Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: Revelation 4:11 | Date: September 26, 2021 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

Thank you. What a marvelous passage of Scripture. All right, as I say, I want to look at the doctrine of creation, and I thought Revelation chapter 4 would be a good starting point. This is a familiar scene, a scene of the exalted God on his throne, ruling over all of creation at various levels of angelic rulers around him, the kings with their crowns, bowing before God, acknowledging his supremacy and his rulership over all of creation.

Then at the end of the chapter—this, of course, is the setup for the dramatic scene of chapter five, which we won’t get to—but at the end of chapter four, they sing their praise in verse 8. They praise him for his holiness. And then in verse 11: “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power.” Why? “For you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.”

All right, I want to look at the doctrine of creation. Two main headings that we’ll consider: first of all, what the Bible teaches with regard to the God of creation, and then with regard to creation itself.

The God of Creation

This, I think, is a good place to start with that teaching with regard to the God of creation. Number one, God created all things. The doctrine of creation teaches us first, God created all things. That is, he created everything. That’s what verse 11 says: “For you created all things.” We have that in Genesis 1. Everything that is came as his work of creation. We have that repeated many times through the Scriptures: John chapter 1, with regard to the work of the Son, that he created everything that is, and there isn’t anything that is but that was created by him. And we have the same in the book of Acts; we have the same in Colossians chapter 1, Hebrews chapter 1.

So God created everything that is. So think big: think the galaxies, the solar systems, think of the planets, planetary motions. Think big, and then think small: atoms, cells, all of that on the molecular level. Think also in terms of the laws that govern what we call the natural world: the law of thermodynamics, the law of gravity, all of the scientific laws. God created them all. All of that is his doing. Everything that is, God created.

Now there’s some entailments to that that are very important theologically. And the first is the God—the creator and creation distinction. God and the creation are distinct. Now that’s easy for you. You’re not tempted to become a pantheist, I don’t think. And I don’t think you’re too tempted with dualism—that there are two eternal forces opposing each other always. But this establishes that. There are two categories. There’s God and everything else. And all the “everything else” is what God created. And there’s always maintained throughout the Scriptures this distinction between creator and creation.

Another entailment of this, “God created all things,” is that God was before creation. We saw that at some length early on in this series in Genesis chapter 1, verse 1. I think it was our first lesson. God was before creation. That’s implied here in chapter 4, verse 11 when he just says that you created all things. There’s God and there’s everything else. That implies he was before everything else. So before anything was, there was God.

That means then there are further entailments. God is eternal. And in fact, God is self-existing. We looked at the doctrine of aseity. God isn’t dependent on the created order. God is self-existing. He exists from himself. And the Bible then unpacks that—we’ve seen this just briefly in our way through Genesis. The Bible unpacks that in a couple of different ways. One, with regard to God’s triunity. God is one, and yet it is a complex unity. There is Father, Son, and Spirit who equally are the one God. And that gets into the doctrine of eternal generation and all of that that we’ve seen before.

The point of that is to say that God did not create because he was lonely. God is self-sufficient and eternal and self-existing forever, and forever content in the fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit. It’s a fascinating question to consider, and there has been some profound philosophical work on it and theological work on the question: why did God create? He didn’t need it. I’m not going to get into that, but the first answer is he didn’t create because he was lonely. God is forever self-existing, self-sufficient, and forever content in the fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit.

As you know, Islam is certainly not Trinitarian; it is Unitarian in that sense—one God. Islam is slow to speak of God as love. And the reason Islam is slow to speak of God as love is because love implies some kind of dependence on someone else. It might imply some kind of vulnerability on God’s part. In a Trinitarian monotheism, you don’t have that problem.

All right, so God is forever existing, self-existing, in his triunity. Another entailment, as I’ve said, is his aseity. God exists from himself. Acts chapter 17 is a wonderful statement of that. Paul says when he’s on Mars Hill: “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.” So there’s nothing in this world that you can give God. It’s already his. And if you have it, it’s because he loaned it to you. This is the God of aseity.

