God Creates the Universe
There is an ongoing argument about how God could created the universe. Typically it goes nowhere because people do not know how to think about it. They get God all confused with His creation. He is not inside the universe; He is outside.
Picture this. You are at a long kitchen table in your house and you decide to set up a model railroad just for fun. You collect all the parts – the railroad tracks, the various cars, engines, little tiny train stations, some plastic people and houses, a few buildings – the Bakery, the Schoolhouse. You find some plastic trees and bushes, a few tiny flowers, plastic dogs and cats and some stick figures on a bicycle. You lay out all this, plug the power source into a wall socket and start having some fun.
This is how God created the universe. He thought about what He wanted to do and over a period of time, it says in the Bible, and He devised a universe where we would live and work. Then when it was all ready, He set it into place. And plugged it in with the sun, moon, stars, everything we now see, and all the stuff we don’t see as well, like DNA.
The universe was not created while God was inside creating it; it was created and then revealed, piece by piece. He says He took six days doing this. I suppose, being God He could have taken two weeks if he wanted to, or three hours. Whatever. But it was all designed ahead of time and then revealed.
In fact, in the Hebrew language the word create can also be translated reveal.
Here on earth, in earth time, we think of the universe being created in situ, that is while it was progressing. But we are stuck inside time and God is not. He is in eternity and not confined by time in any way.
That also means He created items old, new, and middle aged. The Bible says so specifically. So we solved that problem of mountains being old. The two people He began with, Adam and Eve, were adults, that is they were able to have children from day one. In other words they both were “old” although not very old, just old enough to have children.
Here is the passage: Genesis 1:11 11 Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth”; and it was so.
If the seed is in itself, then it was a mature plant. The hen was created mature, with an egg inside. There is no reason to believe that evolution was a progressive thing over millions of years of unplanned accidents. There is nothing in the universe that looks unplanned.
Yes, living things change over a period of time, and adjust to new conditions, some bad, some good, but there is no cause to believe that anything accidental started or progressed over billions of years. If God wanted a billion year old universe to begin with, not a bad idea. He built that into His system.
In the very beginning, it was good, said God. It was pristine. So how did it get to be such a crappy mess?
Well, that is the next part of the story in Lesson 4.
Today read Genesis Chapter One in your Bible and mark all the interesting parts.