Focal Point

Pastor Mike Fabarez: When it comes to how God creates, he does it with a word. He says, "Let there be light," and then boom! And according to this particular verse, he's very concise in telling us he did it by a command. He spoke something, he said something, it was an act of his will, and in that act of his will, he brings into existence things that didn't exist with a word.

Guest (Male): In the beginning, there was nothing? Or in the beginning, there was a creator? This conversation is occurring not only in schools and universities but among friends and family, too. Many people claim the questions surrounding our origins are simply questions of science. But really, this important discussion is a matter of faith.

Today on Focal Point, Mike Fabarez compares both creationism and evolution in order to see which belief is worthy of our faith. We're in Hebrews chapter 11, boldly trusting in God's ability to create.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: For us as Christians, there should be no middle ground faith or lukewarm lives. God has made it really clear that ambitious faith is normative for the Christian life. That's certainly what he wants to see us cultivate in our hearts.

But before the writer of Hebrews illustrates that kind of ambitious faith with this long list of Old Testament examples, he promised he would do that in verse two, he starts in verse three before he gets to that list with one foundational issue that is going to require ambitious faith for us to tenaciously hold onto.

He does this, and it is a surprise to some who don't know the ancient first-century culture because they think, "Well, this truth, the truth about God's creative act, certainly would not be in question in the first century." But those of you who know a little bit about Greco-Roman history and philosophy, you understand that this was well underway as being an attack on the biblical record of creation.

There were a lot of thoughts about eternal matter and matter being reformed and things coming to be in a way that may not perfectly reflect modern evolutionary theory, but there was certainly a conflict about origins in the first century. So it seems appropriate that he stops and says, "Before I give you examples of ambitious faith intersecting with life, let's just start with the most basic thing: how we got here."

Let us ask this question: are we on board with the biblical declaration in Genesis 1 and 2? Today, we see two basic options when it comes to the issue of cosmology or origins. I know there's variations all in between, but let's at least try and understand them, and in juxtaposition to one another, let's just try and make some contrasts and comparisons.

So I put it this way: let's consider the options. I gave you a chart, and the one is headed with the word "evolution" and the other is headed with the word "creation." Our text reads this way. Let's look at the text and then let's fill in a few preliminaries. He's already told us what faith is in verse number one: being sure of what we hope for, certain of what we do not see.

It is a certainty, though not an irrational certainty. That's important to note. It is still a confidence in something that we don't personally observe. Everything about what we hope for in the future is by definition something we don't observe, but many things about the past, and that's where he begins.

Let's talk about the ultimate past: the beginning of the universe. So he says in verse three, "By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command." God said something and boom! So that what is seen, present tense, what we see now, it was not made out of what was visible. Now that struck right to the heart of first-century Greek philosophy.

The idea here was that's not true. Let's get back to understanding that biblical faith is going to require of us, it's not an irrational faith, affirmation of how we got here, which, according to Genesis 1 and 2, was at God's command, where he creates out of nothing something that we now see in its present form.

That is the biblical assertion, and the Bible says we're going to have to grasp that by faith. By faith, and that means I couldn't firsthand look at it and say, "Well yeah, I was there, I saw it." Just like everything in the future that we hope for, a lot of things in the past, we have to say I wasn't there to see it.

So all that means is that I may assemble evidence or I may look at the way things work or the way things are and come up with a concept, but because I wasn't there, I can't say, "Hey, I experienced it." So let's just put that at the top. We'll expand that and explore that a little bit further as we get on with our message.

As it relates to evolution, just put under the word "faith" there: it is, as a theory, and I know there's lots of versions of this theory, it all comes down to an unknown cause. I don't think any evolutionist is going to argue with that. It is unknown. Just to quote one leading evolutionist, he puts it this way, a proponent of the Big Bang Theory: "Mysteries appear as one looks closer to the beginning."

Bottom line is, we don't know. The concept of evolution now for the most part hangs on the theory of the Big Bang, which takes us back to a point of singularity where everything in the universe was down to this absolute collapse of all things and zero-gravitational reality.

