The Ten Scientific Truths in Genesis

Last night, I had a Bible study through the cell phone with my grandkids over in Boise, Idaho. We do this on Friday nights after they've eaten supper, relaxed a bit. So then, we'll just have a Bible study based on their questions. What are some of the biggest questions that they have? One is nine, the girl, and then we have one's twelve, and the other one's fourteen. So, they're coming up as teenage years, and you're really surprised by some of the questions that they pose. They're very deep. It's always interesting, and I try to show them the answers that are in the Bible about some of these greatest questions that we can have. They were quite enthusiastic about the answers found in the first chapter of the Bible, Genesis chapter one. As you know, that has been trashed by even so many religions, and even by Christian religions. They think that, well, this is all a fantasy, and this wasn't the way things were created, and it's really all through evolution that it all happened, and not dealing with the Bible at all. As a matter of fact, as a young high school student, when I came across the knowledge of God's truths, and I was a very die-hard evolutionist. My father was a medical doctor. I was going to follow in his steps, and of course they teach you that things have evolved through time. Even in the school, in a Sunday school there in the Catholic Church, they basically said, well, God created the first cell, but then everything has evolved from there. So they kind of mixed the two. I was happy with that answer until I came into the knowledge of the truth, where I finally started looking at the Bible and seeing what it really says, and I got to the other side of the story. It wasn't just what you're being pawned off with all the time, and I started looking at things that, yes, this has a historical and a scientific background. Genesis 1 is not fiction. It's all inspired by God, from Genesis 1 all the way through Revelation 22. If it is the Creator, if he is God Almighty, he is going to inspire something that is a truthful account. I went to the parish priest of that little town in North Carolina, and I asked him, I said, what do you think about Genesis 1? Can you explain to me? He said, these are all Jewish allegories. These are just nice pious stories, but really that was just a Jewish idea about things. They're not really to be taken, literally. I had already studied this, and I had taken it a lot more serious than this gentleman. I said, if he's saying that Genesis 1 is not true, what about Genesis 2? What about Jesus Christ and everything else in the Bible? That really opened my eyes. I said, thank you. I closed the door to that parish office, and I closed the door to the church. I realized that wasn't where the truth of God was being taught. Here I am now with my grandkids, and they come up with a question about Genesis 1, because they're studying biology. They're studying all of this evolution in school. I'd like to present to you the depth of Genesis 1, because there are 10 fundamental and scientific truths that are found in this first chapter, which the latest scientific evidence has supported.

Although many of the scientists say the evidence does point to it, but we don't want to go along with this. We're going to question it and everything. But the evidence on its own is pointing to these wonderful fundamental truths. These are 10 truths that you can put in your biblical toolkit. When people question, they ask these basic questions.

Here, in just the first chapter of the Bible, God gives 10 great truths that have been confirmed over time. So, I'd like to give that to you tomorrow. No, no, no, not really. I'm going to give it to you today, because it comes from God, and it is something so encouraging. Just like I told you, these are handy tools that you can use when people ask you this question.

So, let's go to Genesis 1. This is what I should have had the person when I asked him about it. Genesis 1. In chapter 1, verse 1, here it reveals the first fundamental and scientific truth. It says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. So, it introduces a person, a being, and this person is a creator. And this person is so great that he actually creates the universe that we see around us. So, the Bible starts answering, how did everything get created?

It was a mathematician, Leibniz, who was a contemporary of Isaac Newton, and also a great scientist, who posed the question, how can something come out of nothing? In other words, if you have the numeral zero, can zero produce a one? No, because zero is empty. So, in the numbering system, of course, when you have one, then there's something that exists. But if you only have zero, zero cannot produce one. Now, once you have one, then you add to that two and three. So, it's the same way here about this greatest of questions. And the answer is given here in Genesis 1.1, that God is the originator of the universe.

He is the one that brought it forth, and He Himself is not created. Nobody originated Him. He is the first cause. He is the beginning. So, what the Bible is telling us here is that there was never a time when there was nothing. It started with the existence of this eternal God, God the Father and God the Son, the ones who became the Word, and God the Father. They have always existed. And through them, the universe is the result, the effect of it at all. So, you see, I don't have to question, well, how could all of this happen? Because I know Genesis 1.1 gives you the answer.

There is a God who is the one who initiates everything. So, we actually start with a numeral one in the sense of oneness. We don't start with zero. That's the way you get to 2, 3, 4, and 5, because that always has existed. Basically, philosophy will never be able to explain this. The greatest scientists in the world have tried to pose a real answer, and nobody has done it. Even Stephen Hawkins, the one in the wheelchair that was this great physicist, he said, I can imagine that the universe came because gravity existed.

So, I guess he put the term gravity as God. Who created gravity? So, that doesn't work. Gravity is not a creator of things. It's just one of the forces that exists within the universe. There is nobody that has been able to explain this. Yet, here we have this ancient book that God said he inspired gives you the answer, the origin of God. And then, in this same verse, we see the origin of the universe.

It says, God created the heavens. Heavens has to do with everything that's created around us. By the way, it's plural because there are three types of heavens described in the Bible. The first is the atmosphere. The heavens, as we call it here, where the atmosphere is, where the birds fly.

This is the first. We call it the sky. That's the mentioned in the first heaven. For instance, the prophet Elijah was taken up in a chariot, but he wasn't taken to the third heaven. He was taken through the first heaven. He was placed someplace where he had already been retired in that sense. And then, Elijah took over, and they tried to find him. And about ten years later, Elijah writes a letter to the king. So it shows that Elijah was still on the earth.

So anyways, this is the first heaven. The second has to do with our universe. All of outer space. Right now, they're calculating about 200 billion galaxies are what exist, what they've been able to detect. Well, that's the second heaven. And then the third heaven is where God is. The presence of God. And the apostle Paul mentions in 2 Corinthians 12 that he was taken to the third heaven. So here it tells us that he created the heavens. And here in particular, it's talking about the universe.

And so we see that the heavens are only a part of God's creation. And they had a beginning. And this is what the scientific evidence poses. That the universe began from nothing, and then it became this great expansion, which they call the Big Bang or whatever. But it's the expansion which is an elegant expansion, all orderly. And right now, basically, they calculate close to 14 billion light years where everything started this way. I don't want to get into all the astronomical issues about that, but we do know that the universe started from nothing. And remember, nothing cannot produce something.

So something outside the universe was already there and brought it forth. Arno Penzias, a Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1965, along with a colleague, they discovered what they called a cosmic microwave background radiation, which is this faint echo of that initial explosion of matter and energy.

And they did it at the Bell Laboratories. They had an antenna that was trying to detect one of these radars, and they had this sound they couldn't get away from.

They adjusted it. They never were able to get rid of it. And then they discovered that this was an initial radiation, that we still have a little bit left of it, about three degrees from that enormous amount of heat and energy that came out. Arno Penzias came to this conclusion after years of studying. He said, the best data we have, talking about the universe, are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, which of course, Genesis is the first one, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole, in that the universe appears to have order and purpose.

So this is what a scientist that wasn't really religious, but he came to that conclusion that the Bible was correct. Now, the priest never told me any of this, but here we are, close to 50 years later, and this is what science can tell us. So, we come to the third fundamental truth, the origin of the earth. Notice how God separated the universe from this special planet, designed for life, called earth. God created the heavens and the earth. The earth is very special, like a fine-tuned watch. Everything had to be just right for life to thrive. It had to have the right distance from the sun, had to have the right type of sun, it had to have the right type of makeup, where it has this iron core in the center that is so hot and it emanates these types of force fields, the magnetic field which repels the solar wind and all of this radiation that would have fried the earth, but it's like a shield that we have around the earth.

We have the right size of a moon. We have enough water to control the temperature of the earth, the humidity, and the waves are like using a broom. They sweep the garbage out and keep the circulation going and refresh the oceans. That was just very few of the special things. But we know how this became.

The earth did not just evolve these features. Everything was fine-tuned for life. And that takes us to Genesis chapter 1-2. Now this is something that most people don't realize. After all of this was created, it was beautiful. It says there in Job 38-7 that when the angels saw this created universe, they shouted for joy. And they gasped when they saw the beauty of everything. But in Genesis 1-2, it says, the earth was without form and void.

