The Attributes of God’s Greatness: God the Creator, Part 2

Okay. We have covered the first and second subheadings under the first major category of theology proper. We talked about the greatness of God and, the, those subheadings under the greatness of God, or God the immortal spirit, and God the triune person. And now we’re looking at that third subheading which we started, started last time, God the creator.

 So we said God is immortal spirit, God is triune person, and God is creator. In the beginning. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Now the basic elements. So just to remind you this is review from last time. Basic elements that a Christian Doctrine of Creation; God preexisted his creation in holy perfection, as the single and the only, simple, and self-sufficient Being. Okay, we’ve talked about all that.

 God created the universe by Divine Fiat, that is by decree and he created the universe Ex nihilo nihilo, no preexisting material. The only thing that was there was God. Then God spoke all matter into existence. Okay. Then also, God created the heavens and the earth according to his absolutely free and sovereign, totally sovereign, his spontaneous will. Okay.

So there was nothing pressing itself. No need pressing itself upon God to do this. It’s his free. The free act of his will. Whenever somebody tries to bring up the free will of man and tries to emphasize that, I just want to push, pause and say, well, let’s remember whose will is most important here, it’s God’s will and the freedom of his will. So, when we talk about free will, I like to talk about the absolutely free will of God, and the more our will is like his will, that makes us free.

 The universe, finally, is dependent on God for its origin, its maintenance, and its preservation. Colossians 1:16 or 17, speaks of Christ who sustains all things by the word of his power. So, if God at some point releases, does not hold on to control, we spin off into some star somewhere and die. Okay. So, it’s him holding all atoms together whether it’s on a macro level or micro level, he’s holding everything together. Okay.

 So, the, the Doctrines of Theology proper, we talked about briefly last time, that are revealed in creation. We talked about, the really, what I like to call the limitlessness of God. We think in terms of creation, you know, and we see this in Genesis one, God forming and then filling. He sets limits on things. There is no limit set on God. He is absolutely limitlessness or he is absolutely limitless.

 So we talked about that and out of that comes his Doctrine of God’s Infinity. That is in contrast to the spatial limits of creation. And we talked about his eternity in contrast to the temporal limits of creation; because both matter and time were created, when God created everything.

 We also talked about His immensity. So the limitlessness of his person, so his immensity, that is, we could speak of that in transcendent perspective, or his omnipresence, which speaks about him being everywhere, which is a reference not to transcendence, as much as to imminence. We can also add two of the other two omnis, which we did God is omnipotent; he’s all powerful. There are limits in the creative world to.

 Even though the sun is very powerful and there are sunbursts going on right now, evidently, that could destroy us, but we know it won’t because God holds everything into. Ren Merry brought this up to me the other day. He said, hey, have you ever heard of what’s going on in September 23rd? Has anybody heard this? It’s like going around the Internet that everything’s going to die as if.

Audience: The lineup of the planets or something.

Travis Right. Right.

Audience: The plants are going to line up. But yeah, that’s all I know.

Travis: Mark your calendars, guys. You want to have your sin confessed by September 23rd?

Audience: That’s the reason you wanted to get past this.

Travis: What’s that?

Audience: Just wanted to make sure your teaching is not past that.

Travis: Is it on September 23rd? It’s on September 23rd. We may or may not meet. So, there is, there is one day, I know that Christ will not return, and it’s September 23rd, because no man knows the day or the hour.

 But, But, as powerful as the sun is, it still has limits to its power. There is an, there’s an end to all the power of the sun. There is no end to God’s power. So he is all powerful, he is omnipotent, and all knowing, omniscient. All, in fact, all facts that we’re talking about that are coming into being at the creation, the moment of creation, and that first creation week, God created all those facts. So he knows everything about them, inside and out.

 God knows all things and it’s in contrast to us. We are finite in our knowledge. So, we, we stated the basic elements of the Doctrine of Creation, Doctrines of Theology proper, we learn through creation, and in contrast to creation, and then we started to get into last time the, the, creation accounts and looking at the, the, Genesis account. And I want us, we’re going to go back to Genesis one and finish that up.

 But before we do that I want you to turn; someone, someone, be a reader for me, good preacher voice and, and read. We’re going to read Proverbs 8:12 to 36 together. This is a fantastic passage, where it speaks of, really personifies wisdom, as being God’s partner in creation. Romans 1:19 and 20 says, “What can be known about God is plain to us, because God has shown it to us. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”

 So, we’re going to reflect on that in, in, this, this, kind of survey of Genesis one, and we’re going to reflect on that. We’re going to ask two questions, of every day of creation. We’re going to go through and ask, what did God creator accomplish on that day? And number two, what does the work of each day reveal about God? Okay.

So what’d God do, and that’s what we want to try to discipline ourselves to not get into the implications of that before we define what he actually did. So let’s look at what he did and then what that reveals about God, the implications.

 So the reason we want to do this is that if we study the works of God in creation, it says in Psalm 111, verse two, great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them. So if we will pursue that study, we’re going to gain wisdom and understanding by which great kings reign wisely. As it says in Psalm 111, “Great kings reign wisely and justly.”

 And so, we, we want to get a fuller understanding of God’s glory and his wisdom; in particular. We’re going to get that if we expose the truths that are in Genesis one, and that will establish for us, this is important, it’ll establish for us a distinctively Christian worldview, Okay?

That what we learned there is going to establish a distinctly Christian world, ew, world view, and that’s going to become important as we come back next time. So let’s, let’s, go to that passage. Romans, sorry, Romans. Proverbs 8, and someone start. Who’s going to start? Who’s going to read? Ah Joe, preacher voice. Okay. Proverbs 8:12 to 36. So read 12 all the way to the end of the chapter.

Audience: “I, wisdom, dwell with prudence, and I find knowledge and discretion. The fear of the LORD is hatred of evil. Pride and arrogance and the way of evil and perverted speech I hate. I have counsel and sound wisdom; I have insight; I have strength.” Be “By me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just; by me prince’s rule, and nobles, all who govern justly.

“I love those who love me, and those who seek me,” diliging, “diligently find me. Riches and honor are” wer, “with me, enduring wealth and righteousness. My fruit is better than gold, even fine gold, and my yield than choice silver. I walk in the way of righteousness, and the paths of justice, granting an inheritance to those who love me, and filling their treasuries.

“The LORD possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of His acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there was no deaths I was brought forth, when there was no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth, before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world.

“When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made” firms “firm the skies above, when he establish the fountains of the deep, when he assign to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man.

“And now, O sons, listen to me; blessed are those who keep my ways. Hear instruction and be wise, and do not neglect it. Blessed is the one who listens to me, watching daily at my gates, waiting beside my doors. For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the LORD, but he who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death.” 

Travis: That is. Thank you very much for reading that. That is such a, I’d love to just camp there for the rest of the, for the rest of the time, because we see right there in the beginning. “I, wisdom, dwell with prudence, find knowledge and discretion. The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil. Pride and arrogance and the way of evil and perverted speech I hate.” So there is a, there’s a sense in which, I mean this is not just a sense; this is the essence of wisdom is to fear the Lord. And the fear of the Lord results in us hating what’s evil.

 If we hate what’s evil and turn away from it and which would be the turning way of, turning away from pride, turning away from arrogance, the way of evil, perverted speech, then we, we, not, not, just turn away from that, but we turn, that turns us toward the Lord. That turns us to pursue the Lord. Where we find wisdom, prudence, knowledge, discretion, counsel, sound wisdom, inside strength, all of that. That’s what comes out.

 That’s, that’s, what we pursue when we turn away from sin. Sin clouds the judgment. Sin blinds us. And if we find the Lord, we fear the Lord, we find him and find life, we find strength. So that’s why at the end it says, “Now sons, listen to me, blessed are those who keep my ways hear instruction, be wise, don’t neglect it. Whoever finds me, listens to me. Whoever finds me, finds life, obtains favor from the LORD. Whoever fails to find me, injuries himself. All who hate me love death.”

 And in the middle of that section of the, the, preparatory and then the exhortation at the end, is the Doctrine of the Creation. Where wisdom is involved in all creation, and so creation is the establishment of divine wisdom. It’s so vital that we pay heed and pay close attention to what God did at the very beginning, because what we learn in Genesis provides all, and only the preconditions, that all the preconditions and the only preconditions for intelligibility, as opposed to every single, Christian, non-Christian worldview. Every other worldview, every other.

