The Attributes of God’s Greatness: God the Creator, Part 3

Okay. So we’re continuing the study of theology proper, looking carefully at what’s revealed in God the Creator. We’ve talked about God being immortal spirit, triune person, God the creator. And we’re just, we are wanting to just walk through the text in Genesis 1. Observe what’s there, see what we can infer and understand from now.

 We, there’s a lot we, more we can say but we’re really wanting to restrict ourselves in our, in our, observations to; What do we learn or discern about God; about his nature, his character, his mind? What do we see? What do we see revealed [about the] by what, what, he did and how he did it? What do we see? What can we learn and discern about him?

 We’ve covered the first two days, and I’m hoping that we pick up the pace today and kind of finish the week. If we, you know, by God’s mercy, we’ll finish Creation week today. By God’s wisdom, we may have to extended another week, but we’ll see. We’ll see how this goes.

 So we’ve gone through day one and day two, and what I’d like to do is just have somebody, with a good voice, well, don’t have, you know, a loud voice is what I mean. Read up to where we are. Just read Genesis 1:1 through, and the day three is what we’re starting on today. So read through verse 13. That’ll get us days one, two, and three. Wayne.

Audience: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, let there be light, and there was light.”

Travis: Yeah, just keep on going. Go all the way through verse, elev, 13.

Audience: “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. Then God said, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. God made the expanse and separated the waters which were below the expanse. From the waters which were above the expanse and it was so. God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

“Then God said, Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear and it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters he called seas. And God saw that it was good.

“Then God said. Let the earth spout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind, with seed in them and it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them after their kind. And God saw that it was good. There was evening and there was morning, the third day.”

Travis: Okay, cool, so, we see on this day, day three, we see the separation of the waters and the dry land, and then we see some filling beginning. Right? Some filling of the earth, of the dry land, at least with, with vegetation.

All right. So we’re going to ask, what did God do? So we’re asking two questions on each of these days. What did God create or accomplish on that day; just to get down what is actually there. What we see. And then what did we learn about God from day three? So, let’s stick with what did God create or accomplish on this, this, day. Just go through the words that are there on verses 11 to 13 or 9 to 13. I’m sorry and see what is there. What do you see?

Audience: Dry land.

Travis: Okay. What did he do? But what did, what did God actually do?

Audience: Separated.

Travis: Okay, so he, he, ordered. Well, he gathered, right?

Audience: Gathered.

Travis: So the waters under the heavens. He gathered all those into one place. Okay.

Audience: Right. He named them. Yeah. He did name them.  

Travis: Yeah, that’s right. He gave names. What? Dry land is Earth. And the gathered waters are seas. Okay? What else?

Audience: He pronounced them. Saw that it was good.

Travis: Okay, good. Yeah. He pronounced, you might say, a blessing on them. Okay. Or, or, a value judgment, you could say.

Audience: Vegetation is on the third day, right?

Travis: Yep. Vegetation here on the third day.

 Audience: So that’s the first mention of life.

Travis: Okay. Yeah. So some kind of life, comes into existence there, right? Good.

Audience: The text is also very specific about them yielding seed and bearing fruit after their kind.

Travis: Good. Yeah. Good. Different kinds of vegetation. There’s the grass, the deše’ (deshe), seed bearing plants, the ēśeḇmazrîaʿ (eseb marcia)or marcia, and then the fruit trees, the ʿēṣ pᵊrî (espari) The grass seems to have like no seed inside of itself. The seed-bearing plants obviously seed inside, then fruit with seeds inside the fruit. Okay.

Audience: And botanists will discover hundreds of years, thousands of years later, that’s exactly how everything is. When it says right here, it’s exactly how botany works.

Travis: Yeah, that’s right. That is exactly how botany works. Okay,

Audience: That’s exactly how it is.

Travis: Good. All right. Anybody else?

Audience: So we can trust it? Is that what you’re saying? Proven now, that this is right. Scientists have proven it, yeah. Sorry. What was that again. He says it. He says that it happened, and happened and then it happens.

Travis: Thank you.

Audience: It makes a catalog of him saying that. It makes a catalog of; it happens.

Travis: Yeah. Okay. So thank you, Brett. I have that written down of a decree. It’s important that we see that God decreed something to happen and then it happens. That’s, tha, there is that pattern that you know, who is this for? Is this for God’s sake? No.

 Is this like a, oh yeah, back in the divine mind, how I do creation; I got to decree it first, then it’s got to happen. If I don’t decree it, it doesn’t. There’s none of that. He’s doing this for our sakes, right? He’s decreeing it to happen. Then it happens. This is for us to learn something. Okay, So he decreed first the gathering of the waters and the appearance of the dry ground. Then he decreed the creation, the growth of, vr, vegetation. What do you see that’s distinct about the growth of vegetation. It’s a little different than the other days.

Audience: Well, that is life. That’s the first time.

Travis: Okay, Yeah. So you mentioned that. And that’s important it it’s first time we see some life here.

Audience: And it’s reproducing itself then, too.

Travis: Okay. Life that’s going to continue on bearing life. Right? Yeah.

Audience: According to its kind. He created the plant and then the seed. I mean, you know, it’s like the chicken or the egg, right?

Travis: Yeah. Chicken and the egg. Which came first? Well, obviously the chicken, the plant. But yeah, good, Excellent. Rod.

Audience: First, he decreed that the Earth would put forth vegetation.

Travis: Yes, exactly. Yeah. The earth is sprouting this forth, right? Good. Yeah, Joe.

Audience: Would it have been faster than the usual.

Travis: Yes. Good observation. Why do you see, why do you see, why do you say that, or think that?

Audience: Just like man was created, wholly man, and there wasn’t like, get to grow up as a baby.

Travis: No belly buttons on Adam and Eve, Right? Good.

Audience: He could have made them with belly buttons. He could have.

Travis:  Be like, what in the world is that?

Audience: You’ll find out. He also distinguishes here, that there’s vegetation and trees. That it’s not something that, I just created life and, you know, whatever pops up, pops up. He’s starting to classify.

Travis: Good, he’s starting to classify, right? Good. Spoken like someone who works at a university. That’s exactly right, though, he, he creates.

Audience: What It says in Genesis 1:1, and there was, it was dark and formless and void and, and, now look what we have there. It’s not formless at all. There’s all this distinguishes, all this classification, all this delineation, all this specialization. It was not formless by any means.

Travis: There was no, there was no form. He gave it form. There, there was void. There was nothing there.

Audience: There was orderly form.

Travis: Orderly form and then he fills the void with life. Yeah. Good. Joe.

Audience: The little phrase, “it was so’. It was, you were able to see it immediately. I mean, it happened. God said it and it happened.

Travis: Yeah, it was. So it happened exactly as he decreed it to happen. Good. Yeah, it wasso.

Audience: This is a little bit below the surface of the text, but the.

Travis: Uh-oh, here we go.

Audience: The Answers in Genesis guys bring out that word, kind, after their kind and distinguish it from like species and things like that. And they just talk about how there’s others from the beginning here. There’s a, there’s a, complexity to the genetic code that allows for multiple species and kinds of vegetations to come.

Travis: We’re going to come to that when we get to the, excuse me, when we get to the land animals. But it’s back to Brad’s word. He created classification and the possibility for classification is there, because he put it into the, the, original design. Good. Yeah, excellent. That’s a great point.

 So let me, just on creating vegetation. There are those three kinds. Berkhof says, ‘The vegetable kingdom of plants and trees was established. Three great classes are mentioned, namely, deshe’, that is flowerless plants, which do not fructify one another in the usual way; ’esebh, it’s ’esebh consisting of” vegatal, “vegetables and grain yielding seed; and then ’ets peri or fruit trees, bearing fruit according to their kind.”

 And Keil and Delitzsch say this, “These three classes embrace all the productions of the vegetable Kingdom.” That’s what you were saying.

Audience: That’s correct.

Travis: Botany. Botanists. This is their, this is their, stock and trade.

Audience: It took us four to five thousand years to figure that out and God is telling us right here. So.

Travis: Right. Right. I yeah, I think it probably didn’t take them, because the Hebrew botanists actually went back to the text and saw this. Yeah.

Audience: God said that’s true.

Travis: Yeah, they’re like, hey, thanks for the head start on botany, Lord. That’s, that’s what they were thinking. So let me. Yeah, let me this is back to Joe’s point. I wanna, I wanna, read something from Keil and Delitzsch here. Just a short. He says, “We must not picture the work of creation as consisting of the production of the first tender germs which were gradually developed into herbs, shrubs, and trees; on the contrary, we must regard it as one element in the miracle of creation itself, that at the word of God not only tender grasses, but herbs, shrubs, and trees, sprang out of the earth, each ripe for the formation of blossom and the bearing of seed and fruit, without the necessity of waiting for years before the vegetation created was ready to blossom and bear fruit.

“Even if the earth was employed as a medium in the creation of the plants, since it was God who caused it to bring them forth, they were not the product of the powers of nature, in the ordinary sense of the word, but a work” work, “of divine omnipotence, by which the trees came into existence before their seed, and their fruit was produced in full development, without expanding gradually under the influence of sunshine and rain.” Do you notice what’s not created yet?

