Satan’s Ultimate Goal and our Greatest Temptation is to raise your _______________________________________ while deceiving you into thinking that anyone other than God deserves the credit. 

• Improved ______________________________________ often leads to forgetting God. 

Amos 8:11-13 NLT - ““The time is surely coming,” says the Sovereign Lord, “when I will send a famine on the land— not a famine of bread or water but of hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from border to border searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it. Beautiful girls and strong young men will grow faint in that day, thirsting for the Lord’s word.” 

When the People of God forget the Word of God, _____________________________________ is diminished. 

Genesis 1:1 NLT - “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” 

7 Main Philosophies Refuted by Genesis 1:1

1. Atheism says there is no God.
2. Genesis 1:1 says that God created the heavens and the earth.
3. Pantheism says that everything is God. The trees, rivers, stars, etc. Pantheism is a form of thinking where people deify nature or give nature a force of its own.
4. Genesis 1:1 says that God is separate from His creation, He is not part of it. He existed first and then He created the world. He is before and after it.
5. Polytheism teaches that there are a multiplicity of gods. The Greeks, Romans and nearly every ancient people as well as many of the primitive peoples today (Africa, South America, etc.) are polytheists.
6. Genesis 1:1 says that only ONE God created all things.
7. Materialism is the basis for most modern thinking. It says that matter is eternal and that matter is the only thing that exists. Communism was based on materialism with its main idea being how to distribute it equitably.
8. Genesis 1:1 says that matter had a beginning. At some point it did not exist and then God brought it into existence.
9. Dualism, an ancient idea developed into different systems by Plato and later Descartes. Basically, it says that there are two powers at work in the universe (good and evil) and that the interaction of these two is responsible for all of what we see (Hinduism also explains the beginning of the world as the interaction of two entities).
10. Genesis 1:1 states that everything we see was created by only ONE power: God. The Bible accounts for evil, but evil is never at the same level as God. There is only one supreme power at work according to Genesis and it was manifested at the very beginning.
11. Humanism teaches that man is the ultimate reality; there is nothing higher or nobler than man. Many good works are done to benefit mankind, and they're done because of people who hold to this philosophy.
12. Genesis 1:1 refutes this idea because it teaches that God, not man, is the ultimate being since He was here before man and that God is the creator of man, and not the other way around.
13. Evolution, our most prevalent idea today, says that the effect of time and chance interfacing with eternal matter is responsible for the universe.
14. Genesis 1:1 says that in the beginning (specific time), God (not chance) created it (not evolution), the heavens and the earth.

GOD

CREATED

HEAVENS

EARTH

IN THE BEGINNING

NFG -