You know if you think of a worldview in terms of three things, think of it in terms of, you know, it’s, it’s, understanding of reality, which we call metaphysics. It’s understanding of knowledge, which we could maybe call epistemology. Where knowledge comes from and how we gain knowledge, and it also talks about behavior. Worldview defines behavior, so our view of ethics, so metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, all of that, are the elements of a worldview.

 The only worldview that provides the preconditions for understanding anything is this Christian worldview, which is established in Genesis one and two. Okay, so we need to pay close attention to that. We’re going to come back to that next time and talk about the implications. But for right now, let’s go to Genesis one and then we will work our way through each of days. Okay?

 So we’ve got, we’ve used 20 minutes. We’ve got a total of 90 minutes. That means 70 minutes. That means ten minutes on each day. Is that about right? Ten minutes on each day? We’ve already gotten into day one. I’m just going to review very quickly what we said because we only talked about what was done on day one. We’re gonna save the implications of that for today. So let me just review. This is, these are things that you said, what did God. Let’s let’s, have somebody read. So somebody else read Genesis 1:1 to 5. Who would like to read that. Okay. Just go ahead, Bruce.

Audience: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness is over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good. And God separated light from the darkness. God called the light Day, And the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, of the first day.

Travis: Okay, good. Thanks. We, a question came up last time, because I have been taught, and I think some others have been taught that this first section here is kind of like an overview, like a heading. That’s what it is, of all, of all the created order. And then really day one starts with verse three, verse three to five, that’s day one or some go back to verse two to verse five, that’s day one.

 And what I was saying last time is that’s all arbitrary and actually not faithful to the text. The, the, there’s a, waw=consecutive, that connects each of those verses together, keeping that whole unit together all the way up to day one. I wanted to hear like, what’s a waw= consecutive? That’s a Hebrew structure. It’s a Hebrew marker in the structure. It’s really, the waw, is like an

‘and’ can be translated, ‘Now’, it can be translated, ‘Even’, but it’s really ‘and’, ‘and’, ‘and’, ‘and’, ‘and’, in the with the verb tenses that are used there, it’s showing this whole thing is connected as a unit.

 I want to read, really quickly, just to, and reinforce what I’m saying, by reading something from Keil and Delitzsch. You haven’t got that set of commentaries. It’s really good. Bruce was just asking me about this. He found it online for free, right? So you can get to Keil and Delitzsch, all this material for free. “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth”.

 Here’s what Keil and Delitzsch say. “Heaven and earth have not existed from all eternity, but had a beginning; nor did they arise by emanation from an absolute substance, but were created by God. This sentence, which stands at the head of the records of revelation, is not a mere heading, nor a summary of the history of the creation, but a declaration of the primeval act of God by which the universe was called into being.

“That this verse is not merely a heading, is evident from the fact that the following account of the course of creation commences with Waw(and),” That’s the word ‘and’, “which connects the different acts of creation with the fact expressed in verse one, as the primary foundation upon which they rest. Resit that’s, “in the beginning”, is used absolutely like, en arche (ἐν ἀρχῇ)in John 1:1 and resit (מראשׁיח) in Isaiah 46:10.” You’d like to check that one out.

 “The following clause cannot be treated as subordinate, either by rendering it, ‘in the beginning when a God created…, the earth was,’ and etcetera, or ‘in the beginning when God created…, (but the earth was then in the chaos, etc.), and God said, let there be light’.” That’s another rendering of that.

“The first is opposed to the grammar of the language, which would require verse two to commence with” a, I won’t read it, but it’s a different Hebrew expression. “The second to the simplicity of style, it’s opposed to the simplicity of style which pervades the whole chapter, and to which so involved a sentence would be intolerable, apart altogether from the fact that this construction is invented for the simple purpose of getting rid of the doctrine of a creatio ex nihilo, which is so repulsive to modern Pantheism.

 “Resit ( ראשׁיח) in itself is a relative notion, indicating the commencement of a series of things or events;” That’s important to realize that when God, when it says, “in the beginning God created”, resit, he’s commencing a series of things or events. “But here in the context gives it the meaning of the very first beginning, the commencement of the world, when time itself began. That statement, that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, not only precludes the idea of the eternity of the world a parte ante, but shows that the creation of the heaven and the earth was the actual beginning of all things.”

 Let’s skip ahead to another comment on: ”The First Day. Though the treating of the creation of the heaven and the earth, the writer, both here and in what follows, describes with minuteness the original condition and progressive formation of the earth alone, and says nothing more respecting the heaven than is actually requisite in order to show its connection with the earth.”

 He is, so he says heavens and the earth, and then he leaves off talking about the heavens because he’s focused on the earth, he’s focused on where we live. That’s what he says here, “He is writing for the inhabitants of the earth, and for religious ends; not to gratify curiosity, but to strengthen faith in God, the creator of the universe. What is said in verse two of the chaotic condition of the earth, is equally applicable to the heaven, the heaven proceeds from the same chaos as the earth.”

 So that’s the reference to tohu vabohu there in verse two, “without form and void”. So, the same, the same structure, and filling, the need to happen to the earth. That same structure and filling, need to happen in the heavens as well. And that’s what I was talking about last time when we went to Job and recognize that the angels are created on day one, Okay? Even though it’s not telling us that or created us after day one. John.

Audience: So, that’s what I was wondering about. What was included in heaven there?

Travis: Right. So it doesn’t get into detail. But I believe that the angels, the angelic host was created on day one, because [in where do we say that] in Job 38:7, it says that the, the, angels are basically there to observe and witness creation unfold. So, I believe it was right on day one and then they were there by God to see all that was unfolding.

Audience: So you’re saying all are including the good angels, bad angels or what?

Travis: Well, the bad angels, yes, there was a fall after there, but they’re all good angels at that time.

Audience: At that time. And then the fall took place. And then.

Travis: Well then, yeah, then the fall took place. But prior to the fall and unexplained to us exactly is when Lucifer fell. That’s prior to Genesis three.

Audience: Yeah. So Genesis three could have been a ways away from Genesis one. The reason I’m asking is just because, it seems like Satan’s pretty mature by that point, you know, to have rebelled himself, taking a third of the angels with him, then come down to earth and you know, that kind of stuff.

Travis: I yeah, I don’t know the answer to that except to say that it does seem like some time has passed. But is it millennia or is it a few days? What’s required? What’s required for Satan to be, quote unquote ‘mature’ by that time because Adam and Eve were created full grown and completely mature, their minds able to grasp and comprehend everything that God has given to them. And Adam did a lot on the first day.

 Audience: That’s true.

Travis: So, I, I just, I just think in that original design in creation. So you know I’ve explained this is a very imperfect illustration, but when we think about, when we think about, sayt, you know, so we think about the fall, okay, decreed by God and yet we see Satan come in the form of a serpent slithering into the garden somehow and he’s malevolent and he’s got murder on his mind.

 And how did that? When did that happen? And, and, wait, wasn’t all, weren’t all things created good? Yes, all things are created good. God decreed that too. God decreed the fall of man. Decreed the fall of Satan. Decreed the all of evil, even though he’s not the primary one responsible.

He’s not the, he’s the primary cause. He’s not the secondary cause. The secondary causes are the ones that are, have the moral culpability and responsibility. He is the primary cause, the one who decreed all things. So how did this happen? I don’t know. Okay.

 But here’s an illustration that kind of I have in my mind that I’ve explained to my kids. So if, if, they go off and become heretics sometime, you know, I’m pretty sure that’s why. All right. But, but, I think of, I think of God, his everything that he sustains, he sustains by his grace. Granted? Is grace something that he must do?

Audience: No.

 Travis: No, no, it’s, it’s, he can withhold, he can choose to give, he can give it in amounts. We’re going to talk tomorrow, out of, out of Luke six about love, right? So we’re to love like God loves. When you see someone who asks you for something, we’re to give, you know, and we’ll talk about what that means.

 But do we then pull out everything that’s in our wallet and give everything to them, or to be okay to give them a few dollars? Can we measure the, the, amount that we give? Yes we can, because God measures the amounts he gives. We don’t see everybody getting the very exact same thing. His grace is not required, otherwise it not would not be grace.

 So when God created the whole earth, he created Satan; Satan is in perfection. The reason Satan or mankind remains in perfection is because like this pen, I’m holding it, you might say by my grace, but I let it go, there goes the pen. And was I required to hold that pen? No, by my grace I held that pen and it stood upright.

 And so by God’s grace he held Satan fast, and by his grace he stood upright, or by God’s grace he stood upright. If he withheld, Satan fell. If he pulled back, Satan fell. Same thing when man fell. Why? Why would God do that?

