Thru the Bible

Steve Schwetz: If you've ever wondered why God created the world, then welcome to Thru the Bible where our teacher, Dr. J. Vernon McGee, shares three excellent reasons why with us. I'm your host, Steve Schwetz, welcoming you aboard the Bible Bus as we set off for another great journey in God's word.

Now as we move along, Dr. McGee talks about the simple but majestic words in Genesis 1 verse 1: "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." To get us started, he has a special introduction for this message, so let's listen now.

Dr. J. Vernon McGee: As we are suggesting that you are on the horns of a dilemma today relative to the creation of the world, actually you'll have to depend on speculation or revelation. There's not a third one at all. Now someone is going to say, "But evolution explains the origin of this universe."

Well, listen to Dr. Howard Shapley and we'll be quoting him later on. He is director of the Harvard Observatory, and he says, "We are still embedded in abysmal ignorance of the world in which we live. We're still absolutely in the dark relative to the creation of this earth on which you and I live."

You see, today it's either revelation or speculation. There are three areas in which evolution cannot move, and we'll see that here in Genesis. And that is, it cannot bridge the gap from nothing to something. It cannot bridge the gap from something to life. And it cannot bridge the gap between life and humanity, that is, self-conscious human life with a free will. These are gaps that evolution so far has not been able to bridge at all.

Steve Schwetz: Dr. McGee gives us some things to think about, doesn't he? And if like me your interest is piqued, well, you're in for a great study full of insight from Dr. McGee's wisdom from God's word. But before we dive in, let's take a few minutes to hear about the great things that God's doing in the lives of our fellow listeners. First, let's listen to this voicemail received from Nico.

Guest (Female): Hi Thru the Bible family, my name is Nico. I love the Bible, I'm in San Diego, California. I love the Bible because it's God's love letter to me and I know I need God's love. I love this ministry. I am calling to share my story because I was just listening to someone else leave a voicemail story of their Thru the Bible experience, and I have put off sharing my Thru the Bible story for too long.

I know that Letter Month is coming to an end, and I didn't want to delay any longer. I listen to Thru the Bible throughout the day, but especially I love to listen to Dr. McGee as I go to bed. It's one of the best ways to remind myself of God's truth and love and hope, and to keep me on the narrow path with God. To listen right before bed, it just helps me to know that I'm laying down and sleeping in peace because of God's love for me. So thank you all. Thank you Thru the Bible and everyone involved and all my brothers and sisters in Christ and anyone listening to this message. God loves you. Thank you.

Steve Schwetz: Thanks for sharing your story, Nico, and for reminding us all about God's deep love. Here is a great note from Wanda.

Guest (Female): I am so in love with this daily Bible reading and listening to Dr. McGee. My husband Mark and I started out doing one hour daily; now we are up to two to two and a half hours a night. We are newborns in Christ and are on a wonderful journey together. We love to have your bookmarks to carry in our Bibles. Thank you so much.

Steve Schwetz: What fantastic news, Wanda and Mark. We're so thrilled to have you. So welcome into the family of God and to having you riding the Bible Bus with us. Your eagerness and your hunger to know God's word, well, it fills us with gratitude.

If you don't know about the bookmark that Wanda just mentioned, by the way, it really goes out each month in our newsletter and on it we print the program schedule. It's super handy to have in your Bible so you always know what passages to read to be prepared for every study. It's a simple but effective little resource. So if you'd like to receive the newsletter and the bookmark by mail or email, just call us: 1-800-65-BIBLE or visit TTB.org to sign up. And then here's a heartfelt letter. This is from Judith in the U.S. and she writes this.

Guest (Male): Thank you for the good teaching. I learned that even when we're lost, we still have a chance to return. If we ask for forgiveness, we will be forgiven. I am learning to walk in the Lord and am trusting that he will guide me in my life. I have trust in him but kindly request prayer support. I'm facing challenges in my marriage. There is no peace and I feel lost as I am also pregnant and nearing delivery.

Steve Schwetz: Thanks for sharing your honest story, Judith. I know many hearing this will be in prayer for you and may God bless you as you study his word and trust in him. Well, what's your story? How's God showing himself to you as you show up to study each day? Or why don't you tell us what you're looking forward to most as we begin this new journey in God's word?

We'd also love to hear how you're sharing what you're learning with others. Send us a note. Maybe we'll be able to share it here on the program. So don't wait. Send your note through our app or email us at BibleBus@TTB.org or send your letter to Box 7100, Pasadena, California, 91109. In Canada, write to Box 25325, London, Ontario, N6C 6B1. And like Nico, you can leave us a voicemail at 1-800-65-BIBLE. Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, thank you for revealing yourself through your creation and through your word. We pray more people will realize your majesty. Please speak to our hearts. We're listening. In Jesus' name, amen.

Dr. J. Vernon McGee: Now friends, we are in the book of Genesis. We are in this first section of the book of Genesis, in fact, the very first chapter and we are not even out of the first verse because this is a very wonderful section and a very important section. We were looking last time at some of the theories relative to the origin of the universe. We were considering some of the theories that have been advanced, the evolutionary theory, and of course it's divided up into many different phases.

