STUDY IN GENESIS: PART 2
- Jan 11
- 20 min read
CREATION VS. EVOLUTION
What you believe about Genesis shapes everything.
In Part 2 of this Study in Genesis series, Pastor Kelly continues laying a foundation for understanding biblical creation, faith, and truth. This message explores the growing divide between creation and evolution, and challenges believers to examine where their beliefs are coming from.
Are your views rooted in God’s Word?
Or influenced by culture?
If you’ve ever wrestled with questions about Genesis, science, or the authority of Scripture, this message will help you build a faith that stands firm.
KEYWORDS
Genesis
Creation
The Bible and Science
Evolution
Apologetics
KEY POINTS
Genesis is the foundation for understanding the entire Bible
The debate over creation is ultimately about authority—God’s Word vs. man’s word
Many believers adopt cultural ideas and reinterpret Scripture
Evolution is rooted in human reasoning, not biblical truth
Scripture and true science are not in conflict
Compromising Genesis weakens your entire foundation
A strong foundation produces confidence when your faith is challenged
BIBLE VERSES
Genesis 1:6-7 - The expanse separating the waters
Genesis 1:8 - God called the expanse heaven; second day
Romans 1:20 - God's invisible attributes are clearly seen in creation
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
What’s really at stake in the creation vs. evolution debate—science, or authority?
Have your beliefs about Genesis been shaped more by Scripture or by culture? How can you tell?
If your foundation was tested today, would you feel confident in what you believe and why?
DEVOTIONAL
Study In Genesis Part 2: The Foundation of Faith from Creation
Day 1: In the Beginning, God
Reading: Genesis 1:1, Romans 1:20
Devotional:
Everything starts here. If you get this wrong, everything else becomes unstable. “In the beginning, God…” isn’t just an opening line—it’s a declaration of authority. Before culture, before opinions, before theories, there was God. He didn’t evolve. He didn’t appear. He is. Creation itself points back to Him. The order, the design, the precision—it all speaks. And according to Scripture, it speaks clearly enough that no one is without excuse. The question isn’t whether God has revealed Himself. The question is whether you’re willing to acknowledge Him. When you recognize God as Creator, you stop trying to be one.
Reflection:
Where in your life are you relying on your own understanding instead of God’s authority?
Day 2: Did God Really Say?
Reading: Genesis 3:1, 2 Timothy 3:16–17
Devotional:
The enemy hasn’t changed his strategy. His first move in the garden was simple: “Did God really say?”
And it’s still working.
When you start questioning the authority of God’s Word, you open the door to replacing it—with culture, opinions, and ideas that feel right but aren’t rooted in truth. You don’t lose your foundation all at once. You lose it one compromise at a time. God’s Word isn’t something you reinterpret to fit your life. It’s something you build your life on.
Reflection:
Have you allowed culture or personal opinion to shape what you believe about Scripture?
Day 3: Truth Doesn’t Need Help
Scripture: Exodus 20:11, Psalm 33:6
Devotional:
God didn’t ask for help creating the world. He spoke—and it was. There’s a temptation to try to “help” Scripture make sense by blending it with outside ideas. But truth doesn’t need support from culture to stand. It stands on its own. When you start adding to God’s Word to make it more acceptable, you’re not strengthening your faith—you’re weakening it. God is not intimidated by science. And truth will never contradict truth. The issue isn’t science vs. Scripture. It’s authority.
Reflection:
Do you feel pressure to make your faith more acceptable to others? Why?
Day 4: A Weak Foundation Won’t Last
Scripture: Matthew 7:24–25
Devotional:
Storms reveal foundations. Not when things are easy. Not when everything makes sense. But when your beliefs are challenged. If your faith is built on feelings, opinions, or secondhand understanding, it won’t hold. But when your foundation is God’s Word, you don’t have to panic when questions come. You don’t have to scramble for answers. You stand firm—because you know what you believe and why. A strong foundation doesn’t remove pressure. It prepares you for it.
