Introduction

In this issue, we will examine Genesis 1:1 and how it relates to the beginning of creation. We’ve allowed our secular worldview, naturalism, and modern understanding to infect discussions about creation from the Bible. This is not about evolution theory, or where you stand on those issues. Every Christian needs to personally decide what to stand for in those debates.

Evolution was unknown to the ancient Israelites who read Genesis 1-3. Evolution wasn’t “a thing” until Charles Darwin. Now, it is the only thing we talk about. In my first issue of Bible Insights and Gems, I want to focus on the significance of God in creation. I want to take us back to what the Bible says about creation and how it affects us.

BIG focuses on how I see a passage by weaving the rest of Scripture together with it to produce a theological and hopefully thoughtful approach to each passage. I hope you enjoy any insights you see here.

Some of this is from other scholars, things I have learned in seminary and Bible College, and much of it is my own thoughts and development of these passages and themes. May these BIG wanderings help us think biblically and make us worship God with our minds as well as our hearts.

The Big Picture of Creation

There’s a theory called the Gap Theory that suggests there is a large period of time between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. You can leave all kinds of room for theistic evolution, evolution in general, and fascinating, wild stories about what would’ve happened in that gap.

How do people understand this “gap”? Genesis 1:1 starts the account of creation by introducing God. Genesis 1:2 starts out with “Now” or “and” (Heb. waw) that some scholars and Bible teachers say makes a break between the introduction of “God created the heavens and earth” and the earth being formless and void.

Even the rabbis get in on what could have happened in this gap. They have introduced stories of a woman named Lilith who was the original wife of Adam. They make her out to be a very, very bad girl who ruins everything and makes God start over after the gap by re-creating the world and we would pick it up in Genesis 1:3.

That’s some crazy and fanciful brainwork! If only that’s what actually happened. Of course, I wasn’t there, but I know Hebrew and biblical interpretation well enough to know these are not options. The “break” here is not temporal but literary.

Here’s what I mean. Take Genesis 1:1 as the biggest picture we see from the widest view. Imagine you are in a space shuttle watching creation happen on a macro, cosmic level. You watch the whole thing, most simply put that God creates everything from the heavens to the earth.

Now take a dive in the shuttle as you come closer to earth. You see instead of a cosmic level God creating just the parts on the third rock from the sun, the Earth. Everything is chaotic, but God brings order through the way He creates. Taken even sharper nosedive to see God bringing His creation under His control as He creates first the form and then fills it with His desired elements.

The wide, cosmic view of God creating from the shuttle is the general, overall statement of Genesis 1:1. As you took a nosedive in the shuttle toward Earth, seeing the chaotic waters and God bringing order to the earth is the zooming in effect of Genesis 1:2. The rest of the creation account in Genesis 1 is even further zooming in, explaining how God created and what He created. It gets even closer when you look at the creation of humanity in Genesis 2.

Trust in God from the Beginning

Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning, God…”

Technically the Hebrew text has, “In the beginning created God…” I will focus on the word “created” in the next phrase. I want to start with what the beginning is and how we must trust in God right from that beginning.

These first four words (three words in Hebrew “In the beginning,” “created,” and “God”) force us to think about God, and to believe in Him first. What beginning? The beginning of humanity? The beginning of the Bible? The beginning of time and space?

In one sense, it is the beginning of our faith journey. Just four words into the Bible (three in Hebrew) and we must acknowledge God’s existence. We must also acknowledge Him as being before the beginning. God is the only one present at creation “in the beginning.”

Even more amazing is that because He created in the beginning, He had to be before the beginning. He was before everything else, and He existed by Himself before anything happened (Romans 11:36). Do what you will with God, but you cannot deny His existence.

In just a few short versus, you cannot argue against His power. That’s why Paul says that people knew God existed, but they suppressed the truth about Him (Romans 1 21-23). Atheists shake their fists at God, but they do not deny He exists. They try so hard to shut Him out, but without success. They can ignore Him now, but like all of us, they will meet their Maker.

This is the beginning of creation, the story of though God didn’t need creation or humanity but created them anyway. He doesn’t need our worship, but when we see Him from the very beginning of time and space, the One who created them outside of Himself, started with the grand canvas of His greatness set as the backdrop, demonstrated through creation.

This is the beginning of our realization that He is sovereign and divine, and we display His glory. God’s sovereignty doesn’t need defended. He stands alone, over His creation, and none of it can challenge Him. He owns it all.

Faith is crucial to approaching the beginning. The writer of Hebrews says that there are two requirements for our faith (Hebrews 1:6). First, we must believe in God’s existence. Think about this: the first three Hebrew words (four words in English) require us to believe in God’s existence for anything else to happen.

From the very beginning, we must accept God’s existence. Nothing that follows in the Bible can be believed if we do not believe in God’s existence before “the beginning.” Second, we must believe God is good, a Rewarder of those who seek Him.