It is one that has never been demonstrated as being true, and it's unfortunate that when you get down to the level of the pseudo-scientists—and I'm thinking of the teachers today in our public schools that teach science—they actually are not in a position to give a fair view of it as they were only given one viewpoint in college. Actually, there are some outstanding men that very definitely feel that it is not demonstrated.

For instance, Dr. G.A. Kerkut, he's of the department of physiology and biochemistry at the University of Southampton in England. Dr. Kerkut wrote a book entitled The Implications of Evolution. I'm quoting from him now: "There is a theory which states that many living animals can be observed over the course of time to undergo changes so that new species are formed. This can be called the special theory of evolution and can be demonstrated in certain cases by experiments. On the other hand, there is the theory that all of the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form. The theory can be called the general theory of evolution and the evidence that supports it is not sufficiently strong to allow us to consider it as anything more than a working hypothesis."

And my friend, if you are an evolutionist, you have to take it by faith. May I say it is speculation and it has always been that, but unfortunately a great many have accepted it as fact. Now there is today a group of these theologians—young theologians for the most part—and they do not want to be called intellectual obscurantists, and so they have adopted what is known as theistic evolution.

Curtly Mather in Science Ponders Religion, he makes this statement. Dr. Mather writes: "When a theologian accepts evolution as the process used by the creator, he must be willing to go all the way with it. Not only is it an orderly process, it's a continuing one. The golden age for man, if any, is in the future, not in the past. Moreover, the creative process of evolution is not to be interrupted by any supernatural intervention. The evolution of the first living cells from previously existing non-living materials may represent a quantum jump rather than an infinitesimal step along the path of progress, but it is an entirely natural development."

May I say to you that it is impossible. In fact, that's almost an unreasonable tenet; it's an illogical position today to say that you're a theistic evolutionist. There are those today that are trying to run with the hare and with the hounds. They'd like to move up with the unbelievers, but they would also like to carry a Scofield Bible under their arm, and I'm afraid that it's difficult to do both. It's like that old Greek race where you put one foot on one horse and one on the other and then you start out, and it's marvelous when the two horses keep on the same route. But believe me, when one of them decides to go another direction, you're in for trouble. You've got to determine which one you're going with, and that's the condition of the theistic evolutionist. He ordinarily ends up in the wrong field, by the way. He generally rides with the wrong horse.

Today, there are so many that seem to be misinformed that are intelligent human beings. For instance, Liberty Magazine years ago—I took this clipping out many years ago—it says, "What according to biblical records is the date of the creation of the world?" You know what they given? 4004 BC. How utterly ridiculous can you be? Who created this universe? May I say to you, God created it. Will you listen to this? This to me is very important to note.

Here is what Life Magazine had as the origin. I am reading now: "For perhaps one half of the long span of early history, the planet Earth lay barren and lifeless under its canopy of air. The waters of its oceans rose and fell with the pulse of the sun and moon and stirred with the respiration of the winds, but in them no living thing moved. Above them, the great continental platforms loom rocky and bleak, devoid of green as the landscapes of the airless moon. Then at some indeterminate point, some say two billion years ago, some a billion and a half, the entity called life miraculously appeared on the surface of the deep. What form it took, what concatenation of physical circumstances brought it into being, science cannot specify, nor indeed reply with assurance to the question, what is life? All that can be said is that through some agency certain giant molecules acquired the ability to duplicate themselves."

Friends, are you willing to go along with that? The fact of the matter is we have some almost ridiculous statements that have been made. I know that one of them takes the position the way man began was in some garbage can. It says from some raw material, some prehistoric intelligence left his garbage here. That's a statement of a scientist, by the way, and that's the way that we got started. Now some of them send us out to look at the seaweed, some of them send us to look up the tree at the monkey in the tree, and my friend, may I say to you, now they send us to the garbage can. May I say to you that this is getting worse and worse, is it not? I don't know about you, but I still feel that God's statement still stands up in this modern age.

Here is the definition that Herbert Spencer gave. It's a very famous definition and let me read it. He says, "Evolution is an integration of matter and a concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity and the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." You turn that one around for a little while and see what you come up with, friends. I do not know about you, but today it still makes sense to read, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."

Who created it? God did. Created it out of nothing. When? I don't know. I have news for you, nobody else knows. They have this record that I read just a moment ago; some say two billion, some say one billion, and I notice now that some are moving it up maybe to five billion years. No one knows. I think they're all pikers. I think it was created long before that. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. May I say to you very candidly, you see God's had eternity back of him. What do you think he's been doing in all the billions of the years of the past? Waiting for you to come on the scene and waiting for me to come on the scene? No, he's been busy. He's had this creation a long time to work with.

You see, he really hasn't told us very much, has he? I think it's rather presumptuous on this little pygmy down here to presume he knows more than he really knows about it. We just accept these majestic words of the word of God and can say with the Psalmist, "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers." The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Paul writing to the Romans in Romans 1:20: "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse."

