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Keep, and they that seek shall find, and those that knock, to them it shall be open. It is a law both of nature and of God's spiritual realm, but what a person sows, that person reaps. And we're told reliably that God does not mock us, nor is he mocked. He who sows to the Spirit will of the Spirit reap eternal life. So let us to our topic, which is, as you hear, the book of Genesis, and we have six sessions, God willing, to spend on this book. It's a large, it is a large book indeed, and six sessions might appear pitifully small, but actually there happen to be, at least in my reckoning, six major parts to the book of Genesis. In the period covered from the creation of the world to the flood, there are, as your no- notes will, uh, record for you, there are three creation stories. Most expositors will tell you that there are two creation stories, but if you will permit my me my eccentricity, I think there are three, and they cover the period from creation to the flood. They do not, of course, contradict each other, but just like there are four gospels in our New Testament that sketch for us the life of our blessed Lord from four different points of view. So the Holy Spirit has counted it wise to give us not just one account of creation, but three that look at creation from different points of view. And then, particularly the second and the third of them, point to implications that lie embedded in the creation tactics of God, that had implications for the history that followed. And the Holy Spirit follows those implications and how they developed on each occasion. Three, therefore, stories, accounts of creation. The second half of the book, much longer than the first half, is likewise in three main parts. There is the story of patriarch Abraham and the promised seed, which at that time in history was Isaac. And then in the second place, there is the story of Isaac himself now become patriarch, and the story of the promised seed, which by this time is Jacob. Thirdly and finally, there is the story of Jacob, now become patriarch, and his seed, which is no longer one, but twelve sons. And the story is told how they are at last welded in a firm family and tribal structure and in process of becoming a nation. Six major parts to the book of Genesis, therefore, and timetable suggests that we ought to try and cover some of the salient points of each of those six parts and cover one part per session. That's a Herculean task. I hope there are plenty of refreshments awaiting for you in the interval. So now, without further ado, to the first creation story, and if you care to take your text in hand, you will see that the first creation story begins in chapter one of Genesis, verse one, and proceeds to chapter two, verse three. Let us read the opening words of this account. Genesis 1, beginning at verse 1. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was waste 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 as it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening, and there was morning, one day. And so the first account proceeds with a story of God's creative acts on six successive days, until it comes to the end in chapter two, verses one to three. Let us read the ending. And the heaven and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day, God finished his work which he had made, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because that in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made. So then is the first account of creation, and it is a coherent whole, as you see, because it consists of this unbroken succession of creative acts of God on successive days. The second account of creation, you will see from verse four of chapter two, goes back to the beginnings once more. These are the generations of the heaven and of the earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven, beginning the another, a second account of creation from that point onward. Our task in this first session is to consider the first account of creation and to mark some, at least, of the main features of the story. I suppose the first surprising thing that you would encounter if you were reading Genesis for the first time ever, and you believe that God is God Almighty and omnipotent and can do what he likes at a word, your first surprise would be to find that when God created our universe, he did not create it all at once. He could have done, couldn't he? By definition, he didn't, in actual fact. He created it in stages. That is a very interesting phenomenon in the first creation story. Moreover, in the work of creation, it soon becomes apparent that each succeeding stage adds complication and development in the course of the creative acts of God. And when you have a series that is increasing in complexity, you come at last, of course, to the climax of the series. And then, following Aristotelian logic, you'll come to what is the main purpose of the series. This particular series comes to completion on the sixth day with the creation of humankind, and thereby makes an exceedingly profound statement about the dignity of mankind, made as the pinnacle of the creation of God, a point to which we shall come back more than once in our studies. The second thing that will strike us by the sheer force of repetition is that in this account of creation, creation, we are constantly being informed, was by the word of God. And God said, and God said. The formula is repeated many times, but it's not merely a literary formula. It is telling us what lies primary in the creation of the universe. With that, of course, the New Testament agrees and repeats it explicitly. Says Hebrews chapter eleven, by faith we understand that the worlds were made by the word of God. And