Focal Point

Pastor Mike Fabarez: God created out of nothing and that cannot be mitigated with a position that you call theistic evolution or progressive creationism. You can't do it. You cannot stand in the middle on this. Can we not take the Bible at face value and say this is what it says? Can we not live with that? Do you have the ambitious faith to believe it?

Dave Drewery: Welcome to Focal Point with author and Pastor Mike Fabarez. I'm Dave Drewery. The definition of ambitious is eagerly desirous of achieving a specific goal. It's helpful to keep that meaning in mind as we continue a series in Hebrews called Ambitious Faith. Christians shouldn't settle for a half-hearted belief or middle of the road acceptance. And passages like Hebrews chapter 11 are written to inspire a gung-ho, no holds barred trust in who God is and what he can do. Pastor Mike says that begins with boldly trusting in God's ability to create.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: God has made it really clear that ambitious faith is normative for the Christian life. That's what he expects from us and 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 on to: the biblical record of creation. Let's just start with the most basic thing: how we got here.

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." 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. He creates from nothing into a mature something.

Look at our text again. "The universe was formed at God's command so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible." He creates out of something that is not there, something that is there and has complete maturity and functionality, immediate functionality. The creation of God with a word and the 86 examples we have that are post-Genesis 1 and 2 are all immediately ready to function. And that's important. That's why it's not a process in part. That's why if you think back to the garden, you picture God in the wording of the text forming this man out of the dust of the earth, breathing into him the breath of life on day six and immediately he becomes a living being.

Now let's just take that for a second. You know and obviously if you're thinking it through, he's not created as an embryo. He's not created as a baby. He's not created as some small cellular thing. He's created as a whole human being. So he's a 20-something, I'm assuming, standing there. At least he looks like it. And he's five minutes old and he looks 20. But let's go back to five milliseconds old for just a second. When Adam is created, if we take the text at face value and believe this verse, have the ambitious faith to believe it, then what we have is much like all the creative acts of Jesus.

With a word, God creates, and in that word everything about Adam is fully mature and functioning. And that means, for instance, that we don't need time for things to move into their proper place. Question: when Adam was created five milliseconds into it, did he have blood in the tips of his fingers, in the veins and arteries of his body? Did he have blood at the tips of his extremities? It takes some time to get blood to pump from here in this big heart chamber valve to here. But guess what? In five milliseconds we take a snapshot: he's got blood there.

Does he have any glucose? Does he have any sugar in his blood? When was the last time he had a sandwich? Never, right? He didn't eat anything. Does his blood have the nutrients in it that he is later going to get from eating fruit from the trees in the garden? Yeah, but he didn't eat anything. And yet he's got the chemical composition in his blood that's nourishing his body. Full functionality a second after he was created. That answers a million questions for people. It answers questions like: does he have a belly button? He's created mature and complete with everything in place. The answer is yes.

What about the trees in the garden? Let's take this a step further. Did the trees in the garden that the Bible says were created whole with fruit hanging off their branches, with seeds already in them, that was what God created? The Bible says with a word he created those trees. Question: did they have rings inside of them? Well, yeah, I guess so. Why? Because when you believe that God creates things complete with functionality, ready to go, then you believe that you have an appearance of age and history they never had.

You're stuck with that conclusion. That they have an appearance of an age and history they never had. Blood in the tips of the extremity would assume that it took time to get from the heart to the end of the finger if he's a brand new person. And yet it's got the history of that. A physician would come in and say, "Well his body looks..." The rings on the tree, a horticulturalist would look, "It's been here for a while." And yet, starlight, same thing. It's the same vein analogy.

People say, "Well starlight, I was doing a call-in show, people call in frequently about starlight." Well that proves there is no creation. Think about it. If the point of the stars was for the people on the planet that God created to enjoy that, then he's got to string the photons from the stars to the earth. And he does that much like he puts blood in the extremities of a body before it had time to pump there. Because God creates things that are complete and functional with an appearance of age and history they never had. That's how the creative story in the garden always works.

How about the rocks in the garden, you geologists? One of the main things about dating the planet, which used to be 6.5 billion years old, the planet earth was all based on what we call radiometric dating, which is the parent radioactive isotopes decaying from one parent isotope to a daughter isotope. And if you take, for instance, uranium, a parent isotope, it goes through various stages to decay to a stable isotope called lead. From uranium to lead, it takes all these steps. And geologists say, "Well we've studied enough about radioactive isotopes to know how it works and how long it takes and it is a mechanized, very timed orderly process from parent isotope to daughter isotope."

