Lesson 2

Genesis chapter 1, this is the most important statement in the Bible. Because the rest of the Bible depends on it. Without Genesis 1-1, you can't have a Genesis 1-2, you can't have an Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. You can't have a revelation at the end of the book without Genesis 1.1. I think everybody, it's very natural for everybody at some time in life to basically think, why am I here? Where am I going? What is my purpose in life? How did we get here? How did somehow we have all these people in the middle of a huge universe floating around on a ball at an incredible rate of speed as it turns in a circle and goes around the sun? How do we get here? Who's put us here? We can't get off. Everyone's dreamed about living on another planet, but they can't. It's not going to happen. So how do we figure all this out? And so if we look here in Genesis 1.1, God's Word tells us what we need to know. Genesis 1.1, everyone should be there. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. I remember reading that when I was a little boy. My mom was giving a panoricidal and I snuck off in this building. And it's owned by the Presbyterian church now. Y'all know what used to be the women's center there? You remember that there in Athens growing up? But anyway it's owned by the Presbyterian church now, but back then my mom was giving piano recital there and I snuck off in one of these rooms and I saw this big, big Bible there and I opened it up and I turned to the very first page Genesis 1-1 and it was so majestic to me. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Let's think about that just a moment. A lot of people say, you know, I don't think I can believe in God. I don't think I can believe that there's something else out there besides what we see here. And some people struggle with that. And you'll hear the scientists say, "Well, based on science, it's things that we can observe, things that we can test, things that we can see with our eyes. And if you can't see it, observe it, and test it, Then and experience it then you can't rely on it. It's not real. It's not true All that's foolishness When we look here in Genesis 1 1 we're given an enormous amount of wisdom We see that God created What we now know and what we experience is heaven and earth He created as a continuum Each Part of that continuum depending on the other part for its own existence I'll give you the old question Which came first the chicken or the egg that's a continuum And I know the answer to that question, but let's think about it just a moment I've got chickens We got an egg and And we got a chicken. The chicken came from the egg. The egg came from the chicken, right? Everybody knows this is science. This is an observable fact that we can test today. Everybody knows a chicken came from an egg. And everybody knows you can't get an egg unless you have a chicken. Now you tell me, anyone know which came first, a chicken or the egg? Huh? The chicken? That's exactly right. Exactly right. Where'd the chicken come from? We didn't come from an egg where the chicken come from. That's right. That's exactly right. It came from God. That's the only way this can work. It's the only way. You say, "Well, the chicken came from an egg." That's the... The egg was first. Was the egg fertilized? If it wasn't fertilized, you can't have a chicken. You can't get fertilized without a chicken in a rooster. It's a continuum. They can't be shaken. And nobody, but nobody has ever seen anything outside of this. Nor can they test anything outside of this, nor can they prove anything outside of this, no matter what they say. Now the scientists, so-called, and by the way, the Bible actually speaks of junk science. Did you know that? The Bible actually speaks of junk science. God knew that there would be junk scientists trying to dispute His Word before He ever gave it to us. And the Bible calls it "science falsely so called." That's how it's referred to. And so when you think of the scientists, here's what they do. The people who tried, the false scientists, who tried to dispute God's Word and say, know there was not a God that created the heaven and the earth in the beginning. That we evolved over billions and billions and billions of years. What they do, it's smoke and mirrors. It's sleight of hand. What they do, they try to use something that the human mind really can't grasp. And because it can't grasp it, it gives up on it. It taps out and accepts what the scientists say. They think, "Well, that's above my pay grade. I'm not smart enough to grasp that." So they say billions and billions of years, that's a plus, actually we'll just say multiplied, alright? We'll make it really, really long time. Billions and billions of years and then everything just slowly evolved. And so you say, well, where did that chicken and egg came from? Well, it came from some other lower life form that eventually evolved to where it could produce eggs and all these things. And it makes no sense whatsoever, but that's what they'll say. And it evolved over billions and billions of years. And so the lazy person, the non-thinking person says, oh, okay, okay, billions and billions of years. But if you erased, you can really make the argument extremely simple. This really isn't that difficult. Erase the billions of years. Take that away and it suddenly becomes easy to grasp. I arrested a man one time and on the way to jail, I would always try to find some way to witness to the people I arrested. And fortunately, in one of the counties where I worked, the bookend sheet asked what religion people were. That way you could put it down, I guess, in case something happened to them. They could contact a religious clergy to break the news of the family. I don't know. But it was on the bookend sheet. And so on the way into jail, I said, I got a few things to ask you know for the book and sheet I'll go and get the information down so I said you know and I asked him a few of the things on there and I said and what religion are you? He said I have no religion I'm an atheist. I said oh that is so good to hear I'm so glad to hear that. He looked shocked and he said well why are you glad to hear that? I said I've always wanted to ask you guys something. He said well okay he got real proud you can see the smile come on his face he's going to educate me now. He said, "Well, what is it?" I said, "Where'd you come from?" He said, "I came from my parents. Where'd they come from? They came from their parents. Where'd they come from?" Well, they came from their parents. I said, "Well, now you know where I'm going with this. Let's push it on back as far as we can. Where did they come from?" Well, they came from monkeys. Where'd the monkeys come from? Well, they came from a lower life form, which was eventually you push it back and it gets into these creatures that crawled out of this primordial soup. I said, "Where did the soup come from? Where did the world come from? And where did the earth come from that all this crawled out of?" He said, "Well, that came from the Big Bang." I said, "What exploded?" You see what I just did? We just cut billions and billions of years out of it to make it real simple. Now we're getting back to their original calls of everything. What exploded? He said, "Gas and matter." Where did the gas and matter come from? And suddenly the smile left his face and the cab of my pickup got very quiet. And he said, "That's a good question, I don't know." You see, he was thinking in the terms of time, space and matter, billions of years, sludge, gas, matter. And there's time, space, and matter. That's all he could think of was time, space, and matter, because he was created in that continuum. He couldn't think outside of it. So he did not know where the gas and matter came from. It had to come from someplace, right? If the gas and matter was always here, If you ever had in the beginning, then the gas and matter would be eternal. The gas and matter would be the originator of all things, with no one or anything ever creating it. That's not possible because the moment something's eternal, something's divine. It's God. And so they deny that. And just a few years ago, in fact, the scientists finally came up with the answer to the question I asked the atheist of which he had no answer to at the time. You'll never guess what their answer was, where the gas and matter came from. They are now suspecting that the gas and matter came from yet another universe that exploded and it spun off from that universe, which we've never seen. And you know what they just did? They just brought billions and billions of years back into the equation. And then the question is, when you cut the billions of years out, where did that universe come from? You see how easy that is? And I told the man, I said, "When you push everything back to where it came from, because Because you and I, we all know, you go to the cemetery, we are defined by this continuum of time, space, and matter. You go to any cemetery, it is going to say Richard Fulton. That's the matter. Born 19, I know what you all are thinking, 1985. Now, I was born back in the 60s. Born back here at this particular time, at this year, died this year. There's the time. The matter is in the ground. There's the space. On the epitaph is the time. Time, space, and matter. That's all we know. That's all we can understand. will say, "Well, if I can't see it, if I can observe it, then therefore it must not be real." When I believe something that I cannot personally observe foolishness, when I'm at work I have a radio. And if there's some kind of emergency we need to communicate, we'll communicate on that two-way radio. That radio has many channels on it and we only hear, we only know what's going on on that one channel that everyone's radio set on. That's it. You have other police departments that are on totally different types of radios that operate off in a completely different wavelength, a completely different spectrum of what our radios operate off of. You have satellites that communicate off yet a totally different way of communicating than those. And if you do not have the right receiver, you will never be privy to the communication. Everyone with me? When God created us, He gave us how many senses? Five. Don't say six because that's not scientific. You can't observe it. Five senses. Smell, touch, hearing, seeing, right? So He gives us these five senses. That is our receiver. These five senses can sense within the continuum we were created in, time, space, and matter. Outside of that, they do not have any sense. They do not have any receptors for that, you see? And so for, in our eyes, you know, at work, I operate an X-ray machine on a regular basis. And I've learned through my training that there are certain wavelengths of light that the human eye, one of the senses, has been programmed to detect. a certain channel that the eye receives. Just lock on a radio. X-rays cannot be picked up by my eye. They can't. Even though they're there. They exist. But I cannot perceive them with my eye. I had to have another receiver, if you would, that x-ray machine that can measure the x-rays, detect them, and then translate that into the wavelength that my human eye then can detect and put it up on the computer screen. But it's been there the the whole time. They're there all the time right now. We can't see them. In the beginning, as I said, we're all measured by time. We all had a beginning. This universe had a beginning. If you'll look here in Genesis 1.1, in the beginning, God. God was there before the beginning began. He is the only one who can then tell us how we began. So we are reading from the authority of God who alone was there in the beginning and tell us how all this happened. And God says in the beginning, what do we have there? With beginning, we have time, right? That's when time for us began. This is a time, space, matter continuum. As you can't have a chicken without an egg, you can't have an egg without a chicken, something outside of the egg and the chicken had to bring it about in the first place. In the same way, this time, space, matter continuum, something outside of time, space, and matter had to originate it in the first place. And I'll show you why. It's a continuum. Time, that's beginning. In the beginning, God created the heaven. What is that? Space. Oops, I'm going to do this. Time, space. That's heaven. And the earth. What's that? Matter, matter. Oh, I did it again. Matter. No matter what matters. Oh, I did it again. No matter what matters. All of these are mentioned here. Brilliantly. This is not just some words just thrown off the page here. This is wisdom of what actually happened. That in the beginning, God created heaven and the earth. heaven, earth, time, space, and matter. And you cannot have one without the other, just like you can't have chicken without the egg. If you had matter, when would you have it? You notice what the scientists do? They never speak of evolution outside time. You notice that? Billions and billions of years. This many billions of years ago, this many hundreds of thousands of years, they cannot speak of evolution outside of time. When they refer to matter, they always link it to time. You cannot have matter unless you have a time when that matter exists. You can't have matter without space because where would you put it? All of these things have to be in existence simultaneously. And when you realize, and we all do, we all should. Look at me. There is a podium in front of me. I'm within so many feet from this camera. Y'all are within so many feet of me. We're inside a room at a particular address in a particular town. We all here are existing in this time, space, matter continuum. And I keep looking up here because I have to keep watching the clock because before long we're going to move from this space to another space at a particular time and all of our matter is going to go from here to there for the next service. And all of this could not have taken place like the chicken and the egg unless it happened simultaneously. And only God, only someone who existed outside of time, space, and matter could have originated that. And I told that young man, I said, "You see, when you keep pushing things backward, you eventually have to come to something that's always been here, that has started it all." And once you bump into something that's eternal, that had no beginning, you've then bumped into God. And now it's simply a matter of identifying who that God is and what His message is to us. And this is what this message is about. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Look in verse 2 now. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. So here we are. The earth was without form and void. Basically it means it was a barren waste. It was an absolute, chaotic, unformed, lifeless mass. That's what the earth was. There was no organization to the earth. There were no seas and rivers. There was no grass and trees. There was none of these things in the beginning. In the beginning, all we had was time, space, and matter. But we had no life. Why do we have no life? We have no light. All light, all life, excuse me, depends upon time, space, and matter. I'm sorry, all light. Depends upon light. Excuse me, I'm looking at time, space, and matter. You're not repeating myself. All life, all life, depends upon light. So right now, God initiates time, space, and matter in our universe in the beginning. And it's without form, no organization, it's void, nothing at all, and darkness is upon the face of the deep. We know that the earth is two-thirds water, approximately. And so there's this chaos, if you would, there's this unorganized mass of elements. And I believe it was round, just like all the planets are now, but there was no organization to it. And it was dark. So the first thing God does, the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. God creates by His Spirit. God is Spirit. He is not matter. You see? The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. He's not matter. And God said, verse 3, "Let there be light, and there was light." Do you see how well thought out this is? Do you see how realistic and truthful this is? You cannot have life without light. You say, "Well, Brother Richard, if we turn the lights out here, we don't all die. If we go into a cave at Carlsbad Cavern, we don't all die. You stay in that cave, you will. And if you're in that cave and the lights go out, you are surviving in the dark of what you gained in the light. What did you have for breakfast this morning? Eggs. The chickens ate something. I know what they eat. They love eating my grass. They love eating the weeds. They love eating my wise flowers. They love eating bugs. All that stuff came from white. Grass lives off photosynthesis, can't have life without the sun. They say, "Well, cows aren't grass, well, the cows eat the grass that came from the light and then transfers the energy and life to them." See, you can't have it without light. So the first thing God does is create light. Now, as the earth was without organization at this time, when God created light, light was without its order as well. If you'll notice, it didn't say God created the sun. This is very important. Light does not come from the sun. The sun comes from light. People say, "Well, the ancient Indians, they worshipped the sun." Or these other people, "They worshipped the sun that gave life to the planet and all." That sun didn't give life to the planet. I want to worship the person who created that sun. We all know the sun's running out of energy. Where's the sun getting its energy from? Right here. God said, "Let there be light." God creates by his spirit, his spirit speaks, and through the word of God, creation is made. God speaks and it happens. It's not a magic formula, but through God's word, all things are created. That's very important for us to remember here as well. So light was the first thing that God made. If you look here now in verse 4, and we're about to close, if you look here in verse 4, sorry, verse 3, "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light in verse 4, and God saw the light, that it was good." Everything God makes is good. God is a good God. Everything God does is good. In fact, the word God itself is the derivative of the word good, God, good, just one "o" less and you have more and you have good. And so God saw the light that it was good. Everything God makes is good. You say, "Well, pastor, there's things in this world that are not good." That's true. That's not what God made. And we'll get into that later as we go. And now look here. Verse 4, "And God saw the light that it was good, and God divided the light from from the darkness. So now the light is divided, it's separated from darkness. And there's a principle here of light and darkness being separated. And so now he divides it. And I believe I have an idea of what that looked like. It probably looked like something like the pillar of fire when Israel came out of Egypt, but that's a whole other story. But right now, the light now is separated from the darkness and there is light in existence Like a painter's paint is an existence, but it hadn't yet been all organized yet to the picture. And so he says, "And God called," verse 5, "And God called the light day and the darkness he called night. In the evening and the morning were the first day." That's right, Michelle, a lot has no fellowship with darkness spiritually as well as physically. And so now the Earth rotates, the light is created, the Earth rotates in the evening and the morning, full turn for the first day. This is day one of creation. Next week we'll get into day two. This is day one of creation. These are literal 24 hour days that God made the heavens, he could have done it all at one time, but he didn't. So light and darkness is divided. This is day one. This the first stage of creation and I call it illumination. First stage of living creation. First stage of bringing about life, illumination. And with that, we'll go ahead and stop and, Lord willing, we'll take back up.