It means it was chaotic and in confusion. And darkness was on the face of the deep. So it tells us that there was this event that happened. Some translations have it more accurately. The earth became without form and void. Something happened. So here we have the origin of the destruction levels in the geologic column. And you can go through like a layer cake.

And you see all of these. Basically there have been five destruction levels. And actually there's an orderly system. The introduction of simple life first, later more complex, and goes all the way to the destruction of the dinosaurs before man is created. Because if we had all these dinosaurs roaming the earth, Adam and Eve wouldn't have lasted for lunch. They would have been lunch. But none of these exist. And so here we see later in the Bible telling us about Satan's rebellion.

And that before man was created, you can read that in Ezekiel 28, Isaiah 14, explains how Satan went up to heaven in this rebellion in which he tried to overthrow God. And then he was thrown back on this earth. And he was there at the Garden of Eden. He was already a fallen angel at that time before the creation of man. So here in Genesis it reveals as best as our understanding is.

Because there are alternative explanations about some of these events. Especially in...we see that it fits with Satan's rebellion. And that this was before the creation of Adam and Eve. Going on, we get to Genesis 1, 3 through 10. What happened after God started renewing the face of the earth? Notice it says at the end of verse 2, And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the water.

So he had to renew the face of the earth. We can go and leave one finger here. Let's go to Psalm 104. Psalm 104. I don't have time in the sermon to just go over every little detail about these things, but we have here in verse 29, he says, You hide your face, they are trouble. You take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.

You send forth your spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth. So this we find is the renewal of the earth. So now God prepares the earth for the coming of man and for all of the animals that we see populated. Different mammals, small reptiles, not these huge dinosaur types at all. Notice in verse 3, it says, Then God said, Let there be light, and there was light.

So this is from the perspective of someone looking at the earth from the earth. And all of a sudden, the light, because of course all of these suns and everything, they already were created. But now God cleans the atmosphere. It says, And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from darkness. God called the light day, and darkness he called night.

So the evening and the morning were the first day. So here we see on this first day of renewal that God cleans the atmosphere. You have the sun and the moon having their job done. Verse 6, Then God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters, talking about the atmosphere. Because you do have the waters on the earth, and things were covered until God has to now bring back the continents. And he said that there's going to be in the atmosphere the water vapor and everything that you need to be able to water things.

Thus God made the firmament, talking about the atmosphere, and divided the waters which were under the firmament, those in the seas, from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. And God called the firmament heaven. This is the first heaven. We talked about the sky. So the evening and the morning were the second day. Then God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear. And it was so. So this is the bringing of the continents up from the waters. And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering together of the waters he called seas.

And God saw that it was good. So everything started to be fine-tuned for what he was going to bring forth. And so now the next thing, once the earth is prepared, he brings forth plant life. He says in verse 11, Then God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, and the earth, on the earth, and it was so.

And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit whose seed is in itself, according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. So God first of all populated the earth with all of this grass, all of the trees, before animals existed. I asked the kids, Does it make sense? What would happen if he created the animals first? And no grass. Nothing. Animals would have nothing to eat. But the plants, they are self-existent. They don't need to eat anything.

Because with their leaves, which are like solar panels, they take the heat from the sun, and through photosynthesis, they create the sugars and all the needed nutrients to reproduce food. And so, of course, you start out with the basics, which are the plant life, and then he does more creating.

And notice, everything is according to its kind. This is a key concept that God made things to reproduce according to their kind, not to evolve into other kinds. And so you have the plant life. What do pine trees produce? Oak trees? No. They produce pine trees. And so they have these genetic walls that have variation, but trees are all reproducing according to their kind. Verse 13. So the evening and the morning were the third day. Then God said, let there be lights in the firmament. So here is the origin of God's calendar. This is when God constitutes the orbits and puts everything in its place. So it says here that there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night and let them be for signs and seasons and for days and years.

Here's the way the Good News Bible has it. Then God commanded, let lights appear in the sky to separate day from night and to show the time when days, years, and religious festivals begin. So you see, God set up this astronomical clock, and it's very precise. You have the orbits around the sun, very precise. One year is the solar year. And then you have the moon going around the earth also.

