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发帖数: 152 | 1 2. (1) A simple factual statement regarding God work as creator.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
a. God created: This summary statement will be detailed in the following
verses, but the Bible simply and straightforwardly declares the world did
not create itself or come about by chance. It was created by God, who, by
definition, is eternal and has always been.
i. “It is no accident that God is the subject of the first sentence
of the Bible, for this word dominates the whole chapter and catches the eye
at every point of the page: it is used some thirty-five times in as many
verses of the story.” (Kidner)
ii. If you believe Genesis 1:1, you really have no problem believing
the rest of the Bible.
b. God: This is the ancient Hebrew word Elohim. Grammatically it is a
plural word used as if it were singular. The verbs and pronouns used with
Elohim should be in the plural, but when Elohim refers to the LORD God the
verbs and pronouns are in the singular.
i. Rabbi Simeon ben Joachi, commenting on the word Elohim: “Come
and see the mystery of the word Elohim; there are three degrees, and each
degree by itself alone, and yet notwithstanding they are all one, and joined
together in one, and are not divided from each other.” Clarke adds: “He
must be strangely prejudiced indeed who cannot see that the doctrine of a
Trinity, and of a Trinity in unity, is expressed in the above words.”
ii. Leupold quoting Luther on Elohim: “But we have clear testimony
that Moses aimed to indicate the Trinity or the three persons in the one
divine nature.”
c. God created the heavens: The simple fact of God’s creation is even
more amazing when we consider the greatness of God’s universe.
i. A typical galaxy contains billions of individual stars; our
galaxy alone (the Milky Way) contains 200 billion stars. Our galaxy is
shaped like a giant spiral, rotating in space, with arms reaching out like a
pinwheel, and our sun is one star on one arm of the pinwheel. It would take
250 million years for the pinwheel to make one full rotation. But this is
only our galaxy; there are many other galaxies with many other shapes,
including spirals, spherical clusters, and flat pancakes. The average
distance between one galaxy and another is about 20 million trillion miles.
Our closest galaxy is the Andromeda Galaxy, about 12 million trillion miles
away.
ii. For every patch of sky the size of the moon, if you could look
very deep, you would see about a million galaxies.
iii. But God did all this Himself: “Indeed My hand has laid the foundation
of the earth, and My right hand has stretched out the heavens; when I call
to them, they stand up together.” (Isaiah 48:13)
iv. But God is bigger and greater than all His creation: Who has
measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, measured heaven with a span
and calculated the dust of the earth in a measure? (Isaiah 40:12)
d. God created the heavens and the earth: If God created the heavens and
the earth, then we must forever put away the idea that anything happens by
chance. “Chance” merely describes the statistical probability of something
happening. Chance itself can “do” nothing.
i. People who are otherwise intelligent often fall into this
delusion. Jacques Monod, a biochemist, wrote: “Chance alone is at the
source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance,
absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of
evolution.”
ii. But assigning such power to “chance” is crazy. Chance has no
power. For example, when a coin is flipped, the chance it will land “heads
” is 50%; however, “chance” does not make it land heads. Whether or not
it lands heads or tails is due to the strength with which the coin is
flipped, the strength of air currents and air pressure as it flies through
the air, where it is caught, and if it is flipped over once it is caught.
Chance doesn’t “do” anything but describe a probability.
iii. When Carl Sagan petitioned the federal government for a grant
to search for intelligent life in outer space, how did he hope to find it?
By using a super sensitive instrument to pick up radio signals from distant
space. When he received those radio signals, he looked for order and pattern
, which would demonstrate the signals were transmitted by intelligent life.
In the same way, the order and pattern of the whole universe demonstrates
that it was fashioned by intelligent life, not by “chance.” Scientists
detect “chance” in the radio signals constantly (in the form of
unpatterned static), but it tells them nothing.
iv. Therefore, when someone says the universe or anything else came
about by chance, they are extremely ignorant, superstitious, or just
repeating a line they have heard before and have unthinkingly accepted. |
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