Genesis 1:1 – In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
An Introduction to Genesis
The Bible is nothing less than the entire history of mankind from God's spiritual perspective. Other history books focus on the rise and fall of civilizations, countries and their governments, cultural advances, warfare and conquest. Though the Bible is historical fact and contains much useful information on the ancient Middle East, its ultimate focus is God and His workings.
While the sixty-six documents that comprise the Bible may seem at times to be disparate in their subject matter, in reality they all contribute to one big picture: The story of God's creating a dominion to rule over, Satan's attempting to usurp God's authority in that domain and lead a rebellion, the on-going spiritual war between God's subjects and Satan's followers, God's final conquering and defeat of all opponents, and God's handing of the universe over to His Son Jesus Christ as an inheritance.
A look at the organization of the Bible reveals two major sections: The Old Testament and the New Testament. In very simplified terms, the Old Testament is the history of man's fall away from God, and the New Testament is the record of God's rescue of man.
The book of Genesis, then, is the beginning of both the spiritual and literal history of the universe. It is the first book of the Old Testament, and the first book of the Pentateuch, a grouping of five books that detail the early history of the Israeli people, the Jews. The book is assumed to be penned by Moses, though who exactly put the words on parchment can never be proven and ultimately doesn't matter; the message came from God (2nd Timothy 3:16; Hebrews 1:1, 2) and He has preserved the message throughout history (Psalm 12:6, 7) so that we can read it and know the truth about God to this day.
The First Ten Words
A full and complete understanding of any subject in the Bible would, if pursued as deeply as possible, ultimately come back to the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis; for it is in these ten simple words that the whole of human history and God's perfect plan find their foundation. This verse is the cornerstone upon which the whole Bible is built, and all true wisdom and knowledge flow out from the truth presented here. To put it another way: If you want to know why the thousandth domino fell, your search will eventually bring you back to the very first domino and the entity who pushed it over.
And so begins God's account of the universe: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." These words are the overview of the first two chapters, a heading to the body of text to follow. They are ten of the most powerful and philosophically devastating words in literature, though we will barely skim their surface in this brief devotional.
The first three words establish the inauguration of time as we know it. Before the beginning there was simply God, who needs no calculation of time because He is outside of it. Mankind is stuck moving forward with the turning of the planet, the ticking of the clock. But God is not affected or limited by the advancement of the time continuum; He created it.
The fourth word, "God", introduces us to the awesome Creator of the universe. In the original Hebrew text, this word is "Elohim", which is a plural noun; so in once sense it would not be incorrect to translate the word as "gods", which does happen elsewhere in the Old Testament. But according to Hebrew linguists, its use here is in a decidedly singular structure. It is a "uni-plural", hinting at what is known as the Trinitarian nature of God that is revealed more fully elsewhere in the Bible.
So a great and mighty uni-plural God initiated the time continuum by doing what? By creating. The word here is "bara", which is only ever used of God's act of creating. While we use the English word "create" to speak of crafting a work of art or piecing together a new invention, no human being can ever "bara" anything. Only God can truly create, bringing things into existence out of nothing.
And what did He create? The heavens mentioned here are not the Heaven that is God's residence mentioned elsewhere. Instead, the word refers to the atmosphere of the planet, and possibly outer space. Either meaning is an acceptable interpretation, and the Hebrew word may simply refer to all of space, from our atmosphere to the furthest reaches of the universe. And since it is true that God created both, there is no real dissension.
He also created the Earth, all the solid mass that is our planet. By extension, this verse can refer to all solid matter, the "earth" of other planets as well, since it all came into being by His power. Consider that every proton and electron of every atom in every molecule of every substance in the entire universe had a specific beginning, when God called them all into existence.
On this one hand, these ten words are quite simple. There is no lack of clarity; the facts are laid out without ornamentation. But the ramifications of these ten words affect everything else in the Bible, everything we believe. This verse sets up the Bible's view of God, of mankind, of the consequences of sin, and even of the purpose for Jesus Christ's crucifixion. Everything depends on that first domino.
While this verse has an undeniably pivotal role in the support of Christian theology, it is also potent in its opposition toward false beliefs. In his book The Genesis Record, Henry Morris lists seven major schools of thought confronted by the first ten words of the Bible.
Genesis 1:1 challenges atheism, because the universe was created by a God.
It challenges pantheism, for God is transcendent from that which He created.
It challenges polytheism, for one God created all things.
It challenges materialism, for matter had a beginning.
It challenges dualism, because God was alone when He created.
It challenges humanism, because God, not man, is the ultimate reality.
And it challenges evolutionism, because God created all things.
Creation Versus Science
Despite its central place in the foundations of theology, the Doctrine of Creation is increasingly ignored or even ridiculed by religious institutions for various reasons, including fear of clashing with and being derided by "science". As the heady intellects of the past two centuries began making evolution sound plausible in scientific terms, unprepared Christians abandoned the belief in a literal Creation in droves.
But even before our so-called "Enlightenment" and the modern era, a literal Christian has not always been the popular interpretation within religious circles. During the Reformation, the Church of England as a body subscribed to the belief that while Creation did happen, the rendering in Genesis should be viewed with some poetic license. Even many of the translators of the King James Version adhered to this way of thinking, being devout Anglicans.
I believe most certainly that what we read in Genesis should be taken literally. Given what the Bible says about God's omnipotence, there is no reason not to assume that these first chapters mean exactly what they say; and the more poetic license one gives to these verses, the shakier one makes the entire theological structure.
Without the first chapter of Genesis, we would have absolutely no way of knowing how the universe began. Science cannot inform us, though the secular preachers of evolutionary faith in biology and geology are certainly good storytellers, imagining billions of years of pre-history out of their biased research into a pathetically small pile of evidence.
But while modern evolutionary thought remains entirely hypothetical because true science cannot touch the unobserved past, for this same reason it should be noted that science will never prove Creation either. Creation, in scientific terms, is a Catastrophic event, not to mention a miraculous one, that was not observed by any human beings and will not be repeated. Certainly there is such a preponderance of evidence in favor of Creation that the blindness of evolutionists becomes more laughable the harder they try to deny God and prove the efficacy of real and imagined natural processes, but neither school of thought can ever be solidly established using science. And any scientist on either side who claims otherwise has lost sight of the Scientific Method and its limitations.
So it is entirely in keeping with the Bible's themes to point out that Creation must be taken in faith. Either believe it or don't. There is no proving or disproving it using scientific means. It was a singular moment in time, a special act of God, and we would know nothing about those first six days if He had not chosen to tell us.
But He did choose to tell us, because it is important to know where we came from, so that ewe can then learn that we are not now as God would have us to be, so that we can then learn that God has provided a plan to restore that order. These ten words are a vital beginning if we are to understand the ending.
