it as being in six days or not, the literal nature of those days, I'm quite prepared to stand by what the Bible indicates. But more than this, God not only made the world, he made the world perfectly.

He made the world perfectly. Time and time again, verse 12, verse 18, 21, 25, and 31. In Genesis chapter 1, we get God standing back and reviewing all that he has done in these magnificent, creative acts.

He sees what he has done, and it is very, very good. It is perfect. And I have great difficulties with those who argue, even Christian people, with me on this whole area of evolution and theistic evolution.

And they say that all this came about in a very gradual fashion. The world sort of improved itself. So, ultimately, the climax of God's creation, Adam, was fashion through a process of evolution.

The whole thing is really evolutionary. And my difficulty is this, that when I read with the limited understanding that I have of science, some of these books and some of these theories, I have problems. I have problems with viruses.

I have problems with germs. I have problems with the disorderly growth of cells and of weeds and various other things that I could cite. You say, well, why have you got problems with these? You know, why are you losing sleep at night over these? Well, it's not exactly that I'm losing sleep.

But the point is this, that all these things that we are told on the evolutionary theory have always been in the world since its beginning. All the flaws, all the potential diseases, the viruses, and so on. But the Bible doesn't say that.

It doesn't say that God allowed a sort of world to be made and gradually he improved it. It rather says that as a result of his six creative acts, he stood back and he found that everything was perfect. And further from evolving into a more acceptable fashion, the world goes through a period, for some reason, of deterioration after God has accomplished his creative activity.

Now, I find this not only in Genesis, but in Romans chapter 8. If you were to read that later on this evening, the apostle Paul speaks about the world almost as though it can talk. And it says that the world, though it's inanimate, is like a creature that groans. Why is the world groaning, Paul? Well, Paul says it's under bandage.

It's going through something that it never had to endure right at the beginning. It's going through a period of being cursed. There are certain things in this world which were foreign to it at its birth.

You read Romans 8 and there is no other conclusion that you can come to but that the apostle Paul believed that when the world fell fresh from the hands of God, it was a perfect, perfect world. And all that evolution does for me, in its Darwinian aspect at any rate, is to create for me problems. And I can't come to grips with it and still say that I agree with the Word of God.

I find that when I try to do a compromise between evolution and the book of Genesis and the rest of God's revelation in the Bible, well, I have to go through mental acrobatics to try and get the two things to interlock. And in any case, I believe that the statement of the Bible makes more sense and is more rational. C.S. Lewis, not exactly the least intelligent Briton that we ever produced, he had a hymn in which cynically he looks at lesser theories of explanation for the phenomenon of life in this world.

Leaders, evolution leaders, up the future's endless stair, choppers, changers, prodders, weeders, for stagnation is despair. Gasping, guessing, yet progressing, leaders nobody knows where. To whatever variation our posterity may turn, hairy, squashy, or crustacean, bulbous-eyed or square of stern, tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless, toward that unknown goal we yearn.

Far too long has sages vainly glossed great nature's simple text. He who runs may read plainly, goodness, what on earth comes next? By evolving, life is solving, and we are more perplexed. Well, with apologies to C.S. Lewis, that sort of sums up my reaction to certain aspects of the evolutionary theory.

God literally made this world, and God made this world perfect. What is more, man is the summit of his creation. Man is the summit of his creation.

This is what we're told, isn't it, on the sixth day. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him.

Male and female, he created them. Here is God, and he's got a direct relationship to human beings like you and me. We're not some sort of intelligent example of a developed ape.

We are made, says the Bible, in the image of God. To quote a philosopher by the name of Kierkegaard, who came from Scandinavia some couple of centuries ago, there is an infinite distinction between the highest animal and man. There is something noble about man.

There is something God-like about man. God creates man in his own image, and he places him in a perfect environment, tailor-made for a being that has the stamp of God upon him. Now, isn't it interesting, when you move away from what the Bible says about man, then you get into some very dangerous theories.

Some of you in the gallery are too young to remember, as some of us just barely can, and others a great deal, that evil man, Adolf Hitler. Have you any idea what the theory of evolution did in playing a part in the thinking of Adolf Hitler? He came to the idea that Darwin was right, that man was just a product of a lower sort of animal world, and as a result of that, the best thing to do was to take the best examples of men and women and breed them together. Literally, breed them together.