Reflection:
What is your faith currently built on—and how has it held up under pressure?
Day 5: Created With Purpose
Scripture: Colossians 1:16–17, John 14:2–3
Devotional:
You weren’t an accident. You weren’t random. You weren’t the result of chance. You were created—intentionally—by a God who knows you and has prepared a place for you. Everything in creation points back to Him. And everything in your life finds meaning in Him. When you understand where you came from,
you begin to understand why you’re here. You were created to know Him. To worship Him. And to spend eternity with Him.
Reflection:
How does understanding that you were created with purpose change the way you live today?
SERMON TRANSCRIPT
Praise God, as I began last week this study of the book of Genesis, I talked about how there's been a shift away from God's word
And it's gone the way of man's word.
And many within the church have conceded biblical truth and they have chosen to follow their own way.
And they've allowed the infiltration of secular ideas into their lives.
The book of Genesis is foundational to the understanding of the entire rest of the Bible.
You can't just read the end without reading the beginning.
And so it's important for us to be sure and to put Genesis within our reading schedule as far as our study of God's word.
The book of Genesis clearly teaches that the one true God is sovereign over all that exists.
We learned last week that the creation days were 24-hour days.
When it talks about six days, it was a literal six days.
When it talks about he rested on the seventh, he rested on that 24 hours.
Now, there's many divisions within our world today, and we see that.
on our TVs, on our phones, on our tablets, on our computers, as we look at just the awful things that are going on all around the world.
One great division is the division of creation versus evolution.
That's one of many things and problems within our world.
And while some Christians don't believe that it's a big deal,
and that it's okay for Christ followers to just have different views of origins.
The truth is, it is a big deal.
This is a huge deal.
And while Christ followers differ on doctrinal views such as tongues and eschatology, believers stay within the bounds of Scripture being the authority for their views.
So they use Scripture to back up their view.
However, with origins, Christ followers who hold a position of millions of years gather their information outside of the Bible and thus reinterpret Genesis with secular ideas.
They use and allow the pagan religion of humanism to conclude beliefs such as the day age theory or gap theory, theistic evolution and progressive creation.
The division over creation versus evolution is actually a division between the word of God and the word of man.
I'm gonna give you a brief summary of where evolution actually came from.
From a big picture and brief perspective, the evolutionary worldview teaches that all life on earth has a common ancestor, that life came into existence about three and a half million years ago and changed over periods of time.
I want you to pay attention to this video today.
The ape that stood up, it was a revolutionary idea.
We needed Owen Lovejoy's expertise again, because the evidence wasn't quite adding up.
The knee looked human, but the shape of her hip didn't.
Superficially, her hip resembled a chimpanzee's, which meant that Lucy couldn't possibly have walked like a modern human.
But Lovejoy noticed something odd about the way the bones had been fossilized.
Just cut it off.
Bloodjoy decided he could restore the pelvis to its natural shape.
Do you hear all that grinding going on?
It's not natural, right?
So he made a copy in plaster.
He cut the damaged pieces out and put them back together the way they were before Lucy died.
How does he know?
It was a tricky job.
But after taking the kink out of the pelvis, it all fit together perfectly.
Imagine that.
Yeah.
You cut your pieces and they're going to fit.
Oh, amazing, isn't it?
When you actually grind things and shape things and cut things and make them fit exactly the way they should be, it looks just like our hip.
I mean, we laugh at that, but that's how ridiculous a lot of this is.
And there are so many Christ followers that believe it.
Believe it.
At its core, it's an attempt of pagan culture to explain life without God.
Do you get that this morning?
Different cultures have taught a form of evolution throughout their early history.
The Mayans incorporated a form of evolution, believing that the rain god created humans by modifying previous creations.
Rivers were changed to fish, then to serpents, and finally, humans.
The Greeks taught evolution by borrowing ideas from the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Indians.
And the list goes on and on and on and on.
You see, Darwin did not invent evolution.
