THERE’S ONLY ONE CREATOR

THERE’S ONLY ONE CREATOR by Pastor Shah, Clearview, Henderson

Nehemiah 9:1-6  1 Now on the twenty-fourth day of this month the children of Israel were assembled with fasting, in sackcloth, and with dust on their heads. 2 Then those of Israelite lineage separated themselves from all foreigners; and they stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers. 3 And they stood up in their place and read from the Book of the Law of the Lord their God for one–fourth of the day; and for another fourth they confessed and worshiped the Lord their God…. now verse 5 “Stand up and bless the Lord your God
Forever and ever! “Blessed be Your glorious name,
Which is exalted above all blessing and praise! 6 You alone are the Lord;
You have made heaven,
The heaven of heavens, with all their host,
The earth and everything on it,
The seas and all that is in them,
And You preserve them all.
The host of heaven worships You.

Overall Background:  In Nehemiah 9 the Jewish people were repenting but they were not repenting unto salvation. They were already saved. They were repenting for all the wrong beliefs they had learned from their Gentile neighbors. God had called the people of Israel to be a light in the dark world – to influence their Gentile neighbors with the truth. Instead, they had allowed their Gentile neighbors to influence them – to influence them in what they believed about God, His World, His Word, and His Ways with His people. Now that they were saved, they were turning away from all their false beliefs and affirming all the true beliefs about God and His Word.

Same thing happens to us today – once we are saved, the Holy Spirit takes us through a process of reprogramming our mind. We are born with a defective chip. He begins by exposing all the wrong beliefs that we have accumulated from the world—wrong beliefs about God, His World, His Word, and His Ways with His people—and then he begins to teach us all the right beliefs. We go through a process of confessing, repenting, and affirming the truth.

Last Sunday morning we looked at the first truth that the Jewish people had to learn. It is found in the first line of verse 6 “You alone are the Lord.” Meaning: There is Only One God. Now we come to the second truth found in the remaining lines of verse 6 – You have made heaven,
The heaven of heavens, with all their host,
The earth and everything on it,
The seas and all that is in them,
And You preserve them all.
The host of heaven worships You. Meaning: There is Only One Creator.

Application: This morning if you are saved, let the Holy Spirit bring you to this truth; if you are not saved, then you need to be before you can have this change of mind.

There is Only One Creator – 3 questions come to mind:

I. WHY DID THEY MAKE THIS CONFESSION?

Background: This confession was based on the second of the Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses. Listen to Exodus 20, verses 4 and 5 – “You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; 5 you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God….” This commandment strictly forbade any kind of idol worship. God was adamant—do not make any kind of idols to represent Me. Why? I am the Creator and you are the Creation. I created you. You cannot create Me. In fact, in the first chapter of Genesis, God’s name is mentioned 32 times in 31 verses. If you add to this all the personal pronouns, the total becomes 43. Bottom Line: God did not want anyone to violate His copyright on creation.

When the Jewish people started worshipping false gods, they were exposed to all kinds of pagan myths about creation:

–       They probably came across Enuma Elish—a Babylonian myth—that everything began as a watery chaos of salt water and fresh water. The goddess of saltwater was Tiamet and the god of fresh water was Abzu. They gave birth to Ea (earth) and Anu (sky). These two decided to separate their parents and Ea killed the father Abzu and covered his body. Hence the earth covers the fresh water forming an abyss. Tiamet (the mother) met another lover, Kingu, who convinced her to kill the younger gods. They in turn figured out what was happening and they got Marduk, the god of light and storm to kill her. He killed her and used her severed body to make the heavens and the earth. Marduk then went and killed Tiamet’s lover, Kingu, and used his blood to create humankind to do the work for the gods.

–       They also might have heard of the Sumerian myth, Atrahasis, in which human beings were created to help break a strike between the major gods and the minor gods. Since the major gods could not get any food, they created humans.

–       While in Egypt, they must have come across the Egyptian Myths that the world came out of the lifeless sea called Nu. In some versions, it is Atum who comes out of the waters to create the world; in other version it is a group of eight gods that merged together to create the world; in yet another version, it is Ptah who came up with everything in his mind. Unlike the Genesis account where God said “Let there be and it was,” Atum sneezed and out came Shu; then he vomited and out came Tefnut. They had sexual intercourse to produce the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut. Some Egyptians believed that the heavens were like a sea in which the sun and the moon were floating. Every morning Ra sailed his boat across and that was the sun.

–       The Egyptians even worshipped Khepri, the scarab beetle, which is a dung beetle. It roles the dung down a hole in the ground and lays its eggs in it. Then the newborns crawl out of the ground. So they worship the scarab beetle as the God of self-creation. Is it any wonder that the 4^th plague that God sent against Egypt were swarms of flies!

You get the picture. God made everything by His sovereign will and power but Satan tried everything possible to infringe on God’s copyright through these myths and mythologies. Now the Jewish people were saved, they were coming back to the truth of their Creator God and they were affirming that He alone was the Creator!

In our own generation there is a creation myth that is stronger than any Babylonian or Sumerian or Egyptian myth – it is the myth of evolution. You canturn the TV on to watch a history program on nature and you will hear of millions of years ago. You can open the children’s textbook from school and read about how humans evolved from ape. You can go to college and hear how science has rescued humanity from the clutches of the Bible.