One of my favorite Bible truths and promises is that when we seek God, we find Him. He doesn’t trick us with a look-alike or counterfeit. He told the Israelites that they would find Him when they seek Him with all our heart (Jeremiah 29:12-13). God rewards our faith and seeking because we find exactly who we are looking for.

John goes the deepest in these theological wanderings. He declares that Jesus, the Word, was with God in the beginning (1:1). Scholars talk about this Word a lot. Was He the word of the Greek philosophers, the matter that was sparked of creation and all things that exist? John may have been referring to Jesus in that way.

I think John was much more aware of the Word of the Old Testament. What am I talking about? Look at all the times in the prophetic literature where “the Word of the Lord came.” We don’t talk about a person’s words coming to us.

We talk about hearing them, or reading them. This language implies the Word of the Lord is an object, or better understood, a Person. The prophets “saw” something, someone. That Person was the second Yahweh, the preexistent Christ, who was also the Angel of Yahweh.

Hebrew theologians speak of the “two Yahwehs” in Scripture. There is the Angel of the Lord who accepts worship from people and stands in the fiery presence of Yahweh at the burning bush, speaking to Moses and so closely related to God that you might as well accept Him as Yahweh as much as you accept Yahweh in heaven (Exodus 3:2, 4-6).

Could this Word of Yahweh be what John refers to as he opens up his Gospel? This is also the Word Yahweh speaks as He calls creation into existence. God spoke the Word, and Jesus fulfilled it. We must have faith to believe any of this is true.

Paul talks about Jesus as preexistent (Colossians 1:15-20). There are other biblical reasons for seeing Jesus as the “Second Yahweh” of the Old Testament. John reveals to us that Jesus is Yahweh. After quoting from some of Isaiah’s prophecies about Jesus, he says Isaiah saw Jesus’s glory and spoke of Him (John 12:41). John is referring to when Yahweh’s train of glory filled the temple in Jerusalem during Isaiah’s worship (Isaiah 6:1-6).

One thing is for sure, whatever you pick up from these first words of the Bible: the Bible will call you to believe in great things in its pages, but if you can’t believe in God’s existence first, you will never believe anything else you read in this book. God calls you to “baby trust” in Him now so you won’t be surprised at what He does later.

God As Creator

“… created the heavens and the earth.”

Believe it or not, we have only covered three Hebrew words and four English words. Now for the rest of the verse, four Hebrew words and six English words. This is the next big concept our faith must make us live and believe.

Actually, the word order in Hebrew is different than in English. Hebrew literally reads “in the beginning created God…” It tells us God’s action first, and then the Author of that action. This is not unusual in Hebrew. The verb comes before the subject most of the time.

I think it is interesting that God, the subject, happens after the verb. Many times in Hebrew, the verb is the only part of the sentence that appears because the verb contains the subject as a pronoun. Moses goes to extra measures to tell us that God is the subject.

The Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) backs me up on this. It has the same word order as the Hebrew text. That’s significant because Greek uses word order to emphasize words and ideas. In the Septuagint, “create” comes before “God.” In other words, the Septuagint emphasizes God’s action of creating and then mentions God as Creator.

We see “created” before we see God in Genesis 1:1. As we often see throughout Scripture, we understand what God is doing war has done before we can realize who did it. God’s doing things in your life you may not realize He is in complete control of. This is nothing in human history has surprised Him.

Nothing that happens in your life is an accident. Even if God is not directly responsible for everything that has happened to you, He is working through the trial, pain, and hardship you endure. He’s making something great out of you through it. He may not stop your trial but He is making you into the person He wants you to be. It’s only when we look back on previous trials that we can see God’s hand at work in us.

If you study God’s names, you will realize that God has names based on two things. Either He tells us His name and its significance, or people in their circumstances give God a name. For instance, when the Israelites are in the wilderness and they cannot find water, and the water they do find is “bitter,” meaning that it is that to drink it causes sickness, God comes to them and calls himself Yahweh Rapheka (Jehovah Rapha) “the Lord your Healer). God gave Himself His name for them to know Him by.

Hagar has just been kicked out by Sarah and thrown into the desert with Ishmael her newborn to die. The angel of the Lord directs her to a place to get water to keep them alive. God tells her he will bless her and her son. She replies “You are the God who sees me” (Genesis 16:15). She gave God and name based on her experience with Him.

God’s names show He is intimately involved with your life, that He sees you and knows your situation. He walks with you. He provides for you. When you wonder if He is still there in your dark situation, look at God’s names and see that He never leaves or forsakes you (Hebrews 13:5). That wasn’t even part of what I was going to talk about. It’s free if it’s for you (The Spirit gave it to me for you. God really is with you.).

The creation account in the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, is dramatically different from other creation accounts, or myths. Creation stories like the Babylonians (Mesopotamian) and Egyptians creation myths, speak of creation and the creation of humans as an accident. not so with Yahweh, the God of the Bible.

We will find as we explore the creation account that God is intentional in everything He does. We know from other parts of Scripture that we are not an accident. God is intimately involved with creating us. We’ll see that in Genesis 2, but other passages like Psalm 139: 13-16 tell us God meets us together in the womb and knows every part of us.

I’m getting ahead of myself. The Hebrew verb “create” in this form (Qal verb stem) only refers to God’s creative action in the whole Bible! If you don’t believe me, you can look up the 50 occurrences in 42 verses. Don’t believe me? I listed them for you to look up and read. Go ahead. I’ll wait. (Genesis 1:1, 21, 27; 2:3, 4; 5:1, 2; 6:7; Exodus 34:10; Numbers 16:30; Deuteronomy 4:32; 1 Chronicles 8:21; Psalm 51:10; 89:12, 47; 102:18; 104:30; 148:5; Ecclesiastes 12:1; Isaiah 4:5; 40:26, 28; 41:20; 42:5; 43:1, 7; 43:15; 45:7, 8, 12, 18; 48:7; 54:16; 57:19; 65:17, 18; Jeremiah 31:22; Ezekiel 21:30; 28:13, 15; Amos 4:13; Malachi 2:10).

I know, crazy, right! God has reserved this verb in this stem for His creative work alone. You could say that God is the only Creator. Humans make things out of what is created. We are creative, but it is only to use the materials that are there. We don’t create out of nothing like God.

Anyway, God is the subject of creation. He is sovereign over creation by virtue of His creating it. Nothing under Him in creation has the right to question its Maker. That’s another interesting thought. We can complain all we want, but we have no right to “put God in His place”. To do so is only to acknowledge His divine and sovereign will over us. That’s why Job can only bow in humility when God asks him all those questions (Job 38:1-40:2).

God is over, outside His creation. He is the ultimate Authority over it. The word for “heavens” is anything above the surface of the earth, including the air we breathe. We have several layers of the atmosphere, understanding space above it as a vast void in which hang via gravity stars, planets,, and other celestial bodies.

The Hebrews did not understand any of that, but they understood God created whatever they cannot understand. We would do well to realize that as much as our sciences have helped us to understand God’s creation, we will never accumulate the vast knowledge of the Creator. Therefore, the science of studying and learning about creation should only cause us to bow in worship and be amazed at God every time we discover how it works.

To the ancient Israelites hearing this story, they would understand the “heavens” to be everything above the earth’s surface. They have no idea as we do today about space and its expanse. All they understand is that the heavens are the realm of birds, and then something greater beyond.

It’s not until Galileo focused his “then” high-powered telescope on the heavens that we learned about planets. Most of the time in the ancient world they were not visible to the naked eye. Think before the Greeks and the Romans. That’s the audience of these first two chapters of Genesis.

 “Earth” refers to the ground under our feet, the dust from which we come (spoiler alert for Genesis 2), and the soil from which all plant life comes. God has created earth for our benefit.

It used to be the University was the study of many things that, when unified, took us back to God our Creator.

Every individual study of physics, philosophy, natural sciences, and every other endeavor to learn was understood to be learning about God in His many facets and creativity. Theology used to be “the queen of the sciences” because every study was ultimately the study of God.

How far we have fallen in our arrogance! The next time you go to study something, the more you learn about it, the more you will realize you don’t know about it. This knowledge given to us by God, and the mysteries we have yet to learn and understand should cause us to worship God for what we know of His mastery of His creation, how it reflects its Maker, and the mystery of what we don’t understand, how God is so much greater than us.

Sovereign over Creation

It’s clear from the beginning of Genesis that God is sovereign over His creation. By virtue of creating it, God has full control and sole authority over it. This is not the sovereignty the Calvinists claim where God is in charge of every molecule. It is sovereignty as in the rights of a King over His subjects. They are the rights of an inventor over her invention, or an artist over his art.

The argument of the prophet fall as quickly on the heels of sovereignty. Shall what has been made say to its Maker, “Why did you me like this” (Romans 8:20-21)? We do not have the right to ask God why He does what He does. It would be like a worm controlling our schedules and checkbooks. We must hear God’s words anew again, “My ways are higher than your ways and My thoughts higher than yours” (Isaiah 55:8-9).

Rather than trying to take God’s place and assert your own sovereignty, focus on the enormous relief that brings to every one of us. I’m not in charge or in control. When things don’t go my way, they certainly don’t God’s way. God’s sovereignty over His creation reminds us we do not have to worry about tomorrow.

We can trust our great Creator that since He had purpose in creating the world and us that He knows what He is doing and there is no more beneficent Creator to submit our lives to.

The Saga Continues…

In BIG Issue 2, we will continue to track Genesis 1:2 and beyond to uncover more insights and gems about God and creation. If you are enjoying this, please like and leave a comment for me. If you want me to do a deep dive into Scripture on a topic for Volume 2, let me know in the comments. See you in our next issue!