Sermon Tone Analysis

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

[1]

Carl Sagan popularised the saying, “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”

The statement was the opening affirmation of Cosmos, the television series Sagan hosted.

This has become a statement of faith for those who have chosen to deny a Creator to Whom man is accountable.

From earliest days of human history people have attempted to account for how the things that are came into being; this was the statement acceptable to agnostics and atheists.

Sagan, whether he was able to admit it or not, deified the cosmos, just as multiplied cultures have done since the days immediately following the fall of our first parents.

Ultimately, there is but one explanation that has ever been advanced to account for the universe—great powers and/or beings have brought all that is into existence.

Interest in the subject of origins waxes and wanes, but never quite fades into the background.

Whether dressed up in language that is sold as scientific, cloaked in mythological terms or stated in the straight forward language of the Pentateuch, all accounts of origins finally appeal to a Creator.

The Hindus have several creation myths.

In the Rigveda, Purusha, the primeval cosmic being is described as “that that has ever existed and will ever exist.”

The “mundane egg” was born from Purusha, though it is not said how this was accomplished.

The gods then performed a sacrifice with the Purusha to create all that is in the manifested world from his various body parts and his mind.

[2]

In another of the Hindu myths, there existed a golden egg before anything was.

Brahma emerged from the egg and created the world.

[3] Robert Graves has given us a form of this myth, telling how the Pelasgians (Bronze Age Greeks), imagined that the supreme creatrix, Eurynome—goddess of all things—rose naked from Chaos to part sea from sky so that she could dance upon the waves.

She caught the north wind at her back, and rubbing it between her hands, she warmed the pneuma and spontaneously generated the serpent Ophion.

Ophion mated with her; and then, in the form of a dove upon the waves she laid the Cosmic Egg and commanded Ophion to incubate it by coiling seven times around it until it split in two and hatched all things that exist—sun, moon, planets, stars, the earth with its mountains and rivers, its trees, herbs and living creatures.

[4]

One of the Egyptian creation myths taught that eight gods representing the primeval waters came together and made all things.

These gods were divided into male and female groups, the males represented as frogs and the females as snakes.

These two groups eventually converged to produce the pyramidal mount; and from that mound emerged the sun, which rose into the sky to light the world.

[5]

Modern minds will not appeal to gods, choosing rather to deify unseen forces of nature.

In this, the modern mind is not unlike the Greek and Roman mind.

During the past several decades, science, and in particular the science of astrophysics has undergone what can only be described as a revolution.

Since soon after publication of Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” people have rejected the idea of creation.

They ascribed to the concepts of “time” and “chance” mythic power to create.

Though not necessarily stated in bold terms, it was assumed that this mythological concept would permit mankind to live without fear of accountability to the Creator.

For generations the prevailing view of the universe had been what was described as the Steady State Theory.

This view presented the concept that the universe has always been and will ever be.

In this view, the universe is thought to be ungenerated and indestructible, hence Sagan’s religious assertion.

The Steady State view was blatantly materialistic and atheistic, having no place for a Creator, even though it did deify time and chance.

More recently, this view has been forced into retirement by the theory that the universe actually had an instance of creation.

In this newer view, the universe came into existence somewhere between fifteen and twenty billion years ago in a gigantic fireball explosion that sent suns and planets tumbling outward from a centre into the form we now observe.

Furthermore, in this more recent view, the components of the universe are still moving outward.

This new theory is called the Big Bang Theory in reference to the instance of creation.

The change in modern scientific thought is rooted in a discovery reported in 1913.

Vesto Melvin Slipher, an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, reported stars appeared to be receding from the earth at tremendous speeds—up to two million miles per hour.

The foundation for this report was the result of study of the shifting light spectrum of distant stars in galaxies far removed from our own.

Six years later, in 1919, another American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, used Slipher's findings to formulate a law for an expanding universe.

Hubble’s law pointed to a moment of creation.

In the meantime, Albert Einstein's theories of relativity were shaking Newtonian physics.

Simultaneously, two Bell Telephone Laboratory scientists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were using new and sophisticated electronic equipment to pick up background radiation from all parts of the universe, which they now identified as the leftover "noise" of that first great explosion.

Growing out of this view is the knowledge that if there was an instance of creation there may well have been a Creator.

Robert Jastrow, Director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute in the United States, states the issue quite strongly in the book, “God and the Astronomers.”

Jastrow wrote, “There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe.

Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event… This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover… At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation.

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream.

He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

[6]

Certainly there are still many problems with this currently popular view of origins.

Current scientific opinion puts the origin of the universe at a point approaching twenty billion years before the present, which Bible-believing Christians tend to find unacceptable, viewing such chronology as fictitious, driven more by a desire to depose the Creator than to understand origins.