Why would God do that? Why would, why would so many people go to hell out of that act? Or that withholding that act of grace because man in the garden was not the end goal. Christ is the end goal. Christ is the end goal, and the full orb glory of God is the end goal. We are a part of that story. We’re a huge part of that story. The whole Bible is about the redemption of mankind, and yet it’s not primarily or ultimately about the redemption of mankind.

The whole Bible is ultimately and primarily about the glory of God. Redemption is the way God is glorified, and especially among us, who are going to be with him forever. So that’s the imperfect illustration I use. If you press it, it’s going to fall apart real quick. Brett, we got to move on. So keep that in mind. I’m going to have to cut you off and say.

Audience: Oh yeah, absolutely. So with the Satan being created on day one. But is there scriptural like, you can’t get around it, that thing, like with that waw=Consecutive, that kind of showed me, okay, so that’s not a heading, you know.

Travis: So not merely a heading.

Audience: So with this, it’s like, is there some reason we can’t believe that Satan was created earlier than day one.

Travis: Other than that God created the heavens and the earth on, right there. Yeah. I mean, everything that came into existence that’s not God came into existence right there. “By Christ all things are created, whether in heaven or on earth, whether invisible or visible. Rulers and authorities and powers. All things are created by Him

Audience: Oh yeah, right.

Travis:  Yeah. So Colossians 1:15 to 17. Okay. So that’s why I say he can’t be created prior to day one.

Audience: Yeah. Okay.

Travis: All things that came into being, came into being by Christ. And then the reason I say it’s not day two, three, four, is because of Job 38. What’d I say 38, verse 7, where it says, well it’s, it’s, it’s God, you know, cross examining Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding who determined its measurements? Surely you know who stretched out the line upon it? On what? What were its bases sunk? Or who laid its cornerstone?”

 And that’s all talking about the earth itself; the stuff of the earth, so heavens and the earth very first thing. “On what were its bases sunk? Or who laid its cornerstone? When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy,” that’s why I say it can’t be day two or three or four, all happened on day one. It’s just we’re not told exactly about that. Because as Keil and Delitzsch said, I agree with that, that, this what, what’s written here in, Gen, Genesis One and two is meant for us to understand our world; the world we live in, not the heavenly world. Okay.

 All right, so that’s getting into a little more implications. But we’ve said God created the immaterial and material world, the heavens, the Samayim, the immaterial heavens and their host, and the earth as well. He created solids, liquids; we might say, and gases, earth and water. He created the solid as the foundation and the liquid covering the solid. You see, you can cross reference Psalm 104.5 and six there.

 God decreed the light. He created the light, which is ‘or’, that’s the word, ‘or’ in Hebrew, it’s energy, life, the principle that sustains life. All you physics guys, God saw the light was good. He separated the light from the darkness. God named the light and the darkness that is, he named it day, he named it night. And then God marked evening and morning, distinguishing the first in the sequence of all subsequent days. Okay. So that’s what he did on day one. We could probably go further and really pull out more things, so we see he did.

 But let’s, let’s, go into implications now. What, what did we learn about God from day one? Anybody want to throw some things out? What do we learn about him? What are the implications of Genesis one, one to five?

Audience: I was just curious. So we can assume that this is a 24 hour day. That he did all these things within this 24- hour day.

Travis: Yes.

Audience: He was busy.

Travis: He. No, but there’s no loss of energy in him. No, no power lost. He’s all powerful. He’s omnipotent. Right. I’d be tired. Someone, someone else. Yeah. Joe.

Audience: But he was like providing for something that he was gonna do like it’s a, he had a plan of, he’s gonna create. He created light so that because man needs to see and kinda like he was providing for.

 Travis: Yes, that’s the, so that, what’s the implication there? He, he’s because provided for something that has yet to come into existence. What is that?

Audience: Foreknowledge.

Travis:  That’s maybe foreknowledge maybe, maybe, I’d use a different term.

Audience: Predestination.

Travis: Just, just plan. Just, I think, planning. And what is planning indicate?

Audience: Vision. Well.

Travis:  Vision, intelligence.

Audience: Will.

Travis: Okay, at least. Will. That’s right. Will, purpose. Okay. So we have a God who’s purposeful, wills, plans ahead. All these things, we can see are predicated of God. Let’s see. Yeah.

Audience: A W Pink actually has a really good way of putting this, right. We, we, see in passages like this his foreknowledge, but the foreknowledge is created by his divine counsel not the other way around.

Travis: Good. That’s good. Divine counsel, first. Somebody else. Yeah. Lee.

Audience: There’s something about it that I, I, don’t know if I can put my finger on it, but if there’s a necessity to this, in other words, God does things purposefully. He doesn’t just do everything that he did in the first six days, in one day. There’s got to be a reason for that, and I’m not sure I know what the reason is. But, you know, he’s not only planning for what will come, but there’s a reason he didn’t do it all at once, because he could have done it all.

Travis: He could have, yeah. So why? Yeah, why didn’t he. That and that’s the real question in creation and, and, six day creation is, why not in a moment? Why not in the snap of a, in the blink of an eye. Why take six days. That’s, that’s, something the early church fathers used to, used to ponder. It’s, it’s not, not the, not the could it have been thousands and millions of years, but rather why did it take six days?

Audience: Well, if you want me to ponder an answer to this. If he slowly teaches us that he does creation over time, he shows us, he starts to model the whole concept of patience. And patience is what we needed in order to wait for Christ to come. Because that was 4000 years later; more probably. And then more patience to let him walk the earth, and then more patience to create the Church. And then more patience for him to return and patience for us with one day we will be with him in glory. But this is the very beginning of God modeling in time: My will shall be done.

Travis: That’s a profound Christ center thought. I like that. It’s really good. Thank you. Somebody else.

Audience: It’s interesting because you have heaven and you have the spirit Beings up there. And then on earth, it’s like a whole different environment. And so that you have, because when you look at us as human beings and it reversed to us as being lower than the angles, whatever that means.

Travis: A little lower.

Audience: A little lower, but here and, and, we as human Beings can procreate and we have to survive in a different environment then they were created. And that’s the way they all they can’t procreate and they continue to exist. You’ve got two.

Travis:  You’ve got two, two realms of, of, existence. Yeah. That immaterial only realm. And then the realm that’s material, immaterial, right.

Audience: And then when you look at it though, because see the angels, they were confirmed either in their holiness or in their sin.

Travis: I know after that fall, that’s right.

 Audience: But there’s some mercy here showed more to us because we can be God. I mean, we can be saved. I mean through His power.

Travis: You got it. There is no salvation for fallen angels.

Audience: So, but with the angels. So you have to say God must have loved us a lot more than he love the angels.

Travis: He loved us differently. That’s right. Yeah, there’s a different love expressed there. That’s right. We see, obviously, in day one, one of the implications. So we just need to, it’s obvious, you guys, and you’re not saying this because it’s so obvious that God is the origin and the source of everything that’s been created.

 Okay, so Contra evolutionary theory, there was no spontaneous generation of the physical material world. Nor was there spontaneous generation of the nonphysical, immaterial world. God is a creator and source and origin of all things. All that is outside of God, right? So he preexisted the created order. He’s obviously self-sufficient. He’s independent. He’s absolutely free. Thus absolutely sovereign.

 God has created here all of our reality, time and space, everything that we know and walk around in, he created that and therefore he exists outside of that. Okay. So it all, and this is very important, there are so many theologians today that want to say that God exists within time. He does interact with time. He does, he does enter into our existence as his imminence, the Doctrine of His Imminence, which we, we, use the word omnipresence to speak of his all being everywhere and involved in everything, rather than his immensity, which is referring to his transcendence.

 But it’s two sides of the same coin. He fills all things in all ways, and so, being near to us, imminently near to us, he does, at the same time, he’s outside time, he walks through time. Think about that for a while. I don’t know, how to say it other than that.

Audience: And he put his son in time.

Travis:  He put his son in time and then in the fullness of time.

Audience: Things are so different and it’s as difference we see as this, this stark difference between heaven and earth. And this helps illustrate to us how much Jesus’s incarnation, how low he became to become one of us. It, it’s just a monumentous step that would just, you know.  It’s still years and years ahead. But he was starting to lay that foundation of the heavens and the earth and we were so focused on the earth that we got to understand how low he came when he, when he incarnated, then became one of those. Not much on creation, I know. I’m kind of off the topic.

