Archive for August, 2011

Genesis 1:16 God is Immense and Omniscient

Posted in Creation with tags , , , , , on August 25, 2011 by paulthepoke

Genesis 1:16b He made the stars also.

How big is the universe? What is the scale of the universe? Is it round or flat or some other shape? Is the universe finite or infinite? The reality of the situation is we don’t know for sure. What we think we know is what we can observe. Tom Murphy (January of 2006) does provide some points of comparison in a paper he has written. Consider these points.

1)      The moon is 1.25 light seconds from earth.

2)      The sun is about 8 light minutes from earth.

3)      Jupiter is about 40 light minutes from sun.

4)      Pluto is about 5.5 light hours from the sun.

5)      The center of the Milky Way is about 25,000 light years away.

6)      The galaxy Andromeda is about 2,000,000 light years away.

7)      The edge of the visible universe is about 13,700,000,000 light years away.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/~tmurphy/phys10/universe.pdf

This is the universe God has created. Jeremiah 23:24 “Can a man hide himself in hiding places so I do not see him?” declares the LORD. “Do I not fill the heavens and the earth?” declares the LORD. If we were capable of going to Andromeda, God is there. If we were to hide anywhere in the Milky Way, God is there. God is ridiculously immense and He is everywhere. He is omnipresent. There is no place in the universe or on Earth where God is not. It is impossible to hide from God.

2 Chronicles 2:6 “But who is able to build a house for Him, for the heavens and the highest heavens cannot contain Him? So who am I, that I should build a house for Him, except to burn incense before Him? This same concept is essentially restated in 1 Kings 8:27.

Psalm 139:7-12 Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the dawn, if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, even there Your hand will lead me, and Your right hand will lay hold of me. If I say, “Surely the darkness will overwhelm me, and the light around me will be night,” Even the darkness is not dark to You, and the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to You.

Regardless of the darkness of space, God is there and He can find us.

Framework of study provided by Systematic Theology, The Doctrine of God, Chester McCalley

http://wordoftruthkc.org/

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Genesis 1:16b God is Omniscient

Posted in Creation with tags , , , , on August 18, 2011 by paulthepoke

Genesis 1:16b He made the stars also.

Psalms 147:4-5 He counts the number of the stars; He gives names to all of them. Great is our Lord and abundant in strength; His understanding is infinite.

God is omniscient. God knows all things completely, including past, present, future, actual, and possible. -Chester McCalley

God knows all of us personally and in great detail. His omniscience encompasses many aspects of our lives and all other topics. He knows about all of us before we were born to the number of days appointed in our lives. The following examples in Psalm 139 demonstrate the depth of God’s knowledge as it relates to our individual lives.

Psalms 139:13 For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb. The same concept of being known to God before conception is noted in regards to the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah 1:5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

Psalms 139:2-4 You know when I sit down and when I rise up; You understand my thought from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down, and are intimately acquainted with all my ways. Even before there is a word on my tongue, Behold, O LORD, You know it all. God knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows every little detail of our lives, all 7 billion of us (population estimate as of October 2011).

Psalm 139:6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is too high, I cannot attain to it.

Psalm 139:17 How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How vast is the sum of them!

God knows all things as it relates to time. His knowledge extends across all aspects of time: past, present, and future.

Past-Acts 15:18 SAYS THE LORD, WHO MAKES THESE THINGS KNOWN FROM LONG AGO.

Present-Psalm 33:13 The LORD looks from heaven; He sees all the sons of men;

Future-Isaiah 42:9 “Behold, the former things have come to pass, Now I declare new things; Before they spring forth I proclaim them to you.”

Hypothetical-Matthew 11:23 And you people of Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? No, you will be brought down to the place of the dead. For if the miracles I did for you had been done in Sodom, it would still be here today.

There are no secrets with God. Psalm 90:8 You have placed our iniquities before You, our secret sins in the light of Your presence.

Framework of study provided by Systematic Theology, The Doctrine of God, Chester McCalley

http://wordoftruthkc.org/

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Genesis 1:16-19 Here Comes the Sun

Posted in Creation with tags , , , , , , , on August 13, 2011 by paulthepoke

Genesis 1:16-19 God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also. God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good. There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.

Notice the repetition of the purpose of these two lights. The greater light is to govern the day. This is restated two times in the verses above. The lesser light is to govern the night. This is restated two times in the verses above. According to Strong’s Concordance, the idea and definition of “govern” is as follows. The Hebrew word is “memshalah”. It means: rule, dominion, realm, domain.

The sun and the moon are to provide light on the earth as noted in the verses above. This is a restatement of Genesis 1:15 “and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so.

The sun and the moon are to separate light from dark as noted in the verses above. This is a restatement of Genesis 1:14 Then God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night…

The Psalmist confirms these concepts and purposes of the sun and moon in Psalm 136:8-9 The sun to rule by day, for His lovingkindness is everlasting, the moon and stars to rule by night, for His lovingkindness is everlasting.

God is very clear about the intent and purpose of the creation of these heavenly bodies.

Isaiah 40:26 Lift up your eyes on high and see who has created these stars, the One who leads forth their host by number, He calls them all by name; because of the greatness of His might and the strength of His power, not one of them is missing.

As of 2010, Universe Today and European Space Agency have attempted to estimate the number of stars in the universe. The Milky Way Galaxy has approximately 200 billion stars. The average galaxy contains between 1011 and 1012 stars. Astronomers estimate there are approximately 100 billion to 1 trillion (10% variance at best) galaxies in the universe. When the number of galaxies is multiplied by the number of stars per galaxy, you get between 1022 and 1024 stars in the universe. Remember, this is the best estimate of man based on what he can observe. There are likely more.

Consider Isaiah 40:26 from a semantic perspective. Various linguistic estimates account for one million words in the English language. Think of the vocabulary of God to name ALL of these stars. All stars are accounted and personally named. Our vocabulary is ridiculously limited in comparison. This number of stars created and noted makes Matthew 10:30 a walk in the park from a counting perspective.

Matthew 10:30 But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. –Jesus

All of this is “good” or “towb” in the Hebrew. It is defined in Strong’s Concordance as: good, pleasant, agreeable (to the senses); pleasant (to the higher nature); rich, valuable in estimation; appropriate, becoming.

We should know the drill, the evening is the start of the day. There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.

 

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Genesis 1:14-15 Lights

Posted in Creation with tags , , , , , , , on August 4, 2011 by paulthepoke

Genesis 1:14-15 Then God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate 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 expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so.

Here we go again, another day and another difference in how God created and man postulates over the creation. The Big Bang says an explosion took place approximately 15 billion years ago. Biblical genealogies back to Adam calculate the earth is less than 10,000 years old.

Science says the sun was present before the earth. God spoke the earth into existence on the first day and the sun was created on the fourth day.

Science says that the sun was present before other light on the earth. God says there was light which was created on day one other than the sun. This light separated day from night.

Science says the stars were before the earth. God says the stars were created on day four after the creation of the earth on day one.

Science says that the earth was created at the same time as the other planets. God says the earth was created first and the other planets were created later on day four. Observations and distinctions are from www.answersingenesis.org .

God does draw a distinction from the “light” created on day one and “lights” created on day four. The following is an excerpt from Dr. Henry Morris’ Defender Bible, www.icr.org

On the first day, God had said: “Let there be light” (Hebrew or). Now He says: “Let there be lights” (ma-or). Light energy was activated first, but now great masses of material (part of the “earth” elements created on the first day) were gathered together in one of the firmaments, or spaces, of the cosmos–the space beyond the waters above the space adjacent to the earth. These great bodies were set burning in complex chemical and nuclear reactions, to serve henceforth as “light-givers” for the earth.

Dr. Morris, www.icr.org , also has this observation regarding the “seasons”.

The establishment of “seasons” (and these were not simply religious seasons, but actual climatological seasons) indicates that the earth was formed with an axial inclination from the beginning, for this is the basic cause of its seasons.

God’s word is radically different than the opinion and imagination of man. Isaiah 55:8 “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD.

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