Boldly Trusting in God’s Ability to Create

Sermon Transcript

Well last week, as you know, we embarked on our 13 week study of what is, for many Christians, the most beloved and challenging chapter in all of the Bible.  For generations, Hebrews chapter 11 has served as the fuel for Christians to trust God more ambitiously, and to serve Christ with more courage and more boldness.  We’ve already seen last week, for us as Christians there should be no middle ground faith or lukewarm lives. God has made it really clear that ambitious faith is normative for the Christian life, that’s what he expects from us, that’s certainly wants to see us cultivate in our hearts.  But before the writer of Hebrews illustrates that kind of ambitious faith with this long list of Old Testament examples he promised he would do that in verse 2, he starts in verse 3, before he gets to that list with one foundational issue that is going to require ambitious faith for us to tenaciously hold onto. And he does this and it is a surprise to some who don’t know the ancient first century culture because they think will this truth, the truth about Gods creative acts certainly wouldn’t be in question the first century. But those of you who know a little bit about Greco-Roman history and philosophy; you understand that this was well underway as being an attack on the biblical record of creation. The Greco-Roman world had posited all kinds of philosophical ideas about how the world came to be, and a lot of thoughts about eternal matter and matter being reformed, and things coming to be in a way that may not perfectly reflect modern evolutionary theory. But there was certainly a conflict about origins the first century. So it seems appropriate that he stops before I give you examples of ambitious faith intersecting with life, lets just start with the most basic thing, how we got here. And let’s ask this question; are we on board with the biblical declaration in Genesis 1 and 2? And it’s a good place for us to start, and if you have your Bibles, I want you to open to Hebrews chapter 11. And I hope that you would also locate your worksheet that is in your worship packet, for those of you that were hungry for one of those infamous pastor Mike charts, that you’ve been secretly longing for, we’ve provided one for you this morning. And I think this is helpful just by way as I state there, by way of introduction a few preliminaries, as it relates to the issues. And we could paint the picture, I suppose, of Greco-Roman philosophy in the first century, but that’s not where we live. It’s not  a lot different, but it is somewhat different today we see two basic options when it comes to the issue of cosmology or origins.  And I know there’s variations all in between, but let’s at least try and understand them and in juxtaposition to one another, let’s just try and make some contrast and comparisons this morning. So I put it this way, let’s get consider the options, and I gave you a chart, and the one is headed with the word evolution, and the other is headed with the with the word creation. And our text reads this way, let’s look at the text, and let’s fill in a few preliminaries in our chart. Verse number 3, he’s already told us what faith is, we defined it last week, verse number 1, being sure of what we hope for, certain of what we do not see, it is a certainty, though not an irrational certainty, that’s important note, and we looked at that last week, it is still a confidence in something that we don’t personally observe, And everything about what we hope for, in the future, is by definition something we don’t observe. But many things about the past, and that’s where he begins, let’s talk about the ultimate past, of the beginning of the universe. So he says in verse 3, by faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command.  God said something and boom.  So that what is seen, present- tense, what we see now, it says, it was not made out of what was visible. Now that struck right to the heart of first century Greek philosophy.  And the idea here was, that’s not true, let’s get back understanding that biblical faith is going to require of us, it’s not irrational faith, affirmation of how we got here. Which, according to Genesis 1 and 2, was at God’s command where he creates, out of nothing, something that we now see in its present form. That is the biblical assertion and the Bible says we’re going to have to grasp that by faith.  So at the beginning of the creation chart let’s put that in the first box.  It’s going to require faith, faith to grasp the biblical picture of creation. Now before you go, well I knew it, that’s it that’s what faith all about, believing in fairytales and fables and myths, and the other column is scientific.  Just realize this, the concept of faith, as we said last week, is not irrational. Paul stood before Agrippa and Festus and said,  if its true, that means, in our understanding of truth, that it corresponds with reality, in this case, what really happened.  See then it will be, as Paul said, reasonable. And that means that everything in we look at should match that explanation. And more on that later, that’s what a lot of our morning is about.  The bottom line is, we weren’t there. and because we weren’t there,  much like the things we hope for that we don’t see, if we think about the creation of the world, we didn’t see it either.  So we’ve got to go back to our definition in verse 1 and say, it’s going to take a confidence in something we didn’t see to affirm that fact, or that truth.  That is our belief, we need faith to affirm that.  Right next to that on the evolution side of this,  could you just jot this word down?  It looks a lot the same because it is the same exact word, faith.  If we’re going to talk about creationism, we understand immediately that we’re going to need faith for that.  But you need to understand that when we talk about cosmologies it relates to evolution as it sits there as a theory today and is a posited, you need to understand just because we use the word science as it relates to that, doesn’t take away from the reality that you have to grasp this concept or this theory by faith.  And that doesn’t mean it’s not rational, see?  And because we already discovered that faith is a biblical virtue, is not an irrational concept.  It just simply means that I wasn’t there to witness it.  So I have to ascertain the reality by faith, and that means I couldn’t firsthand look at it and say well yeah, I was there I saw it.  Just like everything in the future that we hope for, a lot of things in the past we have to say, I wasn’t there to see it.  So all that means is that I may assemble evidence, or I may look at the at the way things work, or the way things are, and come up with a concept, but because I wasn’t there, I can’t say hey, I experienced it.  So lets just put that at the top, we’ll expand that, and explore that a little bit further as we get it on with our message this morning.  As  it relates to evolution, just put under the word faith there, it is, as a theory, and I know there’s lots of versions of his theory, it all comes down to an unknown cause.  And I don’t think any evolutionist is going to argue with that, it is unknown.  Just to quote one leading evolutionists, he puts it this way, a proponent of the Big Bang theory says, mysteries appear as one looks closer to the beginning.  Bottom line is that we don’t know, we don’t understand it, we don’t understand the cause of it , we’ve got our theories about what happened in sequence in order.  We try to explain that with how things are repeatable now in evidence, but we don’t know as far as what caused this we don’t know.  The concept of evolution now, for the most part, hangs on the on the theory of the Big Bang, which takes us back to a point of singularity where everything in the universe was down to this absolute collapse of all things and zero gravitational a reality was as a point of infinitesimally small singularity and from that boom came this explosion and we have what we have now from that.  And what caused that?  Well we don’t know, we can only theorize.  And I’ve read all kinds of people on what we think today is the reason for that and most people just say with this guy said, we don’t know its a mystery, and unknown cause.  Now biblical creationism or,, forget that, theistic creationism anybody inside or outside the Bible that says, there is a God created the world, is affirming this,  that there is an uncaused God that is behind all this.   That there is someone by definition, by definition, by that I mean deity defined as God, is by definition, someone who is uncaused, to quote Aristotle.  So he’s the unmoved mover, he’s the uncaused cause.  He is, if there is a God, by definition he must fit that definition, see?  That is the concept.  As Isaac Newton said, who was known for crystallizing laws about cause-and-effect, and in movers, and moved objects, and in action and reaction, he said that all these laws may explain motions of the universe, but they cannot explain the one who set them in motion.  God, Newton was a Christian, governs all things.  The point is, by definition that is who we say God is.  And all theistic people have said, well, by definition God is an uncaused being.  What caused the Big Bang, of modern evolutionists say, well we don’t know.  But Christians will say, well we believe by definition that this being, if he exists, has to exist with this definition, that he’s uncaused one.  Now when it comes to the actual issue of evolution, the next box, you will want to fill in is, that what we have now came from something, now this is a moving theory, I realize,  that was eternal.  It was eternal something.  Now in the olden days, when first I started studying evolution and reading the textbooks, there was a lot of transition going on in the scientific community.  We used to believe in something called uniformitarianism.  Einstein talked about the concept of things being as they’ve always been.  Hubble’s law came along in the 40s, and there was this big debate about Einstein being wrong about the continuity in the universe, and in matter not being eternal, and this redshift that Hubble observed, well their must be an expanding universe.  