It was a point of infinitesimally small singularity, and from that, boom, came this explosion and we have what we have now. And what caused that? We don't know. But let's get to verse number three now. Hebrews chapter 11, verse 3. I'm going to look at the text and it's going to say at least what we started to say, and that is by faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command.

Here's the biblical positing of the picture: God created the world and he created it with a word. Again, the whole passage and context is about faith, having the boldness to have confidence in God that he did what the Bible says he did. So let's just underscore that, and maybe you can affirm this with me.

Number one in your outline: that we're going to need faith no matter which theory we choose. We're going to need faith no matter which account we believe. We need faith no matter which explanation we adopt. We are going to need faith, and here's the reason why: all history is unseen. Just like all hope is unseen.

Hope is future; future by definition I can't see it. History, most history, all history in some senses is not now seen, and that is an important observation. It is a confidence in what is not seen. It doesn't mean it's irrational; it just means it's unseen. Historical events by definition are unrepeatable.

Creation, if it's a topic, or I should say cosmology or the origins of the universe, is by definition something in the past. For the evolutionist or the Big Bang proponent, it's 13.7 billion years ago. That's the current date on the whole thing. Well, that's something that's not happening now.

So I'm by definition forced to say it is an issue that cannot be repeated in a lab. Now, I can take the evidence to the lab, but I can't take the event and recreate it because history by definition is unrepeatable. And so it is for the biblical creationist. He's got the same issue.

He can't repeat creation, and neither can the evolutionist. We have to look back at it as a historical event, and every historical event is this way. Think about any historical event that you want to claim happened. Think about the Los Angeles Olympics. Did anybody go to the 1984 Summer Olympics, at least one of the events? Did you? I don't believe you. I don't believe you.

So let's debate it. We're going to debate whether you went. I'm going to say no, you didn't, and you want to say that you did. Now, here's only two things that we've got to deal with now if we're going to try to solve this problem as if it mattered. If this were an important decision, we've got to find out who's right if our eternity in some way was impacted by this decision.

We could only deal with two things, and these are broad words, but we'd have to deal with, if it's a historical event, we'd have to deal with evidence that still remains in the present and any testimony that happens to be available. Those are the only things. She nodded her head; yeah, he went. You're saying he went. You're testifying that he went to the Olympics in '84.

You are a witness to that. But for creation and the origin of the universe, most people say, "Well, there were no witnesses. We don't have anybody that we can interrogate." I'm skeptical and we're going to debate all this, but I can really deal with only the evidence and any available testimony.

Creationists say, "Okay, well we've got the same evidence that the evolutionist has because we live in the same universe." But the problem is creationists say, "Well, we believe we do have a witness: the guy who did it. God, the deity, the uncaused eternal person who purposely did it." And so we're saying, "Well, he wrote a book," and again, most people say, "Well, that's a bunch of fairy tales."

But we're saying we believe that it has an imprimatur, and that's a whole different series, but there is credibility to this. And so we take that and we listen to what the Bible says about creation. We turn to Genesis 1 and 2: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." And then we say, "Okay, we've got a claim here from the diary of God, so to speak, and now we should look at the evidence and see."

And if it is true as the Bible says, then it should be reasonable because it matches the facts and my evidence should be able to match that explanation. And that's all we can do. We can only look at evidence and testimony. And that's where we're at in this whole discussion of the universe.

When you talk about Big Bang cosmology, for instance, in the olden days this was kind of a theory on the fringe. Now it's front and center. This is what they're teaching your kids at the university: that we started 13.7 billion years ago with an explosion. That's how it all started.

Now a lot of this was given credence. The steady-state theory, that was Einstein's understanding of the universe, was changed by Hubble's observation of what we call red shift. Ultimately it came down to the hypothesis that everything in the universe is moving proportionally away from us.

So the assumption was if we detect movement, if our observations are right and all our deciphering of these things are true, then everything is moving outward. And so then we extrapolate. Now I'm not saying that's not evidence, okay, although I think it needs to be looked at carefully. There are lots of questions about red shift and expansion of the universe.

But let's just say there is, whether it's a radiation tweak in the universe, which was a big long series of journal articles. But the concept was if this is true, you've got to still see that it takes faith to extrapolate back to a point of singularity. Because it has some similarities and I don't mean to oversimplify it, but if I said, "Yeah, I do have evidence that I can look at and I buy of you coming up I-5 to church," it would be an issue of faith and extrapolation if my evidence only pertained to that last 50 yards on I-5 before the off-ramp.

I would be extrapolating to try and estimate when you were in San Diego, and at what time you were in Tijuana, and at what time you were in Mexico City. I'd have to extrapolate that. So all I'm saying is whatever your theory, no matter how good you may think it is or not, is all going to say we weren't there, we didn't see it, we only have the evidence and any available testimony.

Evolutionists say we have no testimony, we only have evidence. Christians say we believe we have testimony and we have good reason to believe that, and we believe we have evidence, the same evidence you have. Let's look at all of that together. But both of them, all I'm saying because it's a historical occurrence, creation is a historical occurrence, requires that I have faith: confidence in something unseen. All of that to say something we introduced in the chart.

Secondly, let's jot this down: nature is, by definition, something that requires something unnatural for us to get to this place from nothing. And we believe, whether we're a creationist or an evolutionist, that there was a time when what we see was not. And we believe that from either some eternal singularity or some eternal God, what was not became what is.

And so what we're believing about that as we examine the nature that we have to examine is that something supernatural or extraordinary had to happen to get it from here to there. Christians say it was a miraculous event. Evolutionists say it was a series of phenomenal changes: punctuated equilibrium, whatever you want to call it, but amazing things from protozoa to Cindy Crawford. Lots of amazing things.

So that is we sit back and go, "Hmm, okay, interesting." Why are we saying that? Because nothing in nature that we now see gives us that closure to the fact that, well, nature is by nature something that does that. Because it's not. Everything that we see is something that's just the opposite. And I don't want to over-kill this argument because I know a lot of people roll their eyes at it, but things do in this universe are either steady, they're either balanced, or they're either decaying and entropy.

Dynamic thermodynamics, as we call it, second law of thermodynamics. The bottom line is things go from order to disorder. And I know we can needle through this second law of thermodynamics, but the bottom line is you have to admit we have to assume something supernatural, something unusual, something phenomenal to go from a garage that's going from progressive order to disorder to all of a sudden now be reorganized into the Taj Mahal.

You have to have something phenomenal take place because my garage goes from order to disorder every week. It's increasingly worse. And that's how your garage works, too, unless there is intelligent and purposeful intervention into that to make it something better. That's all we're saying is that nature requires that.

Now in the olden days, and this is the frustration about evolution and creation debate, is that the theory keeps changing. When Darwin, who popularized it, was the really the benchmark of people latching onto this name and this concept from this personality, he believed, as most people did in that day who tried to propose and posit this theory, in what we call the spontaneous generation of life.

Now since Louis Pasteur, no one believes that anymore, but in that day they did. They believed that if you throw old rags in the corner of the garage, eventually immaterial stuff like rags that are dirty will produce mice, and living things will come from dead things. Inanimate objects will produce living things. You put a piece of meat out and you leave it out on your patio, it will create maggots and there will be life from non-life.

And they believed that. That was a cornerstone; that's what people assumed about things because that's what they saw. They didn't have the germ theory of Louis Pasteur. Pasteurization came from Louis Pasteur, and one of his great observations is when it comes to germ theory and it comes to things like the Petri dish that still is on his desk in the museum over there in France: if you're going to have life come from non-life, you have to have it come from outside.

The organization and information of life cannot be self-generated or self-organized; it has to be somehow supplanted into that. That's why really maggots don't come from meat; they come from external organisms. That's why rats don't come from piles of rags. It takes rats to produce rats.

The Bible has said no, this is all taken place by God. We'll look at that in a minute, but the theory always, whether it's biblical or non-biblical, requires something outside of what we know in nature. And that's just an observation: nature by its very nature requires something unnatural if it is to go from what we say it was, which is nothing or singularity, to what we now have.

Now, back to our passage. Verse three. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command. And so that he says what is seen, present tense, was not made out of what was visible. I just want to note in the second part of this message: let's note how God creates. Because this is a description, if it weren't good enough for us in Genesis 1 and 2, of how God did it.

And according to this particular verse, he's very concise in telling us he did it by a command. He spoke something, he said something, it was an act of his will, and in that act of his will, he brings into existence things that didn't exist. Now let's just start with the first part of that: when it comes to how God creates, notice that in this passage and in the historical record, he does it with a word.

He says, "Let there be light," and then boom! There are photons floating around in the universe. He creates the fabric of space-time. We could look at all over the week event of the miraculous creation in Genesis and say, "Man, he's talking. He's saying things. He's purposing things and they're happening."

That is what we see, which is interesting, not just in the creative account but in the 86 examples that follow these miraculous breaking of natural law events. It's the same thing. And I just forwarded all the way to the New Testament where Jesus, the incarnate one who claims to be the agent of all creation, right? John 1:1, all things were created by him and through him; nothing came into being that exists that Christ didn't make.

The Bible says that when Christ goes around showing his position and authority as creator, guess how he keeps creating things? With a word. Not a process. He says things and they happen. Let me give you just a few examples really quick. Matthew chapter 9, you don't need to turn there but write it down: there is a paralytic there. A guy who's paralyzed.

My daughter, as you know, is paralyzed from the knees down. Some of you know that, spinal problem, and so her muscles and tendons are completely atrophied in her legs from her knees down. Now there's useless, atrophied, and useless tissue there that's hanging from her knee to her ankle. Now Christ has got a paralytic like that, probably worse. Hip flexors, the thigh muscles, everything, tendons, everything's just a mess on this lifelong paralytic.

And here's what Matthew 9:5 says: "Get up and walk." Four words. Get up and walk. And what we're affirming, if you believe that Jesus actually did that, is that historically a man who had atrophied and useless tissue in his legs all of a sudden now had brand new constitutions in his legs of tissue that worked, cells that worked, nerves that worked, and he stood up because of a word from Christ and he walked away. There was a spontaneous, immediate creation that was with a word.

How about another example? Mark 3:5. We could go all morning on this, just about. Man with a withered hand. Same problem. Lots of complexity from your elbow to your tips of your fingers if you know anything about anatomy. Some of you doctors are here; this is an amazing part of our body from here to here. Amazingly complex. Well, he had a withered hand.

And you've seen people with withered hands and in the ancient days he didn't have any prosthesis, he didn't have any help. His hand's a mess. And Jesus, here's what he says: "Stretch out your hand." And according to that text, his hand was completely whole. Everything that was there that was not ready to make that hand work was immediately there: the tissues, the nerves, everything that was needed to make that hand completely whole. The creative act was with a word.

Bartimaeus, Luke chapter 18, verse 42. A blind man. Now don't be Sunday school, don't be flannelgraph. Be realistic. Picture the blind guy that you know. Picture Stevie Wonder. He's got his black glasses on. He's blind. Pull those glasses off and what do you have? He's got problems here.

And picture Bartimaeus who was that way from life and did live in the kind of sanitary and luxurious environment that Stevie Wonder lived in. All of a sudden now here's the words, three words: "Receive your sight." Boom! And now everything that is needed: all the optics, the lens, the cornea, the iris of his eye, the constitution of his eyeball, his optic nerve, everything. Boom! Now all of a sudden it worked.

In what? In a process? Did it take five weeks? No, in a moment with a word Jesus creates. And he creates something without a process; he creates something with a word. When I was thinking about all that, I eventually got around to John 11. And I'm thinking about talk about a blind man, a lame man, and a guy with a withered hand; his name was Lazarus and he had all those problems and more.

Lazarus is in bad shape in John 11. You remember the story: he's dead. He's been dead for four literally stinking days. He was dead. You know the passage. Mary and Martha when Jesus says, "Remove the stone, let's get to this guy." And they're like, "No." And the KJV is classic: "Lord, he stinketh." NIV says there is a bad odor. We're not going to open that up. We understand something about the decomposition of a body.

Now I know this is going to really be way too much information for you and reveal too much about myself, but I once bought a book on what happens biologically to your body from the moment you die forward. It's all about the decomposition of the body. Isn't that fun reading? Someone came to the bookstore and wanted to buy it this morning. We don't carry it in our bookstore. If you're really that morbid you can get it out of my library.

But what's amazing about that book is as I read that book is that from the moment we die, from the moment, and you doctors know this, from the moment that we die, so much physiologically and in our chemistry immediately changes. Bacteria multiplying every four hours. You've got enzymes being released in the body that are instantly starting to deteriorate all the tissues in the body. You've got your entire cellular structure of your skin begins to break down.

And some of you that are cops, police officers, or paramedics, and pastors, we see this too: the dead bodies we're called in there to the room where the person's been dead sometimes four hours, sometimes four days, and you see the absolute devastation of decomposition from the moment of death when the blood is not oxygenated, when the bacteria takes over, when the gases are released in the body.

It is an absolute mess and in an ancient world in an old cave, here sat Lazarus for four days. Now you can imagine the problems and I don't mean to be morbid, but picture what we've got going on after four days of decomposing death. Now Jesus with a word, talk about a healing here, talk about creative work. The cells that are dead in his body, the things that are no longer available to him, the cellular and molecular structure that needs to be completely recreated from scratch.

Jesus says three words: "Lazarus, come forth." And that was not a process. It was an immediate instantaneous creation of every system, every enzyme, every protein, every molecule of his body to make him live. And he pops out of the grave and says, "Man, it stinks in here. Get me out, get this cloth off of me."

And sits down for lunch. Picture it: lips immediately the constitution of their own tissue fiber changed. Eyeballs dead for four days immediately reconstituted. Every particle of that had to be redone. Boom, in an instant. Jesus shows the same thing that's claimed in Genesis 1 and 2: that he creates and he creates with a word and he does it instantly. That's the picture in Scripture.

Guest (Male): We're looking at the third verse of Hebrews chapter 11 here on Focal Point and a message from Pastor Mike Fabarez called Boldly Trusting in God's Ability to Create. Remember every lesson you hear on this program is available anytime at focalpointradio.org or through the free Focal Point app.

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Pastor Mike Fabarez: Thanks, Dave. I'd like to invite you to join me September 19th through the 26th, 2026, on a Christian cruise through New England and Canada. We'll sail Holland America's Zuiderdam, known for its elegance and exceptional hospitality, to historic cities like Boston, Halifax, and Quebec City.

We'll gather for devotional times in God's word followed by thought-provoking Bible teaching throughout our journey. Grammy-winning musicians Keith and Kristyn Getty will lead us in worship. You'll enjoy the stunning autumn landscapes as we explore charming coastal villages, all while building friendships with like-minded believers.

It's a unique opportunity to deepen your faith and see some of the most beautiful scenery on the eastern seaboard. Space is limited, so don't wait to sign up. Secure your cabin today at focalpointradio.org.

Guest (Male): I'm Dave Drewie and we will see you next time for the final part of our lesson Boldly Trusting in God's Ability to Create, Wednesday on Focal Point with Mike Fabarez.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: Hey there, Pastor Mike here. We're almost out of time, but before we go, I want to personally invite you to contact us here. Let us know how we can be praying for you. Head on over to focalpointradio.org and click the contact page or send me a note on Facebook, facebook.com/pastormike or x.com/pastormike. Can't wait to hear from you. Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries.