In the beginning, God
Genesis 1.1-5
In the beginning, God.
If the Scriptures are the record of the Jews and Christians, then why start here? It would make more sense to start with Abraham’s story, or perhaps the story of the Hebrews groaning in slavery in Egypt. But instead we are told, in the beginning, God.
The Bible never tries to prove God exists, it simply accepts that God does exist and moves on. Whenever we try to use the Genesis creation story as somehow proving God exists, we use it for a reason it was never intended. I know that Genesis’ accounts of creation have dropped from sight in our popular culture, long ago replaced by the Big Bang theory and Charles Darwin. The ongoing fights between religious creationists on one hand and scientific fundamentalists on the other continue to entertain me; I’ve spoken about the fallacies on both sides before and so won’t dwell on them today. Yet the scientific-materialist understanding of reality is so strong, I feel compelled to speak very briefly about it. I quote Dr. B. B. Warfield, long dead now, who was a scientifically educated professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. Warfield wrote:
The story of creation in Genesis is a window through which we see that, In the beginning, God. So when scientific fundamentalists say that Genesis can’t be true because science thinks otherwise, I reply, no, science is only a window to see creation, but I look through Genesis to see that in the beginning God.
There is a contingency to existence, meaning that our existence is contingent on something else. Or someone else. We have to assume that God didn’t have to create the universe. One of the things Genesis shows us is that God is purposeful. For the rest of the first chapter, God follows a rather stately procedure. On the first days this thing was done, the second day another, and so forth. God is not haphazard, he knows what he is doing.
For centuries Christian thought has held that the creation story of the first chapter shows the power of God, while the different creation story in chapter two shows the near presence of God. In chapter one, God is indeed powerful but seems a little remote. God acts, God speaks, God moves, and things just happen. But in chapter two, God walks on the earth, God stoops in the dust, God breathes his Spirit into the nostrils of Adam and shapes Eve from his rib.
Together, these creation accounts show that God is both powerful and close. The stereotype we have of “God in his heaven” while the rest of us struggle here on earth. No, from the very beginning, God has been here with us in power. It should not surprise us, therefore, that God would come to be born as a baby in a manger. A God who stoops in the dust to form humankind, and whose Spirit breathes life into us, would find it neither difficult nor improper to put flesh on and live as one of us - with the same determination and purposiveness that God showed in the beginning.
The creation of everything was an activity of the entire godhead, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The verses from Genesis tell us that God the Father was active, obviously. The “wind from God” in verse 2 is translated as the Spirit of God in the King James Version and almost every version since. It can also be translated as breath. The Jews connected breath with spirit. After Jesus was resurrected, John reports he breathed on his disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22).
John’s Gospel also says of the Son in its first chapter: “He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all people.” So all three persons of the Trinity were active in the creation.
The ongoing work of God is salvation righteousness, and it started right here. Isaiah describes the Lord “striding forward in the greatness of his strength” and saying, “It is I, speaking in righteousness, mighty to save” (Isa 63:1). Zephaniah said, “The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save” (3:17). The activity of the Son, through whom all things were made, shows that the very acts of creation were saving acts. Some Christians have thought that the world was created perfect, but the Bible never says that. Genesis says the world was created good. I think that because the world was created with and through the Son, the goodness of the physical world means that the world cooperates with the saving grace of God. Our physicality aids rather than hinders the saving work of the Son in our lives. The saving activity of God is built into creation itself.
Genesis says the earth was a formless void when God’s Spirit moved over it. The Bible does not actually say that before the universe existed, there was nothing. It simply says that God began creating with a formless void. If anything did exist, it was like a blank slate upon which the Creator would write. Michelangelo said that when he sculpted, he started with a block of granite, formless if you will, void of any particular shape, and then simply removed all the granite that didn’t look like the statue he wanted.
What, if anything, existed before God gave it form and shape is beyond our knowing. What we do know is that God shapes that which is formless. For centuries the formless void has been thought of as chaos, a state of being that is uncontrolled and purposeless. “The deep” may be an expression of the wildness of the oceans, for God’s Spirit moved over “the waters.” In the rest of the Jewish Scriptures, the sea does represent chaos and being apart from God, see Jonah for example. But God tames the deep.
So many people today are living formless lives, void of godly purpose. Genesis offers them a word of hope and assurance: the Spirit of God can bring order from their chaos. God can bring shape to formlessness. God can take any life and from it make something good. “He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing,” said Zephaniah (3:17).
On the seventh day of creation, Genesis says God rested. But it does not say God stopped. Thanks to God we exist, and in God we live and move and breathe and have our being. Creation was not a static event, it is a dynamic process of bringing forth the image of God in humankind and the world at large. The Genesis stories of creation show that the realms of the divine and creation overlap. God is powerful, but not exclusively so, as creation unfurls. Creation has power too, a certain degree of independence and freedom built in God’s very acts of creating.
“God moves over, as it were, and makes room for others. Creation [results in] . . . openness and unpredictability wherein God leaves room for genuine decisions” on our part as we exercise our God-given free will. But the way God has given - and is giving - his creation its being and power also commits him to relationship with us. God is no laborer on a factory floor, churning out worlds that mean nothing to him once they roll out the door. There is only this one created order, and God never waves it goodbye, never simply wishes the best for it. God remains in it.
But God’s will is not the only will in place or at work in the world. We have a will also, and evil prowls, thwarting creation. God’s sovereignty in creation is not absolute divine control, but one that gives power to the created order to some degree.