Then we started to extrapolate, this all came back to a point of singularity.  Now in the old days we used to talk about the illogical nature of eternal matter, that there must have been a beginning and now science in its theories have evolved into a place where we now have a theory that says, well you’re probably right, matter, what is matter, it isn’t eternal  But the concept of collapsed energy and a point of singularity, well that, and I’ve read people on this, and they’re all over the map on this, well that had to be there.  I find no Big Bang proponents that I’ve read recently, that’ll say well, there was there was nothing.  Now maybe a singularity, as they call it, but it was something and that something was there.  And they don’t even want to really explore that very much, but you’ve go to say there was eternal something.  And as it relates to definitions, we see that all the time, an eternal point of singularity. Bottom line is, there’s an eternal something.  In the old days it would be eternal matter, now its eternal something.  In terms of theistic creationism, the next box we want to fill in, Christians have always said, well by definition God is not only the unmoved mover of the uncaused cause, he is also by definition an eternal being.  He sits outside of time, he is not part of time, he is the creator of time, he is this unaffected being by time.  So we’ve got an uncaused cause, and an eternal God, so we don’t have an eternal, in the old days it used to be eternal matter, we have an eternal God.  We don’t have eternal singularity, and outside of singularity, we don’t even understand what that means, the nothingness around the singularity, but at least we had the singularity and that was there forever.  But now we compare that and contrast that, well theism has always said, well there’s an uncaused eternal God, so there is an important juxtaposition and contrast.  Thirdly, or fourthly on this list, when it comes to the origin or the catalyst for all of this, if you research and read Big Bang proponents, they’ll say well, it was an inexplicable explosion, we don’t know what triggered it, we don’t know what caused it.  And I know some people have written some esoteric papers on perhaps what caused it.   But there’s no consensus and most people say what this proponent said, when he says our understanding of the very early universe, and the context of that statement is, when we get down to that early moments at that point of singularity, he says, it’s all speculative.  The proponents are clear to say, well, we can see that point, it is not only mysterious as to what was there prior, but is speculative as to how it all triggered, and how it began.  The catalyst is unknown, we don’t know.  It was an explosion of collapsed energy, and space and time, and yet we don’t have a clue as to what triggered it, one day it just exploded.  And I know, you know, that may be an oversimplification of it because some people have written esoteric papers on it, but the bottom line is we don’t know.  Inexplicable explosion started it.   Now, when it comes to creation and theists, inside and outside of the Bible, they’ve always proposed and posited that it was a purposeful creation.  That an uncaused cause, this unmoved mover, is ultimate eternal being, made a decision to create, he had a purpose and he decided to create something.  And anthropologists who’ve studied, you know, all these cultures, they will tell you this is a universal concept.  And I like to quote the Inca King before any Judeo-Christian influence, before the missionaries ever got to there, who wrote God is the ancient one, the eternal one, supreme and uncreated one, who created all peoples.  And that’s a pretty consistent description of human concepts of sky god, of the deity.  By definition, if there is a God, that’s how he defined.  He is a purposeful creator who decides to create uncaused eternal, unmoved and he makes a decision.  From a biblical perspective we might want to jot down Colossians 1:16, because in Colossians 1:16, in a very terse explanation, it says that all things were created by him and for him.  The purpose of creation from a biblical perspective is that all this was made for God.  For his glory as Romans says, to express his glory, to demonstrate his attributes of grace and mercy in all the things that he does in the world.  It is all about bringing glory to him.  He is the center, he is the eternal one, he’s the uncaused  one, he creates something that is to bring glory and attention and interaction that is going to lead to the honor of God.  That’s the biblical perspective, and it’s another sermon a lot of people don’t like that point, but that’s certainly how the Bible presents creation from a biblical perspective.  Now I know some of you evolutionists will choke on this next statement, here but let me have you write it down anyway, and you can put some quotations around it, but if you’re going to believe in the concept of singularity, which is now dated at 13.7 billion years ago, you’ve got to say to get from that point of singularity 13.7 billion years ago, to today, you have billions of what I’ll call the miracles, ok?   Maybe not call them that, but they are certainly supranatural events.  I didn’t say supernatural, we call them that, supernatural, but they would say supranatural.   They don’t follow the patterns of nature as we know it, they are phenomenon, they are phenomenal events, where we move, as one standup comic said, from protozoa to Cindy Crawford, you need a lot of really amazing things to happen to get there.  You know, from ameba to man,  or from singular cell to eyeball, with all of its complexity and the amazing ness of the cornea, and rods and cones and optic nerve in your head and  you’ve got two otf them.  To get from here to here, we’ve got to say there were some amazing things that were happening.  Whether you call it punctuated equilibrium, whether you call it, whatever you call it, there were amazing things going on in the process that move things from simplicity  to complexity.   From unuseful chaotic information, to assembled and useful information.  And all of those are amazing, we can stand back and say, man that’s amazing.   And even if you want to look at recent evolutionary history, the fossil record, the  concept of well, there’s go to be these forms and maybe there was these big jompson steps, but we don’t see the evidence in the fossil record, but the concept is there are amazing moves from simplicity and complexity, from reptiles to birds, just amazing things that happen.  And we called those amazing things, things that are supranatural, above the natural order of things; they’re not how things normally work.  We don’t get to see them,  and you can say, well, it is happening so slow, you can’t observe it,  and there’s no difference between something so slow, moving so slowly, you can’t measure it, than something not moving at all.  But the point though, is still, there’s got to be something that moves from here to here, and it’s nothing we now observe.  And so I’ll just say, there’s billions of miracles, the layman is going to sit back, watching Discovery Channel, going that’s amazing to get from that primordial soup, to thinking human beings who in lab coats can study that , that amazing series of phenomenal events.  Now the biblical model of creation, and any theistic model of creation, within reason, certainty in the right-hand column, is a belief in a miraculous event.  See?  And its the same kind of phenomenal thing, to go from nothing to Cindy Crawford, just to use her for an example, she’s of my generation, so you pick your own perfect looking person.  But the bottom line is, to go from that to this, you’ve got to have something amazing happen.   And the Bible says that’s called a miracle, and it happened in Genesis 1 and 2.  It was an amazing event.  It was a miraculous event.  It was a supra or supernatural event.  Now, I know event, you’re going to say, well it was six days, and you know it’s like the Toyota tent event, right?  I know it’s more than one day, but it was an event.  Bad example, but the bottom, you get the point, it took place in 6 days, which the Pentateuch says is because it’s trying to give us a pattern of work and rest, God could’ve done it in one day, obviously.  But the point was, according to the biblical model, he was showing us how to live. Work six days, and take one day and rest, that was for the good of our biological units, and a lot of other reasons, and it played into worship later, and Isreal’s sister.  But the point is, God. in a miraculous event, not through billions of phenomenal events, created the world.  And that’s the biblical model.  Now I know these two charts kind of merged together, in a lot of people’s thinkings, and we’ll talk more about that later.  But let me give you one more observation, and you may argue with this one, but lets, let me at least try to explain it simply as I can.  And that is on the last box, just put this down, it is a process of ameba to ma, from singular cell to eyeball that we don’t have any examples of.  We cannot point to examples and say, here is how this works.  And we all stood around and watched this move from bird to reptile, we have no examples that we can look at and see.  Now we can theorize about them, and we can look at this, and look at radiometric dating and rocks and fossils and say, well we assume this to this.  You can assume a lot, we can theorize and extrapolate, but we can’t really see an example of this.  We don’t have it.  And if you’re thinking of finches, and you know, peppered moths, I’m not talking about that.  Because peppered moths and beaks on finches, and I know those are the examples in the biological text books, are not about new information.  Its about a reorganization of information.  If you have a species or a cell or anything that re arranges information, that’s one thing.  But we’re talking about the need to go from single cell simplicity to multiple cell complexity.  And we’re talking about a DNA protein as opposed to an ameba.  