(Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and may contain mistakes.)

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. If you want to take your seats and turn in your hymnals, we'll turn to our first song, 127 Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus. Song 127. Song 127 Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus. There on the first, Tis so sweet to Trust in Jesus. Just to take Him at His word. Just to rest upon His promise. Just to know the Savior, Lord. Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him, how I've proved Him o'er and o'er. Jesus, Jesus, O Precious Jesus, O for grace to trust Him more. O how sweet to trust in Jesus. Just to trust His cleansing blood. Just in simple faith to plunge me beneath the healing cleansing flood. Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him, how I've proved Him o'er and o'er. Jesus, Jesus, Precious Jesus, O for grace to trust Him more. Yes, Tis sweet to trust in Jesus. Just from sin and self to cease. Just from Jesus simply taking life and rest and joy and peace. Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him, how I've proved Him o'er and o'er. Jesus, Jesus, Precious Jesus, O for grace to trust Him more. I'm so glad I learned to trust the Precious Jesus Savior Friend. And I know that Thou art with me, will be with me to the end. Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him, how I've proved Him more and more. Jesus, Jesus, Precious Jesus, O for grace to trust Him more. Good singing. Let's start with a word of prayer this morning. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for giving us this opportunity to come together to sing praises under Your name. I pray that You bless all aspects of our service, that You be with those that are not able to come this morning, and that we would do everything in honor and glory of Your Son. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Go to 166. 166 is for our second song this morning. It feels like evening, I guess, because it's so gloomy out there, huh? 166, I will praise Him. There on the verse, when I saw the cleansing fountain, open wide for all my sin, I obeyed the Spirit's wooing, when He said, Will Thou be clean? I will praise Him. I will praise Him. Praise the lamp for sinners slain. Give Him glory, all ye people, for His blood can wash away each stain. Though the way seems straight and narrow, all I claim was swept away. My ambitions, plans, and wishes at my feet in ashes lay. I will praise Him. I will praise Him. Praise the lamp for sinners slain. Give Him glory, all ye people, for His blood can wash away each stain. Then God's fire upon the altar of my art was set aflame. I shall never cease to praise Him. Glory, glory to His name. I will praise Him. I will praise Him. Praise the lamp for sinners slain. Give Him glory, all ye people, for His blood can wash away each stain. Blessed be the name of Jesus. I'm so glad He took me in. He's forgiven my transgressions. He has cleansed my heart from sin. I will praise Him. I will praise Him. Praise the lamp for sinners slain. Give Him glory, all ye people, for His blood can wash away each stain. And the last. Glory, glory to the Father. Glory, glory to the Son. Glory, glory to the Spirit. Glory to the three and one. I will praise Him. I will praise Him. Praise the lamp for sinners slain. Give Him glory, all ye people, for His blood can wash away each stain. Thank you so much for being here. If you don't already have a bulletin, one of our ushers can come by and get you a bulletin. On the front, we have our Bible memory passage. We're on John, chapter number one. He was not that light, but was sent to bear witness of that light. And on the inside, we have our service and soul-wanting times, as well as church stats. On the right, we have our list of expecting ladies. Continue to pray for all of them. Also, we have our prayer list, and we have lots of people on there that you can be praying for. Really, just our entire church family has been very sick. A lot of people have been sick and have been staying home and everything like that. So, please just pray that people would have health. And apparently, it's not even just us. It's like everyone. Even talking to a lot of my pastor friends and just talking to other people, it's like everybody's sick in the whole world, it seems like. So, I guess when Biden said that it was going to be a winter of darkness and death for everybody or whatever, you know, I don't know. But I'm sure we'll get over soon. And I appreciate those that are staying home just to try and stop people, other people from getting sick. And I appreciate everyone that's here this morning. On the back, we have a couple events. This upcoming Sunday, I'm going to be in Oklahoma City, and we're going to have an ordination service for Brother Tanner Fur as an evangelist. And so, I'm really looking forward to this. This is going to be a great boost for their church, I believe. And hopefully the Lord will just continue to just give them great strength and do great works there in Oklahoma City. They're already getting a lot of people saved up there and definitely making an impact. And so, we just want to continue to be a blessing to that church and help that church and enable and empower Brother Fur to just even do even more for that church. And he has a great zeal for soul winning. Some of you have probably gone soul winning with him. He's a really good soul winner. He still infects his spirit. And he does a good job preaching up there for them a lot of times. And so, we're just hoping to increase all that and just help them and be a blessing. And then, he can be a blessing to that church and help them, you know, through the transition to the point that they have, you know, a pastor locally there all the time and can be their own independent Baptist church and everything like that. That is the goal. That is the vision. I know most churches today are trying to set up satellites forever, permanent satellites over the world, whatever. But we want to set up independent fundamental Baptist churches. We want to, you know, eventually have them be completely independent, God willing, and set up new congregations and appoint new men to lead churches and everything like that. And so, that is our goal. And just getting one step closer to that. And it's exciting. January 29th, we have a baby shower in honor of Tina Glasso and her baby boy. And so, that'll be exciting from 1230 to 230. All ladies are invited to attend. It is nursing is only preferred. She's registered on Amazon. And if you'd like to bring a dish. It's pretty much all I had for announcements at this time. So, we'll go ahead and go to our third song. Let's go to 262 in your hymnals. 262. The light of the world is genius. The light of the world is Jesus. They're on the first. The whole world was lost in the darkness of sin. The light of the world is Jesus. Like sunshine at noonday is glory shown in. The light of the world is Jesus. Come to the light tis shining for thee. Sweetly the light has dawned upon me. Once I was blind but now I can see. The light of the world is Jesus. No darkness have we who in Jesus abide. The light of the world is Jesus. We walk in the light when we follow our guide. The light of the world is Jesus. Come to the light tis shining for thee. Sweetly the light has dawned upon me. Once I was blind but now I can see. The light of the world is Jesus. He dwellers in darkness with sin-blinded eyes. The light of the world is Jesus. Go watch at his bidding and light will arise. The light of the world is Jesus. Come to the light tis shining for thee. Sweetly the light has dawned upon me. Once I was blind but now I can see. The light of the world is Jesus. No need of the sunlight in heaven we're told. The light of the world is Jesus. The lamb of the light in the city of gold. The light of the world is Jesus. Come to the light tis shining for thee. Sweetly the light has dawned upon me. Once I was blind but now I can see. The light of the world is Jesus. At this time we turn our Bibles to Genesis chapter number one. Brother Ben's going to come read for us and we'll pass the offering plate. Genesis chapter number one we'll read the entire chapter and then we'll begin the preaching. Genesis chapter number one. Genesis chapter one the Bible reads In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters and God said let there be light and there was light and God saw the light that it was good and God divided the light from the darkness and God called the light day and the darkness he called night and the evening and the morning were the first day and God said let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters and God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament and it was so and God called the firmament heaven and the evening and the morning were the second day and God said let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place and let the dry land appear and it was so and God called the dry land earth and the gathering together of the waters called heat seas and God saw that it was good and God said let the earth bring forth grass the herb yielding seed and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind who's seed is in itself upon the earth and it was so and the earth brought forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind and the tree yielding fruit who's seed was, in itself, after his kind and God saw that it was good and the evening and the morning were the third day and And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and it was so. And God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that had life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters and the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind, and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind. And God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them. And God blessed them. And God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed. To you it shall be for meat, and to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat, and it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day." Let's bow our heads for a word of prayer. Lord Heavenly Father, we thank you for our church, and I just pray now for those who couldn't make it this morning, maybe they're sick under the weather, I pray that you would intervene in those situations and heal them, Lord, so they can come back, and I also pray that you would fill Pastor Shelley with your spirit and enable him to thunder forth his message for us this morning, give a clarity of mind and give us ears to hear and soften hearts in the room so we can apply the message to our Christian lives, and in Jesus' name I pray, amen. Amen. The title of my sermon