Tag: rest

In Beginning 02: Sky, Water, and Earth

Bill Serjak

This is a message from pastor and teacher Bill Serjak from the Genesis series “In Beginning”

Sky, Water, and Earth
Genesis 1:7-13

The Book of Genesis begins, “In the beginning,” but as I mentioned last week, there is no direct article in the original Hebrew, so literally it could be translated, In beginning. That difference might be significant if we think of this not as creating a time line, but as meaning that God is currently at the core or at beginning of all the universe and that our world is still being held together by God. That is not the way we are taught to think in our modern educational system: we are taught to think of the universe as eternal and infinite and not being held together by anything outside itself. It changes our conception of our world, our default thought mode of thinking, if we start to think, as the Bible says in Colos-sians, that the molecules of our world are constantly being held together by God. The world doesn’t exist on its own and would cease to exist, would melt down, if God didn’t keep holding it together. That new default mode of thinking means that God is eternal and He is all that exists eternally. Genesis tells us that God took chaos and brought order to the universe. He is now still bringing order to the universe and keeping it together. Without God, the universe would go back to its natural state of chaos. Everything in the world goes to chaos unless someone, something, or some group holds it together.
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In Beginning 03: Light and Darkness

Bill Serjak

This is a message from pastor and teacher Bill Serjak from the Genesis series “In Beginning”

Light and Darkness
Genesis 1:14-25

Some think a biblical contradiction is found in these verses. They say that if God created light on the first day that could not be since He did not create the sun until the fourth day. They think there could not be light without the sun. That comes from what I have said we often run into in reading the Genesis account of creation. We have been taught to think that the universe is infinite and eternal; so, whenever we imagine God, our minds automatically put Him somewhere in that infinite universe. But the Bible says He transcends the universe. We also think light must have a source within the universe. We don’t think of light as existing apart from a source like the sun or stars, which are also suns, or the moon, which reflects light. It would not occur to us that light can be created apart from a source. However, since Einstein it is possible for scientists to think of light existing apart from a source. He put together the basic building blocks of the universe in his famous equation E = mc2 , those building blocks were mass, energy, and light. Einstein’s theory of relativity is that everything is relative to the speed of light; nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
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In Beginning 06: Rest and Reflection

Bill Serjak

This is a message from pastor and teacher Bill Serjak from the Genesis series “In Beginning”

Rest and Reflection
Genesis 2:1-3

Sometimes I think I am like Merlin from the King Arthur tales. He lived his life backwards; he was born old and grew younger. I am definitely not growing younger, but sometimes I believe I think backwards. Some people have trouble believing what is in the first couple of chapters of Genesis because they don’t believe God could have made the universe in just six days. I also have trouble with the six days, I wonder why an infinite, eternal, all powerful God took so long to create the universe. I like the fact that God spoke the universe into being, but if I had been making up the Genesis story, I would have just had God speak, and, Bang!, the whole universe would have come into being. The light from stars millions of light years away would have suddenly been at the earth; everything would have come into being the moment He spoke.
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