Focal Point

Pastor Mike Fabarez: I find no Big Bang proponents that I've read recently that will say, "Well, there was nothing." Now, it may be a singularity, as they call it, but it was something, and that something was there. An uncaused cause, this ultimate eternal being, made a decision to create. He had a purpose and he decided to create something.

Dave Drewie: And welcome to Focal Point with author and pastor Mike Fabarez. I'm Dave Drewie. I think it's safe to say that no one listening was there when the universe began. So which view can we trust? Is the world the result of evolutionary chance, or is it the product of a divine creation? We invite you to examine the evidence for both sides today on Focal Point. We're in a series called Ambitious Faith, and Pastor Mike is talking about boldly trusting in God's ability to create.

Pastor Mike Fabarez: For generations, Hebrews Chapter 11 has served as the fuel for Christians to trust God more ambitiously and to serve Christ with more courage and more boldness. We've already seen 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 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 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. He does this, and it is a surprise to some who don't know the ancient first-century culture because they think this truth, the truth about God's creative act, certainly wouldn't be in question in the first century.

But those of you who know a little bit about Greco-Roman history and philosophy understand that this was well underway as being an attack on the biblical record of creation. The Greco-Roman world had posited all kinds of philosophical ideas about how the world came to be, and 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 before he gives 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? It's a good place for us to start. If you have your Bibles, I want you to open to Hebrews Chapter 11. Just by way of introduction, a few preliminaries as it relates to the issues. We could paint the picture of Greco-Roman philosophy in the first century, but that's not where we live.

It's not a lot different, but it is somewhat different today. We see two basic options when it comes to the issue of cosmology or origins. 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 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. He's already told us what faith is. We defined it last week. 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," he says, "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, look, 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. It's going to require faith, faith to grasp the biblical picture of creation.

Before you go, "I knew it, that's what faith is all about, believing in fairy tales and fables and myths," just realize this: the concept of faith, as we said last week, is not irrational. Paul stood before Agrippa and Festus and said if it's true, that means in our understanding of truth that it corresponds with reality, in this case, what really happened. Then it will be, as Paul said, reasonable. That means that everything that we look at should match that explanation.

But the bottom line is we weren't there. Because we weren't there, much like the things we hope for that we don't see, if we think about the creation of the world, we didn't see it either. So we've got to go back to our definition in verse one and say it's going to take a confidence in something we didn't see to affirm that fact or that truth. If that is our belief, we need faith to affirm that. Right next to that on the evolution side of this, could you just jot this word down? It looks a lot the same because it is the same exact word: faith.

If we're going to talk about creationism, we understand immediately we're going to need faith for that. But you need to understand that when we talk about cosmology as it relates to evolution as it sits there as a theory today and as it's posited, you need to understand just because we use the word science as it relates to that doesn't take away from the reality that you have to grasp this concept or this theory by faith. That doesn't mean it's not rational. And because we already discovered that faith as a biblical virtue is not an irrational concept, it just simply means that I wasn't there to witness it.

So I have to ascertain the reality by faith, and that means I couldn't first-hand look at it and say, "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."

As it relates to evolution, just put under the word faith there: it is as a theory, and I know there are 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. We don't understand it, we don't understand the cause of it." We've got our theories about what happened in sequence and order, and we try to explain that with how things are repeatable now and the evidence, but we don't know as far as what caused this. 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. We have what we have now from that. What caused that? We don't know. We can only theorize, and I've read all kinds of people on what we think today is the reason for that and most people just say what this guy said: "We don't know. It's a mystery." So, unknown cause.

Now, biblical creationism or theistic creationism, anybody inside or outside of the Bible that says there is a God that created the world, is affirming this: that there's an uncaused God that is behind all this. There is someone by definition, deity defined as God, who is by definition someone who is uncaused. To quote Aristotle, he's the unmoved mover, he's the uncaused cause. He is, if there is a God, by definition he must fit that definition. That is the concept.

As Isaac Newton said, who was known for his crystallizing laws about cause and effect and movers and moved objects and action and reaction, he said all these laws may explain motions of the universe, but they cannot explain the one who set them in motion. God—Newton was a Christian—governs all things. The point is, by definition, that is who we say God is. All theistic people have said by definition God is an uncaused being. What caused the Big Bang? Modern evolutionists say, "Well, we don't know." But Christians will say we believe by definition that this being, if he exists, has to exist with this definition: that he's the uncaused one.