this morning is Day One of Creation, Day One of Creation, and I want to do a seven-day series where I basically go through each day of creation and I kind of talk about the seven days of creation in Genesis chapter number one and kind of into chapter two a little bit, but we learn a lot of really foundational and important doctrines when it comes to just the very beginning of creation, and we can kind of extrapolate and learn from other scriptures how these things kind of fit together. Right here at the very beginning of the Bible, it's a very unique beginning because no other book really starts like the Bible, never have any kind of other religion giving us such great detail as far as exactly how everything came together, and what's also fascinating is how Genesis chapter one also fits perfectly with all reality, all science, everything that we observe today, it's exactly the same, nothing describes it better, and these words are written of antiquity, you know, before we had great advances in technology and science and satellites and, you know, there's been a lot of foolish ideas of what the universe looks like, what the earth has looked like, and varying understandings of science and all these different things throughout history, whereas the Bible has said the same thing since the beginning of creation, and it's always described everything that we see and observe today exactly as we see it, as exactly as we understand it. Science is always catching up with the Bible, and we don't have to constantly reinterpret the Bible in light of science, science has to constantly reinterpret itself in light of the Bible, because there's a lot of science false and so called, or there's a lot of guesswork or there's a lot of just man's ideas and man's wisdom that never really is true science and has to constantly update, whereas the word of God always stands the test of time. The reason why it's going to stand the test of time is because right here in the opening verse it describes the fact that time is a literal creation of God. Notice it says in the beginning, God, so what does that tell us? What does that four word phrase tell us? It tells us before there was a beginning, there was God, because it's saying in the beginning, God, why? Because God already existed outside of time. God is not bound by past, present, and future. God exists outside of time, and in fact, God created time. Now, how do you know he created time? Well, in order for there to be a beginning, there has to be someone that created that beginning. That's the whole essence of the fact that there is a beginning. And it makes sense because the atheists and the evolutionists today, they essentially worship time as God. Everything that they believe, they always just excuse it away to time. And if you think about it, we have our God, and what is God for most religions? It's something you believe by faith. We can't necessarily see God with our eyes today. We can't look at him. He's not something that's in the visible spectrum. He's not where we could look up and notice him and things like that. There's certain elements of faith that our religion is based on. In fact, that's the cornerstone of our religion is faith. The evolutionary scientists, the atheists even, they have their faith. And anytime there's an explanation upon which they cannot deliver, they simply just throw time at the equation. They say, where did man come from? Oh, from a really long process, from time. How did animals transform from one animal to another? How did we get a Tyrannosaurus Rex into a chicken? Time. How did you get all of the living creatures in this world from a rock? Time. How did you get all the matter in the universe? Time. Basically, they just attribute time as their God. And if you give enough time, eventually everything that you want can happen, apparently. And also, things of the future. If you think about what does a Christian desire look for, they look for what? Eternal life. Immortality. They look to achieve basically living in heaven. Well, you ask the atheist evolutionary scientists, they say give us enough time and we'll fix aging. We'll change the fact that we age and we'll create robot parts and we can live on forever and everything like that. So they believe in time to fix all their problems in the future. They believe time is what created everything that exists. And basically, they worship time as it were. Whereas we don't worship time, we worship God, who is actually outside of and greater than time itself. And from a perspective of worshiping time, you cannot have this phrase in the beginning. That's why throughout history, evolutionary scientists and a lot of these people, they always believed the universe was eternal, essentially. Because if you don't have God creating everything, if you don't have a beginning, then that's what you would inevitably logically have. You would have a universe that's always existed and it's just been kind of a self-existent universe. And that presents a lot of problems for atheism and evolutionary science today because they believe in what's called the big bang. But here's the thing. If there is no God, and I'm just, obviously there is, if we just take their folly that there is no God, it does not matter how far back you go to any kind of initial event that formulated or basically established our universe because there would always be a point in time where those elements of matter and mass existed before that. If they collided or they exploded or whatever, what were they doing before they exploded and how long did they exist? And essentially, you can't even attribute, you can't say the universe is XY number of years old because you could always go five minutes before that and before that and before that. It actually makes it to where there is no age associated with the universe. And that's why you see in modern science today, they constantly are pushing out the date of the creation of the universe. You ever notice throughout history, it's like, oh, the universe is a million years old. That's what they used to say. And then they would say it's 10 million years old. And then they would say it's a billion. And then they'd say it's four. And then they'd say it's 15. And here's why they keep increasing that number. They keep thinking of new evolutionary processes that push that timeline out further. So they're like, well, it has to be at least this much older than or this much older, this much older. But here's the problem. They need to just, they'll have to eventually go all the way back to where it's just eternal. Or you have to believe in a creation event. But here's the thing. With the creation event comes a creator. And why is it they don't want to believe in a creation event? Because then they have to pick a creator that fits that model. And there's only one that fits that model's God. Okay. Now, again, I'm not saying that the things that every everything that evolution teaches or believes is true and happen and God did that. No, what actually happened is described here in Genesis chapter number one. Okay. And sometimes they get mad and they'll say like, how could you believe that, you know, there wasn't this big bang, million, many billion of years ago. But the problem is that the Bible actually gives us a timeline and you can basically realize that we have a seven day week and then we have Adam and Eve created. Okay. Well, in Luke chapter number three, you have a genealogy from Jesus Christ all the way back to Adam. Okay. That means it's not billions of years old. You know, I want to explain to somebody that I don't believe the universe is billions of years old. It takes about two minutes. Okay. It's like in the beginning God. Okay. And then you have seven days of creation. On the sixth day you got man. All right. And then you can go in Luke chapter number three and you can see there's Adam and it goes all the way to Jesus. And these people, while they lived long lives at the beginning, you know, maybe almost a millennia, almost a thousand years. It's not billions of years old. It's literally impossible. Okay. Now the exact age, I believe it's around 6,306 years. Okay. But does that really matter? No, but it does matter to say it's not billions of years old. Okay. And it matters to basically squash all those stupid ideas. But right here in the very beginning we realize time, space, and matter basically all came into existence in this first verse. It says, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. So we have time being mentioned, beginning. Okay. We also have matter and space because we have a heaven and an earth. Well, they also have to have a place where they exist. Okay. So there's all three elements that we have of the space-time continuum that we understand all coming simultaneously into existence with God. Now all three of those elements are necessary for the other two. You know, you can't have two without the third or you can't just have one of these things or whatever. Because it makes sense. If you have time and space but you have no matter, it's like does anything even exist? You know. If you have space and you have matter but there's no time, did it ever exist? You know. It's like what existed if there's no matter? When did it exist if there was no time? And if there's no space, where did it exist? Okay. So you kind of have to have all three in order to have a physical reality. Okay. You have to have something that exists and a place where that thing exists and a time at which that existed. Okay. So we have all three simultaneously coming into existence from the only creator, God. Okay. Now as we study the Bible, we realize who that person is. Go to Revelation chapter number one for a moment. Go to Revelation chapter number one for a moment. Here's another really important doctrine that can be established here is the fact that Jesus Christ is that creator. Okay. Now we realize that God spoke all these things into existence as we read Genesis chapter number one. So we would say that the word of God created everything and the Bible tells us the word of God created everything. Well, that's actually another name for Jesus Christ in the Bible. That's why in Revelation when he's talking about himself, look how he describes himself in verse eight. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty. So notice how Jesus describes himself. He says, I am the beginning. Why? Because in the beginning, God. So you know what he could also say in the beginning? Jesus. Okay. Because Jesus has always existed. In fact, Jesus exists outside of time itself. Okay. And he's describing the fact that he is currently, he was meaning infinite past and he is to come. He's going to be in the future. There's never going to be a time when Jesus Christ doesn't exist. Okay. And the Bible even says Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today and forever. I mean, the Bible just makes it clear he's always going to exist. Verse 11 saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. So notice again, he says, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. So Jesus describes everything for us. He tells us the beginning from the end. Go to verse 17. And when I saw him, I fell at his feet, his dad, and he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not. I am the first and the last. I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Also talking about his earthly ministry, he was alive, he came to this earth, he died literally, and then he rose again three days later. And so Jesus Christ has also lived a physical life, but before his physical life, he was still the first and the last. He was the root and offspring of David, as the Bible describes him. Now, what does that mean, root and offspring? Well, the root is basically the beginning of a plant, and it's where the plant gets its start, it gets its beginning. And then the offspring of a plant would be like the fruit or the byproduct of that particular plant. So he's like, I'm the beginning of the plant, and I'm the fruit of that same plant. Why? He caused David to be born. He generated man in the sense that he created and formed man, and then as man ended up having children and having children and having children, he eventually entered into that lineage of David and was literally born of Mary, who was a descendant of David. And it wasn't like she was just a warming oven, no, it was literally his biological mother, because he's both the root and the offspring of David. He's the seed of the woman, is what the Bible says. Now, that's kind of mind-boggling to some degree, but again, we're talking about the creator of the universe who exists outside of time, always going to be a little bit above our pay grade. Now, go to the end of Revelation, or no, look at chapter 2, verse 8, we'll see this verse. And then the angel of the church in Smyrna tonight, these things say the first and the last, which was dead and is alive. Go to chapter 22 now, though, go all the way back to the end. So, we start at the beginning. It isn't interesting that we start at the beginning of the book, the Bible, and it says in the beginning, and then we're getting to the end of it, and it's saying like, I'm the beginning and the end, and I'm the alpha and the omega, right? And then it gets even stronger. Look what he says in Revelation 22, verse 13, I am alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. Now, what book starts, what religious text literally starts with the beginning and then ends with the ending? The Bible. That's the only text that's like that, okay? And every single story, every single chapter, all fit together in a perfect narrative that all drive to the exact same points. They fit together like hand and glove. Why? Because the Bible literally is God, okay? The Bible teaches in John chapter number one, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. So, this literally is the beginning and the end. Jesus Christ, okay? And he's literally been there and it literally created everything. This created you and me, the word of God, okay? Every single thing. Some people think like, oh man, you worship a book, you worship the Bible, and it's like, yes. You want to know who Jesus is, he's right here in your hand. You want to know who your creator is. Think about a little baby, and a lot of people can think about that in this church. But if you think about a little baby, you know what it is? It just loves its mother, and it loves its father, and it loves to just be caressed by them, and to learn from them, and to be comforted by them. And it's like this is our literal creator right here. You know, we should draw close to the word of God, and we should let it comfort us, and instruct us, and teach us, and basically nourish us, and teach us. And a lot of people, they just don't have that, you know? And really children that are raised without parents just really live pretty rough lives. It's a really kind of a devastating thing, and it's like Christians who don't really, you know, spend time with their parents, quote, unquote, spend time with their spiritual father in heaven, you know, they're basically going to go live a hard life. They're going to have a bad childhood, quote, unquote, living in this world. You know, we have to realize that Jesus Christ has always existed. He created us, and not only that, he gave us the word so that we could know everything we need to know about him. Go over to Colossians chapter number one. Colossians chapter number one. In the beginning, God. And you cannot, I don't care who you are or how smart you think you are, you can't disprove or dispel anything that the Bible teaches about science, about the creation. Everything that the Bible teaches is seen and observed in this physical reality we have today, and a beginning is the only thing that actually makes sense. A beginning is the only thing that actually fits well together with the creation model. And I'm going to get into a lot of these things as we go and develop our creation week here, but you have to understand that there's so many things that exist in the universe that have a symbiotic relationship, meaning that they cannot exist one without another, okay, meaning that you can't have a long period of time where all these different processes are slowly developing. Imagine your body, just your body alone. You can't have some of your body parts developing at randomly different times. It all has to be at the exact same time and at the exact same proportions. It's not like, you know what, I'm going to be born without a heart for a while. My heart's not going to develop for the first six years of my life or whatever. No, no, no, you just die, okay? You can't have part of your arm and your head and your mind. We have so many parts of our body that all have to be functioning together and working together and they have to be at the same level of development and they have to be at the same timing and all these different pieces. And that's microscopic in comparison to the universe itself. When we talk about the fact of how close we are to the sun or how close we are to other planets and the moon and just how gravity works, how grass and trees and oxygen levels and just everything that exists on this earth, it's like it all has to be perfectly dialed in for even just us to exist. And if you just tinker with any of it, just even a hair or just a little bit, all of it ceases to exist. All of it would be destroyed. And so you're like, how did we get to this perfect timing? Someone had to put it all together in a perfect timing, okay? Just like a vehicle, just like a car. There wasn't an explosion in an automobile factory and a truck came out. No, it took a bunch of engineers and scientists to very specifically place every single component, every single part just so everly perfectly together. And even just a little bit off, they won't work. If your truck has a little bit of a wiring problem, it won't work. One wire gets snipped in the right place, the entire machine doesn't work, right? I mean, you have to have it all perfectly dialed in and tuned up and agrees together. You can't just, you know, hope these things are going to work together. And the same is with our universe and the same is with creation. You cannot have all of the simultaneous relationships, symbiotic relationships when we talk about things that are alive and things that have, you know, actual living breathing. They cannot exist without the perfect symmetry and the perfect creation and placing that God did for us, okay? Now, in Colossians chapter number 1, look at verse number 12, giving thanks unto the Father which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light, who hath delivered us from the power of darkness and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son. And then we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins, who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature, for by him were all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created by him and for him and he is before all things and by him all things consist. So, notice when we talk about Jesus Christ, the Son of God, you know, while he is the Son, while the Bible talks about him being created in a sense, we have to also understand that Jesus Christ is before all things and he created all things. When it talks about him being the firstborn of every creature, what does that mean? It's talking about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It's talking about the fact that he was the firstborn, risen from the dead, he was the first resurrected, and so he gets all the preeminence, meaning what? He not only created us, he was one of us. Not only is he one of us, he died for all of us. Not only did he die for all of us, he rose again for all of us and he was the first to rise again and he's the first born. So, just like he's the first to basically kick off man, he's going to be the first to model for us the new man. And so, we get everything is about Jesus. And you say, well, why do you say that? That's what the Bible literally says, okay? I mean, it makes it clear in verse 16, all things are created by him and notice this, and for him. So, why did Jesus create everything? It's for him. Now, what do you mean by that? Well, literally, Jesus Christ is going to rule and reign the entire heaven and earth and it's all going to be under his authority and it's for him to rule, it's for him to reign, and we are to be for his pleasure. We're to be his brethren and his sisters and to help serve him and worship God together for all of eternity. Now, in his creation and formation process, he gets to model for us all of his attributes, okay? And, you know, it's interesting when we think about why God did all the things he did. Go to Hebrews chapter number 1. Here's just some of my beliefs about why God did some of the things he did, but God doesn't really want robots to serve him. You know, you can see this throughout the scriptures that he wants people to choose him. That's why he says in the Old Testament, you know, he sets before them life and death and then he tells them to choose life, meaning that God wants to give us a choice. God wants to create men and women, you know, men specifically in his image, and he doesn't want them to be forced to serve him. He wants them to choose to serve him, which suggests love, okay? Suggests, you know, reciprocating a relationship. And God the Father, just like we don't want to just marry a slave, we want a reciprocating relationship. God wants a reciprocating relationship, but we choose him and we love him back and we appreciate him. Also, God gets to illustrate for us every single one of his attributes. We get to learn everything about God through the creation of the world. So if you didn't have things like hell, you didn't have things like sin, you didn't have things like rebellion, okay, we wouldn't understand a lot of attributes of God, okay? How would you understand that God is a judgmental God if nobody ever sinned? You wouldn't know that, right? Here's another thing. How would you know how holy God is without sin, right? I mean, how do we know that Jesus and God are set apart from all humanity? Why are they the holy ones? Why do we look to Jesus and God and say holy, holy, you know, or say that for thou art alone holy, right? Or why would we basically sanctify the Lord and all these things? It's because he's truly the only holy one. He's the only one that's righteous, he's the only one that's sinless, he's the only one that's perfect, and God gave us all an opportunity and it's not like theoretically we couldn't be, you know, perfect, it's just that for all of sin it comes short of the glory of God. You know, God didn't force any of us to sin. God didn't just say, you know what, I want you to sin. In fact, he did the exact opposite. He told us never to sin. He gives us an opportunity. The problem is just no one is God except for God himself. And so we have modeled for us for all of eternity how he's special, he's unique, and we give him the reverence and the honor and the glory. Not only that, we get to see his love. What's a better picture than love than John 3.16? For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, right? Well, why would Jesus have to die if there was no sin in the world? He wouldn't have to have redeemed us. He wouldn't have had to rescue us. He wouldn't have had to have all these things. So when we have God creating the world and creating the universe, you know, we get to see everything. We also get to see the creative mind of the Lord. And we get to look at the world. We look at all the plants and all the animals and we see the seed and we see the fruit. And we get to enjoy these things. We see the birds. We get to see fish. We get to see animals. We get to have steak. I mean, come on. You know, bacon. I mean, when we look at the universe that we see in this world, and not only that, every single thing illustrates pictures and truths of the gospel and of Jesus Christ and of the word of God. And it models for us how we're supposed to live and how everything is supposed to be in perfect harmony. You know, we learn all these carnal truths that illustrate spiritual truths in this world today. So God obviously has a lot of reasons for creating the world the way He did and giving man free will and allowing all these events to take place and allowing Jesus Christ to be our Creator and our Redeemer. And ultimately choosing that all of it would be done by faith because couldn't God have just always showed Himself unto us and always just stood right there and just commanded, you know, just been like, believe in me, you know, it's like you just see him. But that's not really faith. And how could you really test someone's faith when they're just standing right in front of you and just forced? I mean, imagine, you know, it's kind of like, how do you know that you win the election when half the votes just get switched to you? You know, you don't really know if anybody likes you. You know, when you rig all the polls and you rig all the ballots and you have a rigged media, how do you know if anybody even likes you? You don't. You actually start believing your own lie and you actually think like people like you and that you have a fan base. And then you hold a rally and you realize there's crickets. It's like, okay, well, you know, where did everybody go? You know, where's everybody at? And it's like, nobody likes you. Okay. And so at the end of the day, you know, God is not going to be Joe Biden or the President of the United States, or one of these like Muslim dictators or whatever, where everybody just has to vote for them. You know, you go to the ballot box and you just there's one person on the ballot, and you just God, you just select it and you just sit it in or whatever. No, no, no, no. God wants to give us all opportunity and free will and a choice. And He created the entire world to worship Him, yes, but ultimately have the choice to worship Him. We even see this model through His angels in the fall of the devil. Now you say, when was the fall of the devil? I don't know exactly. You could postulate a lot of different ideas. But I would say it's before He tempted Adam and Eve in the garden. But we don't really know exactly when He fell. But I would say it's probably not in the first six days of creation, because everything that God created in the first six days of creation were very good, is what the Bible says. And in fact, the devil himself was created to be a beautiful, you know, worship leader, essentially, he's like the anointed cherub that cover it, he's got literal instruments built into his body pipes and everything like that. It's no shock that music is so satanic these days, because the devil's literally an instrument himself. But everything was created to glorify God and was created perfect, knowing that it was going to fail though, knowing though that it was never going to achieve that high level of success, because God Himself is the only thing that's truly perfect, truly holy, truly righteous. And we understand that when it says God created everything, that that's actually through the work of Jesus Christ. God the Father created everything through His Son, Jesus Christ. Look at verse 8, Hebrews 1 verse 8. But unto the Son He saith, this is God the Father talking, Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever, a scepter of righteousness is a scepter of Thy kingdom. Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity. Therefore God, even Thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above Thy fellows. And Thou, Lord, in the beginning, hast laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of Thine hands. They shall perish with Thou our mainest, and they all shall wax old as the other garments. So the Bible tells us that it's literally God's handiwork, and it's specifically Jesus Christ's handiwork. Now when it comes to how this worked exactly, I don't know, but I do believe, and the Bible I believe teaches very clearly, that God the Father literally spoke everything into existence and Jesus Christ created it, literally. So you have a tandem here, working in perfect unison, and really Jesus Christ is called the Word of God, which kind of makes sense because if you think about it, if the Father is saying something and then the Son does exactly whatever the Father says, isn't there a really strong parallel to the words that He's saying and then Jesus himself? Because just whatever God the Father speaks, the Son does. And so it's like we see this unity, we see the basic reality of how when God says something the Son does it, and it's like He's the Word of God because, you know, whenever the Father says something, it happens, you know? Let there be light, Jesus creates it, and so we kind of see that relationship. Exactly how that works, I don't know, but the Bible literally is saying here that the heavens are the works of the hands of Jesus. Now some people attack the Trinity, but think about this, okay? If Jesus has hands before the creation, okay, sounds like He's a person, right? I mean, it doesn't sound like this is just this nebulous thing that's floating, you know, before the creation. You know, some people would postulate, there's words, you know, or basically there was just a guy with a book sitting next to him or something like that. No, no, no, no, there was hands next to God the Father, and you know whose hands those were? Jesus Christ's hands. And literally the heavens were a creation of His hands, of Jesus Christ's hands at the beginning. Why? Because you have the hands of the Father, and you have the hands of the Son, and then you have the Holy Ghost. You have three persons and one God that have always existed even before creation. Look at verse 1. God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time passed on the fathers by the prophets hath in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the world. Also notice this, when it says that God created everything, it says He created by Jesus Christ, but notice how it words in verse 2. By whom? That's a person. You know the word whom? That's like someone you're identifying as a person. Who are we identifying the Son? So also, who is it that created everything? The Son. So you say, what was Jesus before the creation? He was the Son before the creation even. Because notice what He's saying, created everything. The Son created everything. It doesn't say the words, or just some nebulous creature, or you know, it's not some blasphemous term that you want to assign to Jesus Christ. No, it's the Son. And so you say, when was Jesus Christ the Son of God? Always. In fact, He's the Son of Man, He's the Son of God, He's the Word of God, He's the Alpha and the Omega. He was the Alpha and the Omega before the creation. He's the beginning and the end, He's the first and the last. Think about this. He said, like, that doesn't make sense that He could be something before it happened. Well, in Revelation, didn't we read that He's the Omega? Didn't we read that He's the last? Didn't we read that He's the end? Has any of the end happened? Has any of the last happened? How can He stand up and say, I'm the end, and the end hasn't even happened yet? Because He exists outside of time. That's why. And because the Word of God already told us the end, it already declared us the end from the beginning, and the Word of God has always existed. It's outside of time. So don't get tripped up on this idea of, like, well, He could only be the Son after He's been born of Mary or something like that. No, no, no, no. He was the Son before that. He was the Son before the world began. He's always been the Son, and literally the Son is by whom, though this is what the Bible says, also He made the world. So when it says, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, what are we saying? We're saying the Father created the world through Jesus Christ. That's what we're saying. And He literally is, He formed the heavens with His own hands. And isn't it beautiful? I mean, talk about some of the most beautiful things you could ever imagine. It's what God created. You know, when you look up in the sky, you look up in the heavens, you look at the sunset. This is what people love to look at. People love to look up in the sky. They love to see the view of a sunset. They love to see the works of God's hands because there's nothing closer. I mean, when you think about drawings and paintings, what are people constantly drawing and painting? The heavens and stars and skies and landscapes and all the stuff that God literally created because there's nothing, you know, that you could really dream up that's better than what God dreamed up. Any of these alien movies, it's all ugly what they dream up, okay? Now, go back, if you would, to Genesis chapter 1. We took a little while to kind of lay down that foundation, but, you know, you really can't lay down a strong enough foundation with just even verse 1. I mean, just think about it. Verse 1, and just think about how much we really could delve into and study. The Bible's not even saying, you know, just creation. It's saying heaven and the earth. Now, I believe what that means, literally, is the heaven where God resides and the earth. Now, the earth is different in this stage of creation, but I believe it's the earth that we're on and the general shape and size that it is, okay? But it does look different, and let's keep reading. It says, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness is upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water. So, we have, basically, a water earth is what it's being described as. Notice it says, and darkness is on the face of the deep, and it says, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water. So, it's talking about the, you know, the face of something is kind of the outward, it's kind of what you're looking at. So, when you looked at the earth, it's just kind of like all water. So, imagine just the entire earth submerged in water, okay? And, you know, what's interesting is there's a lot of symbolism that we can look at here, but if you kind of think about it, our first birth is a water birth, right? And we kind of come out of the water, and really the earth is kind of getting the same birth, where it's kind of like a covered in water, and then it's going to basically have a birth out of the water. It's going to kind of come out of the water, right? And then the earth is going to kind of get born again, in a sense, like through the fire or whatever, and then we're too going to basically get born again through the fire, in a sense, and, you know, we're baptized in fire and stuff like that. So, there's a lot of parallel, like, symbolism of, like, spiritual things and kind of pictures here, but I want to kind of describe some of these words. It says without form. What does that mean? Well, keep your finger here and go to Isaiah 53 for a moment. Go to Isaiah 53. I want to show you another verse with the word form in it, but form can mean, like, defined shape, okay? If you said something is without form, it's basically without defined shape. So, if you think about, like, raw material, okay, a lot of people would say that it's without form. Like, if you go to a factory and they make chairs, they may have in the back a lot of just lumber that's still in 2x4s or in spindles or whatever. It's kind of in the raw material form. They would say it's without form, meaning that it's not shaped into a chair now. It's just raw material, like, you know, pieces of wood and whatever shape they kind of came or were manufactured in. And even us, we could be described as being without form. Now, that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It doesn't even mean that it doesn't have a shape. It's just basically kind of, though, like a blah shape. You know, it's basically just a real simple shape that doesn't have a defined form to it, okay? Now, look at Isaiah 53 and let's look at verse number 2. For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground. He hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire. Now, this is a prophecy of Jesus Christ, okay? And what you have to understand is this is in a very specific context. This is Jesus on the cross. And it's saying at the moment that Jesus is on the cross, he's going to be changed. He's going to be different than when he was on the earth just walking around talking with his disciples. What's one of those changes? His face is literally going to have no form nor comeliness. Now, some people have mistakenly not understood what this meant and they said that Jesus is just ugly. That's definitely not true, okay? Because, first of all, his whole lineage is like attractive people, okay? I mean, we're talking like Sarah. Sarah is attractive at age 90, okay? That's an exception, right? I mean, we got like the most attractive woman ever. We got David. David is considered, you know, a beautiful countenance is what the Bible describes him as. Countenance meaning face, okay? So, we're talking about just a pure lineage of just attractive people all the way through. It's not like then they just randomly had this ugly duckling, okay? And it's Jesus Christ. There's other ways to prove that he wasn't ugly because, specifically, whenever you had a priest come, in the Levitical priesthood. I know he's not in the Levitical priesthood, but he is the picture of that high priest. The priest could not be ugly. The priest could not have anything superfluous on his face. He couldn't have like any kind of bad symmetry. He couldn't have a crook no like crook back or like a weird nose or like anything going on with him. He had to be perfect. He had to be without blemish. And here's just some facts about beauty. Beauty is measured in symmetry. I mean, if you really want to understand beauty from a scientific perspective, it comes from symmetry. So, the reason why someone looks weird is because of symmetry issues, right? Like, kind of higher than their other eye or it's bigger or, you know, their nose has some kind of shape that's a little bit different or whatever. So, if you understand the fact that Jesus couldn't have all these issues with his face, he had to be attractive, okay? He's coming from an attractive life. But when he's on the cross, something's happened. What happened? He got punched in the face repeatedly, right? I mean, whenever he was thin and testify with the chief priest, they're just beating him and they're hitting him with a rod on the top of the head and they were whipping him and they're doing all this stuff. Now, if you've ever seen someone that's been severely beaten, what happens to their face? Well, it starts to swell, you know, and fill with water or just kind of it starts changing and then like you don't even notice all their features anymore. Like, you can't notice their cheekbones and their nose structure, whatever. It just kind of turns into a blob, okay? And basically, what it's saying is that or if you've ever seen someone deceased, you know, if you've ever seen someone deceased, their face structure changes incredibly because they don't have all that fat tissue, they don't have all this stuff. So, it just kind of starts, it kind of becomes blah looking or whatever. That's what it's saying with Jesus. It's saying that basically, his face lost all of its form. So, you wouldn't really recognize, he wouldn't look the same and it wasn't beautiful anymore because it's all beaten and bruised and, you know, it's lost its form. So, it doesn't even look like him really anymore and it's just basically like when you look at Jesus on the cross, there was nothing beautiful about it. You say, why? Because he's supposed to picture taking our sin and you know what? There's nothing beautiful about our sin. There was nothing attractive about our sin. It was a horrifying picture. It was a horrifying thing to look at, but God the Father didn't even look at it. He didn't even look at it. It was just so horrible, it's so awful and it's a picture of, you know, the serpent on the stake, it's a picture of Jesus. So, when it says no form, what does that mean? It basically means that it kind of lost its, you know, luster. It lost its shape, its defined shape. So, when we think about Genesis chapter 1, when it says that the earth is without form, what does that mean? It basically just means that the earth doesn't have any defined shape. Now, imagine a perfect cylinder that's just covered in water. Not really much of a form there, is it? You know, there's not really anything going on. It's just kind of like, it's just void. And what does void mean? Void just means that essentially there's nothing going on. I think it's like a cue ball and pool, okay? There's not really anything going on. It's not really decorated. There's no color. There's no extra shape. I mean, it's just basically the most raw form. It's just this white perfect circle. And in fact, you know, what's interesting about a cue ball, if you blew up a cue ball to the size of the earth, it would be more rough-edged than the earth itself. The earth is so smooth. And then basically that if you were to magnify even a cue ball as smooth and as fine as a cue ball feels, the earth is actually smoother than a cue ball today, let alone at the beginning when there's no rough edges. There's nothing, you know, protruding. It's just basically just a perfect circular wet ball, okay? And it is a ball, okay? There you go. But that's what we have in the very beginning. So I imagine, you know, when it says no form, think of like a stick figure face, right? Stick figure face doesn't really have much form to it, does it? You know, an NPC, it's not really known for its physical features. It's just kind of bare bones or whatever. That's basically what the Bible is describing as an earth that's bare bones. There's not really anything going on. Just water. It's just starting out. It's just at the very beginning stages. And we have some interesting things here. The Bible says the Spirit of God moved upon the face of water. So now knowing that we have God and that was Jesus and the Father and we have the Spirit of God, there's the Trinity already. But even if you didn't know that yet, look at verse three, and God said, there's the Word of God. So there you for sure have the Trinity. You got God, you got the Word of God, and you got the Spirit of God. You got all three right here, right at the beginning, you got the Trinity, and there's even greater Trinity doctrine, you know, in the rest of this chapter. But we have all three. God's Spirit is kind of moving on the waters. And what I kind of think about this, you know, and we'll kind of come back and forth a little bit, the Spirit of God is like everywhere on the earth. Okay. But that doesn't mean that everything's going to respond to it. That kind of makes me think of just the Gospel. We think about that the Spirit of God is kind of everywhere in the world. That doesn't mean everyone's going to get saved. That doesn't mean everybody's going to respond to it. And so God wants to make a distinction. And how does he make that distinction? Well, verse three says, let there be light, and there was light. So we have a start of the earth in darkness, the Spirit of God's there, and then light enters into the world. So much symbolism. We could think about just salvation from a historical perspective, right? How does the world start? The world starts kind of in darkness, yet the Spirit of God's there on the earth. But until Jesus enters into the world, there is no light in the world. You know, he is the light. He's the coming light. And then when he comes, he's the light of the world, and he lights the entire world up. So we have this picture of light entering into this phase of creation as a picture of the Gospel. And it even fits the timeline, because if you think about it, it's first dark, and then light enters in, right? It doesn't start with the light, and then we have the darkness. It starts dark, and then we have the light. So we have a start of the world that's in sin and dark and turned away from God. And really, at the moment that Jesus enters into the world, it's a pretty dark time. Everyone that's not of the children of Israel, they want nothing to do with God. They all have false religion. They have idols. They worship Baal, the work of their hands or whatever. The children of Israel are pretty much wholeheartedly turned away from God. You know, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, they're not worshiping the true God. They're a bunch of fakes and impostors. I mean, it's basically, it's just the whole world's in complete darkness. There's nothing. And without Jesus coming in to basically kickstart Christianity, it was just, humanity's just doomed, in a sense, okay? And so we have this same illustration, even in creation, where we have this darkness, and then the light comes in. How does God describe the light? Verse four. And God saw the light, that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness. Here's another thing that's good about God, is he divides things, right? He doesn't let the darkness and the light dwell together. In fact, it's impossible. You can't have both. You can only have one or the other, okay? You basically have the light shining and the darkness runs away, or you have an absence of light, and that's basically what you have is darkness, okay? And really, you could run with this in a lot of ways. Light is also a picture of truth. So when there's truth, the lie ceases to exist. And with the absence of truth, what do you have? A lie now, okay? And so you can't, they can't both exist at the same time. Truth can never be a lie. A lie can never be the truth. Light cannot be darkness. Darkness can't be light. God divides these things. These things are separate. The Bible talks about God being light, and then there's no darkness at all. So, you know, and when we talk about the devil, the devil is just full of darkness. There is no light in the devil. There's no truth in the devil. We kind of have those two opposite good and evil type spectrums. Let's keep our finger here and go to John 1 for a moment. Let's go to John chapter 1. So he divides these things, and essentially the divisions also described in John chapter 1. Now, what's good about John when it comes to creation is it kind of starts with creation, too. You have some other books in the Bible that kind of start from creation but give you a little bit different perspective or speed up or look at it from a different angle. John chapter 1, and even, in fact, 1 John and Revelation, all written by John, and they all kind of have a lot of, like, parallels with the beginning and the ending and kind of talking about those things. But in verse 1, the Bible says, in the beginning, there's that same start, right? Was the Word. So here's another thing you could do. If it says, in the beginning, God, and then here it says, in the beginning, was the Word, what can we devise from that? That the Word is God, right? We could learn that just from this part, but then we keep reading. It says, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. You know, the Jehovah's false witness, their new world translation, which is really just a wicked corruption, not a real Bible. It won't say that the Word was God. It'll say, like, the Word was a God or something like that. You know, they try to twist this. But with even out that phrase, we already know, if it says, in the beginning, God, and then it says, in the beginning, was the Word, we know that the Word's God. Done deal. Now, the Bible also tells in verse 2, the same, meaning the Word, was in the beginning with God. So he really emphasizes this. He's like, hey, it wasn't just God by himself. The Word's with God, okay? Who's that Word? Well, the Word is made flesh and dwelled among us and will be held as glory. Who's that? Jesus Christ, right? All things are made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made. Now, doesn't that just continue to confirm our doctrine that we've already established? Everything's made by Jesus. Verse 4, in him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. So notice, like I said, how we have the world in darkness, and then physical light, you know, being created, or the reality of light, is the same as Jesus entering into the world, and he's that light, right? There's this parallel. Now, some people get confused about what light is. Now, who's heard of Roy G. Biv? Anybody? Some people. What is Roy G. Biv? Yeah, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Now, what is that? That's the visible spectrum of light, essentially, okay? And the visible spectrum of light. And why do we have those colors defined for us when we're talking about light? Well, essentially, if you shine light through a prism, that prism will reflect the light in a different sized wavelength, and those different sized wavelengths are going to show themselves to us in different colors, okay? And basically, light, though, goes beyond our visible spectrum, okay? If you were to just say, what is light, you know, it's really hard to define. Scientists, you know, struggle with exactly how to define light. They talk about it being a wavelength, a photon, radioactive energy, radioactive energy, things like this. But ultimately, they can't fully decide how to describe light because it's kind of a unique phenomena of this world that we live in, light itself. Now, they measure light or they define light based on its wavelengths, and the wavelengths of energy, it's all measured in nanometers. And when it comes to the visible spectrum, it's kind of in the middle, okay? And then you have it going in the both directions where the nanometers are going to be much smaller and much greater. Now, on the far left side of, like, if you're looking at a chart, which would be kind of the shortest wavelengths, you have gamma rays. You have gamma rays, then you have X-rays, then you have ultraviolet rays, okay? What do you think would be, and then you go into the visible spectrum, what do you think would be the first color after the ultraviolet in ROYGBIV? Violet, okay? It's really, it makes it pretty easy, right? Makes kind of sense that you're rolling in. So if you're going from left to right, it kind of, ROYGBIV is backwards for you, okay? Then you're going to go V-I-V-Y-O-R, okay? Or I skipped the G, but you have G-Y-O-R, okay? So basically, you have those wavelengths going, and then what would be the last color on the right? What's going to have the largest wavelengths? Red, okay? So then when you get to the next layer, which is not visible, it's called infrared rays, okay? So that's kind of easy to remember. You got the ultraviolet, and then that's where the violet spectrum side is, and then you kind of have the infrared, which is kind of where the red is. And then when you get beyond that, you have radar, FM, TV, shortwave, and then AM. AM's kind of got the largest wavelengths when it comes to light. This is what we basically believe is light, okay? As our modern science is trying to keep up with the Bible. But some things are invisible, and didn't that already tell us, didn't it just say that Jesus created the things that were visible and invisible, okay? All things were created by him. So when the Bible says, let there be light, what happened? I believe what it's describing is all the things I just mentioned came into existence. We got the infrared lights, you know, waves, and we got the radar capability, and all the things, all the properties and the functions of light came into existence. Some people would think like, oh, the Bible doesn't make any sense because it says there's light before the sun. And it's like, look, the sun is a light source. Light is something different, okay? Light can exist without the sun. I don't know if you realize this. You say, how do you know that Pastor Shelley? Well, at night when there's no sun out, go into your house and flip on a switch, you know, and there's going to be this thing that comes out of the ceiling. It's called light. And you're like, where did that come from? It's because light exists without the sun. You know, the sun is just a simple light source, right? We have to differentiate the two different things here. Now, if the sun is a light source and then we have the actual existence of light, which one needs to exist first for them to both work? You have to first create light. Explain to me how a light source would work without light even existing. That can't even make any sense. So, in fact, you actually have to have light exist before you can end up having the light source be created, okay? That's why God creates everything in the way that he does, because he's basically setting up the stage or the foundation for the next layer, just like he's not going to create man on day one, because here's a question, where are you going to exist? Good luck just floating around in the nebulous space or whatever. You won't even be able to exist a second, because what are you going to breathe? What are you going to eat? Where are you going to go? Like, you know, none of that stuff's going to work, right? So God has to basically create the environment upon which these things can come into existence and, of course, all the symbiotic relationships that are so important, he's going to create those last. I'm going to create those first, because these other things can exist without other creations. Does the earth really need man to exist? No. Does light need the sun to exist? No. But we need light before we can get to the sun, okay? So we have light itself. Now, what's also interesting about light is light is considered a constant as far as the speed of light, and it's the fastest thing that we can observe in the universe. Nothing travels faster than light. In fact, it travels at 186 at 282 miles per second is what's been measured in a vacuum. Now, light can travel at a different speed depending on which medium it's traveling through, okay? So, like, if you're traveling, if water's, I'm sorry, if light's traveling through water or some kind of a denser subject, then it's sometimes measured at a slower rate than it's traveling. But essentially, supposedly, through many experimentations in science, they've measured that light travels about 186,000 miles per second. That's fast, right? I mean, that's so quick. And think about it. If light didn't travel that quick, we couldn't have all the technology that we have today. How could you have TV and phone? I mean, how could you have it, the one person on the other side of the world can literally call and talk to, you know, another person through a video, and you can see it. Now, obviously, there's also properties like sound that we're talking about here. But, you know, how can I see somebody, you know, literally across the world, you know, almost the exact time that they're there? Obviously, we realize there's a little delay, and most of the delay is not actually light itself, it's, you know, the technology that's slowing it down. Because the light would travel so fast, it's basically instantaneous. If they measure, so the sun is approximately 93 million miles from the earth, okay? So how long would it take for the light that's traveling from the sun to reach earth? 8.3 minutes. Takes about 499 seconds for that light. For light to travel the diameter of the earth, though, it would take 0.04 seconds. 0.04. We're not even saying a tenth of a second, we're saying 0.04. I mean, you can't even, I mean, that's the fast, that's just so fast, you can't even comprehend how fast that truly is. Traveling the entire earth makes sense that God would create all these wonderful things so that we could have this kind of technology and have these, you know, interesting revelations. And now, there's a lot more we can talk about light. I mean, there's, you know, people like Einstein have come up with theories like the special relativity, or the general theory of relativity and things like that, where he literally believes and basically teaches that time is relative, and that light is a constant. Meaning that if you were to travel fast enough, time itself would alter for you. And, you know, I believe it's true because satellites literally have to alter their clocks every single day in order to make up for the difference of the speed at which they're traveling. Now, it's only measured in like nanoseconds. They're basically altering their clocks 38 nanoseconds every single day. But because we use them for GPS satellite coordination, they said if you were not updating it like that, then essentially, every two minutes, their satellites would be off by 10 meters. Every two minutes, and I mean, we're talking about like some important technology that's being used with global position satellites. So, you know, that's even really mind-bending. When you think about the fact that time is theoretically could shift based on speed. Think about it this way, and this is really mind-tripping. I'll just give you one example, okay? Imagine, you know, the sun, right? It has light that's that's racing towards you, and it's going to take eight minutes to get to you. We can kind of visualize the idea of what you observe the sun doing. You're not going to see for eight minutes, okay? Well, obviously, we can never really experience that, you know, on an earthly stage because light's traveling so fast, you know, something from across the room traveling to you, it's going to feel instantaneous. But if you are traveling in the direction away from, let's say the clock, let's say I'm looking at the clock, and I'm seeing, you know, it tick every single second, right? It's just ticking. The light is racing towards me at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, right? But what if I'm going this direction, 186 miles per second? The light that's going to show me how that tick won't ever reach me because I'm going in this direction. So, it'll basically just look, pause, move as I race in this direction, okay? Now, at the moment that I stop, what happens if I then race back towards that clock, okay? Well, then I'm going to observe that ticking even faster, right? Because it's racing towards me, and I'm racing back towards it, so I'm going to go through this time loop. So, you know, and this is a lot of science fiction, but it's based on real science. It's like theoretically if you could travel at the speed of light in a direction far away and then travel back, you would experience no time difference because essentially, you know, you can't, you wouldn't experience it, but the distance that you traveled would change in time incredibly, right? Because you just go instantly this way for five minutes and come back, it could be like 50 years to everybody that's on the earth or something like that. That's why they create like time travel movies and all this kind of stuff or whatever, but it is based on the idea of, you know, the light is a constant and that time is actually kind of relative. Here's the thing, time has to be somewhat relative because here's the reality. God created time. Time is not constrained to God, okay? All right, he's constrained to God. God's not constrained to time, right? He can go outside of time, and think about it. If you can travel at the speed of light, theoretically, time ceases to exist for you. So, if God literally is light, okay, that means that he can travel wherever he wants, whenever he wants, and time is not, you know, going to be limited to him. It means nothing to him. In fact, wouldn't that make some verses like even make more sense how a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day? I mean, when you just outside of time, it's just kind of a weird, it's weird and mind trippy to us, but at some point, we'll even, you know, exist outside of time and live in eternity. Now, when it comes to time, we measure time by the heavens. How do you measure time? When the sun comes up, when the sun goes down, the moon, I mean, all of our time is coming from day four. We don't really understand, you know, time from a human element without these types of things, but the Bible tells us that time existed before the heaven and the stars because in the next verse, go back to Genesis chapter one, it says in verse five, and God called the light day and the darkness he called night and the evening and the morning were the first day. So, we get an illustration of what a day looks like, okay? We have a period where there's darkness, we have a period where there's light, and that's the day, okay? That's a day, and it's the first day, meaning that there was no days before that, right? Now, what does a day mean? It's a 24-hour period in the context of first, but what does day mean in the first part? Like a 12-hour period, right? But it's a little bit driven by context. The word day can be driven by context. When you have an evening and a morning and you have the first day, it's getting pretty clear. It's like, oh, okay, what are you talking about? Approximate 24-hour period of time. Now, let me prove that even further. Go to Exodus chapter 20. Go to Exodus chapter number 20, and I'll try to wrap up here, but when we talk about the first day of creation, we're learning a lot of really important doctrines, and when we think about light, Jesus is that light. You know, he entered in the world and light is coming to the world, and men love darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil, right? And when we talk about the light, it's the gospel of Jesus Christ that basically saves people and pulls them out of the fire and rescues them just because when you're in darkness, you can't see anything, and so Jesus Christ is that light. He rescues us. He saves us. He's good. Notice the light's good. Jesus is good, okay? He divides himself from the darkness. He wants nothing to do with the darkness, and really when you get saved, it's supposed to be like coming from darkness into light. Now you're not supposed to live in darkness anymore. You're not supposed to abide in darkness. You're supposed to abide in the light, okay, until the end. Now, Exodus chapter 20, look at verse 11. For in six days, the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day. Wherefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it. Notice the creation week is a six-day week with a seventh day of rest, and that's how the children of Israel are supposed to observe the week is they were supposed to have six days of working and one day of rest. Now, if he's saying this is a picture of the creation, what does that tell me about the creation? It must have been six 24-hour periods of time with a one-day rest period. Otherwise, the Sabbath wouldn't even work. So, every single thing we have this time is based on the creation week. We have the day, which was evening and morning. We have the week, which we have the six days of creation with the seventh. We have a month, which is the rotation of the moon, and the Jewish calendar used the moon as their month, how they calculated months, and then we have the year, which is the earth revolving around the sun, okay, and we have all the different seasons, and so without the sun, moon, you know, we would have no idea how to measure time. How would you measure time? How would you know what was a day? This helps me also understand eternity, though, if you think about it, because when we get to eternity, the Bible says that we have no need of the what? The sun, because Jesus is the light, right? Imagine if going outside, there was no change in the weather. Zero change. It's the exact same temperature. There's no wind, okay? When you think about the different part of the day, what is it based on? Where the sun is in relation to the sky, right? But you can't even see the sun, because it's just the glory of the Jesus Christ is just everywhere, okay? Then time kind of just ceases to really even be a thing, doesn't it? If you're not aging, if you're stuck in the exact same moment, you're not tired, you're not sleepy, okay, what would time, time just ceases to even be a thing at that point in time, and so you basically just have fun, and really for kids, they would love for this to happen right now, because every kid I've ever met, they never want to go to bed, you know? They're just going to stay up all day, just keep playing, keep playing, and you know, why do adults, why do we change? It's because we got old and we got tired, right? I mean, when you're a kid, going to bed is like the worst thing ever. When you're an