the opening verses of the Gospel of John, with their profound theology and philosophy, read as follows: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him. Without him was not anything made that was made. Powerful statements in God's word, both Old and New Testament, to impress upon us what was primary in creation of the universe, it was the word of God. Now that in itself is exceedingly interesting. Doubtless, it emphasizes that the world came into existence at the command of God. As the Psalmist put it, he spake and the worlds were formed. You'll see. He spake and it was done. All it required was the commanding fiat of the omnipotent God. But of course, when we ponder this in the light of the New Testament, our attention is drawn to another feature about this creation by the word of God. Because the Gospel of John tells us that the Word of God was a person. And the Word of God, when it spoke, was an expression of the mind of God. There is a mind behind the universe, and many Greek philosophers saw that, and some of our modern scientists are coming round to the older Greek view that there must be an intelligence behind the universe. But whereas the Greeks regarded that intelligence as impersonal, the New Testament reminds us that the Word of God was a person and is a person. And when the word spoke that brought the universe into being, it imprinted on the universe some of the very character of the God who made it. Now, I am no scientist, but then a number of scientists these days write books that they hope moderately intelligent people will read. And I suppose in their generosity they account me to be among the, the moderately intelligent, you'll see, and they write them for me. They must be intending me because they charge me a lot of money for the books and, uh, make a lot of money themselves, you'll see. And when scientists write books for the humble layman like me, well, we do our best to understand them, do we? Sometimes have a few questions to ans- ask them to make things a little clearer. But as you will know, one of the modern trends in scientific investigation, started, I do believe, by the engineers, is the development of information theory. Because now it becomes impressed upon us, even from a scientific point of view, that what we have, particularly in biology, is not just a bunch of chemicals that somehow got together and happened to make things. We have a bunch of chemicals that are self-evidently carrying information, so that information has been implanted on the matter of our universe. So let me remind you of that m- much shown picture, a model, not the actual thing, of course, a model of the, uh, DNA double helix, where chemicals are sorted in like, uh, the sides of a ladder with rungs between them and then twisted around them. And the chemicals are arranged carefully in order that they convey information. That has been one of the marvels of modern scientific discovery, hasn't it? Revolutionized a lot of thinking. Take the cell, of course, where the DNA is part of the cell. And we are told that even if the DNA does not, as nowadays the more up-to-date scientists think, does not itself control the being that is produced thereby, it does order the development of the materials within the cell to make what is required. And a marvelously ingenious operation it is. So just think of that. The zygote, the seed from the mother and the sperm from the father, minuscule, they're being joined together, contain not merely chemical elements, they contain the information necessary to form the fetus in the womb and to order the process of its development. No use having a pair of eyes if you haven't got a skull to put them in, so to speak. They control the timing of the development and the timing of the birth. They will continue to control the growth of the child into maturity, and all those wonderful things that happen to human beings in the course of life. The wonderful thing is that, of course, the original chemicals that came from father and mother, they disappear. The information carries on, doesn't it? Copied by the RNA. And not only in the course of the lifetime of the fetus, but when the fetus is born and grows up and becomes an adult and marries, the information goes on through them to succeeding generations. By which we perceive that though the chemicals are important, much more important is the information that is carried by the chemical. This is so interesting that Professor Paul Davies, mathematical physicist of some world renown, and not a believer in God, as far as I understand from his most recent, uh, statements. Nevertheless, in a recent book that he wrote and entitled it The Fifth Miracle, borrowing the title from Genesis chapter one, day five, you see, calls his book The Fifth Miracle. And he has as the guess, I repeat, not, not a believer in God that I ever knew of. He has it to guess that we may have been mistaken all these centuries to think that matter is the basic stuff in the universe. In his opinion, the more likely, uh, uh, scenario is this, that the basic stuff in the universe is not matter, but information. That is a suggestion from one scientist, at least. The Word of God has been saying it for centuries. In the beginning was, not matter, as the, as the Greek philosophers would have suggested, and many people think still. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Creation by the Word, that is the command of God. Creation by the expression of God's mind and purpose that implanted the necessary information on matter in order that his purpose be fulfilled. Now, there are very few, if any, ladies here present that are old enough to remember what I shall now describe. But in the early days when clothes washing machines were invented. They were very simple affairs. They were big sort of plastic or other metal tubs, you see, and inside them they had things that went whirligig. And then at the top, generally on the right hand side, was a slit, and the housewife was presented with a piece of plastic about two and a half inches, three inches square, do you see? And this controlled the many, uh, different, uh, processes that the machine could do. Because this piece of plastic had notches on the side, spaced differently on each side, but notches just in the plastic, you see. And when a dear lady wanted the process for the linens, she got the piece of plastic and put it in the right way round, the right side in, and lo and behold, the plastic controlled the old mechanism inside and made it do the right process for linens. Whereas if she wanted colors or the woolens, she took the plastic out and turned it round and upside down and and and then put the other side in, and lo and behold, the different set of notches controlled the old mechanism for woolens and cupboards, if you please. Of course, you don't remember it, but I do. And, uh, you'll say the interesting thing would have been this. If, uh, uh, you had shown me that bit of plastic and said, uh, Gooding, what do you think that is? And I said, it's a bit of plastic. And you said, yes, but anything else? No, no, nothing I can see here except plastic. I should have been right, shouldn't I? Put the thing under a microscope, and all you would have seen is plastic. Nothing else, would you? Yet it wasn't just plastic, was it? Why not? Because those notches on the side of the plastic were what engineers would call information. Putting on the plastic, uh, things that would carry the information, so to speak, that the engineer wanted to deliver to the engine to tell it how to go. It's all right for the dear scientist to look at cells down his microscope, and all he sees is chemistry, little bit of electricity maybe. But it's not just chemistry, is it? These things are carrying information. That then is the, uh, uh, uh, striking feature repeated many times throughout chapter one. creation by the word. I want to stay with the notion of information just a little while, and uh, if you are tired at the end of the week and a Friday night, uh, if you're not interested in histories, you could go to sleep now for the next three minutes or four. Quite unafraid to go to sleep, because when you wake up, I shall still be talking, you see. I want to make now the point that information is non-material. Mm-hmm. You say, what do you mean by that? Well, ma'am, perhaps your son, uh, has just graduated in his distant university. And you know he's done well because he sent you a bit of a telegram to say he's done well. But he's a modest fellow, and he doesn't tell you what his professor said about him, but a friend of his thinks you ought to know, you see. So she can s- can she she she has this idea in her head. Nobody can see it, of course. She conceives this idea, and she's got to con- somehow con- convey it, man, to your head, you'll see. So how shall it be done? She could convey this information by all sorts of things. She could, in the old-fashioned way, long may it be preserved, uh, sit down and write a letter, you'll see, with ink and pen upon the page. You'll see. Or she could get on the old email and flap a few keys and things. Or she can have it in Morse code, or semaphore with flags. All sorts of ways she could use to convey the information. Let's take the simple way. She decides to write a letter, do you see? And, uh, well, now she has a choice. There's a thousand or more languages in the world. Wouldn't matter which one she used, would it? But she'll use the one perhaps you know, ma'am. So to do this, she uses a lot of chemicals, ink, you see, and a pen, and writes marks on a page, but not just any old marks. They have to be letters, but then they have not just to be letters, they have to be letters very carefully ordered according to what language it is, according to the rules of grammar and syntax. Now, in a modern world, often forgotten, but still there. And Lamar eventually gets this letter with the information it's carrying, and the information goes into her brain. What goes into her brain? The ink? And the letters? They say they remain on the page. Well, yes, so they do. Well, the paper doesn't go into her brain, does it? What does go into the woman's brain? You say a whole lot of photons come down upon the ink, and they bounce off the ink, and they go into the lady's eyeballs and down the retina and, uh, translate it into electrical impulses. I say that's a lot of stuff, and it gets to the brain. Where's the information now? So you say, what happens next? Suppose the signals had come down to you, ma'am, and you're an English speaker, and they come down in Russian. You wouldn't make a thing of them, would you? You couldn't interpret it. So you have to interpret the information off the signals. What is information? It is non-material. That is an exceedingly important thing to remember. For when we read, in the beginning God created and God said, not only issuing command, but imprinting information on matter, God himself is spirit, non-material, and information is non-material even in our world. Now let's go back to that, the idea of the DNA, uh, coil. People commonly agree that it shows every characteristic of being a code. That has very interesting implications, being a code or a language. The chemicals are carrying information, but the chemicals are very highly arranged and organized so that they shall carry the correct information. They bear in technical languages, language, the feature of language as distinct from noise. And when you hear a language of any sort or see it written, you have to ponder the source from which it came. And