Who Are We and How Did We Get Here?

Less than a century ago most persons living
within Western culture found and believed the answer to how the world came to be in the first words of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Today their descendants turn more and more to encyclopedias or other books on universal knowledge. In place of God they find a cloud of gas, and in place of a well-organized universe they find a blob of mud. Instead of beginning with the Spirit of God, the new story begins with inanimate matter which, through some blind force inherent in the material substance, brought the world to its present state during the course of billions of years.

Many in the subsequent, new generations turned from the Bible to the scientist for the answer to the nagging question about the origin of the universe.

Genesis and Science

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Much of twenty-first-century culture is convinced that contemporary scientific thought is fundamentally
incompatible with the opening chapters of Genesis.

Richard Dawkins and other atheists comprise what is now sometimes called the new atheism. All the books of the new atheism are based on the assumption of philosophical materialism: all that exists is matter, energy, space, and time, nothing else. So anything that claims to go beyond that (i.e. God and the Bible), belong to some domain that cannot be reduced to these realities so it must be dismissed, even laughed at as superstition.

Even if you believe the universe developed out of a big bang that took place fifteen billion years ago from an vast amount of condensed mass and became our universe, there is an obvious question to ask.
“Where did that highly condensed material come from?”

What difference does all this make—whether God made it all or it exploded out of nothing?

It is important because the question of how the world and man came into being is closely related to one’s entire world view.

Most people in the Western world presupposed that God exists and that He knows everything. All of of our knowledge must come to us in some sense by God disclosing what He knows. For example, He discloses
it in nature, and by His Spirit, and in the Bible.

This is how we understood how the world came to be and where we came from. It all began with God.
Everything was understood as all started with God, when facing and solving any problem.

The Process Has Changed

The first half of the 1600s witnessed the rise of a new way of thinking. Descartes proposed: “I think, therefore, I am.” With this new way of thinking, many people no longer even begin with God when dealing with any moral issue. They do not begin with God and understanding what He discloses. Instead people now begin with me, which means “I” start evaluating not only the world around me, but also morals and history. Now, I judge God in such a way that God now becomes, at most, something I inject. He is no longer seen as the place to begin.

That changes everything.

That means if I begin with me, then I get to decide what is good or bad, right or wrong. I become God. That is exactly what the New Age movement advocates.

It means I no longer look to the Bible or any other source outside of myself as a basis to make my decisions: it begins and ends with me, man.

Anti-Christian critics dismiss with contempt any notion that a Bible text has a “plain sense” or a fixed meaning. Because language cannot communicate reality perfectly, notions such as the fixed meaning of a text are seen as harmful.

In the Beginning, God

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God

God simply is. The Bible does not begin with a long set of arguments to prove the existence of God.
It does not begin with a bottom-up approach.

If human beings are the test of everything, then we sit back and judge whether it is likely that God exists.
We evaluate the evidence and come out with a certain probability that perhaps a god of some sort or another exists. We become the judges of God.

The Bible begins simply, but dramatically: “In the beginning God.” What we believe concerning that phrase will affect every decision we make. This belief or disbelief affects the very process of our decision making.

As we are deciding what is right and wrong, where do we begin? Do we begin with “me, and what I want” or do we begin with God, His Word and what He says?

God is Real. He is There.
Learn about Him & Go to Him.