Application: Let me ask you what do you believe about this creation? Do you believe that this creation is no more than 6000 years old or do you think it evolved over billions of years? Do you believe that God created this world or do you think that it was nothing more than the survival of the fittest and the process of natural selection? Do you believe that we are fearfully and wonderfully made or do you think that we are just an accident of fate?

II. WHAT ABOUT SCIENTIFIC AND HISTORICAL FACTS?

Background: When we confess, “God is the Only Creator who created no more than 6000 years ago,” the question is raised, “What about Dinosaur Bones?” “What about the Age of the Rocks?” “What about history and science?” Lets look at them briefly (Keep in mind that I am not trying to show the faults with evolution as much as the reason people are open to evolution):

#1  Carbon Dating – There are several major types of radiometric dating: Radiocarbon dating or carbon dating; Potassium-argon dating; Uranium-leaddating; Uranium-thorium; Rubidium-strontium dating. Keep in mind that Carbon dating deals with things that were alive at one time – plants, animals and human beings (organic). The other datings deal with the age of rocks & non-living things (inorganic). Carbon dating only deals with thousands of years while the other radiometric datings deal with the “millions and billions” of years. With Carbon dating, they claim that they can measure the ratio of Carbon14/Carbon 12 and decide how old it is. I am trying to be very simple. Carbon dating works only if you have a historical record to go with the sample. You have to have some idea as to when the sample lived. For e.g. Kernels of grain in the grave of a king can be carbon dated since we know something about the period in which the king lived. Also, there are many exceptions. They try to use the Carbon 12 reading to answer that. Carbon 14/Carbon 12 level in the atmosphere has been different through the years; not every living thing takes up Carbon 14 at the same level; and then the flood has really messed up the ratio of the C14/C12 in the atmosphere. Bottom Line: It is not a very accurate method to date history.

#2  Radiometric Dating – is applied to igneous rocks (formed through lava). It claims to measure the time when it cooled down. This has its problems too.A good example of how inaccurate this type of radiometric dating can be comes from the famous Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980. Scientists knew when that rock solidified because they saw it happen. When they radiometric dated the new rock, the results came back as if the rock was millions of years old even though it was actually less than a year old. So if the dating method does not work when we know how old the rock really is, why do we think it works any better when we don’t know the actual age of the rocks? You often hear about some human remains that are dated to be 2 million years old. What it really means is that they found some bones that happen to be next to some rock that were tested to be that old.

Some people say – Okay we agree Carbon Dating and Radiometric Dating are not worth but definitely ancient chronologies prove that the earth was at least 8,000-10,000 years old.

#3  Ancient Chronologies – Only problem is that Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Akkadian, Sumerian chronologies come to a standstill around 2400 BC. Infact, before 2000 BC history is very sparse and fragmentary. In a 1992 article in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, famous Egyptologist William A Ward wrote an article on Egyptian chronology. Listen to the summary—“The current debate on Egyptian chronology is characterized by divergent opinions on the value of the Manethonian tradition, the lengths of reigns of individual Egyptian kings, the existence of coregencies, and the astronomical evidence. In each of these categories, there is little consensus and a wide range of possible solutions; a precise Egyptian chronology is therefore not possible.”

#4  Someone might say – “what about all the great minds that do not believe in creation?” Some of the greatest minds in the world—Socrates, Galileo, Newton, Einstein—have looked at creation and declared that they believed in God. It takes more faith to believe that this world got here by mere chance than to believe that God made it.

For e.g. One day a group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and tell Him that they were done with Him. The scientist walked up to God and said, “God, we’ve decided that we no longer need you. We’re to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous things, so why don’t you just go on and get lost.” God listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after the scientist was done talking, God said, “Very well, how about this, let’s say we have a man making contest.” To which the scientist replied, “OK, great!” But God added, “Now, we’re going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam.” The scientist said, “Sure, no problem” and bent down and grabbed himself a handful of dirt. God just looked at him and said, “No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!”

#5  By the way, according to a Gallup poll last year (2012), nearly half of Americans — 46% — believe God created the human race in a single day 10,000 years ago. Furthermore, 78% of Americans today believe God played some role in how people came to exist. People know that there is a design to this Creation.

I don’t have enough time to go over all the details. All I want to do is to plant a seed in your mind or peel a layer of the lies that you have heard about the origin of this world.

III. HOW DOES IT APPLY TO ME?  

Because we believe that “There is Only One Creator and that is God”—

• There is no place for racism. Did you know the full title of Charles Darwin’s book? The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or ThePreservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. David says in Psalm 139:14—“I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made”–
• There is no place for abortion. Did you know that the theory of evolution was behind eugenics – selective human breeding? At first it began in the 1920s with preventing the poor, unemployed, alcoholics from having children; then in the 1930s sterilization was advocated; then followed birth control. Now it is here in the form of abortion. Recently we have heard of the Philadelphia doctor, Gosnell, who according to the grand jury, “regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy — and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors.”
• This world is under God’s care. He decides how it will end.

• Jesus is the Creator and Redeemer. You have to come through Him to be saved and have eternal life.
• John 1: 10-13 10 He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. 11 He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. 12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: 13 who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.