Pattern of order, disorder and re-order

From this evening's Bible study at my church:

Isaiah 46: [9] Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me,

[10] Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure:

Notice the issue. "I'm God and you know I am because I can tell you how it's going to wind up from the very beginning."

When He says to them in verse 9, "Remember the former things of old," He's saying, "Go back and look at what's happened in the past, because what I told you in the past is what's going to come to pass in the end. I'm telling you the end from the beginning.

"Look at the stuff I've done and said back here because that's what's over there." That's really what prophecy is about.

Mattthew 25:34: [34] Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: 

That's Genesis 1. From the foundation of the world, God's prophetic purpose that He's declared is the establishment of the kingdom, so when Jesus Christ comes back and sets His kingdom up, He's setting up a kingdom that's been prepared (talked about, prophesied about) not just from Abraham, but from the time He put the earth in play.

Genesis 1 was not written to, as I've put it for years, "put the monkey on the run." What I mean by that is it's not written for the purpose of disproving evolution.

Back in the 1960s there was a movement started by conservative fundamentalists called "Creation Science," and Whitcomb and Morris wrote books about it. Today, probably the biggest proponent of it is if you go down to the Ark in Kentucky and those folks with the Creation Museum.

What "creation scientists" have done is they've convinced evangelicals and fundamentalists that Genesis 1 is written for the purpose of disproving evolution. Now, I don't believe in evolution. Why not? What does the first verse say? "In the beginning God created." You don't need anything else. But they're going to prove science demonstrates these things and so they develop a necessity to use these texts to do their anti-evolution program.

That's not what these texts were written for. They do do that, but that's not their purpose. Genesis 1 is written to show you the purpose God has in His creation and how He's going to work out His purpose in His creation. He says, "The model for how I'm going to work is in Genesis 1."

The methodology of specifics with regard to man is in chapter 2. That's why it seems like it repeats itself because it picks up the sixth day work of man. What He's doing is He's declaring the end from the beginning.

By the way, if you don't put the fall of Satan between these first two verses in Genesis, where do you put it? Because you've only got six days and Genesis 1 has for each one of the six days a morning and evening and that's a 24-hour day in the text.

You have all the things Satan does, for example, in Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 4--all that planning that he does--and you've got to crunch that down into a very short time period.

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." He sets the heaven and the earth in order. Creation.

"And the earth was without form, and void." It's in disorder; it's in chaos. It's without form. No shape and no occupants.

"And darkness was upon the face of the deep." God had withdrawn Himself from His creation. Shrouded it with darkness.

"And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

"And God said, Let there be light." What He does in the first three days of creation is He takes the earth that's without form and He puts form to it. He puts some order to it.

On the first day He separates light from darkness. He brings His presence back into creation. On the second day, He separates heaven from earth. So, He puts order back into it.

The next three days He takes care of the emptiness by putting creatures into it. He puts the sun and the stars and the heaven's up here, and He puts the birds in the open heavens and animals in the sea and then on the sixth day He makes man, another creature.

So the first three days He gets rid of the disorder and the second three days He gets rid of the emptiness. So what you have in the six-day creation is He's rectifying what's in verse 2. You have a pattern.

There's order (creation, life), then there's chaos (darkness, disorder), and then there's a re-ordering and a re-creation. There's life, there's death and then there's resurrection, and there's that pattern of order, disorder and re-order--structure, chaos, restructure. Design, entropy and re-design. That's God telling you as you read it, "Here's how you're going to watch creation." The pattern, even in salvation, is there.