When it comes to the actual issue of evolution, that what we have now came from something—now, this is a moving theory, I realize—that was eternal. It was an eternal something. In the old days, when I first started studying evolution and reading the textbooks, there was a lot of transition going on in the scientific community. We used to believe in something called uniformitarianism. Einstein talked about the concept of things being as they've always been. Hubble's Law came along in the 40s. There was this big debate about Einstein being wrong about the continuity in the universe and matter not being eternal. This red shift that Hubble observed, well, there must be an expanding universe. We started to extrapolate this all came back to a point of singularity.

In the old days, we used to talk about the illogical nature of eternal matter, that there must have been a beginning. Now science in its theories has evolved into a place where we now have a theory that says you're probably right, matter is not eternal. But the concept of collapsed energy and a point of singularity, well, that, and I've read people on this and they're all over the map on this, well, that had to be there. I find no Big Bang proponents that I've read recently that will say, "Well, there was nothing." Now, it may be a singularity, as they call it, but it was something, and that something was there. They don't even want to really explore that very much, but you've got to say there was an eternal something.

Bottom line is there's an eternal something. In the old days, it used to be eternal matter, now it's eternal something. In terms of theistic creationism, Christians have always said by definition God is not only the unmoved mover or the uncaused cause, he is also by definition an eternal being. He sits outside of time, he is not a part of time, he is the creator of time. He is this unaffected being by time. So we've got an uncaused cause and an eternal God. So we don't have eternal in the old days, used to be eternal matter. We have an eternal God. We don't have eternal singularity, and outside of singularity, we don't even understand what that means, the nothingness around the singularity, but at least we had the singularity and that was there forever. But now we compare that and contrast that. Theism has always said there's an uncaused eternal God. So there's an important juxtaposition and contrast.

Thirdly or fourthly on this list, when it comes to the origin or the catalyst for all of this, if you research and read Big Bang proponents, they'll say it was an inexplicable explosion. We don't know what triggered it, we don't know what caused it. I know some people have written some esoteric papers on perhaps what caused it, but there's no consensus and most people say what this proponent said when he says our understanding of the very early universe, and the context of that statement is when we get down to those early moments of that point of singularity, he says it's all speculative.

The proponents are clear to say, we can concede that point. It is not only mysterious as to what was there prior, but it is speculative as to how it all triggered and how it began. The catalyst is unknown, we don't know. It was an explosion of collapsed energy and space and time, and yet we don't have a clue as to what triggered it. One day, it just exploded. I know that may be an oversimplification of it because some people have written esoteric papers on it, but the bottom line is we don't know. An inexplicable explosion started it.

Now, when it comes to creation and theists, inside and outside of the Bible, they've always proposed and posited that it was a purposeful creation. That an uncaused cause, this unmoved mover, this ultimate eternal being, made a decision to create. He had a purpose and he decided to create something. Anthropologists who've studied all these cultures all over, they will tell you this is a universal concept. I like to quote the Inca King before any Judeo-Christian influence, before the missionaries ever got there, who wrote, "God is the ancient one, the eternal one, the supreme and uncreated one who created all peoples." That's a pretty consistent description of human concepts of sky god, of the deity. By definition, if there is a God, that's how he's defined. He is a purposeful creator who decides to create uncaused, eternal, unmoved, and he makes a decision.

From a biblical perspective, we might want to jot down Colossians 1:16. Because in Colossians 1:16, in a very terse explanation, it says that all things were created by him and for him. The purpose of creation from a biblical perspective is that all of this was made for God, for his glory, as Romans says, to express his glory, to demonstrate his attributes of grace and mercy and all the things that he does in the world. It is all about bringing glory to him, to the honor of God. That's the biblical perspective, and it's another sermon. A lot of people don't like that point, but that's certainly how the Bible presents creation from a biblical perspective.

