September 13, 2020

Divine Liturgy Series, Number 2

By Fr. Alex Miller

Genesis 1: 1-31

 

This is the second in a series of sermons on the divine liturgy of the holy orthodox church.

 

Before getting into the liturgy itself this year I feel it’s important to establish the foundation of who is the subject of this worship, what is his nature, and who we are because of him.

 

To do so we must begin in the beginning with God as creator and so today’s sermon is really going to be a Bible study of the first chapter of Genesis.

 

The first 11 chapters of Genesis are what I like to refer to as reverse prophecy.

 

This section of the Bible is unique in that it is telling us things that only God is eyewitness to. These events, especially the acts of creation, the six days of creation were observed only by God himself and through divine revelation this knowledge was imparted to Moses.

 

The nearly universal consensus of the church down through the centuries has been that this account of creation is to be taken literally and not metaphorically or mythologically.

 

The holy fathers of the early New Testament church from the second third fourth century and so on to this day have testified to this.

 

It was only with the introduction of evolution by Charles Darwin that parts of Christendom began to doubt the authenticity of the creation narrative.

 

It is important to note that Charles Darwin and his colleagues were motivated by the hatred for God, racism and for a hatred of any limitations on the sexual appetite. This is also true of Margaret Sanger the founder of Planned Parenthood.

She especially was intent upon the extermination of black people and to this day planned parenthood continues it’s genocide upon the African-American population.

 

The theory of evolution is a man-made fairytale. Not only is it totally contradictory to holy scripture it is unsupported by modern science and it has been proven to be a total impossibility.

 

My children in Christ therefore let us approach the book of Genesis with total faith and trust in the reliability and the accuracy of this account of the beginnings of our world.

 

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was formless and void.

 

In the beginning God. That is all that existed and even the word exist does not explain God. All we can say is that God has been, is, and will ever be, three divine persons, father son and holy spirit perfectly united in one nature.

 

God brought the world into existence out of nothing, ex nihilo.

 

This is the only explanation for what we see. If you press an evolutionist to explain the source of the “primordial slime” they cannot. Though many of them will say “well it came from another planet.” In other words they just kick the can down the road.

 

On day one of creation God brought the world into existence and it was invisible and unfinished, formless and void, and covered with darkness. “The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the water.”

 

On the first day after bringing the world into existence God said “let there be light.”

 

In these first few verses we see the reality of the holy Trinity: the Father speaks, the Holy Spirit hovers, the Son, in response to the Father, creates.

 

The holy fathers of the orthodox church teach that on this first day in addition to creating the world and illuming the world with light God also created the angelic world, the invisible world. This is suggested by various scriptures of the Old and New Testament.

 

Many of the holy father’s have grappled with the question of the nature of the light which was present on the first day. They all agree that it was something different from the sun and the moon and the stars which were created on the fourth day.

 

Many modern Christians have confused these two sources of light or have suggested that is just a mistake in the text or that it really doesn’t matter but it is clear from the patristic record the holy church took this question very seriously and too