Audience: The sun? The sun?

Travis: The sun. Right.

Audience: It’s before photosynthesis.

Travis: Exactly, exactly. And it’s interesting that the very next day this comes, the sun.

Audience: Light has been created.

Travis: The light has been created.

Audience: And that’s what really does the photosynthesis.

Travis: That’s true.

Audience: We get it from the sun. But at that time, where did it come from?

Travis: God.

Audience: Yeah. From revelation from Jesus Christ.

Travis:  Right. Yeah. So. So back to our earlier discussions about, about, light. And then, you know, even, even, sun, moon and stars, which are coming on the next day, right. And we talked about this supposed problem of stars being created, the light taking light years to travel. How could that be?

Well, we’ve gotta extrapolate, you know, billions of years or millions of years in order for light to get here. What did we just learn? What Joe just pointed out; God created in things in full maturity. So if he creates the light bearers, he can also create all the light on the path between its intended object, where man can see it, and the light bearer itself.

 He can create everything in between because he created, we’re just seeing, he’s created all the fruit bearing trees and the grasses and everything already fully matured. We can take that knowledge and information forward to the next day. Yes, Scott.

Audience: Was the light that God created, like just, we don’t really know, but it was him. Was it his light that he.

Travis: Don’t really. Yeah, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t say that he’s all of a sudden going from invisible spirit into visible light and projecting himself as like emanating light. I wouldn’t think of it in that way. I think of him continuing to stay invisible spirit; and yet, I don’t know, is the answer to how do you do the light thing without light bearing bodies?

Audience: Because I was just thinking if he did, then it would be interesting that he started with light and he ended with the light of like, at the end when the world goes in the new Jerusalem. He’s going to be emanating his light.

Travis: Yeah he’s going to be you’re, you’re, absolutely right. In rev, we talked about this in Revelation when you go back to the end of the, end of the story. you see that the, that there is no need of a sun because God himself is the light. So he’s providing the light there.

 We, we, said before this, with Bruce in mind, the electrician, [where this, this] what we’re, what we’re seeing emitting light, these are light emitting devices here, ener, but it takes energy and energy is not visible to us. So God could have created light; ‘or’, which is not visible light. Energy that exists in the whole created order and then he just brings that into light bearing bodies.

 So I, I, don’t know, honestly. Could there have been some bright light in the universe that God put there. I don’t know. I just don’t know. Okay. So let’s, let’s, go from what we just observed there. Thank you, guys. To what do we learn about God from day three. Talk about what he did here. What that tells you about him. Yeah, Gary.

Audience: Order.

Travis: Yeah. Good. Order. Order, want to expand on that or just so that’s good enough.

Audience: We, we, start off with a, you know, look, like I said earlier, we said Earth was without form and void. Well now it’s, it’s, hardly without form and void, there’s, there’s land, there’s water. There’s above we have the heavens. We’ve got the plants and everything in, in, one step at a time was put there and everything he said, he saw it as good. Next day, the next day, the next; We see order of time. We see order of events.

Travis: If we, if we, if we get just a little bit more; go from the, the, abstract order, you know, all that to more concrete. We see that the filling and the forming and everything was done with, with, vivid color. Variety. We see different, in plant life, you see different textures, different fields, different sizes, different shapes. There’s

Audience:  He a creative. Yeah, he’s a creative.

Travis: He’s a creative God, right? So yes, there is order, structure, but there’s also beauty, and variety, and color, and just magnificence. Who’s there to observe it right now? God and the angels.

Audience: Yeah, one of the magnificent things about his, his, creative order and described here; I was talking to the geologist a long time ago and he was saying, you know, the problem is that you see all of this stuff done in a completely odd order compared to what we know was laid down. Now he was talking from rock layers and stuff like that. He’s disregarding the flood.

 And it just stuck in my mind because years and years later, I ran across Bertrand Russell talking about history of philosophy, and he said that there was a uniformity of the way that they talked about origins among, among, philosophers in the Greeks, as far as just order of things; how things happen and then he just gave it and then this is completely different than that.

 So it is magnificent because if you think about it, they’re talking about the exact opposite, where small organisms, simple organisms become larger organisms and it couldn’t have happened that way if God’s creating it. So it gives the lie of creation, evolution, you know, creation through evolution. I mean, it’s just, it’s all internally consistent within itself and it’s all completely different than we would’ve expected. Nobody ever expected it. Nobody ever came up with some creation order like this, you know.

Travis: Right, exactly right. Yeah. It’s all, it’s all revealed and it’s contrary to what humans, what we try to discern on our own and yet you would say, well, maybe it’s just mythology, and someone came up with a really brilliant mythology, say, well, let’s go and check and see. Is the thing that you say, went from simple to complex? Let’s go back to the simple and see, is it as simple as you say?

Audience: Right. It’s really not.

Travis:  It’s magnificently complex. Yeah. So, I’m seeing hands go up. Let me, I think I saw Chuck first, then, then. What’s your name? Jim, Wayne.

Audience: So all I was going to say was that the structure and the beauty are, go hand in hand. You know, we can see that everywhere, even in the design of trees and crystals and, and, all of those kinds of things, down to the very structure of the atom. I mean it’s, it’s, incredibly beautiful. You know the, the, whole science of fractals and things like that reflect that, of that beauty and structure.

Travis: That’s exactly right. And I like what you said about the structure and the beauty. Without the structure, you can’t have the beauty. The, the, structure is robed in beauty. You can’t just, you can’t just have beauty without structure and order. There must be both. Wayne.

Audience: At the start of verse 12, we see God’s sovereignty over the creation, even though he decreed in verse 11, right, it is his decree of creation. In verse 12, we see the earth bringing forth the decreed creation.

Travis: Obeying the word of God. Yeah. Inanimate things giving, you know, obeying what the Creator says. It’s great sovereignty, yeah?

Audience: There’s also a purple.

Travis: I’m sorry, I need to go to Brad first. I just need to honor that hand order. Sorry.

Audience: He was going right where I was going, I think. But I was going to say everything is purposeful and intentional. So, everything was, and goes back to what you were talking about, to have the different canopy that the trees may provide versus what, what, the, the, grasses and the flowers, the beauty; it all ties together. Everything very intentional.

Travis: Yeah. Good. Is that what you were going to say?

Audience: I was going to say that, plus that, it’s progressive. It’s interesting to me that these things happen in sequential days instead of just boom, that all did it in one day.

Travis: Yeah. Back in the early church that was the debate about creation. Is, there were heretics, skeptics who were saying, why did it take six days? It all happened instantaneously. And the early church father was saying no they’re guarding six-day creation, but from another angle. Now we’re having to go the other direction and say, no, not millions of years, six days. Yeah, but, but, that’s true. It shows there’s a, it’s unfolded and, and, as you say, the word progressive, the one thing leads to another and you can’t have day six without day two. Okay, let’s go over here, Scott.

Audience: The, the, proverb where it talks about, when that, when wisdom speaks and it says he was the, he was there before the foundations of the earth. God, you can just see that God’s, God’s wisdom is displayed in how he makes the earth and how, you know, there’s a lot of wisdom in that.

Travis: You see. So yeah, exactly. And you can look and look at I think it’s Proverbs eight, right. Talks about God or wisdom being there with God as a handmaiden basically to, to see this come forth. Yeah, that’s exactly right. You see, you see his wisdom.

 Think about the different ways that this shows. And knowing the rest of the creation story, think about the different ways that this demonstrates forethought or planning on God’s part. How do you see that? Mark, what do you say?

Audience: I saw I was just thinking the same thing that, and I’m not a scientist guy, so I don’t understand all that, but, that the plants needed the earth and God had the earth and the water first and then he brought the plants along and then you see the plants are for future, you know, life, lifeform.  So right. It’s pretty cool. The animal life.

Travis: Okay good. So he’s, he’s, there’s forethought in planning. Okay, going to make humans, and birds, and fish, they all need an environment. So. I mean that’s not what he did. It’s just a perfect thought in his mind isn’t it. But, for me, it’s like, Oh, yeah, that’s what he did.

Audience: Well and next, they need heat to, they’re gonna grow and survive.

Travis: Yeah. So warmth the next. That’s the next step. Yeah.

Audience: I was just thinking in a couple different ways. So it’s showing him as provider for, for, his creatures. And then, also, he’s kind of along the same lines he’s, you know, just, it’s just interesting seeing the botany here and the different divisions and stuff.

 He’s setting it up for man to do science. He’s giving them, he’s giving Adam something to study, and something to cultivate, and give him something to mind. And didn’t just reveal it to, like right away, like what, this is how everything works.

Travis: Right. He didn’t give him a manual with his day one of his existence. He, he basically made it.

Audience: And then Adam learned it. An introduction to botany.

Travis: So, so, okay, one more, one more comment and then I’m out of here.

Audience: And then I was just thinking that God doesn’t have to obey our perceived rules of what, of nature and stuff. But we see plants growing that long, but God doesn’t. He can just do it whenever he wants and have it, you know.