We’re talking about, you know, a bird to a full-fledged at Eagle, not a reptile, but a full-fledged Eagle.  We don’t have those examples of new information either being self organized or organized without the external force being laid upon them.  We just don’t have examples of that.  Now people want to argue some of that,  but I think, you know, and I’m trying to be as fair as I can possibly be, and I don’t want  to be pejorative or disrespectful, I’m just saying  in all of my studies at the university I can’t see those examples.  We theorize about them only, and we make those assumptions, but we don’t see them.  Yet when it comes to the biblical model, and you say well, creation we didn’t see that either.  Jot this down, this maybe a new thought for you, but based on what we been learning about the biblical concept of the miraculous, lets just at least jot this down.   I propose that there are 86 examples of this kind of creative act.  Now if you’ve been with me through the study of Hebrews, or maybe some previous studies, you know that as I’ve studied through the Bible, and counted and turned every page and looked for the miraculous things that we call miraculous events, there’s almost 200 of them, that the Bibles says , here’s Gods intervention into time and space.  But only 86 of them are truly creative miracles where God suspends the natural law as we know it.  And in any theory of origins, we need to do that, because nature demands that there be something supranatural or supernatural that changes these things, that injects organized and useful information.  And were saying in scripture, we’ve got 86 examples of that.  More on that later.  Now that’s just give us kind of an overview, and just because we haven’t  had a chart for long time, and I know you wanted one.  So we got a chart.  Here’s just a contrasting and comparative chart of some basic concepts and components of this.  There’s another chart here, and this is what I call the implications, AKA, reasons Mike would like to be an evolutionist.  Really and this is what it comes down to.  Reasons that I sit back and say, well you know this is the nice thing that comes with evolutionary theory, and some of the baggage that comes with creationism.   And you might want to jot down these two references down and I’ll refer to them later.  The first one is Psalm 14:1 and  the second one is Psalm 10:1.  Psalm 14, Psalm 10, verse1, verse 1.  Both of these tell us that there is lots of moral reasons for this, but comes down to some implications of both that are at least important for us to note.  I know this seems off the topic but really it’s not and I’ll show you why in a minute.  Lets jot this down.  Reason number one that I’d like to be an evolutionist, ok, which I’m not, is that we would get to be then in charge.  And by that I mean if I have no creator, no uncaused cause, no unmoved mover, in intelligent intellectual motion of will, being who purposely creates.  Then the  bottom line is, as I look around, you know, when it comes to planet Earth we as human beings, we’re at the top of the pinnacle and I personally may not be in charge,  but we as a species, we are in charge of this place.  There is no creator.  Problem is baggage, If I believe in biblical or theistic creationism, I have to admit there is a creator and by definition, the creator gets to be in charge.  And the bottom line in the Bible is it keeps repeating that fact.  It gives you examples like well, doesn’t the Potter have a little bit more credence than the pot?  And we go, oh well, I guess that’s true.  I don’t want to be the pot I, want to be the potter.  So I struggle with the concept of having a creator on somedays, particularly on some mornings, I wake up and I say, I wish that, you know, I was is in charge of the universe, or at least the part that I know of.  And the bottom line is, if I am a theistic creationist, I am stuck not being in charge.  Secondly, another reason I’l like to be an evolutionist is, I get to be the smart one, not me personally, necessarily, but we as a species.  Now there may be funny guys with green big heads and large eyes in spaceships, but they haven’t made themselves quite known yet, or the governments hiding them in area fifty-whatever.  But the point is, as far as we know, we’re the smart ones.  We’re looking around at inanimate objects, and we’ve got probes on Mars looking for life, but we can’t, if we find it, its little micro.  But we’re it man.  And I sit back and say well that’s kind of cool because then I ultimately am a part of the smartest species in the universe as far as we know.   And that kind of helps my self-esteem, right?  I feel better about myself, I feel like that that’s okay.  Problem is, that if I’m a creationist, a biblical or theistic creationist,  then I’m stuck with the fact that I got a creator, that just by examining the world I live in, not to mention my own body,  I recognize man, I’m not the smart one.  I think of this sometimes when I fear that I’m going to cut off a finger, or an arm in a garage accident, which I feared before, which hasn’t happened yet.  I think of that, I think, what if this ripsaw just cut my arm off right now?  Wow that would be dramatic.  Then I think about, well I’d want to get it back on.  Now I’ve not ever taken my arm off or my hand off, but, I’ve seen pictures, and I’m thinking that would be complicated.  There’s a lot going on, just right there where my watchband goes, I’ve got bones, I’ve got tendons, I’ve got veins, I’ve got nerves, wow.  And I wouldn’t  say, honey, I’ve got a little job I’m working on, I’m just trying to reattach my hand.  I would look for somebody, who I would hope had studies really hard on a lot of cadavers and a lot of charts.  I’d say can you it back together, and I’ve seen their work and Doctor’s hats off to you, but you don’t  do as good a job as the original.  I’m thinking, uh, it’s hard for me to think, that if there is a creator that created this little tunnel of bones and nerves and veins and all of that.  I’m thinking man; you’re smarter than I am.  Just by observing that, I think, if there was someone that designed this, he’s a whole lot smarter than I am.  And I’m stuck with that as a moral conclusion as a creationist.  And some days I’d like to think that really that I am the smart one in the universe.  Thirdly, and this is the best one of all, perhaps, is that I get to make the rules.  Now maybe not me personally, but  we do together, and  basically we would approach society this way, you stay off my grass, I’ll stay off your grass, and I’ll do what I want to do in the privacy my own life, and you do what you want to do.  And If I want more privacy I can be a Ted Kaczynski and I can live in the middle of nowhere, and maybe you wouldn’t hassle me and if the government did, I could move another weird outback country somewhere and do whatever I want to do.  Make up my own rules.  You certainly couldn’t be some kind of person telling me what I should do, as long as you stay off my lawn, I’ll stay off of your lawn.  I can live the autonomous reality.  And that to me, some mornings, I think, man that’s a great way live.  I’d just like to be someone who really thinks I can make the rules.  And if we came from a cosmic explosion 13.7 billion years ago, and we’re just here, and were the smart ones, and the in charge ones, and I’m thinking yeah, that makes sense.  And I realize as a culture, I’ve got to deal with you and community, but  the bottom line is, we can sit around and  vote for whoever we want in into the Presidency to put a person on the Supreme Court, and we can make our laws and decisions and legislators, and we can do what we want to do down here, because darn it,  we’re in charge.  And that would be nice. I’d like to think that way.  Problem is, if I’m a creationist, I recognize that much like the boxes at Wal-Mart, they usually come with a piece of paper in them that’ll tell you here’s what the manufacturer says you’ve got to do with his product, and here’s how you  put it together, and here’s how you use it.  Now if I’m really a created being, and there is an unmoved eternal personality that is choosing to purposely create me, then I’m thinking he’s probably going to provide some instructions, and that’s what the Bible is all about.  And a lot of other religious systems try to present the list of instructions as well, ours seems to come with an imprimatur that the other books don’t have, predictive prophecy, things that show us that Gods fingerprint is on this book.  That’s why we say it is God’s word, The Bible, and we say well these are Gods instructions for life, that’s a whole different series.  But I think I listed it for you on the back in the small box.  But the bottom line is, I would have to say that I am stuck realizing that the Creator probably has instructions for me to live by.  And therefore, it’s not you stay off my grass and I’ll stay off of yours.  Now all of a sudden God cares what I do behind the fence of my life.  God cares what I think in the thoughts of my head.  And all of a sudden now, I’ve got an issue where I’ve got rules that are imposed upon me, not just for getting along in community, but I’ve got to deal  with the creator.  The manufacturer has some instructions and if I were smart, I should look at those.  For one primary reason, that there would be a day of accounting.  And that’s the great thing, by the way, about evolution, if it’s true, and the days I wake-up wanting to be evolutionist, I could think I can live however I want.  And if I can get away with it in community and society, I’d get away with it.  And by the end of my life, I get to be dead, and that’s nice ‘cause I’m done.  And I don’t know, some people don’t think that’s nice, but at least they think the whole you don’t get judged part is nice.  I mean we are a society definitely bent on not wanting to be judged by anybody.  Certainly as an evolutionist, I would long to be that if I could because I would know  at the end of my life, no one’s going to say well you should done this, and you shouldn’t have done that, and there’s a penalty for that, an answer for that, I wouldn’t have to answer.  Problem with creationism, of course, is we’ve got to answer to our maker.  And just about every religious proposition, not just inside the Bible, is trying to give us a sense that we will have to account to our maker one day, and certainly the truth of the Scripture present that fact, that we’ll have to stand before God and answer for the deeds done in the body, whether good or bad, 2 Corinthians 5.  Bottom line is, that’s rough, I don’t like that column some days.  I mean I know if I’m going to assert that there’s a creator I’ve got to live with that.  But some days I wake up and I want that first column.  Why the two charts?  Because sometimes we think this is just an intellectual discussion, that’s chart number one.  That is somewhat of an intellectual discussion and debate, at least a philosophical one.  It’s the second chart that seems the fuel the first one though, because as Psalm 14:1 and Psalm 10:1 says, lot of  times in my desire to do what I want to do, I want then to change the chart on the top, and shoot for the left column and not right column.  And sometimes that is a moral issue for me.  Now, I’m not trying to say every evolutionist’s got a reason for it, but I’m  certainly saying there are some nice perks that go along with casting off the shackles of a creator.  And the Bible doesn’t make any bones about it and it realizes there is some motives, some personal selfish motives for trying to fight this truth.  More on that perhaps later, at least for just a second.   Now to our passage, that was the worlds longest introduction, and spoken through quite rapidly, but lets get to verse number 3 now.  Hebrews chapter 11 verse 3.  The chart  is a bit more expansive and gives us a little moral catalyst for this, and you’ll have to listen to the CD a few times to catch that perhaps, but that was the point we’re trying to make.  Now I’m going to look at the text, and its going to say at least what we started to say, and that is by faith, we understand, that the universe was formed at God’s command.  Here’s the biblical positing of the picture, God created the world and he created it with a word.  And again, the whole passage and context is about faith.  Having the boldness to have confidence in God, that he did with the Bible says he did.  So lets just underscore that and then step back, based on just the introductory chart that we drew, and say well, I guess that’s true.  And maybe you can affirm this with me number 1 on your outline:  we are going to need faith no matter which theory we choose.  We’re going to need faith no matter which account we believe.  We need faith no matter which explanation we adopt.     We are going to need faith.  And here’s the reason why, if you want to keep writing, as long as your pen is all heated up.  All history is unseen, just like all hope is unseen.  Hope this future; future by definition I can’t see it.  History, most history, all history, in some senses, is not now, seen.  And that is an important observation.  It is a confidence in what is not seen, it doesn’t mean its irrational, it just means its unseen.  Historic events, by definition, are unrepeatable.  Creation if it’s a topic, or I should say cosmology, or the origins of the universe is by definition something in the past.  For the evolutionist, or the Big Bang proponent, its 13.7 billion years ago, that’s the current date on the whole thing.   Well that’s something that’s not happening now, so I’m, by definition, forced to say it is an issue that cannot be repeated in a lab, okay?  Now I can take the evidence to the lab, but I can’t take the event and re-create it.  Because history, by definition, is unrepeatable.  And so is the for the biblical creationist, he’s got the same issue, he can’t repeat creation.  And neither can the evolutionist.  We have to look back at it as a historical event ,and every historical event is this way.  Think about any historical event that you want to claim happened.  Think about the Los Angeles Olympics, which we didn’t get this time around, I know some were disappointed.  But we had it back in what was that, ‘84?  The summer Olympics here, did anybody go to the 1984 summer Olympics?  At least one of the events, did you?  I don’t believe you.  I don’t believe you, ok?  I just don’t believe it.  Scott, you said you went, I don’t believe you.  Nope, nope, don’t believe you.  So let’s debate it.  Ok, we’re going to debate it after church.  We’re going to debate whether you went.  I’m going to say, no you didn’t.  You want to say to you did.  Now here’s only two things that we’ve got to deal with now, we’re going to try to solve this problem as if it mattered.  If this were an important decision, to either say is Scott right or is Mike right?  Let’s make a decision.  We got to find out who’s right.  If our eternity in some way, was impacted by this decision, then Scott and  I would have to sit down and we could only deal two things, and these are broad words, but we’d have to deal with if it’s a historic event, we’d have to deal with evidence, that still remains in the present, and any testimony that happens to be available.  Those are the only things.  And Heather can say, because she nodded her head, yeah he went.  You’re saying he went, you’re testifying that he went to the Olympics in ’84.   You are a witness to that.  Now, I’d have to sit there and interrogate Heather for a while and find out if she’s a reliable witness.  But for creation, and the origin of the universe, most people say, well there were no witnesses.  We don’t have anybody that we can interrogate.  And even if, god forbid this a terrible example, but you’re friends.  Let’s say Heather was dead, ok?   That’s bad, it’s terrible, have your funeral, oh we miss her.  But we’re looking at her journal, we can only study her journal now.  Her journal talks about her husband going to the 1984Olympics, and she writes about Scott’s there and he’s at…what event did you say that you apparently go to?  Boxing.  You went to the boxing.  Ok, let’s just stick with that.  So Heather writes in her journal, well he’s off to the boxing venue today.  So I’ve got that, now she’s dead, but I’ve got her record here of what she says happened.  Obviously if I’m an evolutionist, I don’t believe anybody was there.  Now I could be some kind of theistic evolutionist who believes that God was there, but the agnostics and those that believe in that kind of thing, usually say, God may have been there, he may have been, you know, lighting the fuse and making the explosion go off, but, you know, he aint talking, so we don’t have a testimony from God.  But we have some evidence, and maybe Scott will bring in pictures, he’s got pictures right here, and so I’m going to examine those, and I’m going to  look on his computer, maybe he’s got a little Photoshop going on there.  And who knows?  You have Photoshop on your computer?  Oh but your friends do.  You’ve got friends that have it.  You have Photoshop, see right there?  All of a sudden the case is weakened, because he has the tools to forge these photos, okay?  Right? He could forge the photos.  Take a photo and, you know, and then kind of overlay in front of the Coliseum, or… where is the boxing venue, apparently?  In the sports arena in Inglewood?  Oh no, you see now?  I don’t believe any of this.  But he could a assemble all that with available tools.  So I’m am skeptical, and were going to debate all this, but I can really deal with only the evidence and any available testimony.   Creation is, say, well we don’t, we’ve got the same evidence that evolutionist have who live in the same universe.  But, the problem is, creationists say, well  we believe we do have a witness.  The guy who did it, God, deity, the uncaused the eternal person who purposely did it.  And so we’re saying, well, he wrote a book, and again, most people say that’s a bunch of fairy tales.  But we’re saying we believe that it has an imperermoda (sp?), and that’s a whole different series, but there is a credibility to this.  And so we take that and we listen to what the Bible says about creation, we turn to Genesis 1 and 2, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  And then we say ok, we’ve got a claim here from the diary of God so to speak, and now we should look at the evidence and see.  And if it is true, as the Bible says, then it should be reasonable, because it matches the facts and my evidence should be able to match that explanation.  We’re going to debate all this, and that’s all we can do, we can only look at evidence and testimony.  And that’s where we’re at in this whole discussion of the universe.  When you talk about Big Bang cosmology, for instance, in the olden days this was kind of a theory on the fringe, now it’s center and front and center.  This is what they are teaching your kids at the University. That we started 13.7 billion years ago with an explosion, that’s how it all started.  Now a lot of this was given credence, the steady-state theory that was Einstein’s understanding of the universe, was changed by Hubble’s observation of what we call redshift.  And ultimately came down to the hypothesis that everything in the universe is moving proportionally away from us.  And so the assumption was, if we detect movement, if our observations are right, and all our deciphering of these things are true, then everything is moving outward, and so then we extrapolated.  And I’m not saying that’s not evidence, okay?  Although I think it needs to be looked at carefully, there are lots of questions about redshift and expansion.  Let’s just say there is, whether its radiation tweaks in the universe, which was a big long series of Journal articles.  But the concept was, if this is true, you’ve got to still see that takes faith to extrapolate back to point of singularity.  Because it has some similarities, and I don’t mean oversimplify it, but if I said yeah, I do have evidence that I can look at I’d buy of you coming up I5 to church, it would be, you’d have to say, an issue of faith and extrapolation if my evidence only pertained to that the last 50 yards on I5.  