Kevin DeYoung (0:03)

Hello, I'm Kevin DeYoung, pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, and you are listening to Doctrine Matters. We want this podcast to equip Christians with a better understanding of the rich theology that undergirds our faith. And hopefully along the way we'll be looking at some that have even been misunderstood or maybe threatened in the church's history. We'll point out the biblical evidence, the arguments, and work together to reshape our thinking, be transformed by the renewal of our minds with scripture and reason as we think theologically together. Because, as the title of the podcast tells you, Doctrine Matters.

Unknown Speaker (0:45)

We come this week to the doctrine of creation. This is also a part of theology proper, as systematicians call it. Been talking about the doctrine of God. God as Trinity, God and his attributes, the will and the decrees of God, and now God as Creator. When we think about the creation of the universe, there are three principal questions we can ask. Who, how, why? And of those three questions, the first one is the most foundational, also the most obvious. According to the Bible, God is creator of all things, visible and invisible. The how gets into some of the the questions that relate to the creation days, which I believe to be 24 hour ordinary days, and how God created whether it took a very long time or a week, which is what I think. But we're not going to have time to get into some of those perennial questions. We certainly must affirm the historical Adam. I think there are several different positions on the creation days, so long as one doesn't go the route of theistic evolution. I think there are within the the history of the church and even Reformed theology different ways of viewing it. I'm content with the study paper that my denomination, the pca, put out a number of years ago with a a few different options of how to understand those creation days, even though I gladly affirm seven 24 hour or really six 24 hour creation days in the span of one week, as the Westminster Confession puts it. But what I want to think about here is not the how but those other two questions, the who and the why. Now the who is obvious. In the beginning God created. But let's not move past this too quickly because we cannot overstate the importance that the Bible gives to the revelation of God as Creator. I said earlier with aseity in one sense, that's the first thing we learn about God. In the beginning God we learn of his aseity. He exists apart from everything. He's self existent. He's independent. Yet in the Hebrew Bereshit, bara Elohim in the beginning, then the verb to create. God, God created. We meet him as creator. Our God is the only, is the one through whom all things came into being. The maker of heaven and earth. As we say in the creed, you are the Lord, you alone. You have made the heaven, the heaven of heavens with all their hosts, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You preserve all of them, and the host of heaven worships you. That's From Nehemiah, chapter 9. I am the Lord and there is no other. Isaiah 45:18. When Paul preached to the Gentiles, he emphasized that they should put away their idols. And you remember what he said. Turn to a living God who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. That is one of the distinctions that the prophets and then Paul make constantly. These so called gods of the nations, they are nothing. They live in temples made by human hands. But we worship the one God, the living God who made everything, and he is in need of nothing. So God gives us the answer to one of the most enduring questions. Where did the cosmos come from? Is the universe the result of some freedom, personal agent? Or did the universe somehow create itself? The biblical account teaches creation is distinct from God and at the same time creation is dependent on God. Peter Jones has used these terms, 2 ISM and 1 ISM. It's really easy to remember once you get the distinction. He's saying pagan theology and increasingly so much of our own assumed cultural understanding about The Cosmos is a 1 ism, meaning there is no real creator, creature distinction. There may not even be a creator as a personal agent, but we're all a part of this one thing or the cosmos in some way. Where biblical Christianity is emphatically 2 ism, there is a creator, then there is this chasm, this gulf, this ontological, metaphysical distinction that then we have creation and creators. And the amazing part about Christianity is that we believe that God then sent his Son to live among us in this creation, and that even before that he has always been a God who communicates. Though there is this ontological gap between creator and creation, the Genesis creation account tells a very different story than the kinds of other Near Eastern texts. Sometimes people, Christians will even get nervous and they'll hear in some college Bible class or history class that look at all these other Near Eastern texts. So many they have these other creation stories. And the Bible therefore is put alongside it. It's just another Near Eastern creation myth. But the Bible anchors its Story clearly in history, there's no artificial wedge. There's no sense in moving from chapter three to chapter four of Genesis. Or sometimes people will call Genesis 1:11 sort of primeval history in quotes. And then we get to the real historical stuff with Abraham. But if you've read Genesis, you know that won't work because Genesis 11, the end of it with a short genealogy there goes right into Abram. And there's a connection between all of these names and genealogies from the beginning all the way to Genesis 12. So there's no artificial wedge. You can't say, ah, now we're moving from myth and then we're going to history. The Bible posits all of it as history. Now it might be told in a way that's different than a bare history textbook and there might be exalted language, but it really