The Big Bang Theory tells us nothing concerning the event; neither does it inform us Who may have caused the explosion.

Moreover, this speculation fails to throw light on why the universe has such astonishing complexity and order, just as it fails to enlighten us concerning life’s origin or of many other aspects of our existence.

The conceptualisation is nevertheless exciting to Christians because it does lend hope that scientists are finally moving toward what the theologian has always known.

That brings us to the central question for this study—what does the Bible say concerning our origin?

Ultimately when speaking of origins we are constrained to rely upon either of two disparate views.

One view attempts to extrapolate backwards based on a hypothesis of uniformitarianism—a view which states that nothing changes and everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.

The other view depends upon an observer, the Creator, who related what occurred at the creation.

We who are Christians rely upon the latter because God has told us in His Word what happened in the beginning.

*CHRISTIAN ROOTS* —In the process of working through these initial chapters of the first book of the Bible, we will discover why the book should be of such great value to believers and why it has become a battleground in contending against the forces of infidelity.

We will discover our roots in the Book and such a study will prove of inestimable value to each Christian.

Genesis must not be view as some form of proof or disproof of the Bible, though it is accurate in all that is presented in the Book; the book is, as has been said, the seed plot of the Bible.

Genesis takes us back to the beginning, defining who we are and defining our place in nature and before God.

This is a lesson that we need to remember, especially in this day late in the Age of Grace.

Knowing our roots is important to people of this generation.

Perhaps that is because in earlier generations we possessed a sense of history.

We knew something of our family history and we had a sense of national history.

More importantly, we shared an understanding of the history of mankind.

We had a common foundation based on the Bible which had guided us as a people.

Whether we were Christian or not, we knew the biblical account.

Things began to change with the publication of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species.”

Darwin challenged the idea of God as Creator by appealing to a new god which he designed “Natural Selection.”

According to this new view, animals could change in such a manner to confer an advantage in competition with other species.

Time and change, operating blindly on the constantly adapting creatures within nature could account for the diversity of animal life observed.

Other individuals recognised that through applying this same concept they could account for the origin of government and other human institutions, the origin of religion and the origin of every other social and cultural interaction.

This novel scheme of accounting for all things was imposed on even the origin of non-living things such as the earth itself, and ultimately, the even the universe.

The doctrine of uniformitarianism grew out of this evolutionary scheme and man at last accepted as reality Peter’s denunciation of the thought that “all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation” [2 PETER 3:4b].

In the centuries since the first European settlers arrived in the New World until this day, those arriving generally held this identical sense of history.

Whether they were Christian or not, they knew more immediately where they had come from and they possessed optimism about the future.

They sought to carve out a nation wherein they would enjoy freedom, building hope for future generations.

However, that sense of history appears to have faded for this present generation.

The emphasis in modern life appears to be on now.

In fact, present generations are referred to as “the now generation.”

The concept of the now generation includes Baby Boomers (the first of the now generation) and continues through Generation X, the Millennials to Generation Z.

During the past five decades, western society has adopted the philosophy that emphasises the need to “forget about the past” and focus on the present.

Advertisers tell us “You only go around once.” Whether we recognise the genesis of this prevailing view of life or whether we are unaware of how it came to be, those holding this view are adopting the Darwinian view of life.

People who have no history are incapable of anticipating a future.

If the history of mankind is a fiction of growing out of some primordial soup, it should be no surprise that mankind has no possibility of anticipating a future.

R. C. Sproul, founder of the Ligonier Valley Study Center in Pennsylvania, has analysed the value of a study of our roots in terms of secularism, which means “living within the bounds of this age” (from the Latin saeculum, meaning age).

Secularism is to live with our outlook confined to this present period alone—without a past, without a future, and above all without God.

Modern thinkers have sold contemporaries on the idea that our roots are in nothingness and that our future is in nothingness; thus Sproul asks, “Think, man, if your origins are in nothing and your destiny is in nothing, how can you possibly have any dignity now?”

This is the logical deduction: if we have no roots in the divine, if it is true that we are but grown-up germs, then it makes no difference whether we are black germs or white germs.

It is immaterial whether we are free germs or enslaved germs.

Unless the dignity of man is rooted in something that has intrinsic value, all our arguments and pleas for human rights and human dignity are meaningless.

If all we have is the present, there is no dignity, only nothingness.

Without the teachings of the Book, life is meaningless; and that is precisely the condition of modern philosophies.

If the Bible is in error in these first chapters, then major portions of what follow are meaningless.

If there was no fall, there is no need for redemption.

If there is no need for redemption, there is no need for a Saviour.

If there is no need for a Saviour, how do we know there is a God?

The entire story becomes at best a myth.