Now, in the garden you got rocks. They're five minutes old and you as a geologist go over with your pick and you crack one open, you bring it to the lab and you examine parent to daughter isotope ratios. How old is that rock? Well, I just saw it, let's just say I saw it and I'm saying it's five minutes old, man. And you're going to look at it and go, "No, it's not. It's a completely mature rock with a stable isotope that's a daughter isotope and some stable isotopes that are parent isotopes and various unstable isotopes in between and wow, this rock looks very mature and complete."

And the bottom line is it's only five minutes old. Why? Because God creates things fully functional. He creates them fully mature. He creates them with a word and that means they have as an implication an appearance of age and history they never had. Consider Jesus, John chapter two. He turns water into wine. You got six pots of water and they're out of wine. You know the story and Jesus with a word turns water into wine. Now, if you're going to make wine, it's going to take some time. But Jesus is going to show something about his creative authority, so he speaks a word and turns H2O into wine.

Now, if you're going to create wine, you need H2O, you got to have water which usually comes from a grape, which is 75 percent water, but he doesn't use a grape. Doesn't need a grape. But if you're going to make wine, you need a lot of things. You need hexose, you need sugar. There's going to be sugar in it. And you got H2O, but you don't have C6H12O6. You don't have that. All you got is H2O. And you don't have any ethanol. You need ethanol if you're going to have wine. You got to have that come in somewhere.

Usually that comes from an enzyme process and that takes time. He didn't have any of that. You need varieties of proteins which usually come from the tannin, the skin of the grape. But we don't have any grapes because Jesus didn't use any grapes to create his wine. But that's the process to get those proteins to make the right pH balance as long as we don't have enough oxidation messing it up. Or if we don't have bacteria that runs out of control. If we have the right balance and as people who with these vineyard websites will tell you there are over 300 complex chemical compounds in a glass of wine.

And if it's going to taste good, everything's got to be in the right balance. And the Bible says Jesus does it with a word and there's 150 gallons of brand new wine that everybody goes, "Why'd you save the best stuff to the last? What's wrong with you?" And the bottom line is the Bible says all of those factors, those chemical factors, they beg for a history they never had. They assume and look like as a chemist would tell you that it needs a past but it doesn't have a past. And some of us are quick to say, "Well I believe Jesus turned water into wine and I believe that. But I'm having a hard time believing that he created the universe in six days."

And I'm telling you, what's the difference? Do you think creating wine, do you think creating those things is easy? It's tough, man. But yet if you're the creator of heavens and earth and you're trying to prove something about Genesis 1 and 2, he gives 86 examples of how he can do that with a word. That's how God creates. He creates something out of nothing that has maturity and usefulness and full functionality. The appearance of age and history it never had. One more. Let's just say this about God's creation before you give out on me.

Psalm 19. I just want to say this about God's creation. And most of us who try to study God's creation we stand back and we say, "Wow, it does reflect the creative work of God." There are attributes reflected in this. Romans 1, although that's a negative passage, it says clearly his attributes are seen in what he's made. Psalm 19 says it poetically. Start in verse number one. And I understand this is poetry, this is a song, these are lyrics. But look at the basic thought here. Verse one, "The heavens declare," and heavens we don't mean the throne room of God, the Hebrew word is used also for space and sky.

We look up in the sky and they declare the glory of God. "The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge." There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out from all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens he's pitched a tent for the sun which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion, like a champion rejoicing to run his course. It rises at one end of the heavens, it makes its circuit to the other.

Nothing is hidden from its heat. I understand highly poetic language but look at the world. Look at it. It's like it's running its course. It's so symmetrical. It's beautiful. It displays knowledge. You can't look up without going, "Wow, this reflects the intelligence and the glory of the creator." Bible says that all over the place. And if he created this, there ought to be that reflection that we say this is true. This is an amazing thing that he made. And this really reflects the intelligence and the architecture of the builder.

I think about the planet, the planet that we're spinning on right now. The six septillion ton rock that we call home, Earth. Think about that. It's spinning right now at 1,000 miles an hour on the surface. If you measure on the surface, 1,000 miles an hour. That's how fast. 24 hours a day we come back to the same point. And it is in an orbit by the way at 1,000 miles per second. You want to talk about fast? Around in an ellipse around the sun. 1,000 miles a second. That fast. Feel it. Just stop for a second, feel it.

Can't even feel it. God created it so we don't even feel that. We're hosing through space, 1,000 miles per second and we're spinning 1,000 miles an hour and we're on just the right axis and we've got... and we're going to come right back to the same point every 365 and a quarter days. Boom. And now we're expecting summer and it's all great. We just rely on this. We don't even think about it. We look up in the sky we see two discs every day, right? Hopefully you don't look directly into the one in the daytime but there it is, this ball of fusion.