Now, I know some of you evolutionists will choke on this next statement here, but let me have you write it down anyway. You can put some quotations around it, but if you're going to believe in the concept of a singularity, which is now dated at 13.7 billion years ago, you've got to say to get from that point of singularity 13.7 billion years ago to today, you got billions of what I'll call miracles. They may not call them that, but they are certainly supra-natural events. I didn't say supernatural. We call them that, supernatural. But they would say supra-natural. They don't follow the patterns of nature as we know it. They are phenomenon, they are phenomenal events where we move, as one stand-up comic said, from protozoa to Cindy Crawford. You need a lot of really amazing things to happen to get there.

From amoeba to man, or from single cell to eyeball, with all of its complexity and the amazingness of the cornea and rods and cones and optic nerve in your head and you got two of them. To get from here to here, we've got to say there were some amazing things that were happening that moved things from simplicity to complexity, from useless chaotic information to assembled and useful information. All of those are amazing and we stand back and say, "Man, that's amazing."

Even if you want to look at recent evolutionary history, the fossil record, the concept of, well, there's got to be these forms and maybe there were these big jumps and steps because we don't see the evidence in the fossil record. But the concept is there are amazing moves from simplicity to complexity, from reptiles to birds. Amazing things have happened. We call those amazing things things that are supra-natural, above the natural order of things. They're not how things normally work. We don't get to see them and you can say it's happening so slowly you can't observe it. There's no difference between something moving so slowly we can't measure it than something not moving at all. But the point though is still, there's got to be something there that moves from here to here and it's nothing that we now observe.

So I'll just say billions of miracles. I think the layman is going to sit back and watch the Discovery Channel and go, "That's amazing to get from that primordial soup to thinking human beings who in lab coats can study that." That just took an amazing series of phenomenal events. Now, the biblical model of creation and any theistic model of creation is a belief in a miraculous event. It's the same kind of phenomenal thing to go from nothing to Cindy Crawford, just to use her for an example and she's of my generation, so you pick your own perfect-looking person. But the bottom line is to go from that to this, you've got to have something amazing happen.

The Bible says that's called a miracle and it happened in Genesis 1 and 2. It was an amazing event. It was a miraculous event. It was a supra or supernatural event. It took place in six days, which the Pentateuch says is because it's trying to give us a pattern of work and rest. God could have done it in one day, obviously. But the point was according to the biblical model, he was showing us how to live: work six days and take one day and rest. That was for the good of our biological units and a lot of other reasons and it played into worship later in Israel's history. But the point was God in a miraculous event, not through billions of phenomenal events, created the world. That's the biblical model.

Now, I know these two charts kind of merge together in a lot of people's thinkings and we'll talk more about that later. But let me give you one more observation and you may argue with this one, but let me at least try and explain it as simply as I can. That is, just put this down: it is a process of amoeba to man, from single cell to eyeball, that we don't have any examples of. We cannot point to examples and say here is how this works and we all stood around and watched this move from bird to reptile. We have no examples that we can look at and see. Now we can theorize about them and we can look at this and look at radiometric dating and rocks and fossils and say, "Well, we assume this to this." You can assume a lot. We can theorize and extrapolate, but we can't really see an example of this. We don't have it.

If you're thinking of finches and peppered moths, I'm not talking about that because peppered moths and beaks on finches—and I know those are the examples in the biological textbooks—are not about new information. It's about a reorganization of information. If you have a species or a cell or anything that rearranges information, that's one thing. But we're talking about the need to go from single-cell simplicity to multiple-cell complexity. We're talking about a DNA protein as opposed to an amoeba. We're talking about a bird to a full-fledged eagle. We don't have those examples of new information either being self-organized or organized without the external force being laid upon them. We just don't have examples of that. Now people want to argue some of that, but I think, and I'm trying to be as fair as I can possibly be and I don't want to be pejorative or disrespectful, I'm just saying I know in all my studies at the university, I can't see those examples. We theorize about them only and we make those assumptions. But we don't see them.

When it comes to the biblical model and you say, "Well creation, we didn't see that either," jot this down, this may be a new thought for you, but based on what we've been learning about the biblical concept of the miraculous, let's at least jot this down: I propose that there are 86 examples of this kind of creative act. Now if you've been with me through the study of Hebrews or maybe some previous studies, you know that as I've studied through the Bible and counted and turned every page and looked for the miraculous things that we call miraculous events, there's almost 200 of them that the Bible says, "Well here's God's intervention in time and space." But only 86 of them are truly creative miracles where God suspends the natural law as we know it. In any theory of origins, we need to do that because nature demands that there be something supra-natural or supernatural that changes these things, that injects organized and useful information. We're saying in Scripture, we got 86 examples of that. More on that later.

