The Life of Faith 1 

Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill

Loved ones, for about 12 years now I’ve tried to talk about the spiritual life on Sunday evenings and if God wants us to continue this, I would like to start expounding the Bible chapter-by-chapter from Genesis in connection with the life of faith, which I think is just another name for the spiritual life.  So I’d like to start this evening with Genesis and if we went every Sunday, which I don’t think we’ll be able to do, but if we went every Sunday, then in 25 years’ time we’ll have finished the Bible!  And don’t laugh too broadly because some in the audience were 16 when we started Romans about 15 years ago.

Let’s trust God to give us grace, and you pray for me that I might get life and wisdom from him and then perhaps we will be deeper in this dear book and we will be living more lives of restful faith.  So we’ll start loved ones, with Genesis 1. The book was written by Moses, and Jesus himself indicated that and that’s the primary reason we believe it.   Moses wrote words like that [indicating words written on a projector screen].  He wrote in Hebrew and that is known as the classical Hebrew and it goes from right to left: and God said, let there be an expanse between the waters.”

So that’s the way the Hebrew went that Moses wrote, and from time-to-time I’ll try to show you what the Hebrew means where it helps us, but that’s what it looked like.  We have changed it from left to right (which is much easier to read!) and turned it into English.  So loved ones, let’s look right at the start in verse 1, “In the beginning” and there is no date; I think it’s important for us to see that this chapter is concerned with the generations of the heavens and the earth.  The rest of Genesis -- Genesis means beginning or generation -- is concerned with the generation of the chosen family, the family that God tried to teach to live by faith after all mankind had rejected faith in him.

But this chapter is concerned with the generation of the heavens and the earth and there really is no date.  We need to remember that in all the discussions about evolution and creation that this book is concerned with summarizing for us the relationship between God and his world.  It’s not unscientific, it’s rather non-scientific and that’s no excuse, then, for taking it as just a parable because Jesus himself did not treat it as just a parable.  The Bible usually indicates how it means to be taken and for instance Revelation indicates this is a parable.  John says, “I saw in a vision,” but Genesis is written as history and indicates that it’s to be taken as history.

So it is history, but we need to remember that it is pre-scientific history and it is amazing that God gave us an account here in just a few verses that all men, and all women, and even all little children can understand.  So he is not concerned with scientific detail and yet it seems, if you read an article in the New York Times about three or four weeks ago, that certainly it does not contradict science.  That article ended with the conclusion that scientists, with their arguments about the big bang theory and all their other theories falling into disrepute, scientists have slowly edged up a huge mountain over years, and years, and years and they’ve now at last got their noses over the top and there they found the theologians sitting! God started it all and they’re all coming to that kind of a conclusion too.

So we need to see that Genesis 1 is not unscientific but it is pre-scientific and in a sense non-scientific in that it is not concerned so much with how, as with why God created it.  Nevertheless loved ones, it does say, “In the beginning God created,” it doesn’t say, “God had to create.”  That is it doesn’t say God had to create in order to satisfy himself.  God didn’t have to create -- he created out of love.  It also doesn’t say “In the beginning God expanded himself into the universe,” as the pantheist say, so that the universe, as you find in the Middle Eastern religions, is just an extension of God and therefore of course can’t be studied at all.

But you remember [Francis] Schaffer’s emphasis that it was the fact that God created a separate thing over and away from himself that enables us to study it.  And that’s why belief in Genesis 1 is necessary for the whole scientific progress that we have had in our time:  “In the beginning God created” but when in the beginning?

Well loved ones, here’s the way some people have fiddled about with the lack of a date and really I think it’s just safer to leave it as the Bible does -- without date.  But many have traced back to 2000 BC -- the life of Abraham.  And most ancient and modern critics agree upon that date.  But then back there towards creation is virtually an unknown prehistoric time.  If you track through directly from the scriptural narrative, you get to 2300 years which would take you back  to Bishop Ushers date of 4004 BC for the creation, except that even we have realized, purely on scriptural studies, that there are huge gaps in the genealogies. 