And this fusion is creating light and heat and photons showering our planet every day. This thing that's 93 million miles away from the surface of the planet. And it is in diameter, it's huge, it's 865,000 miles in diameter. A giant ball of burning fusion. Every day we see that. And then at night about the time that's going down when we can look at it, when it's on the horizon, if it's a full moon, we got the other one on the completely other side of the horizon coming up. And that one's not quite as bright.

We can look at that one all night. And that one right there by the way, it's not so far away, it's not 93 million miles away, it's only 234,000 miles away. That's still a long bike ride but that's not as far. And as it's coming up and I'm looking at that and we study the diameter of that, it's not this gigantic 865,000 mile diameter, it's only a 2,160 diameter. That's all it is, 2,000 mile diameter. So you've got this and you've got this and sometimes God just for fun made it to where this one didn't always have a full moon and sometimes they even just for fun he has them cross.

I know it was not just for fun but I mean we get to see it and he makes them cross and that's called an eclipse, right? Now think about eclipse for just a second. I never read this in my high school biology text, I never read it in a college university text, but think about just that one fact. As I look up and we study the eclipse and depending on the season of the year we either have this coronal line around it or not, sometimes they're exactly perfect. Now think about that. Do the math on this. From the earth's surface, the sun is 400 times further away than the moon.

And also, guess what? By proportion, it's also 400 times larger than the moon. So do you see what I'm saying? All of a sudden now from the surface of this six septillion ton rock, I look up in the sky and during the eclipse especially I can measure them perfectly and they look exactly the same size. And they are from our planet perfectly symmetrical. Now I know a lot of evolutionists say, "Well that's quite a coinkydink, you know, just amazing, that's just amazing." And I don't mean to be pejorative or condescending.

But I mean, I never heard people in science class point those kinds of things out. Why? Because they display knowledge, see? That's just not a coincidence. The kind of faith I need to believe those kinds of things were random acts of chaotic chance, debris from an explosion 13.7 billion years ago, I have trouble saying that I'm ready to put my faith in that. I'm going, "You know what? It seems to reflect the knowledge of a creator." And over and over and over and over again we see that.

And speaking of Cindy Crawford, think of the human body for just a second. You've got 60,000 miles of vessels bringing blood to every extremity of your body. Every cubic centimeter of your blood in your veins carries about 4.5 million red blood cells and those are absolutely full of phenomenally intricate and complex kinds of organisms and structures. The nerve fibers in your body, and I've studied these a lot with my daughter's ailment, they are absolutely an amazing series of communication wires in your body. And they are sending messages back and forth at over 200 miles an hour from brain to extremity, extremity back.

They are amazing tools and absolutely work at amazing efficiency. How about these eyeballs? You cannot go to Costco and buy a camera with these kinds of lenses. They're absolutely phenomenal. These lenses right here could stand on a mountaintop on a moonless night and can look out and can see a match being lit 50 miles away. They're amazing. And yet they can stand out in the full sunlight of the beach and watch our kids frolic in the waves. They're absolutely amazing things. The things that Darwin actually said, he admitted as he wrote about his own theory, "It's the thing that makes my theory seem absolutely stupid." That's what he said. And he's right. These things are crazy and absurd, they're amazing. And according to the Bible, they reflect the glory of the creator.

As David said Psalm 139 verse 13, "You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well." And you can think that's some primordial cave dweller who's just afraid to grapple with modern science but I say phooey, that is not what we have. We have some very intelligent people reflecting on the complexities of life, taking the word of God at face value and having the faith enough to say it is true and it matches the evidence and we stand on it without apology.

And that's what we have in scripture. And unfortunately in our society we don't have enough of it. As a matter of fact, we have people trying to make concessions all the time calling themselves Christians and Bible believers but they go into work, they stand by the water cooler and they concede these points like they're dominoes, they fall without any trouble. And I'm saying what's wrong with us? What kind of faith do we have? Let's get back to the text one last time. Hebrews chapter 11 verse number three. Look at the last phrase.

"By faith we understand the universe was formed at God's command so that," now underscore this, "what is seen," present tense, "what is seen was not made out of what was visible." Now historically I know they were fighting Greek philosophy where they were talking about matter somehow being reformed into the modern world. Okay but think about this. Think about our challenge of thinking through the two options that we have in modern society: either the fable or myth of creation from the Bible or the scientific very intellectual theory of evolution.

Now, if I want to merge those two and kind of stand in the middle with neutrality on this topic, I'm saying this right there knocks me off my crate. I cannot hold to a position of neutrality with that statement: "So that what is seen was not made out of what was visible." If I believe that what I currently see, the complexity of our universe, the incredible aspects of our bodies or the structure of the planet, if I look at all that and say well that was made out of a 13.7 billion year process of phenomenal events, punctuated equilibrium, whatever you want to call it.