So he told his men in the SS and any of the fine German youth to pick any Nordic girl. It didn't matter about going through a marriage. That was completely unimportant.

Have children by her, and as a result, the German state would take those babies who would be so well planned because the quality of their parents had been guaranteed, and soon we would have in this world a super breed of men and women. It was Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf who argued for the fact that he wrongly believed to be a fact, who argued for the notion, would you believe it, that the Jew and the Negro were missing links, expendable. They came about as part of an inferior, lower aspect of the evolutionary chain.

When men have lost hold of their greatness and the grandeur of the being of man, they have denigrated their own species. They have handled men and women as though they are pawns that are easily disposable. It's a very interesting aspect of history that Karl Marx wanted to dedicate his book Das Kapital to Charles Darwin, but because of the political implications on the continent and in London, Darwin refused to take the dedication.

Adam Sedgwick, a professor of Cambridge, said 110 years ago about Darwin's theory after reading The Origin of the Species, if this book finds general acceptance, it will bring about a brutalization of the human race never seen before. And those of us who know something about the Nazi regime and something of the persecution in Eastern Europe recognize he was being prophetic. No, the Bible tells us that man was created in the image of God.

It tells us in the seventh verse of the second chapter, where you've got a development of what's in the first, the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being. It was the kiss of God, the infusion of life from our creator that caused man to be supreme in the whole of the creative activity of the early world. Man is the king.

Man is at the apex. And incidentally, just to go back to that classic example I promised you a little while ago, that when God creates, he creates things as though they had a past, that's quoting theologian by the name of Karl Barth, when God creates, he creates as though they had a past. Think of Adam when he was created.

How was he created? What do you guess Adam's age was? He certainly wasn't created as a little baby. He was created as a fully-fledged man, 20 years, 30 years. It's not inconsistent, you see, to come to the early chapters of Genesis, where before the human story commences, a different level of law is operative.

And to accept the notion that when God creates, he creates with the idea that the things that be have had a past. For Adam is not a baby, he's a full-grown man. This, the king of God's creative activity.

My fourth point was this. Sin spoiled everything. I remember, and the persons who are not present here in the tabernacle, so I'm embarrassing nobody.

I remember when we had the extension next door, first of all, and we were doing a lot of work, and also in some of the back rooms in our lounge and hall. Some of the window frames had been prepared for paint. And it seemed a reasonably easy thing to take some paint on a brush and put it on the window frame.

Well, I remember one couple who got far more paint on the pane than on the frame. And I do remember one man who is at present a deacon, and I will not embarrass him at all, saying, wow, you made a right mess of that. He did it in a very loving fashion.

And what you could say, my friend, using that colloquial expression that we sometimes employ today of Adam and his partner, when the world was fresh from the hands of God, as they entered into its blessings, they made a right mess of everything. God gave to Adam his own word. The word of God is always double-edged.

There's always a permission and a prohibition. And we're told in the 16th verse of Genesis chapter 2, the Lord God commanded the man, Adam, you're free to eat from any tree in the garden. That's permission.

But here is prohibition. You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For when you eat of it, you will surely die.

It doesn't matter what those trees actually were. They were sacramental. They were symbolic.

They stood for God's permission and God's prohibition. God will test the piety, the obedience of Adam by giving him a word. Do this and you'll enjoy yourself.

Do that and you will suffer. And Adam, assisted by his partner Eve, went against the Lord. They listened not to the creator, but to the tempter who slides alongside in a subtle fashion in the form of a beautiful snake.

And he dangles in front of our first parents the intoxicating program of eating of the forbidden fruit and becoming like God is. And Eve fell. And Adam fell.

The test was whether they would obey the word of the living God or not. Obey that word and you live. Deny that word, disobey that word and you die.

And as a result of that disobedience, sin which had never polluted our earth invaded. And not only is Adam and Eve under the judgment of God, so is the whole of creation. On the sixth day we're told God saw all that he had made and it was very good.

And as a result of Adam's fall, we're told of God addressing the earth in the third chapter and the 17th verse. Cursed is the ground because of you. And the whole of our world is affected by the virus of sin which Adam and Eve were responsible for.

The serpent is cursed by God. He will lick the dust of the earth. Not because the serpent itself is the devil personified, but the devil used that animal as the devil has used other animals and peoples down the centuries.