And so the Creation Research Society tries to allow for those gaps.  That itself is a problem because you have to decide when it says, “So and so begot so and so,” was that so and so just a head of a family, or the head of a whole tribe, or the head of a generation?  And so it’s guess work even in there.  But the Creation Research Society will say, “Well there’s another 6000 years somewhere in there.”  So they’ll knock it back to 10000 BC and indeed on purely scientific grounds they will argue that there’s no contradiction between that and some of the so-called evidence of great age that you find in the fossil record.  Because they’ll say of course, “Did God create a baby earth or a mature earth?  Did God create pterodactyls that had an appearance of age, or did he create a baby pterodactyl somehow that had to grow old?”  So the Creation Research Society will say that even 10000 BC leaves enough room for that.

I think frankly, brothers and sisters, it’s far better to stay with the scripture itself and to see that the Bible was not concerned with going through “And Adam begat Seth, and Seth begat so and so, and so and so begat,” and not missing one until it comes to “And so and so begat Rick Severs or so and so begat Scott Columb.”  Then we could all say, “There it is -- there’s the proof: it’s a full record.”  It would be one of those signs that Jesus said we were always seeking.  And so the Bible wouldn’t do that.

The Bible wants to indicate that it is giving history but it wants to indicate it in a way that leaves us open to finally deciding whether God is or not on the basis of rational evidence settled by our will and our readiness to submit to him.  So I do submit to you that it is better to stay with scripture and to say, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” 

Now do you see the little footnote at the bottom, “When God began to create.”  The Hebrew, some scholars think, would allow you to do that.  In actual fact it isn’t the best translation -- most of the Hebrew scholars say so.  Because it opens the way to that eternity of matter; “When God began to create the heavens and earth, the earth was without form and void.”  As if there was formless, voidless matter there and God then happened upon it, and then formed it into something.  Well in fact the Hebrew word “bara” does not just mean formed, but made. 

Created, the theologians say, “Ex Nihilo” -- created out of nothing.  God came to nothingness and in the beginning he created the heaven and the earth.  And at the beginning the earth was without form and void.  The Hebrew words don’t mean that it was a deteriorated chaos.  That’s the weakness with some of that idea that some people have that God created the heaven and the earth, then it fell into chaos and then he kind of recovered it again through mankind.  But in fact it simply means at the beginning God made the heaven and the earth and he made it, as it were, in stages, if you can believe that; though we have to see that that is God just putting it in our terminology to help us to understand it.  Presumably it was all done in one great moment in God’s own mind and time.  “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God” even the Holy Spirit was involved in the creation, you remember, “the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” 

Now the very first thing that God did was to divide light and darkness and you see that in Verse 3-5, “And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.  And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.  And there was evening and there was morning, one day.”  How could there be evening and morning one day when the sun wasn’t created until the fourth day? 

Obviously God knew that when he prompted Moses to say that -- and Moses was not as dumb as we would like to believe him -- he knew that too.  Obviously what God did was create cosmic light and presumably had it, if you can sense it, in some part of the universe so that even if the earth was spinning at a slower pace than it is now because the other solar systems weren’t created, yet the light was governed in such a way that as the earth came around there was night and day.  And we have to assume that since the same words are used right through the account; evening and morning, night and day. 

That’s one of the difficulties -- it doesn’t make it impossible -- to say the days were huge spans of years; it is possible still to say that.  It’s not the most likely translation from the Hebrew point of view.  The Hebrew word for day is “Yom” and it’s the ordinary word for day and it normally means a 24 hour day.  Now the Hebrew does use day; “We have never seen it in our day,” or, “This is a difficult day in which we are living.”  But here the indication is that day is not used metaphorically because it mentions morning and evening which tends to suggest that it’s an ordinary day.

It isn’t fool proof but from a Hebrew scholar’s point of view, it’s more likely that that’s the case.  So light and darkness first loved ones; God divided light from darkness.  Then in Verse 6 it seems he divided air from water.  It seems that what the Father had then was the earth, and then light and darkness in the universe, and then great masses of water and water vapor.  And God separated the air with the hydrogen, and the oxygen, and all that’s in it and the water, and separated the air from the water, and separated the water that was under what is called the firmament from the water that was above the firmament and that’s in Verse 6, “And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament,’” and it’s actually that word “raqiya”, it’s a great expanse, “Let there be “an expanse” in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’”

I suppose in a sense because God left some of the water on the earth itself, and then he put a huge expanse, that is here referred to as the heavens, and obviously not heaven where God lives, but the heavens or the atmosphere, and separated that from all the other water vapor in the rest of space, “And let it separate the waters from the waters.  And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.  And it was so.  And God called the firmament Heaven.  And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.”

So the first day divided light from darkness.  Second day divided air from water.  And then the third day, you can see a beautiful logic in the whole thing, the third day came down to where the waters were that were under the firmament or under the atmosphere; the waters that were on the earth, and separated those waters from the dry land.  And you see it there in Verse 9, “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’  And it was so.  God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas.  And God saw that it was good.” 

And so you get three great acts of division:  you get the light and the darkness divided, you get the air and the water divided, and then you get the water divided from the dry land; the sea and the land.  And then the beautiful thing is God goes right back as it were to the beginning and starts back at the light and the darkness and he then begins to people that with creation.  It begins at Verse 14, “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth.’  And it was so.  And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also.  And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness.  And God saw that it was good.  And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.” 

And that was presumably the first day that occurred because of the light from the sun upon the earth.  And there is of course, a further indication that the original light did not come from the sun itself because the Hebrew means “And let there be light bearers in the universe.”  So God obviously knew that there was cosmic light already created on the first day when he separated light from darkness and then in the fourth day he put actual stars and planets in the space that would be able to reflect these lights or to pass them on to other bodies.  And so the stars or the sun did not really originate light. 

So, I don’t know how many of you are faced with the old argument, “Oh, how could there be day and night before there was a sun?”  Well obviously there can be, because God created cosmic light on the first day.  It might be good too to look to the next act, you remember the first one was light and darkness and then he put stars and planets to reflect the light and to rule over the darkness, the moon at night.  And then he divided the waters from the air and so the next thing is he peoples the water and the air.

Look at Verse 20, “And God said, ‘Let the waters bring froth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens.’  So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the water swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.  And God saw that it was good.  And God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.’  And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.”

When you think of the complicated scientific explanations of how the world was created you realize that a child is lost in them and a very intelligent man or woman is lost in them, but there’s a beauty about the simplicity of this that still comes home to you as true and that you feel, finally, the scientists will come back to and will see, “Yes, this is the way it was: light and darkness first, and then the air and the water, and then the land and the sea, and then back to the planets and stars that ruled over light and darkness, and then to the fish in the sea and the birds in the air.”  And then of course finally to the land, in Verse 24, “And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.’  And it was so.  And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and cattle according to their kinds, and everything that creeps upon the ground according to its kind.  And God saw that it was good.”

So in a way loved ones, if you want to keep it clear in your own mind you see that first there is light and darkness and that’s really the first day.  Then you get through to the fourth day and you get the stars, and the planets, and the sun, and the moon.  And then you get secondly the air and the water, and then on that fifth day you get the birds and the fish.  And then thirdly, you get the sea and the dry land, and you get the creation of the animals on the dry land and then coming to the crown of creation -- the man who ruled over the dry land.

Now loved ones, there is one piece that might be of interest to you that does tend to suggest that evolution within the species might be possible, but perhaps the Bible pushes against the idea of evolution across the species and that’s in verse 11, “And God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, upon the earth.’  And it was so.  The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind.”  And you get the same word “kind” involved in the animals in Verse 24, “And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.’” 

There may be an argument as to whether you can make “kinds” synonymous with species but certainly there’s the suggestion there that God made each type of species separately.  And though you might get variations in moths according to their environment, yet it’s doubtful if evolution across those species is possible.  Of course, that’s the whole purpose of the missing link; there seems to be a huge missing link between the species of apes and the species of man.  So there seems some indication in scripture that though God certainly allowed and built into creation some evolution, yet the evolution that is urged that is a result of time plus chance starting from one single cell ameba and working right through to us complicated creatures was not the way God did it in Genesis 1.