Travis: Okay, so the way, the way it’s, the way we observe it now. And God is not bound to do things according to what we’re observing now. He, he, he, when he set it all up, he did it by speaking it. Speaking it, and making it happen. Yeah. Good. So one more. All right.

Audience: This, this creation, man is still studying. And it’s the idea is to, to, God is demonstrating himself through creation. So, you know that, I did a whole idea of searching so that perhaps man can find God or whatever, you know that, that, whole thing. So he’s still displaying himself and he, I think he uses creation to draw people to himself, in a sense.

Travis: Oh, there’s a yeah, there’s a sense, Romans one says, “clearly God’s eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being,” you know, “manifest through what’s made so that”, but, but, notice the ‘so that’, “so that they are without excuse.”

 So go back to Psalm 19 and Psalm 19 shows in the first half, the first table, general revelation which is this. And yet without special revelation coming in, there is no salvation, there is no redemption, there is no full revelation of God and his mind, and the way he thinks.

 So we had to have special revelation. General revelation on its own without God revealing, which he did, specially reveal himself through word to Adam, in the very beginning. You know all these trees, you can eat; of this tree, no touchy, you know, or no eat.

 So, so let me just run through some of this. God, God created several environments to support and sustain different kinds of life forms: Water, dry land, and sky. So the different environments anticipates what he’s going to put in those environments. So, he’s again, that demonstrates his forethought, planning; he set boundaries for those environments.

 Psalm 1O4:8 and nine talks about, I believe that’s a reference that talks about the sea not encroaching its boundaries. So and that, that, indicates his intention, that the boundaries indicate his intention to support and sustain and then protect each kind of lifeform with it, within it’s, it’s, assigned environment.

 So he intends to give boundaries. And the boundaries are for the good of whatever fills and goes into those boundaries. So when birds try to, try to become fish, they drown. He didn’t intend birds to go and swim underneath the water, okay. Well, some birds, but they come back up, don’t they?

 Man, if he stays down underneath the water too long, dead. You know, so it’s just all these, all these different creatures within their own boundaries. God keeps them safe there. Yeah, Mark.

Audience: And those boundaries, wouldn’t they be called laws?

Travis: Yeah. We can discern, we can discern laws that govern each of those boundaries. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, exactly. I thought I saw another hand. Yeah Wayne.

Audience: It, there’s an atheist argument that [the] that sea rise arising from naturalistic processes shows that there is no God because creation shows boundary of the land and sea rise is going to violate the boundary of the land. Right? We, we, can all agree that that’s bunk. Do you have a quick thirty second response to that?

     Sea rise is based on amphibians becoming reptiles. Is that correct? No, no, no, no thinking like Oceans come up and suddenly there’s less land and they’re saying well because of that you can’t have creation.

Travis:  So are they are they talking about like global warming and the melting of the polar ice caps and all help us help us we’re all going to drown. That?

Audience: Pretty much yeah. Environmental theory.

 Travis: Okay. I just said give it another thousand years and see if that argument still holds true. But that’s my, that’s my quick summation. But, but, if I could go, if I could just go a little, a little presuppositional on you with, that is to say, atheist, that’s a, you’re using reason to make that argument. That’s really good. But can you tell me where reason comes from? Can you give me, from your worldview, what provides you the precondition for making that argument in the first place?

 And what I’m saying to you, atheist, is you are stealing from my worldview in order to make your argument against God, even though your argument is foolish. But let’s talk about that later, in 1000 years, when the world still exists, if God wills it. Let’s talk first about where you get your rationality. If we stick to your worldview.

There is no rationality, in an atheist worldview. Everything’s, there is no uniformity. There is no real classification. All the lines of classification are blurred. They’re gone. Everything’s fluid, in flux. There’s nothing, you, there’s jello. There’s nothing you can nail anything to. There’s nothing you can anchor anything into.

So that’s what we’re doing on Sunday nights. Okay. So God prepared again. We talk about the environments. He prepared to sustain animate life forms. So by just setting the boundaries of the water and the earth, he’s creating Terrafirma, you know, land to step onto. By creating categories of vegetation, each according to its kind back to Brad’s word classification. Nick used the word scientific study.

 He, God has created categories here for logical thought, for organization, for classification. And so Wayne, just springboarding on what you just said. The opposite of that, the antithesis of that Biblically, is that we, as opposed to every other worldview, we do have the preconditions for intelligible thought, for rationality. God is the basis of our rationality.

 He’s preparing us to reason by just creating things with classification; each according to its kind. We can count on that kind of plant staying within its kind, and now we can look at the variation. All that, all that, massive variation within its kind and now we can look at these grasses and say they are in their kind and now we can study.

 So all of that allows us to organize and classify and say, this is not that, that, antithetical thinking. So by creating each according to its kind, God designated the boundaries of vegetation within genus and species. Contrary to evolutionary theory, one did not develop out of another.

By creating incredible variety out of relative simplicity, that is three classes, here, he creates the possibility for simple classification. And yet God is here encouraging our rational thinking and even stimulating human, reasing, reasoning because we look at those different kinds of things or those different variations, and it stimulates our thinking to say, well, how does that fit into these classifications God gave us? So there’s a provocation here to our study, to our research, to our gathering and processing and all that.

 By creating the plant kingdom, fully matured, God prepared the world to sustain animal and human life immediately. So, all of that is going to be there when animal, plant, animal life and human life come on the scene. God intends plant life, that is animal, and animal life and human life, he intends plant life to contain, someone said this already, contained the principle of self-perpetuation. So fruitfulness to, to, perpetuate itself.

 So we learn here, and discern from God, that it is a principle of life, that it must perpetuate or generate more life. If it does not do that, we call it dead, right? So think about that principle in relation to the principle of death in the sin of homosexuality, namely, that it cannot perpetuate its own life. Okay?

So here’s where we reason something very obvious to all of us. By creating the plant kingdom prior to the sustaining light of the sun, the energy required for photosynthesis, God teaches us that he is the power that sustains life. Oh yeah, all these plants are without the sun doing photosynthesis. Oh yeah God. So we remember that God is the self-sustaining source of all life. He’s self-existent. He needs nothing. He doesn’t depend on anything. Everything depends on him. Bruce?

Audience: We get the same picture that when we ratchet forward to revelation and the new heaven and the new earth we get the same picture.

Travis: Exactly. Yes, we do, because we see their God is basically the light. So as an electricianer, are you going to walk up to the throne and say, hey, can I just study you for a minute? I like energy, so I’m really into energy, man.

 So this is, I wrote this down. I’m not really sure why I put this quote down, but let’s see what I, what it says. This is John Calvin. This is John Calvin. He says, “We now see, indeed, that the earth is quickened by the sun to cause it to bring forth its fruits;” Nor was it, “nor was God ignorant of this law of nature, which he has since ordained: but in order that we might learn to refer all things to him” [he did not make] “He did not then make use of the sun or moon.” Okay. So Calvin is saying, it’s intentional, that he created things that need light from the sun before there was light from the sun. He wanted to make a point. The point is that we would look back and, and, discern; Oh yeah, God is the one who gives all life. “He permits us to perceive the efficacy which he infuses into them, so far as he uses their instrumentality; but because we are wont to regard as part of their nature properties which they derive elsewhere, it was necessary that the vigor which they now seem to impart to the earth should be manifest before they were created. We acknowledge.”

 So what is that? What does that demolish? It demolishes any sun worship, any, anybody who would want to make an idol out of the sun. You fool, the sun is not at the source of its own power, God is. So look beyond the sun to the, to the light giver. “We acknowledge, it is true, in words, that the First Cause is self-sufficient, and that intermediate and secondary causes have only what they borrow from this First Cause; but, in reality, we picture God to ourselves as poor or imperfect, unless he is assisted by second causes. How few, indeed, are there who ascend higher than the sun when they treat of the [when they treated the] fecundity of the earth?” Or the fruitfulness of the earth.

 “What therefore we declare God to have done designedly,” it “was indispensably necessary; that we may learn from the order of the creation itself, that God acts through the creatures, not as if he needed external help, but because it was his pleasure.” Thank you, John Calvin. I, I, love the way he writes. Don’t you? Especially using words like fecundity. Yeah.

Audience: You have to use a dictionary when you start reading his.

Travis: Yeah, it’s great, though. Okay. So that’s day three. Any, any, other things to wrap up on day three? Yes.

Audience: Yeah. You said earlier something that. I learned, learn something really important, I think just now. The ah, you said, you mentioned how in evolution there’s, what was it? It was very important though.

Travis: Anybody want to help Nicholas out?

Audience: I don’t know, I, this is something that’s interesting that it’s been kind of floating around, but I think it’s worth saying specifically, that God specifically created something to debunk every single possible creation theory out there, by creating the plants before the light. Because there’s no, I mean, evolution won’t allow that. Not before light.

 But, but, you know, the Egyptians, which is where the Israelites were coming out of worship the sun god. So the sun god was created first. All things create the sun before they create the plants. And God did it totally different just to say, no, it’s me.