here is an interesting to, interesting thing to observe. You will all have heard of the so-called SETI program, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, much advocated by the late Carl Sagan or Sagan or whatever he liked to be called, at the expense of multi-millions of pounds of the USA money, and had these great dishes pointing to outer space, and in particular to those areas of outer space where some scientists think there might have evolved life, intelligent life. So they listen into the noise that might be coming, we'll see, signals that might be coming from these distant parts of the universe. They have to, uh, disregard what is just noise. For noise is marked by being random. They're looking for sounds that, when analyzed, would bear the characteristics of language. You mightn't know the language they were in, but language, ordered language, will show up the pattern that it is a language in any sophisticated analysis of the sound. And they were hoping, and they still are hoping, and still paying the millions. But one day they will get in their receivers a flow of sound that upon, uh, analysis will prove to have the features of language. And what will that prove to them? Well, the title of their, uh, uh, project tells you they are in search of extraterrestrial intelligence. And when they get something that appears to be language, they will conclude forthwith and at once, that because it is language, it must come from an intelligent being. It's a highly rational supposition, because in all our experience, language only comes from intelligent beings. For different degrees of intelligence, granted, but, uh, intelligent beings, you'll see. But if the chemicals of nature and the cell show evidence of being a code that is carrying information, question arises from what source does the information come? If it were Carl Sagan looking for extraterrestrial intelligence, and he got a sounds that were obviously language, he would decide at once it comes from intelligent beings. And when we see nature carrying information, as the cell does, is not the rational, obvious conclusion that the information comes from an intelligent source? Yes, says Genesis one. Says the Gospel of John chapter one. Says the Epistle to the Hebrews chapter eleven. In the beginning was the word. Look again at that list that I have put before you on the screen there. You will notice that in the first six days, the formula that begins it every time is, and God said. That tells us this, that each stage in the creation did not develop automatically out of the previous stage, but required a fresh input of Of information. information. If it concerns the cell, for instance, it is true that, uh, the DNA in a cell, and cells themselves therefore, know change, all kinds of modifications that give variety to, say, human life. But never has it ever been observed. Take fruit flies, for instance, much loved of some scientists, because the dear fruit flies have a remarkably prolific rate of generation. You can have thousands of generations in a very short time, and fruit flies have been bombarded with, um, radio ra- you know, radiation of various kinds, and as a result, their cells have suffered permutations of various sorts, and fruit flies that normally have two wings and and two tiny little appendages down by the stomach somewhere, um, have been developed that have four wings instead of two, do they? And all sorts of curious anomalies. What has never happened in all these mounting thousands of generations of fruit flies, has that any fruit fly has been born that wasn't a fruit fly. Oh, well, if you get my meaning. I'm half Irish. What I meant to say was, uh, never has a fruit fly been known to turn in the end to anything other than a fruit fly. To make a change of that kind, says scripture, would you, you would need an input of divine information. You don't arrive at information by accident. Read, well, don't read really, that's the foolish bit of advice, but I was going to say, read some of the manuscripts I write, and you will come across accidental misspellings, which increase in number as my years increase. The misspellings never help forward the information. How could they possibly? You don't get solid information that is necessary for any kind in the world of life without the input of special information. Notice secondly, will you, that whereas on those six days, every day begins with and God said, yet on two of the days, the formula is repeated. On day three, the phrase and God said occurs twice. Again, on day six, the formula occurs twice, and in each time in a very significant way. For day three has the dry land appearing first by the creative a- uh, by the command of God. But then in the second part of the day, for the first time, you meet animate, vegetable life. As to say, from rough matter, inorganic matter, you now reach organic matter. Not just by simple micro evolution. The bridge between the orga- the inorganic and the organic required another input of divine power and information. And similarly, in day six, the first part of the day is the creation of the terrestrial animals of various kinds. The second part of the day is the creation of man and woman. Pray notice that between the creation of animals and the creation of man and woman, there occurs another and God said. Humankind did not evolve out of animals by microevolution, and certainly not by macro evolution, but not even by micro evolution. It's required another input of divine command and information. We said that in the beginning was the work. If one listens to Paul's epistle to the Colossians, we are told three things about a Christ. That all things were made, the all things, that is the universe was made. Three prepositions are used. In him, through him, and