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Let us summarize the main points of this book, not necessarily in the order presented:
The creation story in Genesis 1 and 2 is a straightforward and simply written narrative that has no difficult poetry or prophecies. God wants us to take it as it is written, and it is easy to understand.
While the creation account is easy to understand, it takes faith and trust in God and His Word to accept it as written, especially in light of false teachings and the relentless propaganda of Darwinian evolution and Big-Bang cosmogony.
As a result of unbelief, some people have developed Framework Hypotheses of various kinds to try to “reconcile” Scripture with these false theories of origin. The results are both illogical and dishonoring to God.
Framework Hypotheses treat the twenty-four-hour days of creation as though they actually refer to long ages of time, or to something other than what the text plainly says, and otherwise twist the Scriptures.
If we reject the simple teaching of the first two chapters of Genesis, we seriously injure our relationship to God’s Word, for we destroy our confidence in the rest of Scripture.
This rejection has other ill effects:
We call God a liar.
We take glory from God and assign the glory to time and chance.
We diminish our witness to the world of God’s power, wisdom, glory, and saving grace in Christ.
We deny the great truth that God graciously gave His Word to all people, diminishing people’s confidence in their ability to read and understand the Bible. It also opens the door to trust in false teachers more generally.
The first sentence in Genesis 1 is not a title or summary, but is an integral part of the narrative of what God did on the first day.
In Genesis 1:1, the word beginning refers to the beginning of the first day.
God created everything from nothing (ex nihilo), that is, not out of anything preexisting and not out of His own substance. God also formed, made, fashioned, or otherwise manufactured some things out of raw materials that He had previously created or manufactured. But ultimately, all that exists in the universe has its source only from God’s creation from nothing.
A good part of the text of Genesis chapter 1 is given to emphasizing the fact that God created the universe in six days.
Some of those six days were after the creation of the sun, moon, and stars, thus calibrating the days as twenty-four-hour days.
On the seventh day, God rested, thereby instituting the day of rest known as the Sabbath or the Lord’s Day.
After God finished the heavens and the earth, He turned His attention to planting the Garden in Eden and getting Adam, and later Eve, situated and settled in it.
Proper attention to some details will make the transition from the story of the earth’s creation to the story of the Garden in Eden easy to understand:
The narrative starts with a literary transition to bring the reader from a global perspective to a local perspective.
The toledaw tells us to expect further narrative about what follows after the creation of the heavens and the earth, although it does not give us the exact time of the following narrative.
Care is needed to correctly translate the Hebrew ehrets as earth or land as the context demands.
During the creation of the earth as a whole, God left a more or less bare spot for the future Garden in Eden.
It makes sense that God left this spot of land bare, knowing His future use of that spot. This hypothesis is not essential since it concerns why God did something, but does not alter what He did. It may help smooth the reader’s way through the narrative.
In Genesis 2:7, use of the English past perfect tense as underlined clarifies the meaning of the text: “And the Lord God had formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Genesis 2:7 ESV, author’s changes underlined), and makes the narrative flow smoother.
In Genesis 2:19, use by the ESV of the English past perfect tense as underlined resolves much potential confusion: “Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name” (Genesis 2:19 ESV, dotted underline added). The English past perfect tense makes the verse consistent with the events of the sixth day as given in Genesis 1:25–27, which use of the English simple past tense by many other versions does not.
Our Lord Jesus Christ turned water into wine with an absolute minimum of props or show. The ease with which He did this shows His power in creation, and how He needs no help from anything He created, such as time and chance.
The core issue for believers is whether we will trust God or not, in spite of apparent contradictory scientific or other evidence.
Scientists are human and sinners like all of us.
They have the smarts and expertise to concoct theories of origin that are true to known laws of nature and true to their own religious convictions.
Scientists and people generally embrace these false teachings because they do not want to obey God. Often this ultimate heart-level motive is deeply buried in the subconscious.
Both Big-Bang cosmogony and Darwinian evolution have serious problems that even many scientists are acknowledging.
Chance is not a creative force.
Random mutations or errors rarely improve anything.
The probability of a sufficient number of beneficial mutations happening together to produce a new “feature” in an organism is vanishingly small.
Modern understandings of the complexities of life have led many to recognize that there must have been an intelligent designer.
Anyone who is convinced in his or her own mind that six-day creation is true, but knowingly and unrepentantly refuses to submit to God’s Word in the matter, is in danger of Hell.
There are many practical applications that flow out of a personal recognition that we live in a created, designed, and manufactured universe, a universe given to us by a gracious, loving and perfect Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
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