God's Long Day of Rest

Here's a follow-up to a message I gave in my church, Sunday, about Genesis 1. I approached the text not as scientific or historic literature, but as worship literature. I believe there are at least two reasons we have this revelation from God. God wants us to know that...

1. God is in relationship with all of creation.

- God rules over the creation

- God gives freedom to the creation to function and develop in obedience and worship.

Therefore: we must view all of nature as God’s creation, created for God’s glory, and give respect to all of creation.

It asserts God’s rule – and then the completion of God’s work. (but it does not tell us how God did it – it leaves the door open to scientific discovery)

2. God is in a special relationship with humanity – we are created in God’s image (the Imago Dei)

- God relates to us in grace

- We respond by faith and worship.

Therefore, let us explore our relationship - and live out our relationship - with God as it was intended to be in the Garden.

We looked at the days of creation and noticed that only one of the days fails to end with the phrase: "and evening passed and morning came, marking the ___th day. The description of Day 7 - God's day of rest - does not end with that familiar phrase. Why? Some scholars believe the reason is that God is still living in that Day 7 rest. In other words, there is no more creation needed. We become distracted from the main message of Genesis if we get involved in debates about creationism vs. evolution or Scripture vs. science. Have said that, there is much we can marvel about in seeing how the Scripture still provides truth about creation that science continually enlarges on and affirms. The following is an example of that in an article by Dr. Fuz Rana that shows that all 70 phyla that we know of today burst on to the scene during a relatively brief period of time, which scientists call the "Cambrian age." (or what the Bible calls "Day 6") Incredibly, no new phyla are found to come into existence after the Cambrian Period.

Cambrian Flash, By Fuz Rana

From two independent teams of paleontologists working in Yunnan, China, comes powerful support for the creation model and, at the same time comes further serious challenge to the naturalistic model for the origin of animals.

Fossils previously found in Yunnan province (at sites discovered nearly 100 years ago) and in the Burgess Shale deposits of the Canadian Rockies tell us that all animal phyla (more than 70) ever to exist in Earth’s history appeared “at once” about 540 million years ago. (Some 40 phyla have since disappeared and not a single new one has appeared.) This “burst” of life is called the Cambrian Explosion, and the “at once” refers to an extremely narrow window of geologic time (~5-10 million years).3, 4 The latest reports from the Chinese sites narrows this window to less than 3 million years.

Read the whole article here:

http://www.reasons.org/resources/connections/2000v2n1/index.shtml#cambrian_flash