Sermon II in the Genesis Series
Sean C. Capparuccia
21 June 2026 – Trinity GMC
Rom. 1:18-25; Psalm 8; Mark 10:6-9; Genesis 1:6-31
Here then is the account – the Biblical account – of the six days that changed the world. Paul tells the Thessalonians, “We thank God constantly for this, that when you received from us the word of God’s message, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe” (I Thess. 2:13). So, at least as far as I can tell, the debate over the origins of the world and life is ultimately about authority; it’s really a battle over who ya gonna believe? The word of God or the word of man?
But, as I said last week, God did not create us to be naïve and gullible automatons that simply believe because we are told to. We were created to investigate, to explore, to think, ponder, to judge and discern. And we were also created to listen to God’s voice. So, this week, let us explore the six days of creation.
Recap
By way of a quick re-cap, Last week we ended at verse 5 when God created light and separated the light from the darkness. Remember now in verse 2 that the earth was formless and void – tohu and bohu in the Hebrew – which both signify emptiness and waste, with the connotation of chaos and confusion. Who can even guess what that looks like? Perhaps imagine the elements that make up our earth and sky – nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, silicon, gold, zinc, and thousands of other elements and chemicals – just scattered all over the earth with no organization. Kind of like when I start on a sermon; I go to my bookshelves and start pulling off the books that I think I might use. I may pull a dozen or so and pile it on the couch or desk. Then once I have them all together with a pen, pencil, some paper, the laptop, all the “necessaries”, I start sorting things out. Everything that God would be using to make the world He created – bara – on the first day.
We also talked briefly about the word “and” in verse 2. We read this first chapter of Genesis as a chronology, day one this happened, then day two, then day three. Easy enough. And each verse begins with the Hebrew letter “vav” which translates as “and” or “then.” When the “vav” is followed by a verb – which you see in the original Hebrew, not necessarily in the English translation – it is called a “’vav’ consecutive,” meaning the “and” or “then” indicates a sequence of events. In verse 2, though, the “vav” is followed by a noun – “and the earth” – which makes it a “’vav’ disjunctive” indicating not a sequence, but a comment on the preceding verse. This is all to say that in the Hebrew, the language that Moses used to write this, there can be no long gap of time between verse 1 and verse 2 as some try to understand it. This is significant in the interpretation of the timeline of Genesis and lends itself to an understanding that this was a process of six days which occurred approximately 6,000 years ago. And I will reiterate to you, my beloved, that we cannot insist on belief in a young earth over an old earth as an element of faith, although we can show that it is not only possible, but a highly plausible likelihood.
Another significant thing we talked about was the Hebrew word “yom” which means “day.” Some try to say that the word “day” can mean long periods of time, like “back in the day, we used to take a horse and buggy to church.” We’re familiar with that kind of language. And yom is indeed used this way throughout the Scriptures. But any time there is a number with yom it always means “a day.” So the plain sense is that yom means a day and a day is 24 hours, or, to use God’s wording, there was evening and morning… a day.
And again, the issue at stake here is authority.
I. On day one God created light. Just light. How do you create light? someone might ask. Well let us not forget that light is not just a state of being, but light is, in itself, a thing; it is made up of packets of particles that move through space. It is measurable. And various things give off light, but light is a material thing nonetheless. And God separated the light from the darkness.
II. On day two, God made… Note that this is different from the word “create.” As I I just mentioned, create is bara, and make is asah’. When God makes something it is with materials that He had previously created. So God made an expanse between the waters, a “firmament” or a “vaulted dome.” The Hebrew word here is raqia, which means ‘something firm.” This has been thought of as the sky, or even space or heaven. And we do see the same word raqia in verse 14, 15, 17, and 20 but in those cases they all say, “expanse [or firmament] of the heavens.” Here in verse 6, 7, and 8, on day two, it is raqia alone; just expanse or firmament. The King James translators didn’t know what the word meant, only that it had something to do with being firm. So, firmament. Yet in the Greek Septuagint, 16 out of 17 times the word raqia is translated as stereoma, which means “a firm or solid structure.”[1] Many have simply thought of the sky because in verse 8 it says, “God called the expanse ‘heaven’” but the sky is not solid. Let me put something to you on this: at this time, when creation week was completed and Adam was created, where was heaven? Where was “paradise”? Where did God dwell? In the Garden. So while we think of heaven as out there and far away, in the beginning, heaven was on earth. And isn’t that what was lost when Adam sinned? Heaven on earth? So, raqia could very well mean the crust of the earth. This ~10-mile layer of rock that we live on. The earth was formless; it was covered in water; and now God separates this water vertically by placing a layer of rock between it. This will play heavily when we get to Genesis 7 and 8. Something to think about.
III. On day three, first thing in the morning, God gathers the waters into one place so that dry land appears. He created the land yesterday, remember, but it was covered over. Now the land appears and, just as we’ve always suspected, it was one giant land mass – what the textbooks called Panacea, if I recall from 3rd grade. And we can see that when we look at the continents today how they probably at one time fit together. Here it is in Genesis 1:9. So He makes earth and seas.
Once that was finished, after lunch, God caused the earth “to sprout forth vegetation.” The dry land here was barren. By itself it held no life-producing principle. Until God opened His mouth it would remain barren. But as David points out in Psalm 104, “He causes the grass to grow for the cattle, and herbs for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth” (:14). The important thing here is the fact that each plant produced seeds and each fruit-bearing tree produced seeds so that each plant would self-propagate “after their kind.” Very important: “after their kind.” An apple tree could not produce coconuts. This was before the seed catalog that has that one tree with 10 different fruits growing on it. Amazing thing, but even though the mechanics of it were created by God, those things are man-altered. Neat though. What’s interesting about day three is that God neither created or made anything, He just moved stuff around and instructed the earth to bring forth vegetation, to which the earth promptly obeyed.
One thing that some point out is how God made plants before He made the sun. I am pretty sure that plants can survive a day without sunshine. Even so, they still had light from day one.
IV. On day four God made (asah’) the lights in “the expanse of the heavens”; in the raqia of the heavens. Here we are talking about outer space. The sun and moon were created to be the major sources of light to the earth. And the stars were placed in order to give some light to the earth as well. Imagine what the night sky would have looked like with absolutely zero light pollution. It would have been magnificent! And the planets, too, look like stars, from the earth. But the sun, moon, and stars were also made to measure time. And it is interesting that there has been no change in the constellations since the beginning.[2] We are looking at the same stars that Adam and Eve looked at riding through the night sky in the same positions.
One of the questions, then, about the possibility of a young earth is in regard to the speed of light. Our sun is about 93 million miles away; the next closest star to us is Proxima Centauri which is about 25 trillion miles away. So, according to the speed of light [~186,000 mps] the sun’s light takes about 8 minutes to reach us, and the light from Proxima Centauri takes about 4.24 years. And of course, we are seeing the light of stars much further than that. Well, what Einstein discovered was that the time it takes light to travel is not a constant. See if this doesn’t confuse you to death: It takes about 3 seconds for light to get to the moon and back to earth. But what we don’t know is how long it took the light to get there or how long it takes to get back. Dr. Jason Lisle, an astrophysicist, says that according to the laws of physics, it could have taken 3 seconds to get to the moon and zero to return.” He says, that “all physicists know this. So, just because a star is five light years away, doesn’t mean that it takes its light that long to travel to earth. Speed of light could have been faster in the past…. We don’t know.”[3] Just when you think you’ve got something figured out, physics throws a wrench in it. But, as I said last week, I think God is letting us discover these things over time to make life more interesting. It just keeps pointing back to Him. And I don’t know if you caught the wording there in verse 16: He made the sun and the moon, of course, and then “he also made the stars.” Just a few billion of them. As John Wesley said, “God created the heavens and the earth and didn’t even half try.”
V. On the fifth day God created all of the sea creatures and all of the birds. Here God created (bara), but what did He create that was new? Here He created life, and just like the plants – which were living, but not breathing – this life reproduced after its own kind. Now the theory of evolution wants to tell us that birds evolved from fish but there is just no proof whatsoever of this. What you have to realize is that if it took millions of years to get from fish to bird, as they say, then we would see millions of fossils of these creatures in transition. Think about it: you’ve got millions of years of fish, then millions of years of transitioning creatures running the whole gamut of scales to feathers, then millions of years’ worth of birds, not to mention the fish kinds that did not evolve into birds (because we still have fish). And yet the fossil record has never produced a single fossil showing this. We’ve got fish. And we’ve got birds. Both of them going back to the same time.
VI. And finally we get to day six when God made (asah’) the beasts of the earth, the animals. Again, each “after their kind.” Obviously we aren’t talking about species here. God did not have to create each individual species. When Genesis says “kinds” it means what we would call a phylum. If you remember from grade school science the animal kingdom is divided into Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. And here is where we can get into the complexity of DNA. Suffice it to say that a single animal cell is extremely complex. A single cell “contains more than 200 separate inter-related components”[4] which all work together perfectly aligned and integrated to make the cell function. That’s just one cell! A scientist did the math to see how probable this single cell could have developed through the process of chance. For 200 parts to align together in such a way as to make an animal cell function would be 1 chance in 10375. No matter how you look at it, it is impossible for this to happen. There has to be a Designer, a Maker, a Creator.
Human DNA itself is made up of over 3 billion base-pairs, which consist of two chemical nucleotides which form the “rungs” of the DNA helix. They say that’s equivalent to about 1.5 GB of information. But while computer code is all 0’s and 1’s, life-code, DNA, is chemical. Specific chemicals have to come together to make things work, and not just a few chemicals, but billions of them. I ask you, what is the likelihood of a pair of perfect looking snowmen forming in a blizzard? And that’s just frozen water. Friends, it is impossible for any of these things to simply happen by chance, even over millions or billions of years.
After creating and making all that He wanted to make, God was ready to put His crowning creation in the midst of all that He had made – man. One who would be made in His own image, in the image and likeness of God. He would make a male and a female who would together reflect the loving and selfless relationship that the Godhead had lived in for eternity, and together with Him as well.
And God gave them these instructions here in verse 28: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth; subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. Eat from any plant you wish.” God gave them all that they needed to live happy and fulfilled forever. I grew up being taught that mankind is just another animal that shares this earth with everything else. That we are no better than a polar bear or a zebra, we just have different lives to live. Friends that couldn’t be further from the truth. God’s word tells us clearly that we are not animals, but are made in His image. It tells us that we are not on equal terms with nature, but it was given to us to subdue and rule over it, to care for it. These aren’t mutually exclusive terms. You can care for something and rule over it as we will learn in later chapters.
In the Gospel today, Jesus, even though it was a completely different context for which He was speaking, upheld the truth of Genesis when He spoke of man’s relationship to woman. And though there is so much more to say about this first chapter and the six days of creation, I want to leave you with this: God saw all that He created, all the wonder of our world, its perfection and beauty, and saw that it was good. As we will hear, that goodness was turned upside down through Adam’s sin. But, the good news is that all of it can be restored through Jesus Christ. That’s why He came, to restore that which was broken and lost. And only through Christ can this happen.
We are living in a time of epidemic broken relationships because we are living in a time of epidemic rejection of God’s truth. Most of us have all been taught to reject God’s word here in Genesis as a religious fairy-tale, a myth. But the alternative is no more proven than what God’s word already says.
When you really start looking into the science in the Creation story, you begin to see that nothing in true (observable, empirical, repeatable) science – so far – has contradicted Genesis. Of course, no one was there and we cannot duplicate creation – it happened and now that was made, is made. But you also see, in many places where the science, the date, the results prove that certain aspects of Creation are true and that point – and I’ve read story after story about this – at that point the evolutionist says, “I don’t accept that truth. Interesting, isn’t it? It is completely irrational to go against what one sees to be true because they don’t like the implications of it. It is also irresponsible and Romans 1:18-19 and 24 plainly give us the result of doing just that. God’s word is truth and it is at our own peril to suppress the truth. If something doesn’t make sense…. study it more in depth.
God gave us this world- it is a gift to us, humankind. The designer of creation should make everyone say, “Wow! God is awesome!” How can anyone attribute the intricacies of our world to chance, really, to anything less than God Himself. It is blasphemy and a rejection of who He is. But I want us all to understand that there is nothing in these opening chapters of Genesis that we must accept purely on faith and not natural and scientific study. Faith, reason, and science are not incompatible. What is incompatible is faith, reason, and false science. I invite you this week to investigate some of these things a little further. Answers in Genesis and Biblical Science Institute both have very interesting websites that show fact after fact of how this all works scientifically. We don’t have to believe lies promulgated by atheists about how our world came to be.
All things were made by Christ, for Christ, and through Christ and in Him alone we have our redemption. Creation makes so much more sense when you know the Creator. How difficult it must be to live a life that runs from the Creator and makes every attempt to suppress what is true in order to try and debunk what you know to be true.
May we all learn to trust in God’s word a little more and learn to trust in one another as His image-bearers as well. And also stand up for God’s truth. This concludes today’s sermon, but certainly not the series…. Beloved, we’re just getting started! Amen.
Titus 1:2; I Peter 1:20; IITim 1:9 salvation promised before the creation of the world!
Put at the end. “…the creation of the world was distrubted over six days, for our sake, to the end that our imnhds might the more easily be retained in the meditation of God’s works…”[5]
“Man is an inhabitant of a thin rind on a negligible blob of matter belonging to one of the millions of stars, in one among millions of island universes.” H. G. Wells
Answers in genesis- 101 evidences for young earth
Radiometric dating – not reliable; rocks with known dates (i.e. mt st helens) come back with dates of 300k to 2.5 million years.) Potassium-Argon dating.
“We filter all the evidence we get in accordance with what we already believe.” -Ken Ham
Youtube: Scientist, Jason Lisle, DISMANTLES Old Earth Theory!
Pyramids pre-dating the Flood? Need to remember that Egyptian chronology includes multiple dynasties that overlap. Babel ~100 years post-Flood. Therfore, Egyptian pyramids ~200 years beyond Babel. In Egypt they brought the worship of ‘heaven’ with them.
Ice Age after Flood – interview with Lisle, 27:00
Lower layers have simple animals to upper layers have more complex animals. Strata. The truth is: lowest layers (Cambrian) has very complex animals which look the same today (starfish, etc).
Flood – “Catastrophe of waters” KJV – extremely catastrophic, not gentle rain coming down. Even fish were buried in the mud. Lowest layers – aquatic organisms. Humans in upper layers not because they came later, but because they drowned last.
Evidence for young earth. Let’s first assume that everything is the same as it was back then – rates of decay, etc. carbon-14 found in coal layers supposedly 100’s of millions of years; half life 5700 years, decay into nitrogen. Yet c14 is found.
Magnetic field of earth decay rate. 6000 years ago it was 20x stronger; protects from cosmic rays, solar radiation, etc. If, even if the decay rate is constant, we go back 60,000 years the magnetic field would be stronger than a neutron star – it would literally pull the iron out of your blood.
Jupiter gives off twice the energy that it receives from the sun. How long could it last? Neptune gives off 2.6x the heat as received form the sun.
Galaxy spirals – measuring the rates at which they spin, they would be wound flat like a disc in millions of years, but they aren’t. With known spin rates, they evidence thousands of years.
Youtube: Clear evidence for Young Earth Creation: can scientists accept it?
Coconino sand grains evidence being rolled around in the ocean. Coconino deert is north-central Arizona.
[1] Brown, In the Beginning, 8th ed., 366. The world is anxiously awaiting the soon to be released 9th edition!
[2] Morris & Morris, The Modern Creation Trilogy, vol II, 205.
[3] Dr. Jason Lisle, “Jason Lisle Dismantles Old Earth Theory” youtube.com.
[4] Morris & Morris, The Modern Creation Trilogy, 163.
[5] Calvin, Commentaries: Genesis 1:26.
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