unto him. They are not repetition. In him. Where did it all begin, this universe? It didn't begin with the creation of matter. It began, if you'll excuse the humble term, as an idea in the mind of Christ. Just as your wonderful new hospital here in PEI, Charlottetown, began not when they dug the footings to lay the foundation, but began in the mind of one or more city councillors or doctors. Began as an idea, that then had to be translated by the architects into plans, that then had to be, uh, uh, translated again into actual matter. Oh, creation began in Christ. He is the beginning. It is one of his titles in Holy Scripture, these things says the beginning of the creation of God. And, uh, on my quiet moments, I don't tell everybody, so don't you tell them. But if you were to come across me one day and say, that's a peculiar kind of chap, that is, whose idea was he? I have a ready answer to all your criticisms. Now, I'm Christ's idea. He thought me up. Thought you up as well, too. And most people would agree he made a good job of you anyway, but still, that's another point. He had beginning to the universe in the mind of Christ. He was also the agent through which the idea was put into operation. Through him were all things made, and he is the goal for him. Which reminds me to point out the significance of the very first words of Genesis one: In the beginning. Which tell us plainly that the universe had a beginning. A fact is of the utmost importance. Because if the universe had always been and always will exist eternally with no beginning and no end, you might regard it as just, well, it was one of those things just there. You don't have to account for it, for it never had a beginning. You don't have to ask who started it, because nobody did, and when will it end, because it won't end. Just a brute fact that there it is. But when something has a beginning, and you ask, well, how did it begin? Where did it begin? Whose idea was it? And then it starts developing. You immediately raise the question that it must have had a purpose. This notion has long since irritated atheistic evolutionists that resent the idea that the universe had a beginning. Some of them will admit it sounds too much like God. In my youth, in the dim and distant past, beyond the Paleolithic Age, of course, but in the fifties, it was the current idea then that the scientists were about to prove what they called the steady state theory, that the universe always existed and always will, and was supplied by a small but permanently occurring e- excess of energy and matter to keep it going eternally. They promised they were about to come up with the evidence, but the evidence has not come up. In fact, the majority view, even among scientists, is that the universe must have had a beginning, which raises the whole question of what is the purpose behind it? And the thing that in Sue, let us Christians take notice, is whether there is a purpose behind the universe or none at all. The more extreme atheistic scientists, and not all scientists are that by any means, but the more vigorous and rigorous atheistic, like Professor Dawkins of Oxford, will tell you that the universe has no purpose behind it, and therefore you as a human being have no purpose behind you either. You serve as a mechanism to perpetuate the human genes, what for they can't tell you, because they hold that ultimately there's no purpose anyway. So that what we are considering when we consider God's word about creation is not just merely abstract science. We are debating the very purpose of our human existence, whether it has meaning or not. But with that, let me come to the next, uh, feature I have already mentioned. The pinnacle of the succession of creative actions on God's part was man, human being, male and female, of course, made in the image of God. Naturally, we inquire what the phrase means, the image of God, and doubtless it implies moral and spiritual likeness to God. But in our brief time tonight, let us notice the immediate context of its use in Genesis chapter one. Let them have dominion over the earth. Not to be king, but to be administrator, to have dominion in that sense, to be in charge, to be, if you like, God's viceroy of the world. Sometimes I'm asked by atheists in Russia and elsewhere why I believe the Bible to be true, and I freely confess my bias and prejudice, my inbuilt preferences, you'll say. The Bible tells me that man being created by God was created at the pinnacle to be God's voice- viceroy on earth and to have dominion. What a magnificent concept that is. The lie was soon spread to Adam and Eve that God wanted to keep them down. It's a lie that has persisted to the present. It is the opposite of the truth. God's concept in the making of man and woman is to place the both of them in position of dominion. And that the psalmist, in his eighth lyric, expresses, doesn't he, in the wonderful words of Psalm eight: When I consider the heavens, the works of thy hand, what is man that thou art mindful of him? All of us, I suspect, have experienced that. Like the psalmist, we have looked at the stars and the galaxies, and the more we know about them, the huger and huger they turn out to be. What are they doing, those billions of galaxies at the remote edge of the universe? When I consider the heavens the work of thy hand, what is man that thou art mindful of him and that thou visitest him? And at that point in the lyric, you would have expected the psalmist to go off muttering something. We are but mere worms, little fleas that jump hither and thither in the dust. He does no such thing. He says, what is man? Thou hast put him over the works of thy hands, hast crowned him with glory and honor. It's God's concept of man, God's viceroy. Yes, you will tell me that