Travis: Well, I yeah. And yet, yet, I wouldn’t want to put it in the mind of God to think about, oh, let’s see what theories might come up against me. Let me do it this way. Oh, wait, not that way, because, that’s, that theory right there will contradict it. I mean, he just, he just did it, the only way it could be. And it’s the, it is the manifestation of sin to pervert all of that and to come up with all, you know, alternate theories. None of which will undo the Creator and his creation. Because, because, any sinful theory is going to be a distortion, perversion, or mutilation, a mutation that is not actually more helpful, but less, right? Come back here.

Audience: I remembered it.

Travis: So the thank you for buying him time.

Audience: So you said that in evolution the lines are blurred, the lines of order.

Travis: There’s a fluidity. Yeah.

Audience: And because everything is matter and just evolving and becoming something else and, and, I was thinking about how, you know, this, this, account is really focused on the physical realm, but in Proverbs that, you know, when it talks about wisdom being with God before the foundation of the earth, wisdom’s there at the foundation.

God created everything based on wisdom, and the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. That always struck me how if you want to be wise, you have to do it God’s way. You have to be righteous to be wise, and that expands the creative, creative things into the spiritual and moral realm.

Travis: Hey, that’s really good. That’s a very, very good observation.

Audience: And I was just thinking how the same kind of blurring of the line happens all around us in the moral realm, when I were rejecting God

Travis: Or just the absolute denial of the moral realm. And yet you, like you just said, that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of the wisdom is the cause, well, God’s handmaiden. The, the, tool he used, his own mind, really to, to, do all this. If you want to understand all this, we got to go back to a spiritual reality. And the spiritual reality is you must fear the Lord.

 You must trust him. You must believe him. You must take his word as true and then pursue obedience to it. And God will then demonstrate and show you everything that’s there. Good. Yeah, so there is a, there is a, what’s more, more, more fundamental, more foundational to understanding the wisdom of the natural world is wisdom in the spiritual world, which is tied to the fear of the Lord. Great that’s a great point.

Audience: One of the things that was said, got me, as I saw a thing about [they] a tree that you can get that produces seven different fruits, and the issue was they grafted into this tree, branches, and I’m thinking this is really weird. The source is the same for all the fruit and it’s getting its energy, but each, again, just the ‘Or’ that God made that, that, grafting branch or whatever, will continue to produce the fruit it was supposed to produce. And I just thought that’s the kind of tree you want in your backyard. God, there pick seven different fruits after the tree.

 You don’t need a lot of room in your backyard. That’s what they market those trees for and that’s all they are. They just take cut branches off and shove them in, but they cannot make that tree, that apple tree, you can’t make it bear Peaches, unless you cut off a Peach tree and put it in there. So the only way you can do it, because to this day after it’s all done, that’s the way it is.

Travis: Interesting. So when it, when it sheds its fruit and it’s fruit grow more trees, it doesn’t create the seventh kind of variety.

Audience: Can’t. When the peach falls on the ground it makes a peach tree. One part can get diseased and the other is not, so it’s a weird tree.

Travis: Cant, that is a weird tree. That’s a strange tree, mixed up tree. So what’s it? What’s it identified as?

 Okay, let’s, let’s, go on to day four. Day four, let’s get a different reader for Genesis 1:14 to 19. Someone read that. Yeah, go ahead, Tim.

Audience: “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse 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 for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth.’ And it was so. And God made the two great lights – the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night – He made the stars also. God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. There was evening and there was morning. A fourth day.

Travis: Thank you. Thanks very much, Tim. Okay, so. Two questions again. What a God creator accomplished on this particular day? What do we learn about God from day four? But let’s wait on that question. Let’s start with what did he create or accomplish on day four?

Audience: Light Bearers. Can you give us the Hebrew for light Bearer?

Travis:  Yeah, it’s ma, maor is the singular here.

Audience: It’s Maor. The other one is Or.

Travis: Here it’s Maohrot, which is like the plural of that. So the light bearing bodies, Maohrot.

Audience: And ‘or’ is light?

Travis: ‘Or’ is light.

Audience: When he says let there be light, that’s ‘or’ and this is ‘maor’. Okay.

Travis: That’s right. So he decreed. So on that point, he decreed and created the light bearing bodies in the expanse of the heavens. Okay, what else did he do?

Audience: He separated them.

Travis: He separated them. Okay so that’s. What, what, do you what do you separate the light bearing bodies or something else?

Audience: Light from the darkness.

Travis Okay, good. The day from the night. He’s, he’s, labeled already night and darkness. He’s labeled them day and night. He’s named them day and night. Right.

Audience: So we got the greater light in the day and the lesser night, the light at night. And we’ve since learned that the lesser light doesn’t overpower the, the other lights that are up there, as the greater light does. So that doesn’t say that here.

Travis: No, no, no, you’re I think you’re right on target. I just want to expand on that. That God made the two great lights. So these are great lights. There’s a sun and a moon. Is the moon a light bearing body.

Audience: It’s a lesser light bearing body. It’s a reflection.

Travis: In a way it is, isn’t it? But it’s a ref, but it, but by reflection, by, ref, by, by, reflecting, not by.

Audience: It’s, it’s, the image of light. Because every good reflection, it reflects the, the, true light emanating body, which is the greater light.

Travis: The greater light. But there are two great lights. Now from what we know from astronomy, the sun, our sun is in comparison, it’s Beetlejuice, Betelgeuse, or whatever they call that.

Audience: It’s a tiny star compared to Betelgeuse. Yeah,

Travis: Okay. But from our perspective.

Audience: It’s a lot bigger.

Travis: Ours is bigger. Oh yeah, so two great lights. This is perspectival language and it’s in relation to mankind, right? That’s how God is revealing and he’s speaking in relation to mankind.

Audience: Even though mankind isn’t there yet.

Travis: Even though mankind isn’t there yet. He talks about two Great lights made the greater light to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night. Oh, and the stars also like, like, the Bettlejuice, Betelgeuse or whatever.

Audience: The Hebrew text doesn’t even, stay, say, the stars also, because Hebrew is contextual. It just says the stars, that is, that is the entire word of creation about the stars. Just the stars happen in the same context as the rest of it.

Travis: And the stars, right.

Audience: Which is galaxies and novas and all. Just a, just a star. That’s our perspective at that time. Stars.

 Travis:  Yeah this is. The sun is one star in our Milky Way Galaxy closest to us and yet there are galaxies upon galaxies all swirling through the universe and God says, ‘Oh, those. Those, by the way.’ Which, yeah. Okay, so we’ll come back to that. I’ve got to, I, I, say these things over and over, like, hey, we’re just sticking with what we’re seeing here. It’s not for you, it’s for me. Alright, Scott.

Audience: To be for, like, he allowed them for like navigation. He allowed there to be navigation.

Travis: Okay, wait, wait, That’s an implication. But let’s, let’s, stick with.

Audience: Well, he created that idea.

Travis: Yes, he did. Yes, he did.

Audience: So that’s a creation.

Travis: Yes. Yes, it is true. True Dad, True Dad, Brother man. Yes, Chuck first and then David.

 Audience: So he created seasons, which means that he created the tilt of the Earth’s axis. He created orbits. He did the spin. He did all that as the navigational aids that Scott was talking about. He created all those for the benefit of someone who was not created yet, which creates cycles.

Travis: Yes, cycles, seasons, right?

Audience: Seasons right. Removed. Yeah, you know all that. Where do we get seasons here yet? We said seasons? Yeah, said, “And let them be for signs and seasons.” Signs and seasons, okay, I missed it.

Travis: Yeah, Tim, Tim read that so clearly too.

Audience: Thank you so much. I’ll go get more coffee.

 Travis: You’re welcome. Yeah.

Audience: Well, I think exactly what these two guys have just said, that they’re both fixed and fluid. So, So there’s the fixedness; I think maybe that’s what the signs is. There’s a fixedness that we can reference to it and also fluidity that creates signs or that creates the seasons and day and night.

Travis: Yeah. So there’s, there’s a change, but fixed change, right?

Audience: There’s predictableness. There you go.

Travis: Predictability. Yeah. Good. All right.

Audience: It’s regularly, irregular. What you said. It’s very predictable, like English.

Travis: Like the only thing, the only thing consistent is the fact that everything changes, right? So.

 Audience: Mathematically incredibly predictable.

 Travis: Yes. That’s right. Like the tilt of the Earth’s axis.

Audience: And the, and the, you know, like we can figure out where there’s going to be an eclipse. I don’t care how far in advance you want to determine. We can calculate that.

Travis: That’s right. Right.

Audience: So we’ve got the plants created and now we have the seasons. So they don’t just all grow and produce at once. They’re not going to be seasons. And that’s planning for the provision.

Travis: Good. Okay, good. So they’re going to be seasons where oranges grow and seasons where oranges don’t grow, right? Or whatever, whatever, it is.

 Audience: So we don’t start.

 Travis: Yeah, but different things coming out in different seasons. That’s why we all have pumpkins in the fall. You know, everything pumpkin. Good variety.