So God is not like those pagan gods who have certain needs, such that we have to appease those certain needs for the gods to make them happy. “You scratch my back, I scratch yours”—that’s very much the theology of paganism and Hinduism as well. Gods have certain needs and you have to kind of trade with them in that regard. You keep the God of “X” happy and that God will keep you well and keep you safe and that kind of thing. But our God is self-existing and self-sufficient. There’s nothing you can offer him by way of need. He doesn’t need anything. There’s nothing you have that you could bargain with, with this God.

Now one of the questions that comes up out of that is: how then can you be saved if you can’t offer him anything? Or, what can you offer this God by way of a bargaining chip to get him to save you? And the answer is you can’t offer him anything. If you’re going to be saved at all from this God, it’s going to come from his side. And that, of course, is the whole doctrine of grace.

All right. So God created all things. I’ve already said then, with regard to God’s aseity, we will say then: number one, God created all things. Number two, God created all things freely. And that’s what he says in verse 11 here: “By your will, they existed and were created.” What theologians have meant by that is a very important point that theologians have wanted to push to say that God created freely, and that is he didn’t create out of necessity. The implication here is that everything that exists, exists simply because he wanted it to, and that’s it.

All right, a third point about God with regard to creation is God created everything that is by speaking. That’s a prominent point all through Genesis chapter 1; God created by speaking. God said, “Let there be light.” God said, and God said—we read that I think ten times over in Genesis chapter 1.

Now there’s some entailments to that as well. If God created by speaking, we’re obviously speaking then of the omnipotence of God. It’s an amazing power that’s on display for us in Genesis chapter 1. He just speaks and things happen. But there’s another entailment of that that’s very important for the doctrine of creation as well. If God created everything by speaking, then creation was necessarily out of nothing. You are familiar with the Latin phrase that’s used in this regard: creation ex nihilo, out of nothing. God created everything with no preexisting materials. He just spoke and it was done. The Bible emphasizes that many times throughout.

Now many people have—I should mention this here just quickly—many people have argued that this doctrine of ex nihilo, God created out of nothing, is bound up in the Hebrew word bara, which means “to create.” And you’ll hear it argued, you’ll see it in print sometimes, that the word bara, to create, means to create out of nothing. That’s not quite what the Hebrew word means. The Hebrew word just means “to create.” We get the “out of nothing” from the surrounding circumstances of it all.

Now, having said that, Moses does use that word bara, create, very sparingly in the Genesis narrative. And at each point that he uses it, it’s something new that’s coming into existence. It’s man, or it’s life, or something like that—a divine intervention. And it’s always God who is the subject in the use of it. But the doctrine of creation out of nothing does not depend on the meaning of the Hebrew word. That’s not what the Hebrew word means per se, even if it is some of the implications of how it’s used in the Scriptures.

The doctrine of creation out of nothing, ex nihilo, is dependent simply on biblical statement: God created by speaking. He said, “Let there be,” and there was. And of course the biblical writers pick up on that. I’ll give you some samples. Psalm 33, verses 6 and 9: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made and by the breath of his mouth all their hosts… for he spoke and it came to be. He commanded and it stood firm.” That was the ancient understanding of Genesis 1; it’s clearly the biblical writers’ understanding.

John picks that up. John chapter 1, verses 1 to 3. He picks it up in the same way. There was nothing made that exists that wasn’t made by God himself, God the Son. If you’re taking notes and you’d like, you can jot down Romans 4:17: “God who calls into existence the things that do not exist.” That’s creation out of nothing. Hebrews chapter 11, verse 3, very famously: “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God so that what is seen was not made of things that are visible.” He did not use preexisting materials.

So before Genesis 1:1, there’s God and there’s nothing else, just God and his triune being. And then he speaks. And then we have the created order. Matter then is not eternal. God is eternal. Scientists used to conjecture about that, especially in the early days of the evolutionary theory, positing the eternity of matter. Since the Hubble telescope, they can’t believe that anymore. There is no eternity of matter. God is eternal. Everything else had a beginning, and it begins with God speaking.

Now that’s just of fundamental importance in the Scriptures to maintain the creator-creature distinction. If creation was not out of nothing, then you’re left with some kind of dualism, maybe some kind of pantheism. But everything that exists owes its being to God. Now there’s been an objection—and you might hear it once in a while because it’s given popularly—an objection that’s raised at this point. And there’s a Latin sentence that says it, but in English it translates: “Nothing can come into being out of nothing.” In other words, nothing can create nothing. Nothing can’t do anything because it’s nothing.

