If you want to start a fight with an atheist…
…just mentioned creation.
Even the world “creation” can trigger a strong response. After all, after the Enlightenment, only the “ignorant” would believe some all-powerful being created the unexplainable complexities of the universe.
“God” is a crutch for the weak, so I’ve been told.
But what we do with Genesis is crucial to what we do with the rest of the Bible. After all, Jesus believed in Genesis. And rightly so; He was there. “Through him all things were made,” John 1:3, NIV reports, “without him nothing was made that has been made.”
In short, we have two options with Genesis 1 and 2: accept Scripture for what it is and what was stated, or bend Scripture to whatever modern science states at this point. Just to encourage you, the cutting edge of the science of the formation of universe looks more like Genesis with every discovery. No surprise there because “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1, NIV).
We covered Day 1 and Day 2. Now, we see what the Lord created on Day 3 in Genesis 1:9-13.
And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.
Genesis 1:9-13, New International Version
Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.
There are two distinct creative acts on the third day of creation: the land and sea are prepared and then the land is furnished. While the Lord creates the continents (and by extension, the divisions of the oceans), He also created the mechanisms for the land to produce plants.
One of the common attacks against creation science is this day. The argument is that plants were created before the sun was created. That’s true. Genesis 1:14-19 (next week’s study) tells us the sun was among the celestial objects created.
Plants can’t live without sunlight. To a degree, we can produce it artificially with certain types of lights. But that’s a recent invention compared to human history.
So, did the Bible mess up? How did these plants live without sunlight? And why would they have been created before the sun?
As I have written from the beginning of our study in Genesis, I’ll not debate every point. Nor was Genesis 1 written to combat modern humanistic evolution. In reality, humanistic evolution is the “newcomer” on the block trying to prove itself against what was accepted for thousands of years.
But this point of plants and sunlight bears addressing. The short answer is found in Genesis 1:3-5. Light was created on day one. We call it the electromagnetic spectrum, but it contains visible light. This means there would have been useable light for photosynthesis for the plants from day one. It wasn’t the sun, but it was light.
Zooming out a bit further, even if there wasn’t usable light for photosynthesis, the plants wouldn’t have died in one day (since the sun was created the next day).
Bottom line, nobody was there to see how this worked. Humanistic evolution (again) is an attempt to write God out of the equation. If there’s no God, there’s no one I am ultimately accountable to. Morality becomes relative to culture.
But Scripture provides a foundation for us. It gives us the definitions of right and wrong. It tells us there is a path to blessing and a path to cursing.
Genesis 1:9-13 doesn’t answer all our questions—the Bible doesn’t answer ALL our questions. It’s designed to point us to the One who IS the answer to our lives.
On Day 3 of creation, we find a very different world than what we know today. The plants didn’t have thorns. There would have been no need for poisonous plants. At this point, even the plant kingdom is perfect and good.
It reflected the perfection and goodness of our Creator. This is the same Creator who longs to recreate us from beings under the curse of sin to beings under the blessing of grace.
Even today, you can see the beauty of plants. Genesis 3 changed everything into the world we see today (We’ll get there.). Yet, even today, you can see the echo of creation’s perfection. Even broken by the sinfulness of the world, you can see the unexplainable beauty and goodness of the third day of creation.
Before you go on the next part of your day, look out the window at some flowers or any green plant. Look at the beautiful shadow it still has from the third day of creation.
Life Meets Theology 