Travis: No, I’m just, I’m yeah, I understand the from, you know, Philippians two, talking about him, you know, humbling himself. And I think about when his, when his earthly form, his body was conceived in Mary’s womb, that was, that was humanity, in humanity’s realm. That’s and, and, there’s a sense, I mean, I’m trying to track with your thought and, and, and, say that there’s a sense in which in him being created in the Virgin’s womb, conceived there, actually lifted, that was actually a lifting of humanity in, in that moment, as the second Adam the, the, the, progenitor of an entirely new race. So, there’s a, there’s a lifting up as well, back to God’s original intent which could only be fulfilled; be fulfilled in Christ tested righteousness, that would completely, completely fulfilled in Christ, given to all of us as a gift. Yeah.

Audience: Doesn’t time change to?

Travis: What do you mean by that? Like Spring, Fall, Summer, Winter?

Audience: That doesn’t change. We stay the same.

Travis: That’s a good point. That’s right. God stays the same. So there’s a immutability about God that is not true of the created order. If there’s a progression of moments, there’s change, right? Good. Yes, Joe.

Audience: The, it talks about good and, and, and light and darkness and the tension that goes on there and that it shows that, you know, that he’s favors good, that he is good. He is goodness. Is that, it’s kind of obvious.

Travis: Well, here’s, here’s, the thing. When it talks in Genesis one, it speaks of light and darkness. But in material terms, there’s no judgment on darkness as being evil, necessarily, or, or.

Audience: He said the light was good.

Travis: He did say the light was good but, but, he’s speaking about the material light. What that provides to your point is a, is a picture, and a metaphor that will be used throughout the rest of Scripture to speak of good and evil, using light and darkness as metaphors so we can fully understand.

 So once again, and, and, here just to come to that point and emphasize it in a different way, let me see if I’ve got this down. Oh yeah. No, I’m not seeing it here. Oh, it’s on day two that I have that comment written down. But what I’m, what I’m going to say is, I’m just going to jump ahead of that anyway, to go to your point, because that’s, that’s a very important point, to say that when he created the heavens and the earth.

 He’s, he, he then creates on day two, he creates the expanse to separate waters from waters. This expands the sky. The raqia is a gas filled atmosphere and expands between the waters. He separated the waters above from the waters below. He named the sky, raqia. He named that that raqia. He named heaven. And heavens, the Samayim that refers to the immaterial portion, that’s Genesis 1:1. In the beginning, God created the Samayim and the earth. Okay, but he named the sky, this expanse of sky, which is called a raqia. This expanse, he called that samayim, so he’s naming it.

 The expanse, then becomes a picture for us of an immaterial reality. So, it’s a physical picture of an immaterial world. Which again stretches our mind upward and I think the same thing is happening with light and darkness; where it is a physical thing, you know. We can say that light is a physical energy reality, but that light versus darkness, it is provided for just like the heavens. The, this expanse, the raqia, was a picture of, was provided for, to put a picture of the samayim and the heavens above. It’s all teaching us. So, God is preparing our mind for Christ. Not, not Gary’s not Christ, but no for what Gary said about Christ. He’s preparing our minds.

Audience: I’m glad you finally settled that.

Travis: You see the way he walks around, struts around.

Audience: I was wondering how he got across the water. Frozen lake. So, he’s calling the light, good. So, he’s, he’s, he’s judging. He’s putting a judgment for it there.

 Travis: Exactly. Yeah.

Audience: And, you know, it was good. It was.

Travis: Yeah, God, and this is what Nicholas said. God made the first value judgment. That’s, that’s, what Nicholas said last week. I thought it was a great point when, when, he called the light good. And so once again, we come back to another thing, an implication here that God, God’s judgment then becomes the basis for all valuations, right.

So, it’s his mind, his opinion, his view of good and evil, right and wrong. Good, better, and best. All that, that’s God’s judgment. Again, that valuation that, that’s, that pronouncement of good is exactly what, what, we see there. So yes, I, I’m just, I’m agreeing with you, but I’m just saying that here in, here in, Genesis one, he’s not immediately going to the metaphor of good and evil with light and darkness. Okay?

 So, God inhabits the darkness as well as the light, right? So, all things God. God is everywhere and, in, inhabits both good, you know, darkness and light, and yet darkness and light, as you know, darkness being the absence of the energy is not, in and of itself, morally wrong. It becomes a picture of moral wrong. Just like light becomes a picture of moral, right. So that’s, I totally agree with that.

 But what I’m saying is coming up here, just in Genesis, if we kind of just keep our minds stuck there, in those boundaries that, that, that’s what is happening here, is just the material. And so, when he makes a matery, he’s making the same, he’s making the same valuation judgment on other things as we go through the days, right. So, on day six, day six, he says, he saw what he did and said it was very good. So, we don’t say that animals there, are there, are therefore morally good. That’s not what he’s saying. He’s just, he’s just speaking about the goodness of what he’s done in creating the material world. Right? Okay.

Audience: God is light, right? God is light.

Travis: That’s right.

Audience: God is light. First Genesis. He is the light of the world. The light is good because it’s God.

Travis: Yeah. I can see we’re not going to get out of day one this week. So, seven more weeks. And another thing, it’s Okay. I’m not, I’m not particularly in a hurry. I, I knew, I knew this would happen. It’s Okay, though.

Audience: Travis, can I ask a question? I’m sorry. I know this is going to be [giving force].

Travis: Is it warm in here?

Audience: It’s very warm in here.

Travis: You got it going Ron?

Audience: So, I guess and I, I, just speaking to the holiness of God and, we and, you can’t, you, you, don’t go into the presence of God. The whole, the, the whole idea is that we, there’s a contrast, that didn’t, that started from the very beginning. God’s holy from the very beginning. And then God, if you look at verse two, the Spirit of God is moving over the surface of the waters.

 I, I, Kate and I had this discussion about it was just like a. It will, it there’s a, there’s a few, I think you can cover a couple of the omnis and at the, in that sense and that it’s, there’s not like God’s spirit is over there, over that water area but not over this water area.

So, I think and I touching a little bit on the darkness part, if that holiness of God exists that, at that point, then everything in there I mean that, that’s almost, it’s almost equates to being not, not, necessarily equal to heaven, in this, in this sense. or. But, but, but it is.

This is still God’s. This is God’s realm. It’s where he lives. It’s his residence. It’s, so I feel, like you know, you, there’s not going to be anything unholy in it. Darkness or otherwise. Yet.

Travis: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Yeah. The, the moral evil will come with the fall of Lucifer and the third of the angels that follow him and then the fall of mankind in Genesis three. I agree. So, there’s darkness preceding the fall, preceding the fall of Satan, preceding the fall of man. And darkness is therefore not moral evil. It’s just dark. It’s just no energy there.

 So again, when we come back to God is light and in him is no darkness of all, First John, at all, First John, right? It’s not saying God is energy. It’s not saying, it’s saying that’s a metaphor. And so, God is light. That’s a metaphor for his, well, a lot of things; his moral purity, his Holiness, everything else. And in him is no darkness of all.

 Again, that’s a metaphor to speak of his moral purity, make his distinctions, right. But it’s still speaking metaphorically. And we would not have the basis for [those understand] the understanding of God if we didn’t have, God creating and distinguishing light from darkness, right?

Audience: But, but, the light is also a lot of the omni’s in there too. That’s what Wes was saying, you know, the light is good. With light, you know, you’re enlightened. There’s knowledge, there’s omniscience, there’s, we, we, can then, we just walk down that path.

Travis: Right. And we talked about that before in the simplicity of God to say that the, the, light passes through that prism and refracts all the, the, colors been and yet all those different colors are received by us and yet they’re all have the same exact properties of light. So the light on this end of the prison and the light on this end of the prison, same. Same, right? It’s just refracted. And creation is a refraction of all of God’s glory to us. Okay. One? Just one more.

Audience: Just one more that will divert us for another 15 minutes.

 Travis: No problem.

Audience: Well, we have time markers. We have day and night.

Travis: Evening and morning.

Audience: Evening and morning. Now, in Revelation 21:22, those are done away with. There is no sun. There is no moon. There’s, those time markers are done away with. If you go to revelation 21:23. It says, “The city had no need of the sun or the moon to shine on it, but the glory of the Lord has illuminated it. Its lamp is the lamb.” Then Revelation 22:5, it says, “There was no longer any night and they will have” need “no need of lamp or” or “light of the sun” and so forth.

 So there’s a time marker that anticipates, when we say it anticipates man’s fall, his need for, to understand that his days are limited, that death is an end and he has to search for some way to, to, reverse that. And then the promise of the resurrection, where then that is done away with, I mean is that all involved in that application.