29 and a half days, every time. You can calculate back in time, and you can calculate forward in time. It's so precise. And the sacred calendar, which is based on the Bible, has all of these conditions that we have. We have what is called the 19-year time cycle, which is from all the constellations in the stars and the sun and the moon.

Nineteen years later, it all comes back to its place, to its original place, with just a few seconds difference. But it is so precise. And that's the way we calculate during these 19 years. When is the intercalary year? You add a month to keep everything together. But every 19 years, you have again the beginning of a new solar year. Well, this is where God said religious festivals have to be kept in their time. That's why we have in the spring.

In the first month, and by the way, the term month has to do with the first moon. The first sighting of the moon. Actually, at the beginning, it's the new moon. It doesn't even have any sighting. But you begin, you count. Fourteen days, that is the Passover. That you begin on the 14th day. And you can't do that unless you know when these religious festivals are. So we don't depend on men in that sense. Or like now we have the Egyptian calendar, which was adopted by Julius Caesar. And then the Roman Catholic Church adopted that.

And that's why we just finished a new year here at the middle of winter time. Nothing to do with the seasons of the years and everything. And so we know the origin of God's sacred calendar. It's here in Genesis 1. And then, of course, explain later in the rest of the Bible. Then, after this, it says, verse 15, and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens and give light on the earth.

And it was so. And here it says, God made two great lights. And the term here, made, isn't that it starts from scratch. No, He positioned it. He positioned these two great lights, the greater light, which is the sun, to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. And He, again, should be positioned the stars also. Because we have all of these constellations that are needed to navigate. And all of these things happen just regularly.

Then it says, verse 20. So, evening and the morning, or the fourth day. Then verse 20, God said, Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures. And let birds fly above the earth, according across the face of the firmament of the heavens. So, okay, you have plant life, what is called flora, technically. And now you have animal life, which is called fauna.

So when they talk about fauna and flora, it's talking about animal and plant life. So here begins animal life. Verse 21, So God created great sea creatures, okay, whales, and all of these enormous other creatures. And every living thing that moves with which the waters abounded according to their kind. And genetically, they are that way. I have a book called After Its Kind. And it's just a biologist who goes through and explains these genetic walls that animals cannot go beyond.

They can't evolve into another creature. You know, you had the dog kind. You have many varieties, but they're still dogs. They're not cats. They're not possums. So this is the way God set it up. And it's been happening. This is the first genetic law that needs to be respected. And it says, verse 21, So God created great sea creatures. And verse 22, And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the waters and the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.

And we have billions of creatures. Birds are tremendous variety. All these marine creatures. So the evening and the morning were the fifth day. God still progressively filling the earth with life. Verse 24, Then God said, Let the earth bring forth a living creature according to its kind, cattle. See, how many creatures were cattle during the dinosaur age? Zero. There has never been found one fossil with any type of mammals in it. You have, first of all, what is the age of fishes when God populated.

He started with the aquarium of the oceans. He filled them. Fish and marine life. Then later you have what is called amphibious, where they created creatures that could be in the land or in the water. And then you have the reptilian age, which has to do with the dinosaurs.

And now we're in the mammal age that dominate the world. So, he says, all kinds of cattle according to its kind. So cows reproduce according to cows. And everything that creeps on the earth according to its kind, different types of reptiles. And God saw that it was good. So here's the origin of animal life. And the ninth thing that God reveals to us in these fundamental truths, the origin of male and female. Man and woman.

In verse 26, then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness. So, if God created all these animals according to their kind, what did God create man and woman according to what kind? Anybody know? God kind. God kind. But it's just a process, right?

We're still humans. We're less than the angels right now. But humans are the only ones that have the potential to go from being human to being part of God's family. His divine children. That's why he's saying, let us make man in our image. And then he goes on to say, let them have dominion over the fish of the seas, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

And that's why man is over. Not monkeys. Not any other type of creature. It is man that dominates the earth. Verse 27, so God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created a male and female. He created them. So it's men and women gave them the same supercomputer brain, all the capacities that you see men and women, the same creative powers and things like that. They're unique in God's creation.