Then the writer to the Hebrews: "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen are not made of things which do appear." You have to accept that by faith because even science can't tell you how you can take nothing and make something. God apparently did it that way, but man today cannot tell when this was created. When you put down the account that's in Genesis along with the other creation accounts—and most nations had it, I think most of them were perversions of the Genesis account. You take the Bible account and the Babylonian account, for instance, the tablets that give the Babylonian account. They begin with chaos; the Bible begins with cosmos. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."

The heavenly bodies are gods according to the Babylonian account and they're nothing in the world but matter according to the Bible. You have polytheistic theology in the Babylonian account and you have monotheistic truth in the Bible account. The Babylonian account is just the work of a craftsman and in the Bible, God spoke and it came into existence. The Babylonian account is puerile; it's grotesque. But in the Bible you have here the grand and solemn realities. The Babylonian account is definitely out of harmony with known science, but not the Bible. May I say that the fact that we reject evolution, it rejects God, it rejects revelation, it denies the fall of man and the fact of sin and it opposes the virgin birth. That's the reason that we reject it with all our being, friends, because we do not believe that it is the answer to the origin of this universe.

There are so many other things that could be said. Now there is a third question here: not only who created and when did he create, but why did he create? Believe me, this is getting right down now to the nitty-gritty. This is important to see. Will you notice what the Word of God has to say? This universe that you and I live in today was created for his own pleasure. He saw fit to create it. He delighted in it. You read over in the fourth chapter of Revelation, verse 11: "Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created."

He created this universe because he wanted to create it. He did it for his pleasure. Now you may not like the universe, but he does. He never asked me about where I wanted this little world on which I live placed in his universe. He could have put it way out yonder somewhere, but he didn't ask me that. In fact, he didn't even ask me whether I wanted to be born in Texas or not. Of course, if he'd given me the opportunity, I would have chosen Texas, but he didn't. May I say to you that this universe you and I live in today was created for his pleasure. He saw fit to create, he delighted in the act.

Then the second reason that he created this universe, it was for his own glory. The original creation, you remember, sang that wonderful creator's praise when the sons of God, you remember, they sang together. That was a wonderful time. Over in the 38th chapter of the book of Job, verse seven: "When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." May I say to you, it was created for his glory. It's for him.

Then you remember Isaiah, he says in Isaiah 43:7: "I have created him for my glory, I have formed him; yea, I have made him." God has created this universe for his glory. Then God created this universe and man in it for fellowship. He wanted fellowship with man and God placed that first man in the Garden of Eden. He wanted this man that he created, he wanted him to have fellowship with. He had to make him a free moral agent. God could have made a bunch of robots. God could have made a mechanical man and push a button and have him bow down, but God didn't want that kind of a man. God wanted a man to be free to choose him and to love him and serve him.

Remember that was the awful slur and blasphemy that Satan hurled against God and against Job. He said, you remember, "Does Job serve you for naught?" In other words, you're paying him to. God says, "I want creatures that will by a free choice choose me." My friend, the greatest thing you can do as a human being is in this world of sin where everything is against God today—and he's permitted it that way—but he has put you and me in this world as it is today that you and I can make a choice for him. In the midst of all of this unbelief and the blasphemy around us, we can say today, "I choose Jesus. I accept and receive him. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth." That's the most glorious privilege that you and I have. You can talk about freedom of speech and freedom of everything else, but this poor crowd around us today that's talking about freedom really don't know about it. You have real freedom when you'll choose Jesus Christ as your savior.

And so until next time, may the Lord richly bless you, my beloved.

Steve Schwetz: If you haven't yet chosen Jesus as your savior and received God's forgiveness for your sin, we'd love to help you take that step today. Just tap "How Can I Know God?" in our app or visit TTB.org. You'll find simple but powerful resources that explain what it means to begin a relationship with him. Or call 1-800-65-BIBLE and we'll send them right to your mailbox.

We got a lot more ahead in this great study of God's word. But if you're ready to dig deeper and really spend time in each passage, grab a free download or a printed copy of our Bible Companion for Genesis. Inside that, you'll find clear overviews of Dr. McGee's teaching as well as prompts that will guide you to read the scripture and then listen to the broadcast, and questions that spark reflection or, even better, fuel discussion with a group.

And speaking of groups, the Bible Companions are perfect for starting your own home group. Here in the U.S., we call it a small group, but it's the same life-changing idea and it's happening all over the world using Thru the Bible. People listening and learning together. It's simple: listen to Dr. McGee's teaching, walk through the synopsis, talk through the reflection questions, and pray for each other. That's your recipe for a powerful gathering around God's word.

So go for it. Invite a few friends, start a group, and let God do the rest. You can download your free copy or order the Bible Companions in paperback at TTB.org or by calling 1-800-65-BIBLE. Again, to be in touch, call 1-800-65-BIBLE, visit TTB.org, or email BibleBus@TTB.org. And when you're in touch, tell us how you listen to Thru the Bible. Is it by app, online, YouTube, or your favorite radio station? However you hop aboard the Bible Bus, we want to know. This little bit of information is a huge help as we follow God's lead in taking his whole word to his whole world. So thanks in advance for your help. I'm Steve Schwetz, grateful for your company on the Bible Bus.