Travis: I think, I definitely think it sets up our understanding of that. That’s a really profound point. I hadn’t, I hadn’t thought, that hadn’t crossed my mind at all, but, and, and, I wouldn’t say there are no time markers in the, in the eternal state, but just different time markers, cause if you back up the text you read in Revelation 22:5, “Night will be no more, there’ll be no need they will need no light of lamp or sun or, for the Lord God will be their light and they will reign forever and ever.”

 But if you back up, it says. Well, I’m going to verse one. “The Angel showed me the River of the Water of Life, brightest crystal flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street in the city, also on either side of the river, the Tree of Life with its twelve kinds of fruit yielding its fruit each month.” So now time markers are marked by life.

 That’s a really profound insight, that the time markers here set us up for understanding day, night, good, evil, and end of our life, judgment, accountability. I think that’s, I think that’s valid. A valid implication, seems to me, upon one minute of reflection. Risky. That’s why we pray at the beginning of these things, so we don’t start any new cults or heresies, you know, because, it, the mind can go in wrong directions, you know.

 The Bartonians, Bartonians, two of them are sitting together again. I told you guys you need to break them up. Otherwise, their own, their own thing starts.

Audience:  It’s a DNA connection though.

Travis: Very hard to sever. So.

Audience: So, day two.

Travis: No, we’re still on day one. I got more. Just let me, let me, let me run through this real quick. So, God created the solid as a foundation, the liquid covering the solid. The formlessness and void of the initial creation was the canvas for forming, which we see roughly days one through three, and then filling roughly days four through six.

 So, therefore, God sets foundations before building upon them, and this is what Joe was saying, that he’s thinking ahead, he’s planning, he’s setting something up, that then he can build off of later on. Okay. God the creator, we see the provision for God is a multipersonal God; Triune God. Okay. With the, with the term Elohim. Elohim created, verse one, and then Ruah Elohim, the spirit of God hovered. So we see, we see something in that. We know from John one and Colossians one, that Jesus Christ was the one executing that. Right? He’s, he’s, he’s, also involved.

 God created by speaking, which indicates intelligence, the ability to communicate, the intent to create beings capable of communication. So okay, I won’t go on and elaborate. God created by speaking, which again indicates the distinction between creator and creation. And this is important. I see your hand and I’ll get back to you. There is no stuff of divinity, we might say, out of which, you know, that emanates out of God to form the material world. Okay, Contrary to all paganism.

Audience: Hinduism.

Travis: Contr, yeah, contr, contrary to Hinduism. Contrary to Gnosticism, which speaks as of God. And then there’s, there’s, emanations coming out like ripples of, you know, you throw the rock in the pond and there’s ripples of, of, water. And that’s the, that’s an analogy for how God created the earth. There’s the, there’s the, pure divinity in the beginning and then emanating out from him is a, the things that are divine, but less than divine. And so then this, this one of those demiurges just goes off and does something really foolish, cause it got further away from the divine, that demiurge just created the material world. Oh, oops. Now we got a, now we got a problem. Cause now we’ve got matter which is evil; needs to get back to spirit, which is good. No, there is none of that here.

 God speaks and there is a distinction between creator and creation. There’s no stuff of divinity. God as infinite eternal spirit. He is separate distinct from the material creation. I, again, want to just emphasize that first value judgment. I think that’s very important. God’s judgment is the basis of all evaluation.

 When God saw the light and he pronounced it good, as John Calvin says, here, here’s a quote, “Here God is introduced by Moses as surveying his work, that he might take pleasure in it, but he does it for our sake, to teach us that God has made nothing, but that a certain reason or design.” And again, that’s back to Joe’s point, “as the creator and origin of light, God is the source of life.”

Again, once again, the next one. “Here God makes distinctions by separating and naming, which is evidence of antithesis. That is distinguishing this from that, and that antithesis is the necessary precondition of wisdom.” Okay. Wisdom is the ability to judge and make distinctions between this and that, separating things out. God does that. Okay. God defined boundaries for time. He doesn’t need markers of time. Back to Lee’s point, Scott.

Audience: So it’s just really amazing because the fact that he built everything on the foundation goes forward to the point that Jesus makes and what you’re preaching on, about the time, the house in the rock and everything like that, more always speaking.

Travis: Right. There, I mean, analogies just cascade out of everything we see here in the first, even the first day, What’s that?

 Audience: Just shows how God’s eternal. Correct?

Travis: Just this incredible mind of wisdom that’s unleashed here. Yeah, that’s good. Okay. That’s anybody. Anybody else want to say anything on day one? And it’s totally fine. Go ahead, Mike.

 Audience: Well. Day, so day one, it talks about how there was that distinction; he created light and darkness and that separation. But it wasn’t until the fourth day that the sun and the moon and the stars were created. And I’m thinking, to this eclipse we just had, so was the, I mean, I’m assuming the light was God before there was the sun and the moon.

Travis: We don’t, we, we, see “let there be light” and light than is a distinct created thing. Okay? We don’t know the light source. It could just be God and he’s, I don’t know. I don’t know where that light source was, but you. You’re right, the sun, the moon; two luminaries and then the star. He created and made the stars also like, oh yeah, let’s mention those.

 But all those for the signs in the, in the, heavens, and seasons, and marking off time, and that, you know, navigation. All we’re going to talk about all that, but all those luminaries. So, ‘or’, is the word for light in Hebrew. ‘Maor’, I believe, is the term for those luminaries like the sun and the moon. So, they are light bearers, but not the source. So, so God created this light, this energy, and then he put that energy within these different light bearers.

Audience: Which is really hard for us to understand because we’re used to having the ‘Maor’, as the source of the ‘Or’. Right? It, it, would be very hard for us to understand the light being here in the room without these lights.

     Yeah, but, but, you got to start a star up. You got to get it fired up.

 Travis: So Bruce, if we, if we cut open like an electric wire, can we see energy.

Audience: If there’s enough potential there. In other words, if the voltage is high enough, you’ll see the sparks, right? An arc across. An arc across it.

Travis:  But you’ll see. Okay, but you’ll see. So you don’t see the results of light, but you won’t, or so you’ll see the results of energy, but not energy itself.

Audience: Well, the other thing that’s interesting is once you cut the wire, the energy is not going to flow, at all. You just cut off the source to whatever your light is on, for example, a light bulb. Okay? Your turning the motor on but through the wire you’d lost all energy, right?

Travis: Okay, so could it be that the ‘or’ that God created the light. Created it and yet without light bears can’t see anything; like energy is there.

 Audience: It is a weird thing because without the sun or any suns. No, you could have light without suns. You can have it, but that’s where it’s crazy.

Travis: Because he did.

Audience: That’s right, because it says he did.

Travis: Because it says that.

Audience: But it is contrary to what we think of.

Travis: Contrary to what did we think of, because of what Wayne said is perspectival. We don’t know light without light bearers. And why? Because we weren’t created before the light bearing luminaries, we were created after.

Audience: And so like the comment that was made earlier that I think Mike made, that the sun, and the moon, and those things were created later. And so there is a distinction there, between as we think of light, when we think of the sun. First, you know, the moon just reflects the sun. That’s created later. So there is a distinction here apparently between what’s God calling light.

Travis: Light bearers, light bearing bodies. Nicholas?

Audience: Real briefly, there’s a, there’s an evolutionary objection to our worldview, that says that some of the, the, stars that are really far away that we, that from us, that we see, we shouldn’t be able to see if it was created, if it’s, if it’s a young earth theory, you know, and I think this is actually the answer to that because God created the light first. So, some of those, some of the light of stars that we’re seeing now never actually came from the stars. It was created by God with ex nihilo.

Travis: It’s almost as if all those all that energy is there and all it takes is for that luminary to come into existence and that energy then to be manifest in the light and the pathway, all pathways all in between created at the same time.

Audience: Yeah, yeah, there’s no reason to question that. I mean that’s, that’s, a perfectly good answer. Can you tell that to an evolutionary?

Travis: This is speaking directly to what Nicholas said.

Audience: This is exactly he is. He is so spot on that there’s a, if you have a star here and we’re over here looking at that star, there’s a pathway between that star and us that’s millions of light years long. God filled that entire pathway with light. The light, then he says, I’m going to create the star. Well, then there was no star there, but there was this pathway filled with light that God put there. Then on the third day, he put the star there that started emanating light. We still haven’t gotten that light. We’re still looking at God’s provision, now, because he put it there. That’s what happened. There’s commentary according to Gary, but that’s about it.