man has failed in his responsibilities, and more of that on another occasion. Now, the New Testament, looking at that failure straight in the face, has not abandoned hope. We see not yet all things put under man, says the writer to Hebrews chapter two, but we see Jesus, made a little lower than the angels, truly God, but become truly human, crowned with glory and honor for the suffering of death. And one day God shall put under the feet of Jesus Christ, the man Jesus, Son of God as well, of course, but the universe shall be put under the feet of the man Jesus. And Christians, when they contemplate it, have been known now and again to mutter hallelujah under their breath. You listen to the atheist, he'll tell you that's a lot of nonsense. There was no purpose. There was no plan. We are the accidental product- products of the mindless forces of the universe, who happen to have involved, involved intelligence, alas. Because we can see what these mindless forces will one day do to us. They will destroy us and our intelligence. And we have the intelligence to be able to see what they're going to do, but in the end we shall not have the power to stop them doing it. And when they've destroyed us and our famous intelligence included, the irony is they won't even know they've done it. Isn't that a marvelous use of intelligence, thus to consider the universe and come up with the decision that our intelligence has proved that intelligence in the end, uh, is insignificant. It will be destroyed by mindless forces. Well, if it weren't wrong, I hope it would be. I come finally to another feature of the first chapter of the book of Genesis, and that is it deals not merely with creation, but with organization. This is important to notice because sometimes, indeed frequently, it is overlooked. You will notice from time to time in chapter one, the historian remarks that God called something, something. For instance, on day one he said, let there be light, and there was light. And God called the light day. And he called the darkness night. And then, eh, in verse eight, he made a firmament, and he called the firmament heaven, if you please. And then in verse ten, he called the dry land earth, and he called the gathering of the waters seas. And we want to know, of course, don't we, why God started calling things by these names. At first sight, there seems to be a little confusion, but with the excellent way you speak English here, you no longer find it a confusion, of course. For this term day, I come back to the, uh, verse five. In one sense, there was evening and morning, one day, twenty four hours, if you like. Day is used for twenty four hours. And yet, when God called the light day and the darkness night, now day has a somewhat different meaning, doesn't it? It means the roughly twelve hours of daylight. And the twelve hours of night, uh, darkness he calls night. So the word day is being used in two senses, isn't it? Sometimes of the whole twenty four hours, and then simply of the twelve hours of light. Nothing odd, you say the same thing. Somebody asks you, I, I hear Aunt Matilda or Aunt Matilda is coming. You say, yes. When is she coming? You say, next Thursday. Oh, coming by day or by night? Oh, she's flying in overnight. Thursday night. Oh, uh, it's easy, isn't it? Infants can work that out. But it's interesting, why did God, uh, do this naming business? Called the light day and the darkness he called night. We are, of course, in the realm of the lighting system of our world. It's very interesting to ponder why God has done it as he done it, isn't it? Don't say that's the only way he could have done it. God could have made us phosphorescent like fish down in the deep sea, little lights in our heads and things. Why has he done it this way? You see, it's important to ask the question, how are things done? It's even more important to ask the question why they're done. I was walking once of an evening down a road with a psychologist on the left and a mathematician on the right, so I was in safe company. And the learned gentlemen had been discussing among themselves the difference between how and why. And the psychologist had decided, I think, that the mathematician hadn't quite understood. Sometimes mathematicians don't. So he asked the mathematician a question, pointing to the yellow lights that lit up the road, you see, before it was dark. He said to the mathematician, why are those lights yellow? The ma- mathematician began. And some minutes later, he finished with tremendous a explanation of all kinds of chemical terms and electrical terms that had us both bamboozled. Doubtless correct. But you'll see, when he finished, the psychologist said, that's not why they're yellow at all. That's how they're yellow. The reason why they're yellow is because the city fathers decided that yellow lights were the best to use and light up the road. I can tell you how our Earth's lighting system works. There's a light source, we call it the sun out there, and while it never switches off, the lighting system of our planet is so arranged because the dear old planet is twizzling around, you know, that we get rationed for light. Roughly twelve hours, we twizzle into the light and enjoy it. The next twelve hours, whether we're ready or not, we twizzled out of the light. Such is human life. We have to go and put ourselves in a dark room on a shelf in a dark room to get over it, you see. Every day we do it. Why has God done it that way? When our Lord Jesus was here on earth, he had occasion to use the physical lighting system of our world in order to use it as a parable for spiritual things. He announced he was going to raise Lazarus, you see, from the dead, going to Judea. And the disciples restrained him. They said, surely you're not going to Judea again. Master, of late the Jews sought to stone thee. He said, are there not twelve hours in the day? Well, they are roughly in the Middle East. If a man walks in the day, he said, he doesn't stumble because he sees the light of this world, that is the sun up in the sky. But if he walks at night, he stumbles. And then he added, in Greek at any rate, because the light is not in him. That's saying the obvious, isn't it? But it's a profound observation. The light, ladies and gentlemen, is not in us. Our number one necessity on this planet is for light, for both, uh, seeing how to do things and heat to maintain life. That is the basic necessity, even at the physical level. And God has so arranged it that the light upon which we are helplessly dependent is not in us. It is not in our planet. We are dependent for that light on a light source that is roughly nineteen million miles outside our planet. But we are, if we think about it, made aware. We might be, as the, as Genesis one puts it, in dominion over the planet. But we are dependent on things outside our planet for our very basic necessity. It's a lesson that people forget, isn't it? God did another curious thing. He made a firmament between the waters beneath and the waters above. In other words, he gave us an atmosphere and space. You need it to breathe, ladies and gentlemen. Of course you do. But, you know, I wonder if you've ever seen yourself as you must look like, uh, to any, uh, uh, Martian explorer with a big telescope. And see the round disk of the world, and there's you, and you're sticking out the side. And there's your Aunt Matilda, the other side of the world, she's sticking out the other side. You know, funny. Like clothes stuck in their feet at Apple. And they're at the North Pole, standing upright outside. And the Australians, dear soul, standing upside down. Well, they don't think it that way, but then they're Australians. What a runny spectacle you would look like if you were looked at from outer space, sticking out, and only the skin of your feet on Earth. Oh, you smile, I'm relating to you sober facts. If the skin of your feet is on Earth, where's the rest of you? You say, well, i- i- i- i- in the atmosphere, old boy. You mean that firmament thing? Well, yes, if you like to use that old-fashioned word, firmament. I hope. You couldn't abou- survive without that, could you? You need it for breathing. You're only just on Earth, you know. Why did God call that at- that atmosphere heaven? Didn't he know all the other connotations that the word heaven would gather to itself in the course of history? Sound odd if I told you that this morning, as you walk out there along the pretty streets of Charlottetown, that most of you is in heaven. But I should be literally explaining to you what Genesis says. You say that there's a difference between heaven where the birds fly and the real heaven. Well, yes, there is. Why did God use the same? Oh, ladies and gentlemen, we're made to live on the earth, but we're only just on it. For our very existence as human beings, we need here that atmosphere that God went and called heaven. What a parable it is. And finally, there was the matter of the dry land and the seas. God separated the waters from the dry land. And the wa- dry land was a good name, and the seas was a good, uh, uh, name, you'll say. But he called the dry land earth, and the gathering together of the waters he called seas. Well, how odd. Because earth can be used to describe the whole planet. And yet, it can be used in this other sense in which it isn't the whole planet. It's just the dry land. And the far bigger surface of the planet is occupied by ocean. Why did he call the whole thing Earth, and then yet only the dry land bit Earth? That also points to a remarkable fact, doesn't it? The ancients, you know, were largely afraid of the oceans and the seas. When the sea got rough, they couldn't understand what kept the sea from running back over the earth. And the psalmist dwelt upon the matter, and he said, talked about God who gave the decree, the sea its decree that it shouldn't pass its bound, was when the c- the Mediterranean cut up rough, the ancients were afraid it might invade the land and turn Earth into chaos once more. But we don't fear the seas like that anymore, do we? But if you know the ice caps melted. If the axis of the Earth moved a tiny little bit, that many of the capital cities of the world will be engulfed. The sea is there to remind us, yes, we are, in the words of Genesis, made in the image of God to have dominion. Are we not the ultimate controller, are we? For our deferrable survival of what we call the dry land on are dependent on forces outside of ourselves, outside of our planet, that rest in the control of our creator. That is a marvelous lesson. It chimes in with what the rest of Genesis is going to tell us. Where did things go wrong? Well, they went wrong in the Garden of Eden. And what sin did Adam and Eve do? Well, they didn't start taking drugs before breakfast or anything like that. Nor did Eve poison Adam. Man fell when man was tricked into trying to reach independence of God. And man, says Genesis, is to be saved from the predicament that that put man in by salvation. Yes, but the particular example of salvation that Genesis will discuss at length is that part of our salvation that is called by the theologians justification by faith. In which phrase, the term faith means man being brought back to a position of complete and utter dependence upon God. So much then for a few meditations on some of the salient points in the first creation story. In our second session, when you'll have time in the interval to recover from this one, uh, we must proceed to some of the main points of the second creation story.