And then verse 31, to skip down after he talks about this, he said, then God saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good. God doesn't make mistakes like human beings may. When he made this earth, it was something fantastic. Of course, with time, man has deteriorated the atmosphere. Now we polluted the oceans, we polluted the air, the water, the land.

We have a lot more cancer now than 100 years ago. And the way we're going, it's getting worse. But at first, it was just all pristine. Beautiful. So evening and the morning were the sixth day. Notice now, they finished Genesis 1 and they left out the seventh day. Now the seventh day should be part of Genesis 1. And the Jews have always recognized that. But according to Stephanus in 1555, he was the one that kind of put the chapters and the verses together.

And they said he was doing a lot of this on horseback. So sometimes he would skip and he got the wrong chapter. He closed the chapter in the wrong one. Well, he got the first bump here in Genesis because he missed the... it's like he's describing the seven days of creation week and he put a hard stop on the sixth day.

So disregard that because Genesis 1 actually ends in Genesis chapter 2 verse 3. So we're going to continue because this is what should be in chapter 1 verse 1. It says, Thus the heavens and the earth and all the hosts of them were finished. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had done and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because in it he rested from all his work which God has created and made. So he blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, made it holy.

It's a special day and that started with right after the creation of Adam and Eve on the sixth day God said this seventh day in this cycle that will continue through history every seventh day is the Sabbath day. Whether you keep it or not, it's a holy day. God has reserved it for himself, for people to come, have a holy convocation, and also fellowship and spiritual instruction. When I was with the grandkids, I asked one of them, I said, what day is Saturday? And they said, well, we're not sure.

What day is Sunday? Well, I'm not sure. I said, look it up in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. And so one of them did, right there on Google, and it said Saturday, the seventh day of the week. And then I said, go ahead and look at Sunday, Sunday, the first day of the week. And so people are keeping on Sunday what should be kept on Saturday, the Sabbath day.

I remember when I came across that knowledge, I looked it up in the dictionary. Boy, I was hopping mad. I'm thinking, they lied to me. I've been keeping Sunday, the first day of the week. And here the Bible says, you're supposed to keep the seventh day of the week. I was mad at my parents. I was mad at the Catholic Church. I was mad that society had deceived me.

And I said, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to be deceived any longer. Because one thing is, when they lie to you, but if you continue following the lie, what have you learned? Nothing. You're still keeping the wrong day. And so I said, no more. And I showed it to my parents. Look, look what the dictionary said.

They got mad at me. I said, I didn't write that. Are you mad at the truth? And so from that day on, I've kept the Sabbath for now over 50 years because I don't want to live a lie. And I realize not everybody has that understanding, but to me, the Sabbath is holy. It is special because that's what our Creator, who made each one of us, wants us to do.

So as we wrap things up here in Genesis, the origin of the Sabbath is revealed. The first of God's Ten Commandments that He reveals in such a way. And it is very special. So what do you think, brethren? Not bad for one chapter. So let's cram ten scientific and fundamental truths that help explain what we see around us. Who is involved? Who created all of this? How the earth was really shaped in this way. So special. How plant life began. And then animal life. And all of this is backed by scientific studies. Despite all that belief and evolution, a lot of these men don't buy it.

They just don't want to get fired. They don't have tenure yet. So if you come up and say, well, here's all this evidence that there's no such thing as in the fossil record that we have that a monkey is becoming a human being. We have nothing that a dog is becoming a cat or a cat becoming a dog or an ape is somehow coming from a dog or something else.

There is nothing. Nothing of this gradual change that Darwin predicted that paleontologists, fossil finders would discover. And here we are over 150 years later. Nobody has found anything like that. And so, brethren, that's not bad for chapter one. But boy, when I understood this, of course, not with all the information, but I understood this over 50 years ago. I thought, can't wait to get to chapter two.

And then, can't wait to get to chapter three and go through the entire Bible and have something that was inspired by God and explains the great questions in life. So, brethren, keep the Bible close to us. Keep the Bible, your Bible study, examining, because there's nothing like it. It is the truth of God, and we thank Him so much for it.