Before the offering, I would be extrapolating to try and estimate mean you were in San Diego, and at what time you are in Tijuana, and at what time you are in Mexico City, or wherever, I don’t know where  I5 ends, somewhere down in Baja, Mexico City is not in Baja.  But the point is, I’d have to extrapolate that.  I might even extrapolate where you took a turn off and you really came from El Paso.  I could do that but I’d really have only the available evidence of that last 50 yards.  So, all I’m saying is whatever you theory, no matter how good you may think it is or not, is all going to say, we weren’t there, we didn’t see it, we only have the evidence and any available testimony.  Evolutionists say we have no testimony, we only have evidence.  Christians say we believe we have testimony, we have good reason to believe that, and we believe we have evidence, the same evidence you have, let’s look at all of that together.  But both of them, all I am saying, because its a historical occurrence, creationism is an historical occurrence, requires that I have faith.  Confidence in something unseen.   All of that to say something we introduced in the chart.  Secondly, lets jot this down.  Nature, this may be harder for some to buy, is by definition, something that requires something unnatural for us to get to this place from nothing.  And we believe, whether we’re creationists or an evolutionist, that there was a time when what we see was not.  And we believe it from either some eternal singularity or some eternal God, what was not became what is, and so what we’re believing about that, as we examine the nature that we have to examine, is that something supranatural or extraordinary had to happen to get it from here to there.  Christians say it was a miraculous event.  Evolutionists say it was a series of phenomenal changes, punctuated equilibrium, what ever you want to call it, but amazing things from protozoa to Cindy Crawford, lots of amazing things.  So that is, we sit back and go, hmm, ok, interesting.  Why are we saying that?  Because nothing in nature that we now see gives us that closure to the fact that well nature is by nature, something that does that.  ‘Cause its not.  Everything that we see is something, its just the opposite.  And I don’t want to over kill this argument, ‘cause I know a lot of people roll their eyes at it, but things do in this universe are either steady, their either balanced, or their either decaying.  And thermodynamics as we [inaudible], the bottom line is things go from order to disorder.  And I know we can needle through the second law of thermodynamics, but the bottom line is, you have to admit, we have to assume something supranatural, something unusual, something phenomenal to go from a garage that’s going from progressive order to disorder, to all of a sudden now be reorganized into the Taj Mahal.  You have to have something phenomenal to take place, because my garage goes from order to disorder every week, its increasingly worse.  And that’s how your garage works too, unless there is intelligent and purposeful intervention into that to make it something better.  And that’s all we’re saying is that nature requires that.  Now in the olden days, and this is the frustration about evolution and creation debate, is that the theory keeps changing.  When Darwin, who went popularized, and it was really the strike, you know, the benchmark of people latching onto this name and this concept from this personality.  He believed, as most people did in that day who tried to propose and posit this theory in what we call the spontaneous generation of life.  Now since Louis Pasteur, no one believes that any more, but in that day they.  They believed that if you throw old rags in the corner of the garage, eventually materials stuff like rags that are dirty will produce mice, and living things will come from dead things.  Inanimate objects will produce living things, you put a piece of meat out and you leave it out on your patio it will create maggots, and there will be life from non-life.  And they believe that, that was a cornerstone, that’s what people assume about things because that’s what they saw.  They didn’t have the germ theory of Louis Pasteur.  Pasteurization came from Louis Pasteur, and one of these great observations it is when it comes to germ theory, and it comes to things like the Petri-dish that’s still on his desk in the museum, over there in France.  If you’re going to have life come from non-life, you have to have it come from outside.  The organization and information of life cannot be self generated or self organized, it has to be somehow supplanted into that.  That’s why the Petri-dish still hasn’t launched any living matter.  That’s why really maggots don’t come from meat, they come from external organisms.   That’s why rats don’t come from piles of rags, it takes rats to produce rats.  And the concept has changed constantly.  Matter used to be, as I said, the big debate.  Is matter eternal?  Mathematicians, logical people, doesn’t make any sense.  And now all of the sudden the theories changed, well we don’t believe internal matter any more.  We don’t believe in spontaneous generation of life anymore.  And some people, we don’t believe in punctuated equilibrium anymore.  We don’t believe in a lot of quantum mechanic laws anymore.  Everything is changing, and that is the frustrating thing about the debate.  The Bible has said, no, this is all taken place by God, and we’ll look at that in a minute, but the theory always, whether its biblical or non-biblical, extra-biblical, requires something outside of what we know in nature.  And that’s just an observation.  Nature, by its very nature, requires something unnatural if it is to go from what we say it was, which is nothing or singularity to what we now have.   One more, okay?  And I’ve said this already, but lets underscore it.  Explanations, whether its we evolved from the big explosion 13.7 billion years ago, or God created us, they should, the evidence that we now see, should match the explanation.  The explanation, we say, as Christians, if you’re a biblical creationist like I am, you say, well we believe that God says he did it, and he tells us how he did it, and so we look at, and the evidence should match that.  And in my opinion, it does, it matches it better than the theories that constantly change, as it relates to how we got here in evolution.  Now, Robert Jastro who is no comedian, and wasn’t trying to be pejorative with this, he was the Director of the Dotted Space Institute, and I know some of you have heard this quote before, but he, in his book about God and the astronomers, makes an interesting and an almost comical statement about the fact that with all the changes in theory of origins and cosmology, it could be that all these theories eventually get back to the biblical thing that Christians and theologians have saying forever.  And he wrote it comically the end of his book when he said this, for scientists who have lived by the faith, by the faith that he has in the power of his own reason, the story of this whole thing, he says, ends like a bad dream.  He scaled the mountains of ignorance, and he’s about  to conquer the highest peak, he pulls himself up over the final rock, and he’s greeted by a band of theologians who have been there for centuries.  And the concept is, and I’m not trying to make light of it, or trying to belittle of you, if you have a different view than I am telling you, but I am saying, it is interesting that as we try and hit the moving target of evolution, it keeps moving in the direction of trying to get us to realize, you know what?  This is what we’ve been saying.  Matter is not eternal, it had a beginning, it had a start.  God, the external unmoved mover did it.  All the mysteries and explanations that aren’t made yet, the theories adjusting.  And I’m not trying to claim that people who’ve got that second chart motivating the first chart are ever going to get to saying, you’re absolutely right, we were all wrong, and you know, God really created the heavens and the earth, like you said.  I’m not suggesting its going to happen in my lifetime, or my kids lifetime.  Its probably never going to happen.  But the point is, you have to realize that the evidence keeps leading people away from old theories to new theories to keep on getting closer to the concept of a personal creator, who started this thing called time, space, matter and energy, and he did it outside of it all.  That seems to at least get closer to where we are at today.  No hope that we’ll get there anytime soon, but the idea is at least one worthy of note.  Explanation should match the evidence; evidence is pushing people to constantly reform their theories.  Evolution is evolving as a theory all the time.  Now, back to our passage.  Verse 3, by faith we understand the universe was formed at God’s command and so that, he says, what is seen, present-tense, was not made out of what was visible.  I just want to note in the second part of this message, let’s note this.  That we’ve got to notice how God creates.  Because this is the description, if it weren’t good enough for us in Genesis 1 and 2, of how God did it.  And according to this particular verse, he’s very concise in telling us he did it by a command.  He spoke something, he said something, it was a act of his will.  And in that act of his will, he brings into existence things that didn’t exist.  Things that you didn’t see, are now appearing before you.  Now let’s just start with the first part of that, letter A if you will, when it comes to how God creates.  Notice that in this passage and in the historical record he does it with a word.  He says, “let there be light”, and boom, there are photons floating around in the universe, he creates the fabric of space-time.  WE could look all over the week event of the miraculous creation in Genesis and say,  man, he’s talking, he’s saying things, he’s purposing things  and they’re happening.   That is what we see.  Which is interesting not just in the creative account, but in the 86 examples that follow these miraculous breaking of natural law events.  It’s the same thing.  