Bible Study Snippet Genesis 1:1&2 – Old Testament Lesson 1
Let’s look at the marvelous truths taught in just the first and second verses in the Bible. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
These first few verses refute the doctrine of atheism. The atheist says, “There is no God,” but the first verse in the Bible say that God does exist. It certainly refutes the doctrine of materialism. Materialism says that the Earth always existed, but the very first verse in the Bible says, “In the beginning.” There was a beginning.
It refutes the doctrine of evolution which says that all things came about in accidental processes, but the first verse in the Bible says that in the beginning, God created all things.
Then, I think it refutes the doctrine of polytheism that says there are many Gods. The Bible says that in the beginning, one God, Jehovah God, created the heavens and the earth.
It also refutes the doctrine of pantheism, which says that all is God and God is all. The Bible says that God is apart from creation. He’s related to it, but He’s apart from His creation. So, in just the first verse in the Bible, you have multiple false doctrines refuted.
We also see in the first verse, the word heaven is in the plural. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and Earth.” There are three heavens.
- The first heaven is the home of the birds and the clouds.
- The second heaven is outer space with the sun, moon, and stars.
- The third Heaven, apparently, is the present abode of God and the Holy Angels, because in II Corinthians, Paul speaks about being caught up into the third Heaven.
With these verses comes the other question, how old is creation? Is this world, the Earth itself, and the universe 15 billion years old? There is a lot of recent evidence that would strongly suggest this is not the case at all, and in our lesson notes we give a number of reasons for saying that.
I’m always amazed and staggered, and my imagination is fired up as I look at some of the statistical figures about creation.
For example, how vast or how big is our universe? Well, it’s so big that it takes a beam of light that travels at a rate of 186,000 miles a second only 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach planet Earth from the Sun. Now, that’s pretty fast. At 186,000 miles a second, that means that a beam of light can travel around this Earth seven times in one second.
Think about that — 186,000 miles a second. Do you know there are galaxies and stars out in the universe that we have spotted with our powerful telescopes that may be as many as 20 billion light years from planet Earth?
That means it takes a beam of light traveling at the rate of 186,000 miles a second, 20 billion years to reach planet Earth — incredible.
We have a couple of illustrations on that. I like the paper stack model. You’ll find this in your notes. Let us say that the thickness of a sheet of paper represents the distance from
the Earth to the sun, which is some 93 million miles. To represent the distance to the nearest star besides our sun, we would need a stack of paper 71 feet high. To cover the diameter of our Milky Way Galaxy, it would require a stack 300 miles high. To reach the edge of the known universe, with the thickness of each sheet representing 93 million miles, it would demand a pile of paper sheets 31 million miles high. How great thou art!
It’s not only the bigness of the universe, but the smallness of the universe and how much power exists in the protons, electrons, and the neutrons. For example, German physicist Otto Gail has calculated that just a single drop of gasoline if totally utilized in an automobile—including all the atoms and everything in it — would be sufficient for 400 journeys around the world. That’s a trip involving 10 million miles. You talk about gas economy. That’s incredible.
Of course, the key thing is how complex our universe is. We’ll discuss this later in other lessons, but could life come about accidentally? The answer is never in a trillion years. There are certain things, mathematically, that could not happen, and one is that life came about accidentally.
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