Travis: Got to get to you Brett.

Audience: Yeah. Just, just that one of the implications you mentioned about that God not using speech and not being stuff and it just, it just, makes me think like, if Genesis one, there are so many questions that come up and so many things that I’ve had questions about ever since. I had the worst Sunday school teacher in the world when I was a kid. You know, when I was really young, like second grade, my parents were fine.

Travis: Parents were good.

Audience: But my parents, you know, we didn’t have formal lessons about this stuff.

Travis: But, you know, flannel graph can only go so far.

Audience: But yeah, Bretts off on the lady too, you know. But she didn’t like hard questions. But, but, but Genesis one has, I mean unbelievable. And like the first couple of verses are so packed with the implications. It’s the implications that pack it, and it just makes you realize how superior.

 I mean, the Bible did not have to reveal this stuff and yet it did. It’s, it makes you so grateful to the Lord. And it, and it’s so superior. And it’s, it’s, weird that you get in, the stuck in these conversations, where with our limited, and our understanding, and you know like I don’t, I don’t know everything about science and stuff like that. You can get a question come at you that you don’t know the answer to and you get all weirded out by it.

 But it’s just it, it, it, it, would be really nice,[ I was just thinking], if, if, if this, if this, this idea, every time you come here, every single Saturday that we talk about this stuff, I am in awe of God. I’m grateful to him for revealing himself and I wish that, that, that, that or I’m hoping, [I’m actually not wish], I hope that that keeps with me, because I am a little bolder just, but it’s like.

Travis: A little?

Audience: It’s only a little bolder. You know it’s a long time. But yeah, you should see me.

Travis: Talk about a rock.

Audience: I’m not really very bold around my boss but, but he. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Travis: Don’t, don’t distract him.

Audience: So that’s what I’m saying. It’s like, it’s like, I just hope that, I’m praying that, that this stuff emboldens, because it’s so superior. I mean, like, I’ve sat in college classes and debated this stuff ad nauseam and there’s no answers out there. Compared to this stuff, and like you said, you nailed it, all Paganism is about some essence of the divine, you know, little pieces of his face.

Travis: Totally confused, and, and when you press, as we’re going to learn to do in the apologetic section, Sunday nights going through the fall, when you press any of their worldview, I mean, just give it a little bit of pressure and it just falls apart.

Audience: It completely crumbles.

Travis: It collapses. They cannot, they cannot give a reason for all that is reality, metaphysics. They can’t give a, they can’t give a reason for epistemology; the knowledge and where it comes from. They cannot give a reason for conduct, behavior, ethics. They have no the, the, preconditions of intelligibility of, of, reason, they do not have in their worldview. Why? Because they, back to Proverbs eight, they’ve departed in sin into darkness, and they depart into folly. So, as long as, they embrace that, there’s no fear of the Lord. Their whole mind, their way of thinking, falls completely apart.

 And I, I, do pray, just as you’re mentioning here, and, and, is it, I pray that we will be emboldened by this. Think about this. This is written, what, 14-15 hundred years before Christ. Moses wrote this. He’s no slouch. I mean you, when you think about all the people to whom this was revealed, as they said, just like we’re doing in reflecting upon their God out of Genesis one.

 They’re having these conversations like we’re having then. Like we’re having now, we’re having those then, 1500 years before Christ. This is before Socrates. This is before all the Greek wisdom. This is before all the, the, great, greats of mankind or whatever they’re purported to be. And all the, all of their thinking is folly. It’s foolishness. It’s a reason, it’s a chasing after the wind.

And I do pray that we would be emboldened in this. In the knowledge of our God to go out and, and, call it what it is, you know in in gentleness and kindness. But at the same time, look, we have nothing to cower from and, and, I do, I also feel the same way. You’re talking to an unbeliever and they seem so, they’ve got, you know letters after their name with all these degrees. And, you know, just in our Sunday schools, we can teach this to the kids. They can go and unravel that worldview of that PhD or whatever he is. In, in a heartbeat. It just doesn’t.

Audience: Yeah. The reason that their stuff doesn’t make sense, makes sense to us. In our worldview, explains why their worldview doesn’t make any sense.

Travis: Right. That’s right. Exactly. Okay, Yes, Bruce.

Audience: Think about if God was to choose to reveal all the detail. Moses would still be writing this today. Probably. Yeah.

Travis: You got it. You got it. Thankfully, we didn’t get a whole lot of more explanation about the immaterial, the heavens. He’s focused on the earth. Otherwise, man, our minds will be blown. Okay, let’s, let’s go to day two, shall we? Wait. So, you got 20 minutes for days two through seven.

Audience: Ain’t gonna happen. Two and a half minutes.

Travis: No. So. Can, can, somebody read, please? Genesis 1:6 to 8.

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

Travis: Okay, good. So. What did he do? Nah, just not talking about implications and not talking about what this tells us about God yet. Just very quickly.  What and this is a short one.

Audience: Created distinct expanses.

Travis: Okay. Created distinct expenses. Good. What’s that?

Audience: Which, which he also titled.

Travis: Okay, Which he also named. Yeah, go ahead.

Audience: I just was..

Travis:  What he was saying. Okay, somebody else. What did he do?

Audience: Separated.

Travis: Okay, he’s separated something. Yeah. Good. Scott.

Audience: He reaffirmed morning and night.

Travis: Okay, reaffirmed. We see the second in progression of days. Good.

Audience: This is also the first time that we see layering, in verse seven. Above and below.

Travis: Oh, good layers.

Audience: There doesn’t appear to be creation here. There appears to be organization.

Travis: Yeah, that’s right. Good, good.

Audience: He, he, says it in the subjunctive. Anyway, he says, “Let there be.” So, I, he did that in verse one, too. But I didn’t say anything about it. I just, I wondered about that or in day one. “Let there be.”

Travis: Yeah, he’s calling something into existence. So he’s not, he’s not commanding something to do something. Right? So it’s a, it’s a, there’s a state of aspect of this command. Yeah. “Let there be.”

Audience: He moved water up above the air, the sky.

Travis:  Okay, good. Scott.

Audience: What does he mean by “let her be”? Like, does it mean? That’s an implication we have to talk about though.  Oh? Brett keeps us on task. Brett is always good to talk.  I, I, think we just hit a [tiality] meter there.

Travis: And, and, but anything else on, What did he do? Okay. So he, let’s start with he decreed. Lee? Okay, he decreed. He decreed the expanse. He decreed the expanse to separate waters from water. So he created this expanse; tThe sky, which is the word raqia. And it, it, it’s really a gas filled atmosphere. Anybody know the percentages there?

Audience: Yeah

Travis: what is it?

 Audience: 90%. What is it?

Travis:  79% oxygen, 21% nitrogen.

Audience: no, the other way around.

Travis: So 79% nitrogen, 21% oxygen.   We had 79% oxygen, oxygen narcosis and the heartbeat. Yeah.

Audience: There is creation there, because as God made the expanse, so if prior to that maybe there hadn’t been gas.

Travis: Yeah, I that was a question in my mind too. Did he create solids, liquids, and gases on the first day like was is it in the property of water there must have gas dissolved into it or no. Is there, is there gas? Can you have liquid like water; it’s H2O, right?

Audience: Right. So the H, both of those are gases that are coming together.

Travis:  Yeah, they’re coming together. So it seems that you got but gas..

Audience: Water in its very essence, kind of, absorbs everything. So yeah, there is gas in it. I mean, there’s oxygen in it.

 Travis: So, I’m just not sure if he actually created gas, that was a question in my mind is: Did he create gas on the second day or was gas. I think the gas was created on the first day and then he separated it out. So yes, he made, which is a perspectival thing. He made this expanse, he made, but the gases were there, he just extracted them. And (makes sound of separating)

Audience: I’m thinking, when he said the expanse, he made a space and then what he already created filled that space. So, the expanse.

It says specifically, though, that God made the expanse and separated the water. So I don’t, I mean that’s NASB. So I mean, but I don’t want to get into it, but anyway, either way, he made the all the elements on day one.

 I don’t know how he did it. And it’s just it’s a state change, yeah, because if you made the elements, they were already there. But yeah, so there’s nothing to say that, so I don’t want to put anything in that’s not stated, because otherwise we’re taking our..

When you say, you’re not saying he made the wood, you know, you’re just saying I made the house.

