By Everett Henes

The opening words of the Bible set the stage for everything that follows, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." These words teach us some important things. The first is that God is. God exists. The Bible takes this for granted because it is the word of God. This is the great presupposition of every believer. Gods existence is the foundation for knowledge, science, and morality. Without Gods existence all of these things fall apart. Culture around us proves this to be true. Nothing seems to be grounded in fact. Morality is constantly changing such that what was known to be right and true twenty years ago is known to be truly wrong now. Even what we know and how has become a slippery slope. Why? Because without the rationality of Scripture we are left with our own irrationality.

Genesis declares to us that God exists and, further, that everything else that exists has been created by him. That means the world should exhibit design, and it does. Think of the way the human body works. Its so intricate that it takes a team of technicians to build a robotic replacement for any part. The irony, of course, is that it takes a team to design and build that replacement and yet so many people believe the world is a result of chance and time. Whether you believe the world is old or young, the reality is that everything around us and within us exhibits design.

At the end of the creation account we read, "God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good." (Genesis 1:31) God made all things good in the beginning. The broken world we see around us and within us is the result of what we will see in Genesis 3. From the start, though, God made all things very good. Psalm 19:1 teaches, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork."

The truth is that everything in creation has a purpose. One of the more humorously named parts of the body is the appendix. The word appendix is a Latin word meaning something attached. Its what you find at the end of a book but is generally unnecessary for the story. Since it is unclear what the organ does, it is referred to as something that is attached to the other digestive organs. Just because its unclear what function it has in the body doesnt mean that it has none. There are plenty of things in creation that dont have a function that we can understand, but that doesnt mean they serve no purpose. We are still growing in our knowledge. While we know more about creation than was known a thousand years ago, we dont want to make the mistake that we know it all and that anything we dont know isnt worth knowing. Creation is not inexhaustive, but it does reflect its Author who is inexhaustible.

God made all things from nothing in the space of six days and all very good. The crown of his creation is on day six. It is there that we read, "Then God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." (Genesis 1:26) Mankind is created by God, for a purpose. The very next verse says, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

These words are, quite possibly, the most offensive in the Bible in our current day. We have gone from irrationality to irrationality and embraced things that are contrary to nature. The widescale rejection of God has not led to enlightenment and pleasure, but the opposite. We are entering a new kind of dark ages that opposes free thinking and makes pleasure out of things that are debased. This is not surprising to anyone who has been watching the tides of culture these past decades. What began with simple questions of whether Gods word is true has devolved into a rejection of all truth. Well see, in the coming weeks, that this is precisely what happens in Genesis. The good news is that if the Bible diagnoses the problem, that means it will also provide the solution.

Pastor Everett Henes, the pastor of the Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church, can be reached at pastorhenes@gmail.com.

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In the beginning...the important things - The Hillsdale Daily News