And I just fast-forwarded all the way to the New Testament where Jesus, the incarnate one, who claims to be the agent of all creation, right? John 1:1, all things were created by him, through him, nothing came into being that existed that Christ didn’t make.  The Bible says that when Christ goes around showing his position and authority as creator, guess how he keeps creating things?  With a word.  Not a process.  He says things and they happen.  Let me give you just a few examples really quick.  Matthew chapter 9, you don’t have to turn there, but write it down.  There’s a paralytic there.   A Paralytic, a guy who’s paralyzed.  My daughter, as you know, from the knees down, some of you know that, spinal problem, and so she hurt her muscles and tendons completely atrophied in her legs from her knees down.  Now there’s unuseful atrophied and useless tissue there that is hanging from her knee to her ankle.   Now, Christ has got a paralytic like that, probably worse, hip flexors, the thigh muscles, everything, tendons, everything is just a mess on this lifelong paralytic.  And here’s what and Matthew 9:5 says, get up and walk forwards, get up and walk.  And what we’re affirming, if you believe that Jesus actually did that, is that historically a man who had atrophied and useless tissue in his legs, all of a sudden now had brand new constitutions in his legs of tissue that worked, cells that worked, nerves that worked, and he stood up because of a word from Christ, and he walked away.  There was a spontaneous immediate creation that was with a word.  How about another example?  Mark 3:5, we could go all morning on this, just about.  Man with a withered hand, same problem, lots of complexity from your elbow to the tips of your finger, if you know anything about anatomy, some of you Dr’s are here, this is an amazing part of our body, from here to here.  Ok?  Amazingly complex, servers its just amazing this thing.  Well he had a withered hand.  Okay?  And you’ve seen people with withered hands, and in the ancient days, right, they didn’t have any prosthesis, and he didn’t have any help.  He’s a mess, his hand’s a mess.  And Jesus, here’s what he says, four words in the English language, “stretch out your hand”, and according to that text, his hand was completely whole.  Everything that was there it was not ready to make that hand work was immediately there, the tissues, the nerves, everything that was needed to make that hand completely whole.  The creative act was with a word.  Bartimaeus, Luke chapter 18 verse 42, a blind man.  And now don’t be Sunday school, don’t be flannel graph, be realistic.  Picture the blind guy that you know.  Picture, I was going to say Ray Charles, but is he dead?   Is Ray Charles dead?  Stevie Wonder, that was the one we came up with last service.  Stevie Wonder, right?  He’s the guy that does this all the time.   He’s got his black glasses on, he’s blind, right?  Pull those glasses off, and what do you have?  Have you seen behind that?  He’s got problems here.  And picture Bartimaeus, who is that  way for life, and didn’t live in the sanitary and luxurious environment that Stevie Wonder lived in.  All of the sudden now, here’s the words, three words in English, “receive your sight”.  Boom, and now everything that is needed, all the optics, the lens, the cornea, the iris of his eye, the constitution of his eyeball, his optic nerve, everything Boom!  Now all of a sudden it worked.  In what?  In a process?  Did it take 5 weeks?  No, in a moment with a word, Jesus creates, and he creates something without a process, he creates something with a word.  Ok?  And while I was thinking about all that, I eventually got around to John 11.  And I’m thinking about, talk about a blind man, a lame man, and a guy with a withered hand, his name was Lazarus, and he had all those problems and more, right?  Lazarus was in bad shape in John 11, ok?  You remember the story right?   He’s dead.  He’s been dead for 4 days.  For 4 literally stinking days he was dead, right?  And you know the passage, Mary and Martha, when Jesus says, “remove the stone, let’s get to this guy”.  And they were like, no, the KJV is classic, Lord he stinkith, right?  The NIV says, there was a bad odor.  We’re not going to open that up.  We understand something about the decomposition of a body.  Now I know this is going to be way too much information for you  and reveal way too much about myself, but I once bought a book about what happens biologically to your body from the moment you die forward, ok?  It was all about the decomposition of the body.   Isn’t that fun reading?  Someone came to the bookstore and wanted to buy it this morning.   We don’t carry it in our bookstore.  If you are really that morbid, you can get it out of my library.  But what’s amazing about that book, as I read that book, is that from the moment we die, the moment, you Doctors know this.   From the moment that we die, so much physiologically and in our chemistry immediately changes.  Bacteria multiplying every four hours.  You’ve got enzymes being released in the body that are instantly starting to deteriorate all the tissues in the body.  You’ve got your entire, the cellular structure of your skin begins to break down.  And some of you that are cops, police officers, or paramedics, and pastor’s we see this too, the dead bodies we’re called there to the room where the person’s been dead sometimes 4 hours, sometimes four days.  And you see the absolute devastation of decomposition from the moment of death.  When the blood is not oxygenated, when the bacteria takes over, when the gases are released in the body, it is an absolute mess.  And in an ancient world in an old cave, here sat Lazarus for four days.  Now you can imagine the problems, and I don’t mean to be morbid, but picture what we’ve got going on after four days of decomposing death.  Now Jesus, with a word, talk about a healing here, talk about creative work.  The cells that are dead in his body, the things that are no longer available to him.  The cellular and molecular structure that needs to be completely re-created from scratch.   Jesus says three words, “Lazarus come forth”, and that was not a process, it was immediate, instantaneous creation of every system, every enzyme, every protein, every molecule of his body to make him live, and he pops out of the grave, and says, “man it stinks in here, get me out of here, get these cloths off of me”, right?  And sits down for lunch.     Picture it, lips, immediately, the constitution of  their own tissue fiber changed.  Eyeballs, dead for 4 days, immediately reconstituted, every particle of that had to be re-done, boom, in an instant.  Jesus shows the same thing that claimed in Genesis 1 and 2.  That he creates, and he creates with a word.  And he does it instantaneously.  That’s the picture in scripture.  Second, an important thing to note, about how God creates.  He creates from nothing to a mature somethings.  He creates out of nothing into a mature something.  Look at our text again.  The universe was formed at God’s command so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.  He creates out of something that is not there, something that is there, and has complete maturity, and this is maybe a more important and exacting word, it has functionality.  Immediate functionality.  The creation of God with a word and the 86 examples we have that are post Genesis 1 and 2 are all immediately ready to function, and that’s important.  That’s why it’s not a process in part, immediately.  That’s why if you think back to the garden, right?   You picture God in the wording of the text forming this man out of the dust of the earth.  Breathing into him the breath of life on day 6, and immediately he becomes a living being.  Now let’s just take that for a second.  You know, and obviously if you’re thinking it through, he’s not created as an embryo, he’s not created as a baby, he’s not created as some small cellular thing.  He’s created as a whole human being.  So he’s a 20-something I’m assuming, standing there, at least he looks like it, and he’s five minutes old and he looks 20.  But let’s go back to five milliseconds old for just a second.  When Adam is created, if we take the text at face value and believe this verse, ok?  We have the ambitious faith to believe it.   Then what we have is, much like all of the creative acts of Jesus, with a word God creates, and in that word everything about Adam is fully mature and functioning.  And that means, for instance,  that we don’t need time for things to move into their proper place.  Question.  Adam was created.  Five milliseconds into it, did he have blood in the tips of his fingers, and veins and arteries of his body?  Did he have blood at the tips of his extremities?  Answer would be, well, if I take the text at face value, the answer would be, yes.  And I’m saying, it takes some time to get blood to pump from here in this big heart chamber valve, to here,  But guess what?  In five milliseconds, we take a snapshot, he’s got blood there.  Does he have any glucose?  Does he have any sugar in his blood?  When was the last tim you had a sandwich?  Never, right?  He didn’t eat  anything.  Does his blood have the nutrients in it that he’s later going to get from eating fruit from the trees in the garden?  Yeah, but he didn’t eat anything.  And yet he’s got the chemical composition in his blood that’s nourishing his body.  Full functionality a second after he was created.  That answers a million questions for people.  It answers questions like, does he have a belly-button, right?  He’s created mature and complete with everything in place.  And the answer is, yes.  What about the trees in the garden?  Let’s take this a step further.  Did the trees in the garden, that the bible says were created whole, fruit bearing, fruit was hanging off their branches with seeds already in them,  that was what God created, the Bible says, with a word he created those trees.  Question, did they have rings inside of them?  Well, yeah, I guess so, why?  Because when you believe that God creates things complete with functionality ready to go, then you believe that you have an appearance and aging history it never had.  