doesn't even have the structure of typical Hebrew poetry. There's rhythm to it, there's parallelism, but it's, it's not exactly Hebrew poetry. It is given to us in the same way that the, the rest of the story is told. And then this happened. And then this happened. In fact, if you first studied Genesis, you know There are these 10 tola dote sections and these are the generations of, these are sort of knots on the rope along the story of Genesis. You can't take one of those knots and say, well, this is myth, this is primeval, and then this is really history. No, all of this is told in Genesis as God's dealings in the world. And it starts with him creating the world ex nihilo. That means out of nothing. If you look in the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth, for example, Apsu, the God of fresh water, Tiamat, the goddess of salt water, mingled together create other deities. Eventually there's a God named Marduk who vanquishes the army of Tiamat and the world is formed from her carcass. The Bible story is not anything like that. The God of the Bible creates the world by himself without any primordial conflict, without any pre existent material. The visible from the invisible, something out of nothing. Romans 4:17 testifies that God gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hebrews 11 by faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. Well, it's true that God created the world by giving shape and order to the formless chaos. Tohu wabohu, formless and void. We must remember that even this material so called was the result of God's personal creative agency. The nothingness of creation ex nihilo was an absolute nothingness. In some strands of Greek thought, there was a nothingness that could be conceived of as a positive nothingness, as something that might limit divine activity. The Bible does not understand ex nihilo in those terms. The nothingness before creation was a negative nothingness. It was a space so called, without any characteristic, without any quality that would become an obstacle for God's work. There were no rivals to God in creation, no obstacles to overcome, not even the nothingness that was not an obstacle. God spoke and there was light. Such is the power of His Word. Now, why so we've been talking about the who, which is critically important. The who God created the heavens and the earth. The how in the span of six days, creation days variously understood. But I would understand that the the word Yom there. There are no indicators that yom in the rest of the Old Testament should be taken in a different way other than a. A day, a miraculous provision of light before the sun is created. So this is a supernatural work for sure. But morning and evening tell us we are in the. The realm of days as we understand them. In fact, the, the refrain in Genesis of days and months and seasons is another indicator that we're. We're not talking about ages and epochs, but we're talking about days as we understand days and understand seasons and months and rhythms of the calendar. But I want to finish by thinking about the why. Famously, Jonathan Edwards wrote a treatise, the End for which God created the world. And he says, divine glory is the end for which God created the world. This is the biblical idea. The psalmist says, let all the earth fear the Lord. Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. For he spoke and it came to be. He commanded and it stood firm. Psalm 33. Likewise, Psalm 148 calls on the heavens and the heights, the Lord's angels and his hosts, the sun and moon and shining stars, the highest heavens, the waters above the heavens, to praise the name of the Lord. Why? For he commanded and they were created, and he established them forever and ever. He gave a decree, and it shall not pass away. In other words, God made us and created the heavens and the earth for his glory. Creation is the overflow. It is God's decision to go public with his glory. It is the superabundance of divine goodness, beauty, mercy, love, wisdom, power, sovereignty, sufficiency, self existence, justice, holiness, faithfulness, freedom, here's how Edwards puts as there is an infinite fulness of all possible good in God, a fulness of every perfection, of all excellency and beauty, and of infinite happiness. And as this fulness is capable of communication or emanation, add extra so it seems a thing, amiable and valuable in itself, that this infinite fountain of good should send forth abundant streams. Thus it appears reasonable to suppose that it was God's last end, that there might be a glorious and abundant emanation of his infinite fullness of good ad extra and that the disposition to communicate Himself or diffuse his own fullness was what moved him to create the world. So Edwards is why did God create the world? Well, there are many proximate reasons. But the chief end that is the last, the ultimate end, is that he was disposed to communicate Himself, to reveal his own fullness, to show his own glory, to go public from the microscopic level to the cosmic level. To think about that, Science estimates there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on Earth. The Milky Way has 150 billion to 200 billion stars, and our galaxy is only one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. Depending on which estimate you follow, there are more than 100 billion trillion stars. I mean, those numbers hardly even make sense to us. We could just be saying anything. But think of a number one followed by 23 zeros. That's the number of stars in the universe. It defies human comprehension. And yet Psalm 147:4 says he determines that is the Lord, the number of the stars. Not only that, he gives to all of them their names. There's no Christianity without the doctrine of creation. That's why they sing around the throne now and will forever worthy Are you our Lord and God to receive glory and honor and power for you created all things and by your will they existed and were created.