And so it’s often been objected that this creation out of nothing doctrine is a self-contradiction; it’s philosophically unsound. But it’s important to realize that we’re not saying here that creation came out of nothing. We agree that nothing can come without sufficient cause. What we’re claiming is that the cause is God.

All right, number four. God continues to uphold and sustain his creation. Hebrews chapter 1, in verse 3, is the famous verse in this regard, with regard to the Son who upholds the world by the word of his power. We have it in Romans chapter 11 in that wonderful doxology at the end of the chapter: “From him and through him and to him are all things.” So God created everything that is, and God continues to uphold and sustain his created order. God is the governor of his created order.

Now how is that important? Well, one, it means that the universe is not what we call an open universe. An open universe is governed by the whims of spiritual forces, or governed by fate, or something like that. It’s not an open universe. It’s not governed by random things that might happen. But neither is the universe a closed universe that is governed simply by naturalistic mechanisms, whether they’re biological or otherwise—that it’s a closed system and what you cannot see in the scientific lab and demonstrate scientifically, that’s all there is. That’s a closed system.

The Bible doesn’t allow either an open system for the universe or a closed universe. What the Bible teaches is a governed universe. The God who created it governs it and rules over all of it. That then brings into the equation the whole possibility of miracles. In a biblical view, miracles are no problem at all, philosophically or theologically. We have God who governs it and he—the one who put the natural laws in place and governs the world by those—governs those laws himself and can suspend them and make exceptional cases anytime he wants. Once we say, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” and we say God upholds the world by the word of his power, miracles are easy. The whole question is simple.

All right, number five. As creator and sustainer, God is Lord over all. We have that in Revelation 4, verse 11, where they sing praise to God. Here’s all of creation gathering around the throne, even with all the levels of spiritual authorities and the ranks of angels and whatever. All of creation bowing before the God of heaven, singing his praise: “You are worthy because all the rest of us are your creation.” And they recognize that they are subject to him and so they bow before him.

So there are some entailments to that as well. Worship is one; he’s worthy of our praise. Ethics is another; this God who made us has rights over us. He governs over us. He has the right to command and to tell us how to behave and what to do, to define what is right and what is wrong. All of that’s evident in Genesis 1 and 2. God creates man, he puts him in a garden, tells him to do this and to do that, tells him not to do the other. God has rights over his creation. He is Lord over all.

And then last under this category, what is the doctrine of creation with regard to God? God displays his glory in creation. This is a wonderful theme. It’s a familiar one to you: Psalm 19 famously, Romans chapter 1 as well. The heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament shows his handiwork, and everywhere it’s evident, and everywhere there’s people, they can understand it. God declares in his very creative work something of his glory. So we see something of God’s power, God’s wisdom. We see God’s display of his might in the created order. And that, Paul argues in Romans chapter 1, is self-evident to every creature. We recognize intuitively that there’s a God who created everything that is, and that there’s a God who created us, and that we are responsible to him.

Creation Itself

All right, so we’re looking at the doctrine of creation. What does the Bible teach about creation? Number one, the God of creation. Now let’s spend some time talking about the creation itself. What was the original creation like? A few things here.

Number one, creation was complete. Creation was complete. Genesis 2 emphasizes that. God finished the work that he had created and so he rested. That’s it. It’s done. Exodus chapter 20, verse 11 echoes that. In six days he made all that is. We find it in Hebrews chapter 4 as well. His works were finished from the foundation of the world and so he ceased from his work. Creation was complete. No ongoing or continuous creation.

Number two, creation was perfect. We read it several times over in Genesis 1 in the narrative: “and God saw that it was good.” That’s God’s opinion of the original creation. And then we find him in chapter 2, verses 1 to 3 of Genesis, taking his own Sabbath, resting and admiring the work that he had done. It was “very good.” And sort of taking, what do you say, pride or joy in the work of his hands—creation was perfect. So it was just as it was planned, it was impressive, it was beautiful, it was balanced, it was symmetrical, it was orderly—everything functioning the way it was intended to function. It was majestic in many ways, and it testifies to the God who made it.