Travis:  And there is a difference between the Hebrew verbs, of, the Hebrew verb for create, which is kind of, which is used in the ex nihilo thing is, is, bara, is, is to create.

Audience: Is What?

Travis: Bara and then I’m not sure, I can’t remember what the, do you remember what the Hebrew word is for fashioned or formed? That’s what this word is.

Audience: Oh, ‘made’. It’s ‘made’ in the ESV, it’s just fashioned or formed. I’m looking at an interlinear right now and it’s, you know, the verbs that are used are ‘in the midst of’ and ‘caused to separate’, right. They’re not using the verbs for creation.

Travis: Yeah, right. So making or forming or fashioning an expanse, separating the waters that are under the expanse from waters above. So he, he, decreed this expanse to separate it and, you know, the ‘let there be’ and then he did it. He, he, made this expanse, the sky, gas filled atmosphere, an expanse between the waters. So he separated, the waters above.

 There are some, you know, creationists, theorists, you know, who will say that prior to the flood there was a, there was a dome or not a dome or some kind of a shell, you could say, of a thick water. Yeah. And then there’s this expanse and so that, that, shielded us from the full radiation of the sun, which, you know, you could maybe see and so life could live for, you know, whatever many years.

God could provide for that and protect the earth that way. And then when the floods came. Says the fountains of the deep burst forth and the water that broke up. And so you could see in this cataclysmic judgment, you can see this waters from the heavens, now, just deluging the earth and drowning it and then God formed the land masses.

 So you know all the tectonic movement, which you know you can almost look at the, the, map of the earth and see this single continent being pushed together in that Pangea, you know, of one single continent. But if that was all divided up in the flood, you know, you can just imagine this cataclysm of, of, judgment.

Audience: A total mess.

Travis: Yeah, a total mess.

Audience: The word is asa.

Travis: Asa. Okay. So, I don’t know. I mean, I, I’ve heard, I’ve heard them. I, I, like the sound of that theory, but then when I, I, kind of read other scientific articles, which I’m not a scientist, but when I read, I’m saying, yeah, I don’t know, could be on shaky ground. It could just be talking about clouds in the heavens and maybe they’re thick clouds. I don’t know.

Audience: There was no rain until the fall.

Travis: Right. There’s mist coming out to water the garden.

Audience: That theory lends itself to, like you heard in athletics, a hyperbaric chamber and they’ve created hyperbaric chambers that they’ve planted plants and stuff and everything flourishes just in an incredible way.

 I mean and it’s like a, a, miniature jungle atmosphere, only everything just grows super-fast, as there’s a lot more oxygen and all that kind of stuff and it fits into, “Let the waters team”, and, and, that view of the earth just being a massive place where creation is on display and, and, and, just incredible numbers. So, anyway, that’s just a, a, thought on that theory of the greenhouse or whatever you want to call it.

Travis: Right, and, and, like I said, I like it, I’m kind of fond of it, but I’m, I’m, very careful not to be dogmatic about it. But this, let’s see, we, Bret and I, were talking about this the other day. How, you know, it’s in second Peter three. “You need to remember the predictions of the holy prophets, the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles, knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. And they will say, ‘Where is the promise of His coming? Ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.’” Is that true?

Audience: No. Things have changed.

Travis: Things have changed, right? So everything that’s created here in Genesis, and this expanse, and the waters above and everything, something’s changed. So this is the principle in geology, they called it uniformitarianism, where you know, the present is the key to the past. So as you look at what’s going on, all the processes going on now, you can just project that into eternity past and that’s what always has been going on. What, I keep hitting this? Is that what your..?

Audience: Oh no. It’s funny that people say that.

Travis: But that’s what they, that’s what they believe. So this is what they say. “Ever since the father fell asleep all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation. For,” [this is what Bret was pointing out, this], “they deliberately overlooked this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth and now exists are stored up for fire.” Judgment of fire “being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.” So.

Audience: I mean that would that, that, that’s the green, the greenhouse.

Travis: seems to me as well. Yeah seems to support.

Audience: Something changed with the waters and the waters.

Travis: And that’s what, that’s what, as you think about the scientists, they, they, try to say all these processes we see now have always been existing, to just project that into eternity past and that’s what we see. No, they ignore this one fact. They ignore what the, what the geology of the Earth tells us, that everything died by means of a flood at one time. Yeah, Joel.

Audience: They have to say that because that’s the only thing that makes sense with their worldview, because they started from the worldview of evolution or whatever, other than creation. And so they have to say what we see now is what was back then, because that’s the only thing that fits with their mindset and their role.

Travis: Yeah, that’s right. They and they, as, as, Peter says there, the, what comes first is not their worldview, but their own sinful desires. That’s what comes first.

Audience: That is their worldview.

Travis:  That’s their, that. And so then they create a worldview. That’s right. They create their, they create a worldview to uphold and support that and that’s evolutionary theory. Which by the way, I read in Calvin, earlier that, that he, he, was talking about those fools who say that matter has always existed. So it was then. It was also in the time of, of, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle. Matter is eternal. Same thing.

 So, this evolutionary theory and matter is eternal and total materialism is nothing new. It’s, it’s always been. It’s always been there. Okay? Well.

Audience: That was in Peter.

Travis: That was in second Peter three. okay. So, so God separated this, the waters above from the waters below. So, we can say the waters above are at least clouds, but could be thick clouds. Could be this pre flood firmament of a, of a, shield around the entire earth and he separated that from the waters below, which we call the seas or the ocean.

And God named the sky. So that’s important. He named this Regia. He named it heaven, which we’ve already seen. We’ve already been introduced to the word heaven, Samayim, in the very first verse, God created the Samayim and the earth. Okay. So, he created this expanse and called it the, the, Samayim. Okay.

So, with that in mind, anybody, anybody, else need to add some last thought on what God did on day two?

Audience: Well, is there a distinction between heavens and heaven? The plural, plurals.

Travis: When it, it, when the Hebrew ‘you’ refers to the heaven, it refers to in the plural, Samayim. So it’s like, yes.

Audience: An obvious thing is he spoke again. Now he’s speaking to a creation. So not speaking into, but speaking to it.

Travis: Yeah. That’s right. So he’s doing some forming. Yeah. Yeah. This, like you said, created wood but then made the house. Yeah. Yeah, Scott.

Audience: Yes. I’m still wanting to know what those “let there be,” mean.

Travis: “Let there be,” let it come into existence. let it happen.

Audience: That doesn’t mean he’s like allowing it to happen.

Travis: No.

Audience: But that, yeah. But are there implications that we were going to get to that. He is the causative agent of.

Travis: Yeah, causative agent of.

Audience: The things that aren’t living, obey him.

Travis: Yes.

Audience: Even things that haven’t existed yet obey him and become existent and they begin to exist.

Travis: I don’t know what you’re pressing for, Fred and Scott.

Audience: Oh no, no, we were just. I was just wondering.

Travis: Yeah. I’d “let there be”. Let it happen. Let it come into existence. Let it, let it proceed. Yeah. So, it’s a decree. That’s what we call it; Divine Fiat. Creation. Fiat means a decree, speaking into existence, yeah. So what? Okay, so, now what do we learn about God? We got, guys, five minutes left. So what, what do we learn about God from day two? What happened there? Yes.

Audience: Just, just, to touch on that as well. I think this is important, because as we get into the later states of creation and we talk more about the fall that’s coming, etcetera, that there is a big difference between God’s agency and God’s permissiveness. Right? Where he has created another agent Lucifer. Right. So recognizing that all of this is direct agency is a very important concept.

Travis: Okay. Direct agency, Matt. I can, yeah, I can see that, that he is the primary cause. I like to speak in terms of primary and secondary cause and, and, when I think about permissiveness, I, I, I, I’m careful with that word. Permissiveness seems to imply a passivity, where there’s not his planning and decree involved.

 So I, I, I, understand what you mean. Some people say what God allowed sin. He decreed sin. There’s something stronger than allow. It’s the word decree. And did he allow sin? Yes. Does he allow men to go? Yes he does. But so, I just, I just at the same time I say allow, I also want to say, but decreed, as well.

Audience: He bears the blame for it. He’s the fault. He’s at fault for it.

Travis: No.

Audience: And there we stop. Showed up.

Travis:  And, and, that’s why I say secondary cause is where the blame and the fault is found.

 Audience: Oh yeah and you said something earlier, it’s made sense, is moral culpability is on the second cause and in the primary cause doesn’t have moral culpability. because they’re like outside of it. They, they’re the justice system that needs served by, by, injustices and justices.