And this earth, which was so lovely and so beautiful, instead of producing fruit and trees with glorious blossom, will alongside produce thorns and thistles. And from the very earth that Adam was formed, he would have to attend to it with the sweat of his brow to gain a living until the day came when physically he would die and his body, which came from the earth, would return to the earth. And so we find the picture of Adam and Eve cut off from God, expelled from the garden of paradise.

If eternal life is to know God the Father and to enjoy him forever, eternal death is to be separated from the Lord. And I understand the sad story of the insanity of men and women down the centuries in turn, in terms of them suffering from the judgment of God as a result of God's pronounce, sentence, and then. So the story of man is a tragic story.

But I've got one last thing to say and then I'm through. This universe that God created will be repaired. It will be renewed.

Have you ever noticed when you're going through the countryside that if you find a patch of nettles, you will also discover within striking distance a dark leaf. Whenever you might be stung, then nature gives you the opportunity of getting relief from the healing effect of that weed, the dark leaf. And whenever you come across the nettle of the judgment of God in scripture, not far away, there's the dark leaf of his mercy.

And here in the book of Genesis, references made to the seed of the woman, to the descendant of Eve, one day coming along and being able to crush, to smite the snake, to undo the evil influences of Satan on this earth. Right at the heart of the beginning of Genesis, in the heart of chapter three, there is what Bible scholars down the centuries have called the first gospel. That in the generations to come, Adam's work will be undone by another Adam, the second Adam, the last Adam.

And when Adam is sent out of the presence of God, when he's expelled from Eden, he is given not only the judgment of God, but a hint of God's mercy. The dark leaf is nearby. Adam knew what God was saying in as much as he called his wife later on Eve, which means the mother of all the living, as though Adam was anticipating that this would not be the end of the story.

This great God somehow would rescue him and his descendants. And you remember how as they move out of the garden of Eden, God clothes them in skins. An animal has been slain.

As though there is a hint right at the beginning of scripture that one day sin will be repaired by the shedding of blood of another. The Bible tells us that this world was made as a result of this express command of God. It was a perfect world, fitted for a man and a woman, perfectly formed.

Sin came into the world. It not only affected man and woman, it affected the created universe itself. But the Bible tells us, and this is the glory of the Christian message, that Jesus Christ, the one who was responsible for creation in the first instance, would step into the world that he had made.

He would step into time and space. He would be born as a man, and he would undo the work of the first Adam of centuries back. And when he died on the cross of Calvary, this is precisely what he was about, offering his life as an atonement for the sins of believing mankind.

And he promises us that one day he shall return. That one day this vile body, filled with disease, for in one sense we're all in a state of decay, would be replaced with a body like unto his glorious body. The apostle Paul says this mortal must put on immortality, this corruptible must put on incorruption.

And this world, this universe, which still suffers from the curse, the condemnation of God, is going to be released from its bondage. God is not through with this world. God created it.

God created man. And from the descendants of Adam, those who believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, those who confess their sins, God has a program for them in store, the like of which beggars eloquence of language to be able to describe. Eye has not seen, says the apostle Paul, nor ear heard of the things that God hath in store for them that love him.

The apostle Peter says that the earth shall yet see the righteousness of God, and that he's quoting one of the Old Testament prophets who puts it more picturesquely, the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. Now I put it to you. Do you accept this? Certainly it makes more sense than these naturalistic materialistic explanations of the world.

Certainly it profits more hope. But the point is this, my friend, as Adam deliberately sinned, and as you have deliberately sinned, so you must deliberately acknowledge your sin, confess it, and come to the Lord Jesus Christ and say, Lord Jesus, cleanse my life of all the sin and all the rebellion, because you died to forgive me and prepare me for that new world, that new era, that new dimension which you have for all those who have exercised like faith in you. God's handiwork was spoiled when man made a mess of it, but blessed be God, what Adam did, Jesus has undone, and if you confess him as your Lord, you can begin to know personally and one day absolutely paradise restored, regained.

Let us pray. Lord, we just ask that if what has been shared this evening is the truth of your word, then the persuasion not of logic, of the mind of a man, for that's so limited, but the persuasiveness of your spirit may apply this word from the book of Genesis to the sons of Adam and the daughters of Adam in the tabernacle now and direct them to the Christ of God to plead for forgiveness. Amen.