You’re stuck with that conclusion.  That they have an appearance of an age and history they never had.  Blood in the tips of the extremity would assume that it took time to get from the heart to the end of the finger if he’s a brand new person.  And yet its got the history of, a physician would come in and say, well his body, the trees, a horticulturist look, its been here a while.   Starlight, same thing, it’s the same vein analogy.  People say well starlight, I was doing a call-in show, people call in frequently about starlight, well that proves there is no creator.  Think about it.  If the point of the stars was for the people on the planet, that God created, to enjoy that, then he’s got to string the photons from the stars to the earth.  And he does that much like he puts blood in the extremities of the body before it had time to pump there.  Because God creates things that are complete and functional with an appearance of age and history it never had.  That’s how the creative story in the garden always works.  How about the rocks in the garden?  You geologists, remember that?  Remember one of the main things about dating the planet, which used to be 6.5 billion years old, the planet here, the planet Earth.  That was all based on what we call radiometric dating.  Which is the parent of radioactive isotopes decaying from one parent isotope to a daughter isotope.  And you geologists can nod at me, you at least took geology at the University, yeah that’s right.  And if you take, for instance, uranium, a parent isotope it goes through various stages to decay to a stable isotope called lead.  From uranium to lead it takes all these steps.  And geologists say, well, we studied enough about radioactive isotopes to know how it works, and how long it takes, and it is a mechanized, very timed, orderly process from parent isotope to daughter isotope.  Now, in the garden, you got rocks, they’re five minutes old and you as a geology go over with your, you crack one open, you bring it to the lab, and you examine parent to daughter isotope ratios.  How old is that rock?  Well, I just saw it, lets just say I saw it, and I’m saying its five minutes old, man.  And you’re going to look at it and go, no, its not, it’s a completely mature rock with a stable isotope that’s a daughter isotope, and some stable isotopes that’s a parent isotope, and various unstable isotopes in between, and wow, this rock looks very mature and complete.  And the bottom line is, its only five minutes old.  Why?  Because God creates things fully functional.  He creates them fully mature, he creates them with a word, and that means they have, as an implication, an appearance of age and history they never had.  Consider Jesus, John chapter 2.  He turned water into wine.  You got six pots of water and they’re out of wine.  You know the story, and Jesus with a word, turns water into wine.  Now if you’re going to make wine, its going to take some time.  But Jesus is going to show something about his creative authority, so he speaks a word and turns H2O into wine.  Now if you’re going to create wine, you need H2O.  You’ve got to add water, which usually comes from a grape, which is 75 percent water.  But he doesn’t use a grape.  Doesn’t need a grape.  But if you’re going to make wine, you need a lot of things.   You need hextose, you need sugar, right?  There’s got to be sugar in it.  And you’ve got H2O, but you don’t have C6H12O5, you don’t have that, right?  All you’ve got is H2O.   And you don’t have any ethanol, you need ethanol if you’re going to have wine, you’ve got to have that come in somewhere.  Usually that come from an enzyme process, and that takes time.  He didn’t have any of that.  You need varieties of proteins, which usually come from tannin, the skin of the grape, but we don’t have any grapes because Jesus didn’t use any grapes to create his wine.  But that’s the process, right?   To get those proteins to make the right pH balance, as long as we don’t have enough oxidation messing it up.  Or, if we don’t have a bacteria that runs out of control.  If we have the right balance, and as people who have these vineyard websites will tell you, there are over 300 complex chemical compounds in a glass of wine, see?  And if its going to tast good, everything’s got to be in the right balance.   And the Bible says, Jesus does it with a word, and there’s 150 gallons of brand-new wine, and everybody goes, why did you save the best stuff to the last?  What’s wrong with you?  And the bottom line is, the Bible says that all of those factors, those chemical factors, they beg for a history they never had.  They assume and look like, as a chemist would tell you, that it needs a past, but it doesn’t have a past.   And some of us are quick to say well, I believe Jesus turned water into wine, I believe that.  But I’m having a hard time believing he created the universe in six days.  And I’m tell you, what’s the difference.  Do you think that creating wine; you think creating those things is easy?  Its tough man.   But yet, if you are the creator of the heavens and the earth, and you’re trying to prove something about Genesis 1 and 2, he gives 86 examples of how he can do that with a word.  That’s how God creates.  He creates something out of nothing that has maturity and usefulness in full functionality, the appearance of age and history it never had.  One more, lets just say this about God’s creation before you get out on me.   Psalm 19, now we haven’t turned to any cross references, let’s turn to this one.  Psalm chapter 19.  I just want to say this about Gods creation and most of us who try to study Gods creation, we stand back and we say, wow, it does reflect creative work of God.   There are attributes reflected in this.  Romans 1, well that’s a negative passage, it says clearly his attributes are seeing in what he’s made.  Psalm19 says it poetically.  Start in verse number one, and I understand this is poetry, this is a song, these are lyrics.  But look at the basic thought here.  Verse 1, the heavens declare, and heaven’s we don’t mean the throne room of God, the Hebrew word is used also for space and sky.  We look up at the sky, and we declare the glory of God.  The skies proclaim the work of his hands.  Day after day they pour forth speech.  Night after night, now underline this, they display knowledge.  There is no speech or language for their voices heard, voices not heard rather.   Their voice goes out from all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.  In the heavens he’s pitched a tent for the sun, which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion, like a champion rejoicing to run his course.  It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is hidden from its heat.  I understand, highly poetic language, but we got, look at [inaudible], its symmetrical, it’s beautiful, it displays knowledge, you cant look up without going wow, this reflects the intelligence and the glory of the creator.  Bible says that all over the place.  And if he created this, there ought to be that reflection that we say, this is true, this is an amazing thing that he made.  And this really reflects the intelligence and the architecture of the builder.  I think about the planet, the planet that we’re spinning on right now, the 6 septillion ton rock that we call home, Earth.  Think about that, it’s spinning right now as thousand miles an hour on the surface, thousand miles an hour, that’s how fast.  24 hours a day we come back to the same point.  And it is in orbit, by the way, as thousand miles per second, you want to talk about fast.  Around in… ellipse around the sun, thousand miles a second, that fast, feel it, just stop right now and feel it.  Can’t even feel it.  God created it and we don’t even feel that.  We’re buzzing through space, zzzzz, thousand miles per second, and we’re on just the right axis, and we got, and we’re going to come right back to the same point every 365 and ¼ days, boom.   And then we’re expecting summer, and its all great, we just rely on this, we don’t even think about it.   We look up in the sky; we see two discs everyday, right?  Hopefully you don’t look directly into the one in the daytime, but there it is, this ball of fusion.  And this fusion is creating light and heat, and photons showering our planet everyday.  This thing that’s 93 million miles away from the surface of the planet.  And it is in diameter, its huge, its 865 thousand miles in diametert.   A giant  ball of burning fusion, everyday we see that.  And then at night, about the time that’s going down, when we can look at it, when its on the horizon, if it’s a full moon, we’ve got the other one completely on the other side of the horizon coming up.  And that one’s not quite as bright, we can look at that one all night.   And that one right there, by the way, its not so far away, its not 93 million miles away, its only 234 thousand miles away.  That’s still a long bike ride, but that’s not as far.  And as its coming up, and I’m looking at that, and we studied the diameter of that, its not this gigantic 865 thousand mile diameter, its only a 2,160 mile diameter, that’s all it is, 2000 mile diameter.   So you’ve got this, and you’ve got this, and sometimes God just for fun made it to where this one always didn’t have a full moon, and sometimes they even, just for fun, he has them cross.  I know, not always just for fun, but I mean, we get to see it.  And he makes them cross, and that’s called an eclipse, right?  Now think about eclipse for just a second, I never read this in my high school biology text, I never read it in college university text, but think about just that one fact, as I look up and we study the eclipse, and depending on the season of the year, we either  have this coronial line around it, or not, sometimes they’re exactly perfect.  Now think about that, exactly perfect?  They’re hugely different in proportion and distance from the planet, size and distance.  And yet, think about it, do th math on this, from Earth’s surface the sun is 400 times further away than the moon.  And also, guess what?  