He just made the idea popular for a pagan culture desperate for a life without God.
Genesis chapter one, verse six and seven.
And God said, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let us separate the waters from the waters.
And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse.
And it was so.
The water-covered earth was apparently surrounded by a vapor.
This expanse in the Hebrew is rachina, excuse me, rachia, and it means firmament, a vault of heaven supporting the waters above, considered by Hebrews as a solid and supporting water that was above.
The expanse was like a canopy, and it separated the two waters, the space between the clouds and the surface.
The waters that were above provided protective greenhouse effect over the world at that time.
In Genesis 1, verse 8, God said, and he called the expanse heaven, and there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
That word heaven there is shoma.
shama and it means the sky the atmosphere there's also another word shamayim and it means the sky the atmosphere now there are three heavens that are mentioned in scripture and we see this the first heaven which is the sky we see the second heaven which is space and then the third heaven is the place where god dwells this is what we read in scripture in this verse
The first of the three that are mentioned, we clearly see God is, excuse me, we clearly see in God's creative acts, his divine power on display.
The earth is not flat.
The earth is not flat.
There is nothing in the Bible that says, it is metaphoric when it uses the terms pillars.
It is metaphoric when it says that we are suspended by pillars.
It is a globe.
And that's not science, that's biblical.
Read the Bible.
The Bible talks about the roundness, the circle of the earth.
All right?
Everybody got that?
Don't be sending me YouTube videos this week.
I don't go to the first church of YouTube.
All right, I don't believe it.
You can't believe everything that you see on YouTube or Facebook, especially with AI these days.
I've had people send me videos of people saying certain things and I'm like,
Are you kidding me?
Do you use your brain?
Seriously.
I don't mean to be insulting or anything, but you can tell the difference between, at this point in history, you can tell the difference between AI and non-AI.
You just can't.
There's gonna come a time when we're not gonna be able to.
We're gonna have to use real discernment, Holy Spirit discernment.
But it is not flat.
We clearly see in God's creative acts, his divine power on display.
God shaped the earth.
God shaped the planets.
God spoke and creation was.
He did not labor or toil as if we were, or it was some arduous task, something great, you know, too big for him.
He didn't sweat a tear.
He didn't sweat anything.
He created by the sound of his voice.
By his power and by his powerful hands,
He created the world.
And by that same word, by his same mouth, he holds all things together.
Our God is an awesome God.
He's mighty and worthy of our praise.
In fact, I feel led to acapella a little bit this morning.
Anybody know what acapella is?
No music.
We're just going to sing it with our voices, all right?
And be respectful.
I like it when you sing with an exuberant voice and you sing out.
But right now, I want us to sing as a choir.
Okay, and in a choir, you don't have somebody trying to overpower somebody else.
You have everyone blending together.
Do you know that song, that chorus?
Our God is an awesome God.
He reigns from heaven above with wisdom, power, and love.
Our God is an awesome God.
Man, that sounds good.
Let's do it again.
Our God...
He's an awesome God.
Amen.
Praise God.
Hallelujah.
So my challenge for you is to think outside the box.
There are things that we can learn and we can grow from Scripture that we have the knowledge of that are found in Scripture.
You see, Scripture doesn't go against science, but science will go against Scripture.
Let me say that again.
Scripture doesn't go against science, but science will go against Scripture.
All right, so in the early days, when a scientist would go and he'd do his experiments, he generally was a Christ follower, was a believer.
of God's word.
You see, I'm not scared of science.
Some people say, well, if you're a believer, you can't believe in science.
Yeah, you can believe in science.
You can believe in science.
I love when we used to dissect animals and stuff and learning about the animals.
Some of y'all are like, oh, man.
Yeah, it kind of stunk.
The formaldehyde was pretty strong.
But I loved learning about what the animal was, what made that animal grow and tick and happen.
Biology was one of my favorite courses.
biology and history i love those two classes and math i wasn't so good at and i wanted to be an astronaut you gotta be really good at math to be in an ass be an astronaut and i'm like okay well i'm not good at math so that's that's not going to happen but i love the idea of exploring the universe star trek one of my favorites all right i'm a trekkie yeah what how you doing yeah
Do your little spot.
There you go.
Yeah, I'm a Trekkie.
I like Star Trek because I like just seeing.
I always say I don't believe in aliens.
I believe we are God's creation in this universe, and we're it.
There's no other life out there.
Now, if there is life out there, like plants and stuff like that, okay, whatever.
But they're not alive like you and I, okay?
And I believe that because is God going to create many devils?
Because the devil can only be at one place at one time.
All right?
Or angels.
No, man, there's only one heaven.
There's not multiple heavens.
All right?
And there's not multiple Jesuses to die for all these other people that are out there or things that are out there.
There's not.
We're it.
The Bible doesn't tell us anything about that.
Again, we're putting stuff into the Bible.
Can we speculate?
Sure.
But when we begin to believe it, then it becomes our belief system, and we're putting it in the Bible.
God doesn't say anything about life on other planets, right?
Why is it so quiet?
I mean, am I wrong?
I don't read about other life on other planets or anything.
I read about how there are other planets and that God created the universe.
I read that and he created the stars.
Why did he create all those things?
For us.
They shine down on the earth.
They shine down on the earth.
And they helped, especially, we don't use it now because we have our phones with Google Maps on it.
We Google Map everything so we don't need the stars anymore, but at one time they needed the stars in order to travel.
So God placed them there to help people, to help his creation while they're here on this earth.
But all of that creation sings the glories of the Lord.
All the stars, all the planets, all the rocks on those planets, all the meteorites and all the asteroids, everything is singing joyful praises unto their creator.
And how do I know that there's a creator?
Because there's a creation.
It's just like this.
If I take this thing and take a hammer to it, what are the odds that it will come back together in one piece again?
Zero, zero, all right?
So God is the one that can put pieces back together and make things whole.
He is the only one that when things are shattered that he can take and build, take those building blocks and put them back together and make them better than they were in the origin, in the original.
Praise God.
Hallelujah.
You see, to believe in evolution, to believe in millions of years, you would have to first of all believe that when God said that it was good, that there was sin in the world.
You would have to believe that.
god would not say that sin was good god would not say say disease is good god would not say on the seventh day that everything was very good if things had been here there had been people here or there had been things here because there's there's there's one of the theories and i forget which one it is i showed you up here today one of the theories believes that there was a creation of god that was so bad that they got wiped out and then adam and eve were created that is a belief within the church
Now, it's little small facets of the church.
And when I say church, I'm not talking about our church.
I'm talking about the church universal, okay?
So in the church universal, there is some belief towards that, which means that there was death and suffering before creation that God said was good.
That doesn't make any logical sense at all.
Not to mention the fact that people that don't believe that there's a God, they don't have any problem at all, at all, believing that there was a bookbinder person that was running a machine somewhere that put this together.
Well, I believe that.
Did you meet him?
Did you see him?
No, but you have a book in your hand.
Okay.
So you're saying there's a bookmaker that you have faith that's out there.
You haven't seen him?
You haven't met them, but you have evidence.
Well, guess what, folks?
Go outside.
Don't look directly at the sun, but see the sun's rays or light upon the earth.
That was created.
That wasn't a mistake.
You see, when they add millions of years and millions of years, it kind of makes our eyes gloss over.
I can't go back that far.
They can't either.
And as I move forward in this series, I will show you and I will prove to you that carbon dating is a farce.
That it's no good.
They carbon dated, and I will use this as an example, but I'll give you a little foretaste of it.
They took Mount St.
Helens 10 years after it erupted.
And I believe it erupted in either 1980 or 1981.
It was in the early 80s.
And when it erupted,
They took carbon dating from that volcano eruption 10 years later and it showed that it was 10,000 years old.
And so I actually had a question, and some of you may have had this question rise up in your mind after I said that.
I had the question of, well, couldn't the materials within the volcano have been 10,000 years old?
So I went to Brother Tommy.
He actually worked for Answers in Genesis.
He is now home, praise God.
But I went up to him, and he was a, what do they call him, a Vulcan?
Vulcanologist.
Vulcanologist.
It's kind of like a Vulcan.
Yeah.
That's why I think it's a really cool title, man.
I want to be a Vulcanologist.
Anyway, so I went up to him and I asked him that question.
And he said that at the time of eruption, that that molten lava
is at zero you know on the time scale and it's it has to do something with the uh the neurons and the electrons and everything you know all the things that are going on inside of that rock formation that is molten that that is at time zero and that all scientists agree with that so when that lava came out of the volcano that was zero
So when they carbon dated that rock from that eruption, it should have showed them 10 years and it showed them 10,000 years.
So carbon dating is wrong.
They will say, well, scientists say blah, blah, blah.
Well, guess what?
There are Christian scientists that say this and cancels out what you say.
And so I think a lot of times for me, it would take more faith to believe that this all just accidentally happened.
That at one time there was a fireball and then that fireball kind of cooled down and then it began to rain.
And so my great, great, you know, put 30,000 greats, grandma crawled up out of the water
and with some amoeba, and then over time became a bird and became this, which raises another question.
How come I don't see a half crocodile, a half zebra?
Seriously, how come I see nothing evolving today?
And I will show you there's a difference between microevolution and macroevolution.
People do adapt to their surroundings.
Animals do adapt to their surroundings.
They may grow a longer beak or a shorter beak depending on where they are.
They may have more melatonin in their skin to protect them depending on what part of the hemisphere they're in.
Okay, so those things really do happen.
But evolution as Darwin made popular does not exist.
God created human beings and God created monkeys, but they were not related.
They are not related.
No matter how hard you want to cut a hip bone, grind a hip bone, however you want to fit that puzzle together, let me tell you right now, our hip bones are not like a monkey's hip bones.
Now, if you want to believe your uncle was a monkey, you go right ahead and be a monkey's uncle or a monkey's nephew, niece, whatever.
I'm not going to be kin to no monkey because monkey ain't no kin to me.
All right?
My ancestors didn't swing from a tree.
Now, yours may have, but mine didn't.
Now, a few of them acted like they did, but they didn't.
God created Adam and Eve.
They had children, and those children had children, and those children had children, and it went on and on and on until evil got so bad in the world, and God sent the judgment of the flood of the earth.
I'm getting ahead of myself.
I just, I love the book.
Who else likes a book of Genesis?
Yes.
Yes.
My dad actually began to talk about creation and Genesis back when I was in my teens.
And I did that.
I yawned just like she's yawning down here.
Girl, I'm going to get you, I'm going to get you something that's going to keep you awake.
And either that or when you yawn, can you just go?
Yeah, that'd probably be better.
Um,
And that's what I did when my dad began to talk about these things and my eyes glossed over and I'm like, yeah, whatever.
But then as an adult, I took an interest in it.
because the arguments that came from people, I needed an answer for them.
It's called apologetics.
And I needed an answer for when they would say certain things.
And I love getting into the book of Genesis and learning about origins and where things begin.
because once I have that foundation, you know, the devil, as Brother Ken Ham always says, the devil doesn't have a problem with little Johnny going to youth group and little Johnny believing in Jesus, as long as he doesn't have a foundation because one day he knows little Johnny's gonna become big Johnny.
Big Johnny's gonna have an argument that's come along
And somebody's gonna say something and he's not gonna have an answer for it because a foundation was never built.
And then Johnny's gonna begin to question God.
And then little Johnny's gonna walk away from Jesus.
Big Johnny, I should say.
So the devil doesn't have any problem with you giving your heart to Christ.
Because he knows at some point he's going to send somebody your way that's going to cause you to doubt.
That's exactly what he did in the garden with Adam and Eve.
He caused them to doubt God and he can do the same thing with you.
He's good at it, man.
That's his playbook and he's good at it.
But when we have a foundation, we have security.
When we have a foundation, we have surety.
When we have a foundation, people can start to mock us and laugh at us, but we're confident in who we are because we know who we are in Christ because he's told us in his word.
He has showed us in his word who we are and no one can take our legs out from underneath us because they are in a firm foundation in God's word, not just the New Testament, but in the Old Testament as well.
Praise the Lord.
Don't let nobody, don't let no preacher, don't let no teacher, don't let no person ever say, all we need is the New Testament because we're the New Testament church.
Well, what do you think they had in the New Testament church in the first century?
They had the Old Testament.
They were living the New Testament.
They didn't have it yet.
Then they began to write it.
70 years, 80 years, 90 years, 100 years after the fact of it happening, they began to write it down and pin it down for you and I. But before that, they had the Old Testament.
They had Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
They read about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego standing up to the man and saying, we're not gonna bow to your idol.
We read about how they got thrown in the fire and there was another man in the fire with them.
They came out of the fire not smelling like fire, not singed, no nothing.
That's found in the Old Testament, y'all.
And that encourages my faith today.
That gives me strong feet rooted in a strong foundation because I know who the first Adam was.
I can understand who the second Adam is.
I can plug him back and find out exactly what happened and why Jesus had to come in the first place.
Jesus used the old Testament.
He used Adam.
He used the 10 commandments.
He used these things to get his word across and to preach the things of God.
And you and I are called to do the same.
We don't live under the law, but the law still is there.
And it's important for us.
Come on.
We say we don't live by the law.
We live in freedom.
Yeah.
But you still shouldn't kill somebody.
I mean, come on.
I mean, somebody saying I don't live by the law.
Well, do you kill people?
I mean, if you're an assassin, you may, that's your job.
Hopefully no one in this house is an assassin and you've been sent to get me.
Although, hey, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.
Praise God, I got to use a little bit of Christianese, you know.
But we today, you and I, you and I, I want you to think about this this morning.
You and I have been created to worship and to praise the creator.
And you and I have a hope that we will spend eternity with the creator.
Jesus said, I go to a place.
And if I go, I will come again to bring you to be with me.
Now he made that mention 2000 years ago.
So he has been preparing this place called heaven for you and I. For you and I. Can you imagine how beautiful it is?
Now I gotta tell you right now, I like amusement parks and I like some of the things of the world, but they don't hold a candle.
to the joy and the awesomeness that you and I are going to experience when we get to heaven.
Praise God.
Aren't you thankful this morning?
Let us pray.
Dear Heavenly Father, we praise you, God, for your creation.
Father, I'm sorry for the things I do and have done that has caused taintedness
of your creation in my life and pray that Lord God, you would forgive me of my sins and my transgressions and that you would cleanse me from those things.
Give me the wisdom, the godly wisdom, and give me the strength, Father, to do your will, to speak your will.
I love you, God.
And I thank you for loving me, for first loving me.
And I pray, God, your hand would be upon your people.
That Father God, this sermon series would not be opinion.
There will be opinions.
I will give my opinion.
But I pray for godly facts to come out and that those facts would take root into our hearts.
and would help us in our witnessing and help us in our lives to continue to do your work in this world.
Be with our leaders in our nation.
Be with our leaders within our church and help them and us to see you
to see you in what we do, that our focus may be about Jesus and how we can help others see Jesus.
We honor and praise you, Lord.
In Jesus' name.
And everybody say a hearty amen.
Praise God.
Watch this video.
What's the best proof of creation?
Well, actually, I want to divide this into two sections.
First of all, when we read Romans 1.20, we're told this, In other words,
God's Word tells us, if you don't believe in God, you're without excuse because it's so obvious there's a God.
God has made it evident to all that He is the Creator.
Where has He made it evident to all?
Well, we can see it.
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