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I. God has created the entire universe.
A. John 1:3 - All things were made by him; and without him was not
any thing made that was made.
B. Hebrews 1:10 - And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the
foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands:
II. Why did God create the universe and everything in it?
A. Proverbs 16:4 - The LORD hath made all things for himself: yea, even
the wicked for the day of evil.
B. Revelation 4:11 - Thou art worthy, IO Lord, to receive glory and
honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they
are and were created.
III. The word "beginning" means first, or the beginning.
A. If this is truly the beginning, then there was nothing before it as far
as humans and this creation are concerned.
B. Job 38:4-7 - God asks Job where he was when God created the foundations
of the earth in the beginning when the morning stars sang for joy.
1. Rev. 22:16 - Jesus Christ is the morning star.
2. Indications in Job are that the morning stars (plural) are the angels
that God created to praise Him and be His messengers to the earth.
IV. Why I don’t believe there is a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2.
A. I don’t know when Satan was created by God, but when he was created,
he was very good. God didn’t create anything that wasn’t good. The
traditional meaning is that there is millions of years between these two
verses, when Satan was cast down from heaven and destroyed the first creation.
1. If this was so, then death has come from something other than the sin
of Adam.
2. God said that the sin of Adam was what caused death to come to all the
creation.
B. Genesis 1:31 - God said that all of His creation was very good.
1. If everything was very good, then Satan was also very good.
2. He had not yet fallen.
V. Why did God take six days to create the world?
A. He could have created it immediately if he had wanted to.
1. Exodus 20:8-11 - God intended to use the seven days of creation as a
lesson for humankind.
2. We are supposed to work for six days, then use the seventh day for
worship of God.
B. How long is a day?
1. Genesis 1:5 - The evening and the morning was the first day.
2. This is 24 hours long.
VI. What about dinosaurs?
A. If there is a gap between Gen. 1:1 and 1:2, then the destruction of that
world caused by Satan would not only have destroyed the dinosaurs, it would
also have destroyed any evidence that dinosaurs existed.
B. It is likely there are still dinosaurs on the earth today.
1. China has always been renowned for its dragon stories, and dragons
have always been prominent on Chinese pottery, embroidery and carvings.
England has its story of St. George, who slew a dragon that lived in a cave.
2. But we are not just referring to stories dating back thousands of
years, for even in the tenth century, an Irishman wrote of his encounter
with what appears to have been a Stegosaurus.
3. In the 1500s, a European scientific book, Historia Animalium, listed
several animals, which to us are dinosaurs, as still alive.
4. A well-known naturalist of the time, Ulysses Aldrovandus, recorded an
encounter between a peasant named Baptista and a dragon whose description
fits that of the dinosaur Tanystropheus. The encounter was on May 13, 1572
near Bologna in Italy, and the peasant killed the dragon.
5. So the evidence for the existence of dinosaurs during recorded human
history is strong.
C. We also have the description of two beasts that could very well have
been such great reptilian creatures still existing in Job's day (Job 40:15,
41:134).
1. The text records that God was showing Job how great He was as Creator,
in causing him to observe some of the most powerful of the creatures He had
made. In Job 40:15, God tells Job to look at behemoth.
2. In many commentaries, behemoth is said to be an elephant or a
hippopotamus.
3. However, this description is unlikely, since behemoth is said to have
had a tail like a cedar (Job 40:17).
4. Now if there is one thing an elephant's tiny tail is unlike, it is a
cedar tree!
5. The elephant is quickly eliminated as a possibility for this beast.
6. In fact, after reading this passage in Job very carefully, one is hard
put to find any living creature to fit the description.
7. The closest that we know could be Brachiosaurus, one of the dinosaurs.
8. Leviathan (Job 41:1) seems also to have been some form of
fire-breathing dragon.
9. For those who wonder about this, remember that the living bombardier
beetle can shoot out super-heated gases in its own defense.
10. Why not leviathan?
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