By proportion it’s also 400 times larger than the sun, or the moon rather.  So, do you see what I’m saying?  All of a sudden now, from the surface of this 6 septillion ton rock, I look up in the sky, and during the eclipse especially I can measure them perfectly, and they look exactly the same size.  The nighttime disc, the little reflector, and the daytime disc, that tans our skin, they are from our planet, perfectly symmetrical.  Now I know, all lot of evolutionists will say that’s quite a qwinky-dink, you know?   It’s amazing.  That’s just amazing.  And I don’t mean to be pejorative or condescending, but I mean, I never heard people in science class point those kinds of things out.  Why?  Because they display knowledge.  See?  That’s just not a coincidence.  I’m just thinking it gets too absolutely unbelievably incredible, it comes to the place where the kind of faith I need to believe those kinds of things were random acts of chaotic chance, debris from an explosion 13.7 billion years ago.  I have trouble saying that I’m ready to put my faith in that.  I’m going you know what?  It seems to reflect the knowledge of the creator, and over and over and over again we see that.  And speaking of Cindy Crawford, think of the human body for just a second.  And I know what we see; we grapple with that, but what we don’t see, how about the 60 trillion cells in your body?  And every single cell has 90 trillion atoms in every cell.  You’ve got 60,000 miles of vessels bringing blood to every extremity of your body.  Every cubic centimeter of your blood in your veins carries about 4.5 million red blood cells, and those are absolutely full of phenomenally intricate and complex kinds of organisms and structures.  The nerve fibers in your body, and I’ve studied these a lot with my daughter’s ailment, they are absolutely an amazing series of communication wires in your body.  And they’re sending messages back and forth at over 200 miles an hour from brain to extremity; extremity back, they are amazing tools that work at amazing efficiency.  How about these eyeballs, you cant not go to Costco and buy a camera with these kinds of lenses, they’re absolutely phenomenal.  These lenses right here could stand on a mountaintop on a moonless night and can look out and can see a match being lit 50 miles away.  They’re amazing.  And yet they can stand out in the full sunlight of the beach and watch our kids frolic in the waves.   They are absolutely amazing things.  There are things that Darwin actually said, and he admitted as he wrote about his own theory, it’s the thing that makes my theory seem absolutely stupid, that’s what he said.  And he’s right, these things are crazy and absurd, they’re amazing, and, according to the Bible, they reflect the glory of the creator.  As David said, Psalm 139 verse 13, you created my innermost being, you knit me together in my mother’s womb, I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  Your works are wonderful, I know that full well, and you can think that some primordial cave dweller who’s just afraid to grapple with modern science, but I say, phooey, that is not what we have.  We have some very intelligent people reflecting on the complexities of life, taking the word of God at face value and having the faith enough to say, it is true and it matches the evidence and we stand on it without apology.  And that’s what we have in scripture.  And unfortunately in our society we don’t have enough of it.  As a matter of fact, we have people trying to make concessions all the time, calling themselves Christians and Bible believers, but they go into work, they stand by the water cooler, and they concede these points like they are dominos, they fall without any trouble.  And I’m saying, what’s wrong with us?  What kind of faith do we have?  Let’s get back to the text, one last time.  Hebrews Chapter 11 verse number 3, one last statement, with this we’ll be done, this one will be fast, I promise.  Look at the last phrase.  By faith we understand the universe was formed at God’s command so that, now underscore this, what is seen, present- tense, what is seen was not made out of what was visible.  Now historically, I know they were fighting Greek philosophy where they were talking about matter somehow being reformed in the modern world.  Ok, but think about this.  Think about our challenge of thinking through the two options that we have in modern society.  Either the fable or myth of creation from the Bible, or the scientific very Intellectual theory of evolution.  Now if I want to merge those two. And kind of stand in the middle with neutrality on this topic, I’m saying this right there knocks me off my crate.  I cannot hold to a position of neutrality with that statement.  So that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.  If I believe that what I currently see… the complexity of our universe, the incredible aspects of our bodies, or that of the structure of the planet.  If I look at all that and say, well that was made out of a13.7 billion year process of phenomenal events, punctuated equilibrium, whatever you want to call it.  If I say that, I cant affirm that, because this says what I now see, was made out of things that you cannot see.  God called them into existence, out of nothing.   That little Latin phrase was what the evangelical, the orthodox Christians been saying for centuries, God creates out of nothing.  And that can not be mitigated with a position that it you call theistic evolution, or progressive creationism.  You can’t do it.  People can try all day long, but I think its an acquiescence because we want to somehow be respected as intellectuals in a society that thinks we’re a bunch of stupid fundamentalists.  I just want to end with this one statement.  Point number 3 on your outline, we just need to rethink our attempts at neutrality.  Just rethink it for just a few minutes.  Let’s just ponder that applicable challenging statement.  This verse, I’m contending, if you take it seriously, you cannot stand in the middle on this.  You cannot go to church and go, I believe God created the heavens and the earth and then stand by the water cooler and discuss the last Discovery Channel special and go, yeah well, that’s right.  Yeah, that’s right, that’s how it all happened.  And then somehow in the darkness of your mind, say well, I just believe that it was God that was kind of pushing this along in doing this thing.  They call it progressive creationism, or they call it some kind of theistic evolution.  And I’m just saying, I don’t get that, I don’t see that.  And merge it with what?  Merge creationism with which theory?  Today’s theory, or 20 years ago, or 50 years ago, or 100 years, or the one that’ll be here in 50 years?  What do we try and merge?   And then I want to ask this question, just to end this whole thing.  Why?  Why are you doing it?  Who are you trying to impress, really, let’s talk about it.  Who are you trying to impress?  Are you trying to have the honor and respect of those guys at work who don’t give a rip about your God, and don’t care about his book that you claim to rest your eternity on?  Are we really trying to be respected in their eyes, is that what its all about?  You really, to put it in the words of the writer of Hebrews, care about what people think about you who are willing to trample the gift of salvation and forgiveness, the blood of Christ, under their feet and say, I don’t really need that?  You want to be well respected in their eyes?  Let me give you a little truth from Christ.  If they hated the master they will hate the student as well.  The servant’s not going to be well liked if they took our King and nailed him to the cross.  And I’m saying to myself, we want to be honorable and intelligent and respected in the minds of the world, and they don’t give a rip about what we’re talking about here.  They don’t care about what we base our life on.  And I’m saying why are we trying to acquiesce to this?   Can we not take the Bible at face value and say, this is what it says?  The evidence does not controvert it.  It seems to be the reasonable response of a God who creates 86 other times, with a word, out of nothing, things that are fully functional, mature.  Can we not live with that?  Do we really need to be middle ground on this?  I’m just saying, I don’t think we should.  Because I’m not trying to impress anybody out there.  I’ve got no interest in what the world thinks of us.  And Jesus warned us, you know, you’re not going to get along out there too well anyway.  They nailed me to a cross.  If it’s true, then we need to grapple with that.  Because here’s the bottom line, I don’t think there’s anybody, if this is true, now again if this is all just pretend, then write all this off and forget I ever said any of this.  But if it’s true, then you and I will stand before our creator one day.  And we will look Jesus in the eye, the agency of all creation, and I don’t think there is one person there that is going to be proud that they acquiesced to man’s theories about our origins of cosmology.  When they look into the eyes of the King of the world and say well, I just you know, kind of thought that whole Grand Canyon speech was pretty impressive, I didn’t believe you.  I think we’re going to look into the eyes of the all-powerful one, and if you want to get a glimpse of what he looks like…Revelation chapter 1.  He’s not gentle Jesus, meek and mild, he is glorified with the glory of heaven, and he will stand there, and there will not be a doubt about his power to create.  And you and I will stand there and go, wow, you can create with a word.  You can save with a word, you condemn with a word, you are the King of the universe.  And I’m thinking to myself, why are we trying to mitigate the simple and plain language of Scripture?  This is what God says.  Do you have the ambitious faith to believe him?  Are you willing to stand on him?  I mean that’s how he starts this, start there.  Before we ever look at examples of living for Christ with great faith, can we just affirm the first verse of the Bible, in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth, very simple.