So the essential goodness of the original creation—now that actually becomes important in theological debates in the history of the church. The one you’re not tempted with is old and it’s gone, but in the early centuries of the church, they had to battle against Gnosticism, which was influenced by Platonism. The whole idea that there’s spirit and there’s matter in this dualistic thought, but that influenced some Christian-esque kind of thought. And so what is spiritual is what is good; what is material is evil. And so the ultimate goal of salvation is to be removed from the material to the spiritual.

And Christian theologians had to come along and say, no, there’s nothing wrong with what is material; God created it good. And in fact, the goal of creation, the goal of history, is not just to bring us salvation to our souls, but to give a full restoration of all of the created order.

Yeah, Alan.

“Yeah. Speak up a little. I was sitting in a biblical counseling seminar one time, and the lecturer was going on and on about, really, our hope is just that—it’s just all spiritual. And I showed him a slide later, and I said, ‘You’re basically telling everybody you’re counseling that this world sucks and it’s terrible, and there’s no goodness or joy or happiness, and everything is to come later.’ And he was really like—that was really what his thought process was. I said, ‘That’s not what the Bible teaches at all.’ I said, ‘It’s Gnosticism. They think that this material world has no goodness to it.’ And he was kind of taken aback and kind of thought that he would change the way he was teaching it. But I’m like, we’re still teaching this stuff.”

Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. Christians tend to talk like that as well. We talk about heaven as our ultimate goal. Actually, the ultimate goal is the new heavens and new earth. And actually a new problem with this, related to this, is the doctrine called Preterism. Some of you’ve read it and heard of it. You’ve heard me talk about it, where it reinterprets prophecy in terms of everything being fulfilled, having been fulfilled back in AD 70 or whatever. And so all future hope, if there’s any, according to which Preterist you speak to, is to be understood in spiritual terms. There’s not going to be a resurrection of the body. There’s not going to be a redoing of the created order.

And all of that misses the essential goodness of creation and that God has created it good and intends in his saving plan to restore all of the created order, including the human body. So we are restored body and soul. Creation was perfect. Creation is good.

All right, what was the creation like? Number one, it was complete. Number two, it was perfect. Number three, creation of living things was according to kind, according to its kind. We read that some ten times over in Genesis chapter 1 about plants and animals. For instance, Genesis 1, verse 11: “God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind on the earth,’ and it was so.”

Genesis—I’ll just take one more—Genesis 1:24: “God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures, each according to their kind, livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth, according to their kinds.'” Okay, we have that several times over in Genesis chapter 1, this teaching of the fixity of kinds in nature.

Now, I don’t know how to define that, whether it’s genus or species or how that works, and it certainly allows for the development of subspecies and all of that. We recognize all of that. But it remains true that you cannot cross a horse and an elephant, and so on. There’s a fixity of kinds, and in fact, this has been one of the hurdles, one of the difficulties for the whole teaching of evolution. The fossil record is no friend to the evolutionary theories because everywhere in the fossil record, what we have is the fixity of kinds. We have no transitional forms, no evolution of forms from one kind to another. Again, that allows for variations within the kinds and all of that, but the basic kinds, Genesis tells us, were fixed at creation. And of course, science affirms that everywhere except when they come to the doctrine of evolution. But that’s another discussion that we’ll have in a few weeks.

Number four. All right, so we have: what was the original creation like? Creation was complete, creation was perfect, creation was according to kind, and number four, creation necessarily entailed a superficial appearance of age. I’ll take a minute with this. Creation necessarily entailed a superficial appearance of age. So Adam and Eve were created as mature adults. It’s necessarily the case if you’re going to have creation. Even if they were made babies, where would the babies come from? There’s some appearance of history, some appearance of age, necessarily, if you’re going to have creation at all.

Same with the animals. And this settles the age-old debate: which came first, the chicken or the egg? It was the chicken. I had some Chick-fil-A chicken for breakfast recently with some eggs. And I told Kim, I just was confused; I didn’t know which to eat first. But you have that—if you’re going to have creation, you’re necessarily going to have some superficial appearance of age. First trees were created mature. Unless you can show that growth rings in the trees are necessary to the life somehow, those first trees didn’t have growth rings. There’s a superficial appearance of age that’s necessary to any doctrine of creation. Even if they grew from seeds, the seeds themselves have an appearance of age. Where’d the seeds come from? You keep pushing back and you’re left with this: if you have creation, you’re going to have a superficial appearance of age of some kind.