Travis: I’m not sure if I can get into your justice system analogy, but I, I, let me just say that God is, here, the primary cause and agent, and there is a secondary cause and agent, as well, Christ by the Spirit. Okay?

 So taking full responsibility, moral culpability, all of this is God. God is doing this all the way up to, “and it was very good.” Okay? So he’s taken full responsibility for this. Once sin happens, secondary cause is their moral culpability on the secondary cause like Lucifer and like Adam.

Audience: So, like, his final purposes are served by evil being allowed for.

Travis: Decreed.

Audience: Decreed, and then, and then, and then. Man that causes it has moral culpability for it, because there’s no, there’s no, shifting [of God] in God. There’s no, there’s no, since he’s all life. That, the thing in James.

 I like the way you put it a moment ago, that his, his purpose, right, his, his, glorification found it necessary for us to see the rest of his redemptive plan. Which require the cause of moral capability.

Travis:  That’s right. That’s right. Okay Joe.

 Audience: And by calling it heaven, doesn’t he kind of set up and just that he desires to communicate it with somebody. I thought if you would you want to call it heaven if you didn’t need to tell somebody that’s what happened is

Travis: Yeah yes there is so. In so, yes, by calling it heaven, by, by, calling this expanse of sky, which is a, there’s a material thing there, right? These gases are material elements of the world, and we breathe this material element into us and we exhale material elements. It’s all material.

 And yet what is this material expanse, invisible to us, right? Can’t see it. It’s interesting that. And so I, I, I, do think what you’re saying is he desires to communicate to us something beyond the material and physical that we can see and touch. This something invisible out there and he calls what we what he created there that expands, calls it that immaterial name, Samayim.

So we think of our of the heavens above. We think of like a, a, terrestrial heavens, which is the sky. We think of a, you know, a cereb, celestial heaven where the heavenly bodies are, right. The Mormons make a lot of hay off of, you know, terrestrial, celestial, and telestial heavens, and the telestial heavens where the really good Mormons are gonna be and, and, all of us guys are, you know, we’re pretty moral and stuff will probably be somewhere in the celestial heavens and then there’s.

Audience: Where God only visits every now and then.

Travis: Right. And then there’s really bad guys like the, they’ll be on the terrestrial heavens. So everybody’s going to heaven just to read.

Audience: Lots of difference.

Travis: That’s a bunch of garbage but, but, I think there is, there’s something about this, this heavens here, the sky, which is instructive to us later on to teach us again about immaterial things.

 I, I, think it’s interesting how the Spirit of God in the Old Testament and the New Testament. Spirit and the Old Testament is Ruah, and which is breath, wind. Same thing in the New Testament, Pneuma. Pneuma is wind and spirit. So, there’s an invisible reality again, that is, we, it’s the, the, visible, the material world for us, helps us to see, to illustrate for us immaterial things that we can’t see.

So, like the wind, you know, Jesus uses that with Nicodemus to speak of the wind. You, you don’t know where it comes from, where it’s going, but you see, it’s effect. Same thing with the Spirit of God and regeneration. You’re going to see the effect of regeneration in a person’s heart, in a person’s life. And so yeah, back to your point.

Okay, that’s all happening on day two. Day two, what else? So you have one more thing. Anything? He planned, prepared for a world inhabited by gas, breathing, life forms. Plants, birds, fish, animals, mankind, that gas is all there for us to breathe, right? And then the by naming the sky, God made the invisible expanse, the material world, illu, illustrative of the spiritual expanse of the immaterial world. Okay? Yeah.

Audience: Is there also just a kind of a correlation here? We know that we have progressive revelation taking place. So you have things, shadows, in the Old Testament that are fulfilled in the New Testament. Is this also, an, sort of setting up that sort of thing, that things do change, but God progressively reveals himself.

Travis: Yeah, yeah, I think so. I do. I think he’s establishing it right here. We cannot think outside of these categories that he’s set up for us, because God didn’t intend us to. He intended us to think within these categories, to accept our creatureliness, how our, our fine, finiteness, our limitations that we might learn about him.

Audience: So it’s the, it’s the spirit world which we can’t see and the other world which we look at as reality, is what we can see. But God is in this spirit world, which is, in reality, the real world and what we are in is.

Travis: I would, I would not say it that way, because even this immaterial world where the angels, he created that too. He is supra immaterial, immaterial world. He’s above it, outside of him, he inhabits it, but he’s above that too. So there’s not like, and that’s where Plato, you know, that’s sounds, you know, not to condemn you, but that sounds a little bit platonic, because he spoke of a material world that is a form of the immaterial world.

 So this, this, is this a pulpit? Is this the pulpit? No, this is not the pulpit. This is a form of the perfect. This has pulpitness, which is why we can identify as a pulpit or lecternness. But the perfect ideal lectern or pulpit is in the immaterial spiritual world. So everything perfect is there, and everything imperfect is here, of which everything we see are forms of what actually is. That’s how Plato was trying to synthesize the material in the immaterial world.

Audience: Well, I was thinking, you know, because..

Travis:  And I’m saying and

 Audience: When I worship in spirit and in truth we see as opposed to..

Travis: Let me, let me not go off on that John 4:24. But just to say that in, in, contradistinction to Plato, who said that the material then are forms of immaterial and the immaterial is the ideal and that’s where God is. I’m saying God made immaterial and material, Okay? And God is here, wherever, here is. He’s not here. He’s not extended into space, so he’s not there or here. He’s everywhere.

 But, but, material and immaterial, God made them both, and the immaterial beings of angels and powers and all that, exist here. We exist here in the material world, and he putted in things into the material world that teaches us and instructs us about this immaterial world, all of it together, is to instruct us about God.

 It’s just hard to talk about. That’s why we pray every time. God help us to speak rightly of you, you know.

Audience: When you’re speaking immaterial. It’s immaterial in our ability to apprehend it with our senses. But angels are spatial beings. They have to be, in the sense that they can only be in one place at one time. So in some way they’re material, but not in a way that we can understand or that we can through our senses.

Travis: True.

Audience: I take comfort in John 3:12 right where, where, Jesus just says, look if I, “if I tell you about earthly things and you don’t understand spiritual things.”

 You don’t have to bring the scriptures in again.

Travis: The only thing that’s going to help is if someone descends from heaven and tells us; that is Jesus, you know.

Audience: I think it’s.

Travis:  We, we, tried to end on Jesus. What are you going to end on?

Audience: Back to what we were talking about. I think the fact that God made humans with both the material and immaterial aspect of their being. Shows that he wants us to think of them as equal in reality, in being, in real. You know, there’s it’s not like the spiritual is more real than the physical or.

Travis: Or somehow superior. Because why do we know that’s not true, that the spiritual is more superior than the material or the immaterial is more superior than the material because, Satan and his demons inhabit the immaterial world, as well. They’re not superior, morally. Right? So God created ‘all’ and he called it very good, till sin entered the world.

Audience: And that’s the reason you should really be thankful that he give, he’s giving us his word, because otherwise we would be continuing to create God in our own mind and image.

Travis: That’s right. I’m so thankful for his word and it just gives us immense insight in. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father thank you for what we’ve learned about you and, and, we just pray that if there is anything inaccurate and inappropriate, we’ve spoken about you, that you, would strike that from the record of our minds and, and, help us to, to, think rightly about you.

 It, it, we do struggle to, to, think and to speak correctly, but we do trust you that you’ve given us your word, that you know the secret things belong to God, that the things revealed are for us and for our children. And so we just pray that you would help us to rejoice in what is revealed. There’s enough here for 1000 lifetime times of meditation and we never still will get to the end of it. We’ll still scratch the surface.

 Thank you for, for, what you’ve given us. And, and, you know what Brett was saying earlier is the important impact that we hope you will produce in us of this study is to create a deep devotion in, in, you that we would worship you in spirit and in truth that we would love you. And in that love and devotion, you’d give us a deep, settled confidence in the truth, and then a holy boldness, and a humble boldness as we go out and speak to others.

 Help us to teach others confidently, to share with other people while we’re learning, but then also to evangelize those who do not know you and teach them about the God that they just merely grope for. We pray that you would save many and sanctify many through just this formative instruction from Genesis one.

 We thank you for this and pray that you pray that you would bless the rest of our day, our weekend, bless the services tomorrow, and all that happens in this place, every single class, all the music that we sing, and in the worship that we offer to you. I pray that you would prepare our hearts even now to be right for you and offer hearts of praise with a clear conscience. We love you. Thank you again for this time. In Jesus name, Amen.