Hebrews 11:3 Commentary and Bible Study

Genesis teaches us that God created the worlds, the earth, the sun and moon, and the stars, and all created things, out of nothing. He spoke them into existence when he alone existed. He did not create them out of some other pre-existing material, as if the universe is eternal and was simply moulded into its current form by the word of God. He commanded the atoms to exist and arranged them into a variety of materials and forms of life, not through some protracted process which required vast ages of time, but in six days. The world was created with man in mind from the start, and was prepared as a fit home for him, and was replete with many wonderful lessons in the creation itself for him to learn from. We cannot now look back and deduce anything about creation from existing processes and the present form of things. Yes, there are gradual processes now at work which bring about change in the world, but to extrapolate back from these to the origin of all things as if these processes are responsible for bringing everything to be as it is now, is to deny supernaturalism. Only faith can accept this. Without faith we always try to grope for a naturalistic explanation that does not involve God’s workmanship. The Theory of Evolution claims to offer man an alternative explanation for the variety and complexity of life. It is an entirely naturalistic theory. It is an inadequate explanation for the massive increase in information that is contained in the DNA of current living organisms assuming that there was once no life. It cannot explain the origin of life which has a basic minimum of biochemistry in place and needs to be able to self-reproduce from the start, or else any chance gain is immediately lost. It cannot explain all the sophisticated features of man: possessing consciousness, having a moral nature, the ability to communicate concrete and abstract information, the capacity to design and create, the need for a sense of purpose, entering into deep and loyal, life-long relationships, and having an instinct to seek and worship his Creator. In one sense therefore it requires faith to credit such an inadequate mechanism with such enormous results, but this is not the same as the faith spoken of here. Only God can bring into existence what did not exist before. Only he can create matter and energy and information out of nothing. We can know nothing about his work in creation unless we receive his revelation on the subject. We were not witnesses to it, and we have no access to any witnesses other than God himself. Faith believes his testimony; it also believes in his wisdom, his great skill, and it believes in his omnipotent power to work on a scale both great and small which our minds cannot grasp. Faith brings understanding of what could not otherwise be known. It opens the door to knowledge which could not be obtained by human reason alone. This is true knowledge but it is inaccessible to those who refuse to exercise faith. This is said here to commend faith’s power, and the example chosen, the origin of creation, is a very clear example, just because there is no other way that we could know what God did other than to believe what he has told us about it.‘The worlds were framed’ – the Greek is ‘perfectly ordered and developed’. The English ‘framed’ is good, because it suggests that nothing was just an accident; nothing just rattled into shape. Some modern versions say ‘by God’s command’. That is not good enough. God spoke and it was done, yes, but it goes further than that. We know that Christ is the Word incarnate. That is why the KJV uses a capital W for Word. He is the glorious one who formed all things. Why should the writer select this terminology? Because by the word of God we know these things. How does faith know it? Because faith looks to the word of God.