Now if you say to me, “Well brother, do you think that it’s really impossible?”  Oh loved ones, I don’t think the whole faith depends on arguing against a single cell ameba.  It seems to me if God chose to do it that way there’s no reason why he couldn’t do it that way and there’s no reason why he did not program into the single cell ameba all the evolutionary process.  It’s just that finally, you have to accept that there was order and intelligence and planning behind it.  But it would seem from just a simple reading of Genesis 1 that evolution is not the explanation of how things came about but that things came about as outlined here in Genesis.

Now, if you would say, “What do you do about the arguments that scientists will have with this account?”  Loved ones, you say to them what they would say to themselves, “Well, that’s your account today but what will be your account next year, or your account the following year?”  And they of course will just have to bow down and say, “Well you’re right -- we’ve kept changing our theories on the basis of new evidence and we agree that we have put ourselves forward as the scientific know alls and we must admit that we can’t even yet decide whether light is particles or rays and many of our hypothesis are being blown apart as just hypothesis, just present working theories.” 

So it does seem loved ones, that there is ground for a humble attitude in regard to creation, but yet not a know nothing attitude, but ready to explain it as it’s outlined here in Genesis and yet not going to bat to be more scriptural than the scriptures.  You remember how Cecil B. DeMille was more scriptural than the scriptures when he burned the 10 Commandments into the stone.  Well, don’t find yourself more scriptural than the scriptures; you always get into trouble when you do that.  Don’t argue about dates because frankly, God was so good; he kept us clear of all dates here.  The Creation Research Society can get themselves into 10000 BC and have to argue the age of pterodactyls and the fossil evidence.  We don’t need to because the Bible mentions no date it simply says, “In the beginning God.”

So that brings us loved ones, to verse 25 and then it’s probably good for us to see that at the end of Genesis 1 is mentioned the creation of man.  But it’s mentioned just briefly because of course, the purpose of Genesis 1 is – well, you see that in the RSV it is indicated because the paragraphs give rather better the sequence of the narrative than do our chapters, you see that Genesis 1 really spills over into Genesis 2:4, because it’s a kind of summary there in Genesis 2:4, “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.”  Now that’s the content of Genesis 1, it’s just with whichever guy divided them into chapters, he obviously stopped it there and probably  Chapter 2 should begin in that paragraph, “In the day that the Lord Good made the earth and the heavens,” because up to the end of Genesis 2:4, this is primarily the generation of the heavens and the earth with, at the end, the account of man in his relationship to the earth and the heavens.

Then in Genesis 2 it deals with man in his relationship to God and relates his fall and reaction against God.  It’s important to see that because if you were like me who went to liberal seminary or absorbed a lot of liberal theology, we used to argue, “There are two accounts of man’s creation so you see, that proves that actually this is just a few different bits and pieces sewn together by different men.”  Well in actual fact the account in Genesis 1 has a specific purpose; to show man in his creation in his relationship to the world of nature and the universe that God had made.  Genesis 2 goes on to man and his relationship to God and his reaction against God.

So you see in verse 26 then, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’”  That was our purpose loved ones; to have dominion.  It is important in these days that we don’t lose sight of that and that  you and I were created -- not to be overcome by flat tires, not to be overcome by financial difficulties in a recession, not to be overwhelmed by an increasingly chaotic world -- but we have been put here to have dominion over those things.  And that doesn’t mean the exploiting dominion that we have often been so continually accused of as private enterprisers, and maybe justifiably so. 

Maybe too often we have rushed into a country and exploited the people of that country and the country itself and we have said, “We’re subduing the earth.” “We’re having dominion over it.”  Maybe too often it has been so-called religious people that have gone in and drilled the oil wells any old place, or carried on the strip-mining and destroyed nature.  But that isn’t the sense in which we’re to have dominion over the world; but rather to develop the world in a way that will glorify God and that will bring peace to its inhabitants.  But we are meant nevertheless, to have dominion over it. 

I don’t know how many of you have been to India, but one of the dreadful plagues that grips you when you’re in India, is the dreadful sense that people have that the way things are going is set by fate and you can’t fight it.  And the sacred cows that you cannot even move off the sidewalk are almost an indication of that:  “God is synonymous with creation and whichever way his creation is going all you can do is bow down and let it go.”  So there is a dreadful passivity in India and a dreadful sense of fatalism and actually in people a paralyzing sense of inadequacy; an inability to do anything.  And so loved ones, it’s interesting that where people have not received the royal commission that God has given to mankind through his word here, where they have not received that, they have in turn been overcome by the evil spirits and the elemental spirits of the universe.  And so you find in so many nations that people are spending all their time placating the evil spirits -- trying to hold them off from destroying us -- and barely managing to do that, and ending up more and more under the heap of overwhelming confusion. 

So it’s not just “American” to get things in order!  One of the blessings that God brought to us in America was a sense that we are meant to have dominion over the fish of the sea.  Now some of us have difficulty catching Northerns and Walleyes, but we are meant to have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the land itself.  And if I could encourage you in your own jobs and in your own homes and your own room, and even in your own finances, and your own cars: they are meant to be in order.  They are.  We’re meant to have things in order.

Now I agree with anyone here who says, “Oh, my dad -- that’s all he thought about -- he had everything in order.”  I know you’re not supposed to have every blade on the lawn standing up to attention every time the national anthem is played but it does seem that God intends us to be here to bring order to the world and so we need to see that in our own lives.  We need to see that in the sense that where there is encroaching disorder either in our jobs, or our businesses, or our homes, or our private lives -- to that extent we are cutting ourselves off from God, and to that extent we are aligning ourselves with the elemental spirits of the universe that are out to bring chaos in our world.  And to that extent of course, we are failing to be able to call upon God for his infinite resources.

The Father’s life is available to you and to me for bringing things into order.  And so verse 26 then, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”  And then verse 27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”  We’ll talk more about what it means to be created in the image of God when we deal with it in detail in chapter 2, but certainly it does mean at least that we are like God in that we have some of his qualities; we have minds  and emotions and spirits and  he did create us male and female.

I don’t know how many ladies here have suffered under the utterly unfair and unjust and, it seems to me, egotistical attitude that men have so often had to women.  It’s not justified by God’s word at all. God made us in his image by making us male and female.  Every husband and wife here, every boy and girlfriend, every brother and sister here are precious because together they express the image of God.  It’s pretty interesting that it isn’t, “God made us in his image male he created us.”  It isn’t.  It’s, “He made us in his image and male and female he created us.”  And it’s in that combination of male and female that God is able to show himself either in husband and wife or in brother and sister.  But there is no place for anything but infinite respect and regard for each other as men and woman, and no place at all for any attitude of domination but only the attitude that Jesus had of great respect for woman as for men.

In verse 28, “And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’”  “And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’”  It seems that so often we fail to see the connection between the being fruitful and multiplying and the subduing of the earth.  That was the purpose of being fruitful and multiplying;  there was a time when that was the thing that was needed in physical situations.  Often when you had a ranch of several thousand acres and you had no one to ride that fence but yourself, and you had no one to plow it but yourself, often it was important to be physically fruitful and to have as many children as your dear wife could bear, so that you could bring that little bit of earth that you had into some kind of order.  And often that is right and it’s good to do it, but it is important loved ones, to see that Jesus brought a deep meaning to that -- especially in our day. 

Especially in our day when certainly God doesn’t mean us not to have children at all, but undoubtedly one of the problems now that we’re trying to overcome in our earth – and I agree with everyone that says, “We shouldn’t have it. If we shared all the grain instead of trying to store it up or trying to dump it probably there’d be enough food.”  But the tragedy is that there are too many people at the moment on the earth for the amount of food that we’re able to distribute to the right places.  And it behooves us to see that when Jesus came he brought a whole new meaning to being fruitful and multiply.  He said, “Listen, I want you to father many children in the kingdom.  Not many of you can call anybody father.  There are just a few of you who can call a certain man father who has brought you into Christ and into the kingdom.  I want you to do that;  I want you to be fruitful spiritually and I want you to multiply spiritually, and I want you to fill the earth and to subdue it.”

So it behooves us in our day to be in some sense responsible in regard to this commission; to be wise when we marry, and think about that.  Don’t allow that to go by chance, that’s terrible.  But bring before God what he wants for us in the way of sons or daughters, and then act upon that and again, bring control into that part of our lives.  We’re meant to have that part of our lives under our dominion and there are ways to do that and I’m willing to discuss it some evening if you want me to, but you need to be wise about that and you need to decide now, “Will a multitude of physical children aid me in trying to bring the masses that are going to hell daily, into the kingdom or will it hinder me?  And does God want me to concentrate on trying to bring into spiritual birth and being fruitful in that way and multiply those hundreds of thousands who are already on their way to hell?  Or, does he want me in fact, to concentrate on having more physical children?  Will that be the right thing for me to do?” 

And it may be that the truth is somewhere in the middle, but it is undoubtedly something that we need to deal with before the Father and see that it is connected up with having dominion.  And maybe I could say to you that especially in a ministry such as ours which is a pioneering ministry – and you know it!  We hope to get into Russia and China and we hope to establish ourselves there in a pioneering situation.  It’ll be very important that we have just the number of children that God has intended for us or that in certain cases we do not have any children because it gives a greater freedom and liberty.  But it does seem to me loved ones, that there needs to be spiritually enlightened wisdom in regard to that great commission.

And then in verse 29, “And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.’”  Now I don’t know that that makes us all vegetarians because you remember, God permitted the eating of meat later on in the old covenant, “And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that is the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’  And it was so.  And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.  And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day.  Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.  And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done.  So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation.  These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.”

What were they like loved ones, these heavens and this earth?  Really, when you begin to look at the figures involved and you begin to see what our God made out of nothing, it just startles you.  Man’s buildings on the earth are 93 cubic miles and that’s if you put all the buildings, all the bridges that we’ve ever constructed down through our history together; they would constitute about that figure, 93 cubic miles.  The earth itself is 260 thousand million cubic miles -- that’s the size of the earth!  So when you begin to think of what our God made and you begin to try and get an idea of the magnitude of what he created out of nothing -- I mean, he took nothing.  There’s nothing in my hand -- except there wasn’t even that much nothing -- he created all of this out of absolutely nothing.  He just spoke and the thing was created this earth that is 260 thousand million cubic miles of matter, and with all our working we’ve created a complete construction of 93 cubic miles. 

The sun: the size of the sun is 1,250,000 earths.  So you think of the size of our earth compared with what we have made, but then you think of the sun itself and you realize that you could fit into it one and a quarter million earths like ours.  And then you think the sun is only one of about 400 fixed stars and the distance from the earth to the sun is 93,000,000 miles.  And you realize that when we talk about our solar system we’re talking about a tiny corner of space as far as we’re able to see it.  And in that space the sun is one of 400 such fixed stars.  And the size of space: light speed is 187,000 miles per second so light travels at the speed of 187,000 miles per second and traveling at that speed to get from our earth to the third nearest fixed star it would take us 9.7 light years.  And this is what God created in a second -- in a second -- he created all of that. 

If you go to the Pleiades constellation there are 1,681 stars in it, but if you look through our radio telescopes, the whole constellation called Pleiades looks no bigger than our moon.  It’s so far away that it looks the same size as the moon in our most powerful telescopes and yet we can spot in that little space 1,681 stars and actually with our more powerful telescopes we can spot another 5,000 stars beyond that.  The stars in space are like one quart of water sprinkled over the earth’s surface and the earth’s surface consists of 196,000,000 square miles.  So if you were to think of the size of space in comparison with the planets that are in it, and you see how many of them there are and how far away they are, it would be like taking a quart of water and sprinkling it over the earth’s surface and the earth’s surface is 196 million square miles.

So it gives some idea of the vastness of space -- and our God created all that.  Do you think he can handle your money problems?  I think so.  Do you think he can handle your marriage plans?  Do you think our God is someone that you can put your faith in for the little things of your own life?  You may say, “Well, yes if he can ever see beyond all those huge things and see me.”  Are not two sparrows sold for a penny and not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will?  And in the midst of all that not a sparrow falls to the ground but God sees it.  But even the hairs of your head are all numbered and that Creator who has made all that has also counted the hairs on your head.  That’s the God that you can go to each day.  That’s the God that I’m asking you to have faith in for the everyday matters of your day-to-day life.  Let us pray.