And so the entire universe then is created with some appearance of age that it didn’t have. It wasn’t there, and then it was. Creation’s impossible without it. So for example, when Jesus feeds the five thousand with a boy’s lunch—takes five loaves, two fishes, feeds a multitude. And their people were eating fish that had never been wet. They’re eating bread that had never grown from grain. Same when Jesus turned the water into wine; it had never grown on a vine. It’s a superficial appearance of age. Anytime you have creation, you’re left with that.

Now, this becomes important in some of this idea of a mature, original creation. It doesn’t answer finally any questions about the age of the earth or anything like that. But it does help answer some of the arguments that are given one way or the other. So some “old earthers” will argue, well, it takes so long—and they’ll give you the number of years, light years it takes for the light of the sun to reach the earth. And if on a “young earth” model, you have the light reaching before that, then they argue God is being deceptive. And it’s got a history that it didn’t have.

And the answer is, of course, whether there’s a young earth or an old earth, that argument has no teeth. God creates with a superficial appearance of age. If he can create the sun, he can create the light beam. It just doesn’t answer the question entirely. If we’re going to have a tree, for example, without growth rings, we can have a sun and a sunbeam or starlight without a long history behind it.

Now I should make some distinction there, and that is there might be a difference between an appearance of age and an appearance of history. For instance, some of the people at the Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute here in Hatfield—Bob Newman has done a lot of this kind of work—where they have tried to show that certain coral reefs or whatever have an appearance not just of age but of a history that must have happened for it to be like it is.

One of the studies I remember reading was layers of forest. Some part of the world, I forget where it was, but you have layers of forest, and you have so many layers of forest. And you have a layer of forest, and then it was burned. You have a forest fire, and it’s burned. And then you have an overgrowth. And then after so many hundreds of years or thousands, whatever it is, you’ve got a burnt forest again, and then you have growth again, and you’re able to detect these layers of forest. You add them all up, and it comes to more than the young earth view of 6,000 years. And so, well, I don’t know how to argue with that. That is an appearance of history, not just an appearance of age. That doesn’t demonstrate anything near the millions of years that evolutionists want. But I think this is an important factor to remember: that creation was made with a superficial appearance of age. And I think, as I say, it doesn’t answer the question of the age of the earth; it does answer some of the arguments that are used in that regard.

Number five. And here I think we’ll take the rest of our time. And here’s sort of a biblical theology of creation.

Creation Anticipates the Eternal State

Creation anticipates the eternal state. You’ve heard me use the word “protology”—that the original anticipates the final. And we have hints in the creation record that are picked up throughout the biblical writings pointing toward the perfection that will come in the end, in the new heavens and the new earth. And we have that virtually from the beginning.

The creation as we have it now is fallen and it’s cursed. Now what effect that has on the appearance of the earth and the created order, I don’t know. It’s beyond my ability to say. Scientists have worked with that; that’s not my field. But the created order that we have now is fallen and it’s under a curse. There’s death, there’s disorder on every level. There’s thorns, the resistance of the created order against humanity, there’s storms.

Humanity itself is out of sorts with God. And because humanity itself is out of sorts with God, we read in Genesis 3, all the created order is out of sorts and in turmoil. Paul picks that up in Romans chapter 8, that the created order as it is, is full of vanity and waiting for its redemption with the sons of God.

But what we find then, beginning with the prophets—we find it in the Psalms as well—is an anticipation of a coming new creation when everything will be made right again. You find it described poetically in the Psalms and in the prophets sometimes of the hills leaping, and the hills and the vineyards bringing forth this abundance of grapes and harvest every month sometimes, and that kind of thing, the trees clapping in the fields, dancing, and the new creation theme that comes. And we find that commonly in the prophets—that this fallen created order is not the permanent situation, but that the initial creation of perfection is what we will see again.