adult, it's like the greatest thing ever. You're just like, I can't wait to go to bed, you know? Now, if you can't sleep, it's kind of frustrating, but if you know you could go to sleep, I mean, you're ready. You're just like, I want to get in there, and I'm ready to go to bed, and it sounds great, and it sounds wonderful or whatever, but here's the thing, if you were never tired, and the weather's perfect outside, and it's not going to change, you're like, what's the forecast? Perfect, okay, when is it changing? Never. What's the 10-day forecast? Perfect, you know, it's just like, there's no change in weather, you're never going to see, like, what time is it? How would you even know? Because there's no reference, you're not going to be looking up, and it's like, well, the sun, it's high noon, right? Or whatever, the sun's about to set, or, you know, that's how we think of as time is based on these concepts, but if Jesus is just lighting up the whole world, and you can't even see the sun for the glory and the brightness of Jesus Christ, I mean, time just basically becomes irrelevant at that point, and you're just doing whatever you want, and there's going to, you know, I've talked with other people about this, you know, eternity is kind of an interesting concept, but some people are like, I think I would get bored. It's kind of a normal carnal thing that you might think, but isn't there activities that you like to do, and you've done them a million times before, but you still like doing them anyways, whether that be like, you know, playing a sport, or playing a game, or, you know, reading something, or whatever, you know, some people just love doing the exact same thing over and over. Some people listen to the exact same song over and over. I mean, think about that. I mean, they just can't get tired of the stuff that they love and they enjoy, and we do all the same things, and we still love them. I mean, I had Christmas this year, but you know what? I know all my kids are excited about Christmas next year, and you know what? They're going to be excited about Christmas after that, and you know what? When they're going to not want to have Christmas, never, right? Aren't they going to love? I mean, we go to church on Sunday, but you know what? I get excited about church next Sunday. I get excited about church next Sunday, right? So, when you live in eternity, how is that any different? We're going to have our feast. We're going to have our parties. We're going to have our events. We're going to have, you know, the Red Hot Preaching Conference, you know, whatever that is in heaven. I mean, it's going to be epic, right? I mean, we're just going to have all these different events. We're going to have all these different things that we're doing. We're going to have all these activities that we love that are way better. We're going to have a meal. I mean, you know, I eat steak, but I'm always ready for the next one. You know what I mean? Like, I don't, I wasn't like, okay, that was my last steak. You know, that was my last burger ever. That was my last shaker. It's like, I'm ready for the next one. You know what I mean? And so, when we talk about heaven, it's just a perpetual state of just constantly getting to enjoy all the things you love and worshiping God and get to seeing Jesus and getting to talk to Jesus. You know, if there's a person in your life that you really like, you could just talk to them forever, can't you? I mean, the people that you really enjoy, sometimes you feel like you can't get enough. You just want to keep hanging out. You want to keep talking. You love seeing them. You love being around them. I mean, in heaven, we're going to be around so many people you like and enjoy and some people you tolerate. And then Jesus, you know, it's like God. So, it's just going to be like this perfect state of bliss. And we kind of enter back into a blissful state. Now, go over to Psalms 119. That's the last verse I want you to turn to real quick. Psalms 119. When we think about day one of creation, you know, it really emphasizes light. And if we want to apply this sermon to our personal lives in a little bit more practical way, we have to think about the fact that now that we have the light, we don't want to run away from the light. We don't want to go where the darkness is. We want to stay in that light. And that light has already been illustrated for us as being Jesus, as being the Word of God. And how are you supposed to live your life? You know, we live our lives in light from a physical reality. You know, I don't do things in the dark. The only things I do in dark are like trip over stuff at night or something, you know. We don't, even at night, though, people that, you know, say like, well, I work at night. Yeah, but I guarantee wherever you go work, you turn on lights. You know, you're not working in a dark shed somewhere or something like that. You're turning on lights. We all work by the light. Light is necessary to do work, okay. No one does work without any lights unless you're just blind. I mean, we're all using light here, okay. And here's the reality. In the Christian life, the only way to do work for God is in the light. You turn the light on, okay. We have to use the light and that light is the Word of God, okay. It tells us what to do. It tells us where to go. It tells us how to operate. It helps us understand what we're doing and how to be efficient and effective in that. Psalms 119, verse 105, thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. So every decision I'm going to make in my entire life, you know what I need to do? I need to look at what does the Bible say? How does the Bible direct me? Where am I going to go? Where am I going to live? What am I going to eat? Who am I going to marry? What job should I have? You know, what does a successful Christian life look like? What kind of knowledge should I learn? What kind of people should I hang out with? You know, every single thing that I'm going to decide in my life has to be interpreted through the light of the Word of God. That's why it's so important to read the Word of God. That's why it's so important to go to church and hear the Word of God being preached. That's why it's so important to be around like-minded people that also have the light. Because, you know, what's nice is when you're working that everybody else that's working next to you also has light. You know, I don't want to be working and have light and everybody else is in darkness. That sounds scary, right? You know, I want to be working shoulder to shoulder with everybody that's got a lamp on, that's got a headlight on, that's turned the switch on, you know, that's not having their eyes closed or whatever. And so it's important to be around like-minded people that have the light. You're going to church. You're hearing people instruct you in the light. You yourself are reading the Bible and you're getting the light. We need to be children of the light. We're children of the day. We're children of the light. We're not of the night, okay? We don't want to be of the night. We want to have fellowship with the night, with the darkness. We have to constantly go back to the Word of God. And so you can't really overemphasize the importance of the Bible. And when you see Christians start making really bad decisions, it's a light problem. You know, they hate their brother because they're walking in darkness. You know, they don't have the light. We need to constantly be reminded of what the Bible says so we know how to live our lives. Now, just as much as you will never leave this church and ever live your life without light physically, you need to decide, I'm not going to live my life without the spiritual light, because this is going to tell me how to live my life. We don't want to walk in darkness, as the Bible says. We want to walk in the light. You know, and without this, you can't have any. And we want to help bring people into the light, right? By going out and preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ and letting the light shine in the darkness. The darkness doesn't comprehend the light. We have to help the people in the darkness bring them into the light and show them the light and then encourage those that are in the light to stay in the light. Obviously, you can't lose your salvation. What you can do is you can decide to start walking in darkness again and destroy the life that you have on this earth. So let us be reminded of the first day of creation, the importance of light, the division of light, that the light is good, and that we want to always live our lives in the light which God has given us, which is Jesus Christ. Let's close in prayer. Thank you Heavenly Father for this chapter. Thank you so much for the creation week. Thank you for giving us light. Thank you for giving us the word of God. Thank you for giving us the Bible. I pray that we would never underestimate the value of God's word, of the light that you've given us, of how to walk, and how we appreciate light every day, from the sun, from light bulbs, from fire, from all different kinds of inventions. We use light to know where to go and how to behave ourselves and the work that we do. I pray that we would see that there's even a more important light, which is the word of God, which is the Bible, and that we would use that in our everyday life to know where to go and how to behave ourselves. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Our last song for this morning, 374. 374. Send the light. On the first, there's a call comes ringing or the restless wave. Send the light. Send the light. There are souls to rescue. There are souls to save. Send the light. Send the light. Send the light, the blessed gospel light. Let it shine from shore to shore. Send the light, the blessed gospel light. Let it shine forevermore. We have heard the Macedonian call today. Send the light. Send the light. And a golden offering at the cross we lay. Send the light. Send the light. Send the light, the blessed gospel light. Let it shine from shore to shore. Send the light, the blessed gospel light. Let it shine forevermore. Let us pray that grace may everywhere abound. Send the light. Send the light. And a Christ-like spirit everywhere be found. Send the light. Send the light. Send the light, the blessed gospel light. Let it shine from shore to shore. Send the light, the blessed gospel light. Let it shine forevermore. Let us not grow weary in the work of love. Send the light. Send the light. Let us gather jewels for a crown above. Send the light. Send the light. Send the light, the blessed gospel light. Let it shine from shore to shore. Send the light, the blessed gospel light. Let it shine forevermore. Good singing. You are dismissed.