Now that's just given us an overview. I've said this already, but let's underscore it. Explanations, whether it's we evolved from the big explosion 13.7 billion years ago or God created us, they should, the evidence that we now see should match the explanation. The explanation we say as Christians, if you're a biblical creationist like I am, you say well we believe that God says he did it and he tells us how he did it. So we look at that and the evidence should match that. In my opinion, it does. It matches it better than the theories that constantly change as it relates to how we got here in evolution.

Now Robert Jastrow, who was no comedian and wasn't trying to be pejorative with this—he was the director of the Goddard Space Institute, I know some of you have heard this quote before—but he, in talking in his book about God and the astronomers, makes an interesting and almost comical statement about the fact that with all the changes in theory of origins and cosmology, it could be that all these theories eventually get back to the biblical thing that Christians and theologians have been saying forever.

He wrote it comically at the end of his book when he said this: "For scientists who have lived by the faith, by the faith that he has in the power of his own reason, the story of this whole thing," he says, "ends like a bad dream. He's scaled the mountains of ignorance and he's about to conquer the highest peak. He pulls himself up over the final rock and he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been there for centuries."

The concept is, and I'm not trying to make light of it or trying to belittle of you if you have a different view than what I'm telling you, but I am saying it is interesting that as we try to hit the moving target of evolution, it keeps moving in the direction of trying to get us to realize, you know what, this is what we've been saying. Matter is not eternal. It had a beginning. It had a start. God, the external unmoved mover, did it. All the mysteries and explanations that aren't made yet, it's the theories keep adjusting. I'm not trying to claim that people who've got that second chart motivating the first chart are ever going to get to say, "Well you're absolutely right, we were all wrong and you know God really created the heavens and the earth like he said."

I'm not suggesting it's going to happen in my lifetime or my kids' lifetime. It's probably never going to happen. But the point is you have to realize that the evidence keeps leading people away from old theories to new theories that keep on getting closer to the concept of a personal creator who started this thing called time, space, matter, and energy, and he did it outside of it all. That seems to at least get closer to where we are at today. Explanation should match the evidence. Evidence is pushing people to constantly reform their theory. Evolution is evolving as a theory all the time.

Dave Drewie: There's still a whole lot more we need to hear about creationism. So be sure to join us when we continue our study next time. Mike Fabarez is talking about ambitious faith here on Focal Point. And if you missed any part of today's message or want to find more, just go online at FocalPointRadio.org or download the free Focal Point app and take it with you wherever you go.

If Focal Point has become part of how you take in the word week after week, it didn't happen on its own. It's here because people who've been moved by careful text-driven Bible teaching chose to put something behind it. And that's what keeps verse-by-verse instruction like this moving through the airwaves day after day. If you're at a point where you want to be part of what sustains that, a gift of any size has real impact.

And this month, every donation to Focal Point comes with something we think belongs on your shelf. It's the journals of Jim Elliot, edited by Elizabeth Elliot. What makes this collection unusual is that none of it was written for you. These were private pages, the un-guarded thoughts of a young man pressing hard after God, working out his faith before anyone was watching. He hammered it out on the page, raw, specific, aimed at God himself. These journals pull you in close to a life that was fully, deliberately spent.

Request the journals of Jim Elliot when you make a donation to Focal Point today. Call us at 888-320-5885 or give online at FocalPointRadio.org. If you'd rather mail your gift, just write to Focal Point, Post Office Box 2850, Laguna Hills, California 92654. And if today's your first time getting in touch, ask for Pastor Mike's booklet, Offering Our Best, a straight-to-the-point look at what it actually costs to bring God your genuine best. It's yours free just for reaching out. Call 888-320-5885 or go to FocalPointRadio.org. I'm Dave Drewie, inviting you to join us again next time when Pastor Mike Fabarez continues our message on boldly trusting in God's ability to create Tuesday on Focal Point.

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