Audience: He created the, the, positioning. Not have all of the stars and the lights to, like he didn’t put the stars right, in the sky like right, right, really close to the earth. He, he, he, kind of illuminated them for us.

Travis: Okay. All right let’s, okay, let’s go; Tim, Brad, and then back; did you also raise your hand? Okay this, okay right over here, we got Mark over here. So I was going to say this is like a very active side over here.

Audience: We’re getting active over here.

Travis: All right. Must be like more air conditioning coming down this.

Audience: Starting to kick in.

Travis: Yeah. Starting to kick in. All right.

Audience: Well, Gary is our point man, but he can’t hear.

Travis: He’s letting the whole team down. Gotta get him that miracle ear or tell him the phone number for that miracle ear. Alright, we got Tim, Brad, Nick, Joe, Mark. All right.

Audience: I just have more of a question. When it says there’s to be signs, what’s implied by that? Is that simply like Psalm 19? Is that more like Psalm 19 where the heavens declare the glory of God or for the navigation or you know some of those, some of those.

 Means the entire Gospel is written in the stars. You can figure out the entire Gospel from them.

Crazy YouTube videos about we died today they referenced this verse about, you know, signs, Jupiter coming into Virgo is a sign. So what exactly is implied by that word?

Travis: You know, I, I, actually didn’t write down the, I believe that I didn’t write down the quote. But I think it’s, I think it’s Calvin again, who, who, had those kinds of people in his own day and he tried to, he tried to bring, you know, to lasso those people and pulling closer to common sense. What the sign and what it basically says is the signs is pointing to what it’s says it’s pointing to. So a sign points to something. So like when you see Denver, you know, here’s the city of Denver population this amount or elevate, here in Colorado it’s elevation, right. We’re very proud of that; how, how, high we are.

 But you get to Denver and you see the sign. You don’t, you don’t look at the sign and hold on to it and say Denver, you know, you look beyond, because the sign points to something, and the same thing here, the sign points to what, times, seasons. So it’s, and we’re going to get to that when we see what God, why God did that or [what he’s see], what he’s trying to point us to. But we’re looking, I, I, got to go forward so; it’s the sign is pointing ahead to, ‘Oh I got to get prepared for fall. Oh I got to get prepared for winter.’

 So he is putting into the, the, way things are designed, our planning and our preparation; it’s to point to things that have to do with the maintenance of biotic life, you know, by us. Doesn’t have to do with crazy Virgo in the sky and all that kind of stuff, Jupiter.

Audience: And like the leaves changing color.

Travis: Leaves changing color says, ‘hey I better store up more nuts and it’s going toward winter and I won’t be able to get any nuts.’ That kind of stuff.

Audience: Speaking of nuts, no, mine was in, in, line with Tim’s, because I saw that signs. Is that a prediction from God saying, I’m going to put a star in Bethlehem for a sign for my son? I don’t know. That’s where my mind went.

Travis: I would say that, that by, by, human mankind, humanity observing the stars, something that wasn’t there before and is now there and is pointing toward Bethlehem, stands out. But, and you could maybe say that the, the, the fixed position of these signs, of these stars and everything, that that, helps us to discern when something that is not fixed, it wasn’t there before is all of a sudden there. So I think that’s true. But I would say it’s just prepared by contrast and later on we see, wait that wasn’t there before. So Brad.

Audience: I, was going to just play off of what Scott was saying there. And I think just as we, we, look at the, the, greater light, the lesser light and the stars and, and, he says very clearly, again, and God set them in the expanse that they have them give light on the Earth, but he set them. So, and then again, coming back to the purposeful and intentional. Everything, it’s not in, in, a big conglomeration of them here. Everything had a purpose and still does to this day. And you know the distance between them and, you know, the, the, expanse that we have; all of it, just, it’s set. It was, it was purposeful.

Travis: Yeah. All purposeful. All fixed. All set by God. Good. Yeah. Thank you. Nicholas.

Audience: Yeah, I was just noticing the word govern in 18 and how the, the, lights are the, the, sun and the moon kind of set boundaries on the amount of activity that can happen during the day and night.

Travis: Okay. So God made the light bearing bodies with purpose and what’s the purpose? To rule or to govern. It’s the word, memšālâ. We’ll come back to that. But to rule and govern the day and the night. Separate the light from the darkness. Good. Now let me go to Joe. He’s been waiting. Wait.

Audience: He created the stars and their maturity, again, just like the vegetation, not 13 billion years old, but they might. The light might be 13 billion years old.

Travis: Yeah, and they may be, truly, that many light years away, but isn’t it magnificent that God created that and all the light in between and we discern it right now. He turned everything on in an instant. Good David.

Audience: Just a funny story from last night with my five year old about governing the star or the sun governing. We have a rule that once it gets dark, they can’t ride bikes anymore. And so last night, my five year old, or maybe it was the three-year old even, it was getting dark and he was whining like, oh, I don’t want the sun to go down. Like, sorry buddy. You know, it happened today and I can say sorry, that.

Travis: Take it up to your creator.

Audience: Right? It will come up tomorrow, man.

Travis: But it’s interesting too, just in that illustration, how God’s making one rule creates other rules. Don’t ride your bike at night. Who did I see? It was Brett. Do you want to go next?

Audience: No. I forgot what I was going to say.

Travis: Great. All right, Bill. Not great that you forgot. Great, I can move to.

Audience: Apparently, its whatever we decide to do.

Travis: Don’t read into it, alright.

Audience: Did we decide what we are here for?

 I want to make comment after Brett’s made a comment. I apologize in advance for any poor comment. But at least from my perspective, I had a, had a, had a, history of reading this because I know where I come in and tend to read it in light of what I know happens. But if we stop and look right here, no further, we can see that God is glorifying himself. He’s glorifying himself. We can read ourselves into the story later, but even when we do that, we have to read ourselves into that as being part of God glorifying himself. And in that, brothers, we start to see the beginnings of the gospel.

Travis: That’s right, That’s exactly right.

Audience: Even the gospel reason we come from is God glorifying himself as being good, and righteous, and proper  anyway.

Travis: Even all the story of redemption. That is not the entire purpose of the Bible, even though it does talk about redemptive purpose. If you read redemption as the purpose of everything, then you’re very man centered.

If you put redemption in the purpose of God glorifying himself, which is, we’re not even to man yet. There is no man observing any of this. God is just glorifying himself. Just manifesting his glory. And so redemption is in the larger purpose of God bringing glory to himself. It’s a great point. Yeah. But you guys have skipped ahead, again, and encroached into the boundary. Shows, shows whose not sovereign, right?

Audience: Just an observation. So the Earth is created first, before the sun, that the Earth is going to revolve around. So that is kind of amazing.

Travis: It is, isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah.

Audience: We don’t know that it’s revolving yet. Yeah. All we know, it’s sitting in space doing nothing and then they put the sun there and then it starts revolve, we don’t know. It would have been kind of a jump, yeah, because that acceleration zero to 800 is pretty wild. Yeah. 2000 miles per hour is pretty, aahh. The trees are all bending.

Travis: Okay. So some of these are gonna get out.

Audience: I was just going to piggyback on what Bill said though that, he said he created the stars also and that’s all there is. But with the vastness, it’s all designed, so the man has to look up and say, you know, what is man in compared to those, and all, and who is, what is out there? Why is it? Why is it always like that? And I’ve heard that atheists say God didn’t, you know, if you believe God created this, he didn’t just throw that out there just so he can say, I’m big, and I say.

Travis: Yes he did.

Audience: Yeah, you’re exactly right.

Travis:  See that is so like the unbeliever just to make a make a statement like that with nothing to back it up, we have to challenge those, those, anti-supernatural biases and say, what gives you the right to say that. What gives you the right to say that. That’s, that’s not yours to say. You need to back that up, pal. We, we, we, actually have it revealed to us. It’s exactly the opposite. He did create all that just to show his greatness, and that’s Okay. Yeah, Tim.

Audience: Along with showing his greatness, that idea that he created everything in maturity. I think is a fine point because I’ve read and I even struggled with myself that and on one level that seems deceptive. Why would you create stars, that, to our reasoning, would be 13 billion years away. But if you fast forward to the Gospels, when Jesus turned water into wine, he created aged wine. He didn’t appear to be the age of wine. It was real age of wine. And nobody got mad at him.

Travis: What a deceiver. So you don’t want the wine? I’m sorry to deceive you here’s water.

Audience: You can see of his power, that he cannot only create it, but create it with true age. Not the appearance of age, but true age.

Travis: Maturity, matured. Yeah, exactly. See you, Gary. Have a good one. Take these great thoughts into your woodwork.

Audience: I thought maybe he was offended because he wasn’t old enough to spark the (not understandable)

Travis: No, he’s gonna go get down into the wood grains that were created on day, day number three. Ryan. I’m going to have to take just two more and then we go to speed on. So Ryan and then Scott,

Audience: This will be quick. It was just touching on what Bill and maybe Lee said, when God answers Job, ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding to determined its measurements or surely, you know. I just know man’s property, you know God created all of that and it’s almost, you know, it’s a stumbling block for the unbeliever because you know they see this, this, vastness and they say, well there has to be something more, you know, there’s, you know, and then we invent aliens and all this other stuff, just to, cause we can’t comprehend why God does what God does, or they couldn’t. We as believers, we know why God.

Travis: Yeah, And, and, the unbelieving mind is pushed toward folly by rejecting this account. You take like Stephen Hawking and some of these people out. If someone writes like a science fiction novel, you say, what goofy stuff that’s fun to, you know, read, but you don’t take it seriously, right? But when you put a few Phd’s after his name and he’s world renowned and everything, and then he says, I think we need to look for life recurring from alien life or what, then it’s all of a sudden has credibility. It’s the same story, just with more information, but it’s the same story. So as you said, we’re all humbled before what’s out there.

Audience: I was just going to say that it’s really, really amazing that people can’t help but prove the fact that God is infinite and you just see all, all of these days show that he’s infinite. Everybody’s been learning new things every single day about plants and everything that he’s created.

Travis: Good. So, there’s as you see this, what’s, what’s, coming out of God’s eternal, infinite bounty. We are so infinitesimally small in trying to catch up to that day by day, every day can be filled with more and more study and we’ll never come to the end of it. It just proves again, I think, that’s what Lee was saying about the stars out there; God is vast. He’s great. Good, very good point.

So, one more thing, I just wanted to say that God, and I think we’ve already said this, but God designed the light bearing bodies, and he designed them with purpose. So, you see those words, ‘to do this’, ‘to do that’, that’s demonstrating his purpose. So, to separate day from night, and then that’s the first purpose; just to separate day and night. Number two, to be for signs, for seasons, for days and years. So, we might say for the purpose of marking time. Whether it’s minute by minute time, day by day time, week by week time, month by month time, or season by season time, it’s all there, right? And then, number three, to be lights, to give light on the earth.

 So, there are three purposes for the light bearing bodies, to separate day from night, to be for time, and then to be for light to give light on the earth. Okay, and So what do we learn about God from day four? Bill said we, we, learned that God is intending here to glorify himself. This is prior to anything being in existence, and which does set the Gospel in context, exactly. What else do we learn? What else do we learn here? God’s immensity, God’s vastness. You guys have said that. Yes.

Audience: The infinite; I mean it says somewhere in Psalms, I think, it says that God put infinity in the hearts of man. So we wouldn’t even have that idea without all of this infinity that he created.

Travis: So that’s, and that’s kind of what Lee was saying too, that all that is out there. He put eternity in the hearts of men. Not like we have some kind of maternal thing. Just, just, this, this, sense of, I’m going to go look at that vastness and see.

Audience: In so many ways. I mean, it’s vast out there, and vast internal, and vast in every direction you can look.

Travis: Yeah. This is a total sidetrack, but have you ever seen that video on YouTube where they, they, start now?

Audience: Powers of ten. What’s it called? Powers of ten. It goes through powers of ten, tens.

Travis: That is absolutely incredible. It starts, it starts, from great big and, and goes, starts to shrink down to earth, and then shrink down to land, and down into the cells. Right?

Audience: And, well, it goes all the way to atomic and then subatom, well molecular, then atomic, then subatomic and power of ten each, each, each iteration is a power of ten, less or more. It’s incredible.

Travis: Powers of ten. That is..

Audience: What’s really incredible about that is, that’s still finite. That we, you know that, and it’s not, I mean, it still goes beyond in both directions infinitely. But it, but it’s amazing.

Travis: It is amazing.

Audience: It’s basically powers of ten in front of mans discovery, at this point. Yeah.

Travis: Okay. I’m just going to set my expectations here verbally. So you, you, know, day four. We’re going to finish day four today.

Audience: Whatever. So, so the question on the table was?

Travis: It is what do we discern about God, his purposes, his mind, his glory.

Audience: So to piggyback on Nicholas a little bit, and just because I haven’t heard this yet, I probably slept in one of these comments. We see God saying ‘it is good.’ if we fast forward that to the, to the, to the, to the, Psalm One idea of fear of God.

 At the most basic level, of fear of God, we want to say, what God says is good and what God says is not good, is in fact, not good. So we start here then with these, with these, tail end phrases, God is good. God is good, to see what a fully worked fear of God starts to look like. It shows us what’s good enough.

Travis: So is the way Nicholas put it was valuation. God, God is the source of all valuation. What he says is good is good. What he says is not good, is not good. And in the fear of the Lord, we line our minds up with his. We, you know, in Psalm 36, I think it says, we think we’re, we’re, in your light, we see light, you know, we, we, we, are thinking God’s thoughts after him. That is what it is to be fully rejoicing in God and fearing the Lord is to think his thoughts after him and think like he thinks. Yeah.

Audience: I was going to see that go what he said, it’s like everything about God is good. If we think about anything else, it’s evil. It’s like, it’s not the things of God is only good. There, there’s nothing else that, that, is good, but God and things of God. Everything, you know. There, it, it all points to his goodness.

Travis: When we, and when we doubt God’s goodness, as you said, that takes us into evil. We start using our imaginations in a sinful way, to take us away from  what’s revealed.

Audience: It goes back to, ‘think on these things, whatever is good, whatever is true.’

Travis: Yeah, Philippians four. Good. Joe, no Wayne.

Audience: He plans to work within time that he sets up these days, and nights, and years, and you see throughout the rest of the Bible that these years have importance that we can look at back at history and say on this day. Yeah, he’s setting up time, so true, I didn’t think about that.

Travis: by setting up time. And here’s the infinite God working within finite creation. And So what does that tell us about God? It tells us he accommodates us. It tells us he, he, is able in his infinity, his eternity, his, his, immensity, he’s able to, then, still work within his creation. So that precludes any deism. And there’s no deism where God set, set it up like the, like the watch, the clockmaker and just set it spinning and walked away.

 God is imminent. He is, he’s transcended, but he’s imminent. He comes near in his immensity and he is involved. And he’s working within our time. That shows a massive accommodation. What does it show? Mercy. Shows compassion. It shows interest, shows kindness. Excellent point.

Audience: Reinforcing the creative point from, from, day three. You know that, that, one phrase, ‘and the stars’ combined with being signs, separating the seasons, right? That creation, you know, is so phenomenally complex and demonstrates its own beauty. That, that, even the part that is away from the created beings that were created to glorify God, right, the, the, complexity and beauty that, at that point and for thousands of years after he did this, would never be seen up close by humans. He did that for his own glory. And you know how you could go and look at, I don’t know, a NASA gallery of, you know, stellar phenomenon and, and, not come away with an appreciation for just how amazing, and powerful, and creative God is. I have no idea.

Travis: Yeah, good. Good point. Let me hold on to your comments. I’m going to make one point here and I want to make sure and get in. God, God, provided light for the earth for the sustenance, growth, development of organic life, to energize the vegetation, to provide life giving light to animate life forms. And, so, we see God here as a self-sufficient, not only creator, but sustainer of his creation.

 Second point I just want to make very quickly is that as the moon itself does not possess light, but reflects the light of the sun and yet still radiates light to us. So also we infer from that, that, all their light bearing bodies carry light, but are not themselves sources of light. God is the source of light. Does that make sense?

So the, the, sun itself we think is energy emitting, but it in and of itself is not the one. It didn’t get its own energy from itself. It’s not self-sustaining. God is the one who gave that and sustains it, just and, and, we see that represented in the moon’s relation to the sun. He could have created the moon with its own light; if he wanted it duller, he could have made it a duller light. But he didn’t. He wanted it to reflect the sun’s rays.

 He created the lights to rule; the word is memšālâ, a word that means to exercise dominion or authority. It’s interesting. It establishes a principle here on day four, before there’s any mankind, God says let them exercise dominion. He does this, “establishes a principle here of governance and oversight, establishing the principle in two illuminating luminaries that rule by providing service warmth. Light, providing an environment” to throw “in which to thrive and to grow, provides energy to stimulate, sustained growth, provides vision for us to see what’s out there.” All of that, God established. This is what governance and the exercise of authority looks like.

Audience: It’s shepherding isn’t it. It’s giving your life for a good; providing.

Travis: What is the, what is the sun doing? It’s burning itself up.

Audience:  For him.

Travis: For you. And that’s what authority does for people. Okay. That’s what we do in positions of authority. It’s not self-serving. It’s for the purpose of you.

 There’s an entry for memšālâ in the Theological Word Book of the Old Testament and says this, “There is no specific” thought “theology to be drawn from the meaning of the word” memšālâ and “Yet the passages … demonstrate the importance of the principle of authority, the absolute moral necessity of respect for proper authority, the value of it for orderly society and happy living, and the origin of all”, all “authority in God, himself. Authority is of many degrees and kinds. It has” it has “various theoretical bases. It originates in God. Man has no authority at all as man, but simply as God’s viceregent.” End Quote.

 So there’s a principle here in the sun and the moon designated to rule, to exercise or to show dominion, exercise authority. There’s a principle here of delegated power, the energy of light. The ‘or’ is delegated to the light bears, the ‘maor’ and it is established first in the heavenly bodies. The sun gets its light from God to exercise its dominion over the day. The moon gets its light from the sun to exercise dominion over the night. Both bodies designed to rule and all for the good of others. Okay. So back to your, I’ve got a few other things here, but I’ll, I’ll want to get some of your comments in. Brett you.

Audience: Yeah this is my question, is just what does it mean that it, in what sense does the sun have authority over the day. I mean, it’s, they’re ruling the day and then and then so that, because and it’s already set up that there was day, and there was morning. Or morn, the first day.

 So when God separated the light from the darkness and then had the earth revolving; or whatever made that first day. So then that was already, day was established. And then the sun is authority over the day. Does that, what does that mean, that, in what sense does that mean?

Travis: Basically, this right here, and it’s kind of going, like, think about back to David’s comment about his son not being able to ride his bike at night. Why? Why is he making that subsidiary rule? Because he’ll get hurt if he rides his bike at night and doesn’t see something and smashes into something or cars may not see a kid riding a bike at night and run into him.

 So what is it? What is the sun? The, the, fact that the sun has gone down means we all go to bed at night. There’s, actual, there’s a lot of science to this too; that we thrive when we’re up in the day and we sleep at night. We thrive. When we don’t do that and this is what technology is doing to so many, the fact that we have just lights, we can stay up all night and see things if we want to. It’s not good for us though. This doesn’t have the same rejuvenating effects as the sun does. And there is a benefit to turning off that sun.

Those, those, effects and having everything shut down; they’re, they’re chemicals that when everything goes dark, chemical says, ‘okay, time to go to sleep.’ And that sleep is so crucial to our health, to our existence. So there’s a governing that goes on there, in this, in just in those kind of senses and what can be done during one time and what cannot be done during the other time; orders our world okay. So I, I, think I saw Chuck and I’ll come back to you guys. Chuck you, you, were saying something.

Audience: Just, just, again in the creation draw. He’s creating it to draw men to him, you know, ultimately. But that’s, that’s, like whole creation every day.

Travis: Everything. Yeah, everything. Draw men to himself to worship him. Gary.

Audience: I think you shared that the sun’s burning out for us. And I’m not a scientist, but I, I remember reading that, how much the sun’s capacity is diminishing on a yearly basis and why evolution is stupid. Because if you had, if you had billions of years, the sun would have been so close to the earth, life couldn’t have been sustained.

Travis: That’s right. So is that; That’s the law of entropy. Is that right?

Audience: Yeah.

Travis: Yeah, Mark.

Audience: I think Scott was before me.

Travis: But was he? Okay. I thought I saw Josh first. So let’s go to Scott, then Josh, then you.

Audience: It’s a quick question. But you said that we were made to get tired at night. Was that right? Like were we.

Travis: Yeah. There’s just a physical like chemical thing going on that says when light goes out we start to shut down. Yeah.

 Audience: But I was thinking, couldn’t we like make like a schedule for us to like sleep during the day and then be up at night, so.

Travis: We can, we can, it’s just not as good. It’s not good for you. It’s not as healthy.

Audience: People that do that, do have ill effects from that.

Travis: They do. There’s a, there’s a, study done on, I’m trying to remember the name.

Audience: Alaska. In Alaska, there’s

Travis: It’s actually Antarctica is the one I saw, but Alaska probably tons of studies up there, but in Antarctica where it just goes dark and, and, their minds start to really go a little nuts-o. So you don’t want a guy like nailing station down or whatever. Research station. Josh and then Mark.

Audience: Yeah. Just kind of what you said on, on, the authority aspect of the sun. It also, the, the, first authority; that all authority is a stewardship authority. Stewardship from, because God had already established day and established night and he left the sun in charge of it. It’s not, there’s no ultimate authority outside of God. It’s all stewardship.

Travis: That’s good. That’s really good. Thank you. Yeah, Stewardship. The sun is stewarding the realm that he’s been given to steward; he, it is idolatrous. I’m sorry.

Audience: Two things. One, I was telling Rod, there’s doctors are actually prescribing for guys who are having difficulty sleeping. Go camping for a week to two weeks. Isn’t that funny? And not to take lanterns, they can have a flashlight, but that’s it. Go camping. Technologies gone. Isn’t that funny?

Travis: That is very interesting.

Audience: I thought it was funny.

Travis: Get you, get you back on a sleep wake cycle.

Audience: Get back on a pattern, you know. Like God established.

Travis:  Bruce, Bruce is all of a sudden discovering some sleep issues he’s experiencing.

Audience: Is that without kids, police officers, and others that do work. But when you were reading about the sun and the moon and it reflecting, that the verse came into my mind, “that the light has come into the world” and I thought about Jesus Christ. That, that, that light, that son and during these dark times, as he’s gone, we’re like the moon. We reflect Christ. We’re not the light. We’re just a picture of that.

Travis: Yeah, that’s really good. Yeah. All kinds of pictures come out of what, he, God did to inform us and instruct us, give us analogies, give us symbols and signs, and everything pointing to his greater glory. And, and, for us, the redeemed, we, we see that all fulfilled in Christ. All just expanding our understanding of who God is. We’re, of all people, most privileged and blessed aren’t we? Are to, to, enjoy this forever. Yeah, really good. Brad.

Audience: Get really off the cuff here out there, but I hope there’s movie night in heaven. I really, I’d love to see. All right. Tonight showing Creation Day Three; Watch these plans. Just, I mean, you see time lapse, lapse, video of stuff where you can see it kind of growing and so forth. I’d love to see that. I don’t know where my mind was there. I like where he went. That’s awesome. New Jerusalem 4:7

Travis: I’ll let, I’ll let you ask the eternal lamb about movie night Brett.

Audience: If we have a movie night, I’m making popcorn.

Travis: All right, So what was I doing before this? Just a few. Just a few, just a few more things to go through real quick. I see that. You need to say that?  Okay, go ahead.

Audience: Oh yeah. I was just going to say that’s really, really amazing that all of this, this right here, it defends every single other religion out there. Catholicism, you can see that man can’t get to heaven, because they have to depend on God for everything and even their sin.

Travis: To, to, deal with their sin.

Audience: Yeah. And then Mormonism, there’s only one God and there, you can’t, there’s no, not like other gods because God created everything else and.

Travis: Okay, and then so every other worldview is demolished just by this.

Audience: And then there’s like Muslim, where they believe in like a God who’s very angry and he like, he’s, he’s, a really, really angry God.

Travis: Arbitrary. He’s arbitrary, just like mankind.

Audience: This shows that he’s gracious and merciful too. And, and, then there’s every religion, you know, evolution.

Travis: Every single religion, every single world view every single system is undone, just by this. That’s why, that’s why, I can’t stand it when there are some of our Christian brothers, sisters who, who, will want to, they want, you know, they want to accept evolution into the story and try to wed them together. I, I, just, they don’t know what they’re doing. You know, they just don’t know what they’re doing.

Audience: Well, we, I didn’t even know what we’re doing before we started studying this. It’s really been amazing for me, just how I think really it is just a matter they don’t read the Bible enough, you know. I didn’t. I don’t read the Bible enough. I don’t read it with this kind of depth, you know, this is just so instrumental just to go through and study and hear other people’s perspective on it. You would never think of everything that 20 other people think, you know? And it’s, it is just infinitesimal, or infinite. And it just makes you, it makes you worship God. Just thinking about him, makes you think of those systems as pale.

Travis: Yeah. Yeah. So small. So, so bankrupt. That’s right. Why would we want to, you know, rubber, rummage around in the trash of old systems when we have this feast.

Audience: Yeah. You wanna like when you talk to people, you do wanna just kinda like, hey, man, just let me read this to you. And let’s discuss the implications. And then we’ll talk about your system. Your system might have merit to some degree, but listen to this. This is incredible stuff.

Travis: Yeah. Yeah, Yeah, That’s exactly right. It, it, I think, I think, just slowing down and reading the text and making observations which, you know, look, none of us, none of us are Stephen Hawking’s, none of us are geniuses or anything. We’re just, we’re just observing what’s there and we’re not, we’re not making speculative, fanciful implications out of this. This is all warranted by what’s actually here.

 So we don’t have to be Socrates. We just, we just, have to be us and take our observation, which we all have and see what’s there, make implications. God intended a few other things about what we discern about God from this. God intended for the movement of mankind by providing, someone had said this earlier, but by providing the, the, tools for navigation for which is essential for exploration.

 So God allowed man, and I would say intended man, to go out and look around, to go out and explore, to go out and, and, chart and categorize. Again, it’s, it’s all this, all this study, exploration, discovery. So one of the greatest joys in life and this is what I, when I try to preach and teach, I, I’m aiming every time to try to help bring all of you, everybody that I can into the joy of discovery. So because when you discover it for yourself, it’s like the light bulb goes on. You absolutely love what you’re seeing there. That’s what God is doing to us, you know, he’s providing all the tools that we can have so that we can go out and discover and learn and see more and more of his, his, glory.

 God intended mankind to mark time, to number days, and years, and seasons. He intended mankind to, this is the word prognosticate, to predict, to look at what’s ahead, like the coming season in order to prepare for things. And by this he intends man to plan and prepare and get himself ready. And we’ve already seen by what he’s done and what he set up, that he plans and prepares and gets things ready. So he lays out the table before he puts the food on it. You know, that’s, it’s the same thing that, we, he, he intends for us to do.

 God intended mankind to live within boundaries. To live within boundaries of our finitude. Boundaries of our design. Boundaries of general seasons. He wants us to live in the boundaries of days and years, and we thrive when we do that. And when we try to, you know, go outside those boundaries, we, we, suffer consequences.

 You know, I, I, was in the Border Patrol once and worked different schedules. And man, it, it, really messed with me to, to, go and I had to, because of the way the, the, station and the, the, sector was [sent] set up, I had to go from four weeks of days, to four weeks of swing shifts, to four weeks of night shifts.

I could never get used to anything. I was, I was a zombie. I mean, Nicholas was really young, but he kind of remembers me as a zombie at that time, you know, just drifting from one thing to another. It’s not healthy, you know, and people who people who live that way. It’s just, it affects you. So he tends to live us and thrive within these boundaries that he gave us.

 And God then intended for us to observe the heavens, to read the celestial signs. And this comes back to, we don’t want to take that too far, like, the crazy world’s going to end on September 23rd thing but, but, to read celestial signs, which one, they are going to point and you know reading in Joel 2:31, they’re going to point to divine judgment, just as they pointed to divine grace in Christ. You mentioned the star, Bethlehem star. They’re also going to point to judgment. And when there will be, sun will be darkened and the moon turn to blood and all of that, we’ll notice, hey, something’s different. I think somethings happening bad. Okay, so any final comments? Chuck.

Audience: Psalm 16:6, “The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.” I love that verse. And it’s the boundaries.

Travis: Yeah. Good.

Audience: “I have a beautiful inheritance” since the last couple of years.

 Travis: Fantastic.

 Audience: I just love the fixedness of, of, it all and that you were talking about the navigational thing. So we can, we can, actually shoot a rocket to the moon and know where, where, it’s going to go and, where, when it’s going to get there and all that kind of stuff, because of the fixedness. When the postmoderns say there aren’t any absolutes, there aren’t any, you know, governing laws and principles, we just make up our own truth. That is go, you know, jump off a cliff and say you can fly.

Travis: I know. Yeah, the postmoderns, the postmoderns all say that, as postmoderns, it’s the modern world and the assumptions of the modern world that got us to the moon to begin with. And they’re denying all that, ignoring all that. I, I, saw that movie. Did you ever see that movie, Hidden Figures? That is, that is amazing. Yeah, very amazing. To see the precision with which they could chart, you know, and count on when the capsule comes down, it’s going to land within this area, right here. That was the, you know, because we want to get our man back, you know, we want to send him to the moon, but we also want to have him back, so he can live and thrive.

Audience: And the astronauts really appreciate it.

Travis: They sure did and their families too. But that’s the, the, movies kind of about that, about some of the ladies involved in that, in the very beginning. But that’s a, it’s, it’s, fascinating to see the precision. Now this again sets up all this uniformity of the way things work and they’re fixed, so that we can count on them. And today’s logic actually works tomorrow, and worked thousand years ago, as well. So our logic isn’t always changing. It’s not always up for grabs. There is something fixed and reliable and, and, that provides the preconditions of intelligible thought, right?

 Audience: One of the last thought about that, was just that fixedness allows us to back project, so we can actually, with computer projections, go back and say this is what Bethlehem sky looked like when Christ came. You know, I mean roughly. I mean we don’t know the day and so forth, but I just go, you know this is what these wise men, what whoever would have seen afterwards and all that kind of stuff. And, and, it’s just phenomenal to think about that up there because of those fixed laws.

Travis: That’s right. That’s right. I have one more comment to make. But Rod, you had your hand up.

Audience: You know it’s interesting. We, I mean since Genesis, up until just the last, in the early 50s, we’ve always seen the heavens from an earthly perspective. It wasn’t until we start pulling into outer space that we begin to see the glory of God. In some of the pictures we saw, at the last, at the shepherd’s conference, of what that looks like and, when the, when they put the Hubble telescope and begin to see further out into space and the clarity, again we’re beginning to see the glory of God in his, in his perfect wisdom.

 This is going to sound crazy, but you know Hubble, Hubble, was launched during my early, you know, child development and into my teen years and nothing in my life has actually made me appreciate God and his power in creation more than the Hubble Space Telescope. Just because you know all of the, you know, you don’t want to worship the creation, but the creation does show the majesty of God and his creative power and the succession of literally thousands of images as they’ve enhanced that to scope and looked at things we never knew were out there. It’s just incredible.

Travis: It’s interesting. One more comment.  Go ahead and I’ll say this.

Audience: Somebody brought it up. Just the idea of it’s amazing. I’m thinking about just reading and what we need to read more and everything. I don’t think it’s just that we need to read scripture more. I just think we need to believe what we read. We have a tendency, I think, to come to God’s word and try to logically figure out everything instead of just saying, I loved who your friend was from Australia I think came in here, where he said, how many of us and I grew up with this: God said that, I believe it. That settles it. He says one of those statements is not true. God said it. That settles it. Whether I believe it or not, is not important.

 And I just, just, as you, you look at scripture. It’s not up to me to decide whether this is believable. God sits outside my laws all the time, everything here. And you see this from the very beginning. We could never explain creation. Man has been studying how to create life for, ever since we’ve been here, and he’s starting with known objects. God started with nothing and we haven’t got the slightest ideas.

Travis: He started with God.

Audience: What, I mean, I mean, he didn’t need any.

Travis: No preexisting material. Yeah I know.

Audience: And man, man is no closer, even having that head start, coming up with the simplest form of life, quote ‘simple’. It’s just ridiculous.

Travis: That anything he’s doing is after God already did it. But he’s using all preexisting material. He’s using all, all, God’s wisdom or all God’s, what’s God revealed in creation. He’s using it all, you know, and he never honors God or gives him thanks.

 I just, with regard to the Hubble telescope and Rod, what you said about all of, all of, this glorifying God’s greatness as we look out into space, or as we look into the smallest molecules, and atoms, and all that.

You know, men have, you know, I’ve, I’ve heard them kind of mock Genesis one; the two great lights, the sun and they say, it’s not that great. You know when you, when you, look out into, into, space, you see all these greater lights. But it shows that God, in revealing all of this, he doesn’t care about all that. He’s speaking, he’s speaking perspectively, from man’s perspective, even before man is on the earth, which indicates, God centers his attention on mankind. Is, all of this is for the purpose of man, that man might see God’s great glory.

 God knows that there are different, different relatives just, just, real quick. That God knows that there are different relative sizes of stars, and different colors, and different things, that maybe, from our perspective might be more magnificent. But what good does Betelgeuse do for me, in relation to the sun?

Audience: And oh by the way, if you put one of those other more powerful stars, we would all burn to a crisp.

Travis: Exactly so that all that power would just consume us. God knows that from the very beginning, that all of this is focused on us. And that’s why maybe some things that we might have curiosities about. Oh, and he made the stars also, which is, they’re out there.

 It really does put it in perspective, all of that. And by saying the greater lights, we say, oh, but the moon isn’t a light. It’s not in and of itself a light like the sun is. No, it’s different. And we’re supposed to discern something. So we should never, and anybody who makes a mockery of any of this by, you know, condemning, condemning what’s revealed based on what they’ve seen, they just need to observe with belief. They need to observe with the fear of the Lord. They need to observe all this with an intention to worship the one who revealed all this.

 That’s, that’s, the difference. We do need to come into it with the fear of the Lord; believing, trusting, in order to put our faith in him and trust him. Worship him. Yeah, Brett,

Audience: It even says to give light, to give light on the earth. That’s why they were put there. It says to put to give light on the earth.

Travis: Exactly.

Audience: Is the most important thing. And if you see the CMVR, it’s the center of the universe too.

Travis: Yeah, so all that, it is very geocentric, isn’t it? Man centric, but in God’s universe, we’re all supposed to look up.

 Father thank you for the time we’ve had this morning and, and, we, we, can only seem to get through a day or two at a time and, and, if, if, we were to spend, if we were to spend days on each day, we wouldn’t get to even to the bottom of it, there’s so much here. We were humbled before the world we live in, but we’re also humbled before your word, as you teach us to interpret what we see.

 The Hubble telescope in and of itself is, is, a great tool. But without your revelation to inform our understanding; it would just be more facts. Cold facts that would just further and fuel our rebellion. So we’re thankful for your Holy Spirit, we’re thankful for salvation in Jesus Christ, because you’ve taught us the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom, and you’re continuing to grow us in wisdom and understanding, in the knowledge of Christ.

 We thank you again for the time and how you’ve used it this morning. We look forward to more time to discover what you did on day five and day six. Please help us to live within your boundaries, as your creatures. Help us to think your thoughts after you that we might give all glory and honor and praise to you. In the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior, Amen.