Now, in fact, what we find in the book of Revelation is we’re back to Eden and beyond. It’s even better than that. But there is this new creation theme that runs throughout the Scriptures. That creation was paradise, perfection; we had paradise lost, and there’s this great hope that it will all be regained again. You have some promises in the prophets that the land—Israel—will be restored to the land. And then sometimes you find the land promises themselves; they seem to expand and it entails the whole earth and not just Israel, but all the nations.

You have this growing promise of a new creation that’s coming. And this original creation that we read of in Genesis serves as the model of the coming creation, the new creation that will come. One of the famous passages of that is Isaiah chapter 65 and 66, where God says, “Behold, I create a new heavens and a new earth.”

I’ll read Amos chapter 9, verse 13 here: “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when the plowman shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed. The mountains shall drip with sweet wine and all the hills will flow with it.” We have that in Isaiah 65, Isaiah 66. A marvelous portrayal of it in Ezekiel 47, Joel chapter 3, Romans 8 talks about it, 2 Peter chapter 3 talks about it—this new heaven and new earth that’s coming. That’s the hope that the original perfection will be back.

I think that is part of the significance of the miracles of Jesus, that you have this in-breaking of the new creation. He stills the storm. He raises the dead. He turns water into wine. He heals the sick. And all of this disorderedness of creation is being undone in Jesus’ miracles. And here we have a flash of what it will be like in the eternal state, in the new heaven and the new earth.

I think it’s interesting and significant also that when we come to the cross where Jesus is crucified, I think it’s entirely significant that what he has on his head is a crown of thorns. The very symbol of the curse is his, and here’s the turnaround point. And so then we come to his resurrection and he enters the age to come, and there’s the defeat of death and the defeat of the curse, and Jesus enters the new creation himself. As we saw last Sunday morning service, he takes us with him into the new creation. And that’s why Jesus is referred to as the firstborn from the dead, the beginning of God’s new creation.

And then we come to the epistles and we have this—we actually have hints of it in the gospels, particularly in the gospel of John. More fully than in the epistles, we have this wonderful teaching that we have now being joined to Christ in his resurrection into the new creation. We have begun to experience the new creation. Whomever may be in Christ, he’s a new creation. We’ve entered the new creation already ahead of time.

And so there’s this “now and not yet.” It’s still coming and it still will come in full. But already we’ve entered the new creation in Christ. And we sense that. We sense it in our own experience. But we will experience it in full. There’s more of it to come and Paul picks it up in Romans chapter 8. For example, we groan in this body waiting for the adoption, that is the redemption of the body. All of the created order groaning with travail, waiting for the better day. And it’s all caught up with man in his fallen state. And when man’s condition is finally redeemed fully, then the created order will be restored as well. We find passages back to the prophets of the lion lying down with the lamb and so on—a new creation has come.

And all of that climaxes in the book of Revelation, of course, where we have the “coming of God” theme, the tale of two cities, Babylon and Jerusalem. And we have the coming of the city of God, or the coming to earth and so on. I get to chapters 21 and 22 of Revelation and there’s that whole theme of “back to Eden and beyond.” There’s the river flowing from the throne, and there’s no more curse, and there’s no more sin, and there’s no more crying, and you have the tree of life on the banks of the river bearing its fruit every month in Revelation. All of this is “back to Eden” thinking, picking up this new creation theme.

Let me read you some of the passage from that. If you’d like to follow along, Revelation chapter 21, verses 1 and following. Revelation 21, verse 1: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with men. And he will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore. For the former things have passed away.’ And he who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.'”

If you want to jump down to chapter 22, verse 1: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. Also on either side of the river, the tree of life with its 12 kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face. His name will be on their foreheads, and night will be no more, and they will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.”

And so we have this back to Eden and beyond, that creation—creation fallen, now creation restored, and the new creation. And the New Testament perspective of all of that is, yes, that is coming, but it is something that we in measure have already begun to experience, joined with Christ in his resurrection to the age to come. This radical transformation of who we are in Christ is itself an anticipation of the fullness of that to come in the eternal state.

All right, I wanted to give just a broad overview of a doctrine of creation within my perspective. Next time we will look at the subject everybody wants to hear about, and that is the meaning of days in creation.

All right, any questions?