If I say that, I can't affirm that. Because this says what I now see was made out of things that you cannot see. God called them into existence out of nothing. That little Latin phrase was what the evangelical, what orthodox Christians have been saying for centuries. God creates out of nothing. And that cannot be mitigated with a position that you call theistic evolution or progressive creationism. You can't do it. People can try all day long but I think it's an acquiescence because we want to somehow be respected as intellectuals in a society that thinks we're a bunch of stupid fundamentalists.

I just want to end with this one statement. Point number three on your outline. We just need to rethink our attempts at neutrality. Just rethink it for just a few minutes. Let's just ponder that applicable, challenging statement. This verse I'm contending if you take it seriously, you cannot stand in the middle on this. You cannot go to church and go, "Well I believe God created the heavens and the earth," and then stand by the water cooler and discuss the last Discovery Channel special and go, "Well yeah, that's right, yeah, that's right, that's how it all happened."

And then somehow in the darkness of your mind say, "Well, you know, I just believe it was God that was kind of pushing this along and doing this thing." They call it progressive creationism or they call it some kind of theistic evolution. And I'm just saying I don't get that. I don't see that. And merge it with what? Merge creationism with which theory? Today's theory or 20 years ago or 50 years ago or 100 years ago or the one that'll be here in 50 years? What are we trying to merge?

And then I want to ask this question just to end this whole thing: why? Why are you doing it? Who are you trying to impress? Really, let's talk about it. Who are you trying to impress? Are you trying to have the honor and respect of those guys at work who don't give a rip about your God and don't care about this book that you claim to rest your eternity on? Are we really trying to be respected in their eyes? Is that what it's all about? You really, to put it in the words of the writer of Hebrews, care about what people think about you who are willing to trample the gift of salvation and forgiveness, the blood of Christ under their feet and say I don't really need that?

You want to be well respected in their eyes? Let me give you a little truth from Christ. If they hated the master, they will hate the student as well. The servant's not going to be well liked if they took our king and nailed him to the cross. And I'm saying to myself, we want to be honorable and intelligent and respected in the minds of the world and they don't give a rip about what we're talking about here. They don't care about what we base our life on.

And I'm saying why are we trying to acquiesce to this? Can we not take the Bible at face value and say this is what it says, the evidence does not controvert it? It seems to be the reasonable response of a God who creates 86 other times with a word out of nothing, things that are fully functional and mature. Can we not live with that? Do we really need to be middle ground on this? I'm just saying I don't think we should. Because I'm not trying to impress anybody out there. I got no interest in what the world thinks of us. And Jesus warned us, "You know you're not going to get along too well out there anyway. They nailed me to a cross."

If it's true, then we need to grapple with that. Because here's the bottom line, I don't think there's anybody... if this is true, now again if this is all just pretend then write all this off and forget I ever said anything. But if it's true, then you and I will stand before our creator one day. And we will look Jesus in the eye, the agency of all creation. And I don't think there's one person there that is going to be proud that they acquiesced to man's theories about our origins or cosmology when they look into the eyes of the king of the world and say, "Well I just, you know, kind of thought that whole Grand Canyon speech was pretty impressive. I didn't believe you."

I think we're going to look into the eyes of the all-powerful one and if you want to get a glimpse of what he looks like, Revelation chapter one. He's not gentle Jesus, meek and mild, he is glorified with the glory of heaven and he will stand there and there will not be a doubt about his power to create. And you and I will stand there and go, "Wow, you can create with a word. You can save with a word. You can damn with a word. You are the king of the universe." And I'm thinking to myself, why are we trying to mitigate the simple and plain language of scripture? This is what God says. Do you have the ambitious faith to believe him? Can we just affirm the first verse of the Bible? "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Very simple.

Dave Drewery: The first step towards ambitious faith is being confident in God as Creator. Today was the final portion of a message from Mike Fabarez called Boldly Trusting in God's Ability to Create. And this is Focal Point. We'll continue this study tomorrow. And if you'd like to revisit any of these messages or share them with someone you know, just go to focalpointradio.org or download the free Focal Point app.

And this month we have a unique resource that builds on the theme of this series: what it genuinely means to give God your best, not just your leftovers. It's the Journals of Jim Elliot, edited by Elisabeth Elliot, and it documents the internal faith journey of a man who eventually gave his life on mission for the gospel. These journals show you what that conviction looked like in real time, on the page before anyone was watching. Request your copy of the Journals of Jim Elliot when you make a gift to Focal Point today.

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Pastor Mike Fabarez: Hey there, Pastor Mike here. We're almost out of time, but before we go, I wanted 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.

Dave Drewery: Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries.