Hebrews Chapter Eleven, How The World Was Made

 

Let’s recall the first two laws of thermodynamics. Law number one is the conservation of energy law. It states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, only altered in form. The second law is the law of increasing entropy; it states that a closed system will progress (or regress?) from a highly organized to an increasingly disorganized state.

The laws, when taken together, paint a universal picture that suggests our current universe has the same quantity of energy it has always possessed, while the quality of said energy deteriorates until its usefulness is depleted. What can this teach us? The present universe did not spring into being of itself. Energy/mass cannot be created or destroyed, merely changed. That is, unless an external source (that is, outside our spatially defined universe) imbues it. Also, unlike the theory of Darwinian Evolution, the universe and the species that people it are not advancing from lesser to greater states, but rather the opposite. This seems to rule out the eternal universe theory, since entropy would have made the universe a cosmic graveyard by this point, were it so.

 

Instead, we read, “by whom (Christ) also he made the worlds…upholding all things by the word of his power,” Hebrews 1:2, 3 KJV. The same Greek word, “aion,” is employed here for “worlds.” It suggests material creation in its fullness, including time, one means by which the creation is measured. The Father made all of creation through Jesus Christ. John informs us, “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made,” John 1:3, KJV. Paul adds, “For everything was created by Him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible…all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and by Him all things hold together,” Colossians 1:16, 17, HCSB.

 

Paul tells us by Christ all things hold together. The author of Hebrews writes that Christ upholds all things by the word of His power, like a proverbial Atlas with creation settled on His shoulders. To summarize, Genesis gives the account of God literally speaking creation into being in six twenty-four hour periods, beginning with light (energy) and ending with mankind (Adam and Eve). These events, and the order of their creation are rather out of order when contrasted with the Day-Age theory, and utterly contrary to evolution properly explained. But the writer links our understanding of God’s creative power to order the universe with a “so that,” we may know that nothing visible or material emerged from something previously made.  The term used sometimes is ex nihilo. It is translated, “out of nothing, nothing is produced,” or, “nothing comes from nothing.”

 

When we reason that the universe in general and humanity in particular are the product (or more appropriately, by-product) of time and chance coupled with other mechanisms such as mutations, they are rejecting the clear witness of the natural order, which even Richard Dawkins admits has the appearance of purposeful design. When man rejects the evidence of divinity in nature and attributes to nature its own inherent divinity, “they are without excuse,” Romans 1:20. Yes, naturalism elevates the creation to deity and attributes the guiding laws that govern it as the utterances of Darwin’s god, evolution. They fall under the injunction of Paul’s warning for such men, that they are, “always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth,” 2 Timothy 3:7. This verse is particularly apropos for those who espouse Theistic Evolution, the Day-Age Theory, the Gap Theory, and every other absurd amalgamation of Darwin and Scripture in a vain and unnecessary effort to save the Bible from its humiliatingly poor explanation of origins. Like Daniel’s iron and clay, the two do not mix, and will break apart at the first examination.

 

If we are true Christians, then our cry must be, and always should be Sola Scriptura. Genesis, as opposed to pagan creation myths, such as the Babylonian Enuma Elish, is simple and concise. It is not embellished or replete with the bizarre. It begins with God, and not the universe. When we read, “In the beginning,” it means the beginning of the “worlds,” we are currently considering, because God by His very nature is immortal and has no beginning. If this seems to explain away ultimate origins, the alternative, an eternal universe, is already demonstrably false by the scientific principles of the laws of thermodynamics. Man cannot explain God in terms of His eternal, pre-existing nature. We are beings of time, spirits in a house of flesh with a clearly determined beginning. Not so with our Creator. Be that as it may, the writer wants his Jewish audience to understand that God created all things by His word, and these things, contrary to the primordial creation myths of a cosmic sea from which existence sprang, were created ex nihilo.