Yet at the end, God’s will does prevail, according to the Scriptures, and creation really is brought to perfection. In the beginning, God, and in the end, God. And always, the grace of the Son and the work of the Spirit, by which we are given life and life eternal. Creation is an ongoing process. I think it is reasonable to say that creation is not finished until the prophecies of the book of Revelation are fulfilled, when God’s justice is established over all the created order, evil is finally overcome and death is defeated. Our calling as a people of God is to assist the divine creativity. Discipleship is a cooperative work of creation with God. We are, like the world, a work in progress, moving on to perfection.
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.In the beginning, God. The opening verse of Genesis is one of the best known in the whole Bible. It has become boring in its familiarity. Why does the Bible begin here? After all, the Jewish Scriptures are primarily a record of the Hebrews and Jews. Before long, the Bible leaves creation behind and dives straight into the story of the first covenant people. Then our Bible tells of the founding of the next covenant people, we Christians.
In the beginning, God.
If the Scriptures are the record of the Jews and Christians, then why start here? It would make more sense to start with Abraham’s story, or perhaps the story of the Hebrews groaning in slavery in Egypt. But instead we are told, in the beginning, God.
The Bible never tries to prove God exists, it simply accepts that God does exist and moves on. Whenever we try to use the Genesis creation story as somehow proving God exists, we use it for a reason it was never intended. I know that Genesis’ accounts of creation have dropped from sight in our popular culture, long ago replaced by the Big Bang theory and Charles Darwin. The ongoing fights between religious creationists on one hand and scientific fundamentalists on the other continue to entertain me; I’ve spoken about the fallacies on both sides before and so won’t dwell on them today. Yet the scientific-materialist understanding of reality is so strong, I feel compelled to speak very briefly about it. I quote Dr. B. B. Warfield, long dead now, who was a scientifically educated professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. Warfield wrote:
A glass window stands before us. We [may] raise our eyes and see the glass; we note its quality, and observe its defects; we speculate on its composition. Or we look straight through it on the great prospect of land and sea and sky beyond. So there are two ways of looking at the world. We may see the world and absorb ourselves in the wonders of nature. That is the scientific way. Or we may look right through the world and see God behind it. That is the religious way.To understand the world in religious terms is not wrong, nor to understand the world in scientific ways. Both reveal truth, but neither reveals all the truth. But we don’t put windows in our homes in order to see windows. We use windows to look through, not at.
The story of creation in Genesis is a window through which we see that, In the beginning, God. So when scientific fundamentalists say that Genesis can’t be true because science thinks otherwise, I reply, no, science is only a window to see creation, but I look through Genesis to see that in the beginning God.
There is a contingency to existence, meaning that our existence is contingent on something else. Or someone else. We have to assume that God didn’t have to create the universe. One of the things Genesis shows us is that God is purposeful. For the rest of the first chapter, God follows a rather stately procedure. On the first days this thing was done, the second day another, and so forth. God is not haphazard, he knows what he is doing.
For centuries Christian thought has held that the creation story of the first chapter shows the power of God, while the different creation story in chapter two shows the near presence of God. In chapter one, God is indeed powerful but seems a little remote. God acts, God speaks, God moves, and things just happen. But in chapter two, God walks on the earth, God stoops in the dust, God breathes his Spirit into the nostrils of Adam and shapes Eve from his rib.
Together, these creation accounts show that God is both powerful and close. The stereotype we have of “God in his heaven” while the rest of us struggle here on earth. No, from the very beginning, God has been here with us in power. It should not surprise us, therefore, that God would come to be born as a baby in a manger. A God who stoops in the dust to form humankind, and whose Spirit breathes life into us, would find it neither difficult nor improper to put flesh on and live as one of us - with the same determination and purposiveness that God showed in the beginning.
The creation of everything was an activity of the entire godhead, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The verses from Genesis tell us that God the Father was active, obviously. The “wind from God” in verse 2 is translated as the Spirit of God in the King James Version and almost every version since. It can also be translated as breath. The Jews connected breath with spirit. After Jesus was resurrected, John reports he breathed on his disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22).
John’s Gospel also says of the Son in its first chapter: “He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all people.” So all three persons of the Trinity were active in the creation.
The ongoing work of God is salvation righteousness, and it started right here. Isaiah describes the Lord “striding forward in the greatness of his strength” and saying, “It is I, speaking in righteousness, mighty to save” (Isa 63:1). Zephaniah said, “The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save” (3:17). The activity of the Son, through whom all things were made, shows that the very acts of creation were saving acts. Some Christians have thought that the world was created perfect, but the Bible never says that. Genesis says the world was created good. I think that because the world was created with and through the Son, the goodness of the physical world means that the world cooperates with the saving grace of God. Our physicality aids rather than hinders the saving work of the Son in our lives. The saving activity of God is built into creation itself.
Genesis says the earth was a formless void when God’s Spirit moved over it. The Bible does not actually say that before the universe existed, there was nothing. It simply says that God began creating with a formless void. If anything did exist, it was like a blank slate upon which the Creator would write. Michelangelo said that when he sculpted, he started with a block of granite, formless if you will, void of any particular shape, and then simply removed all the granite that didn’t look like the statue he wanted.
What, if anything, existed before God gave it form and shape is beyond our knowing. What we do know is that God shapes that which is formless. For centuries the formless void has been thought of as chaos, a state of being that is uncontrolled and purposeless. “The deep” may be an expression of the wildness of the oceans, for God’s Spirit moved over “the waters.” In the rest of the Jewish Scriptures, the sea does represent chaos and being apart from God, see Jonah for example. But God tames the deep.
So many people today are living formless lives, void of godly purpose. Genesis offers them a word of hope and assurance: the Spirit of God can bring order from their chaos. God can bring shape to formlessness. God can take any life and from it make something good. “He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing,” said Zephaniah (3:17).
On the seventh day of creation, Genesis says God rested. But it does not say God stopped. Thanks to God we exist, and in God we live and move and breathe and have our being. Creation was not a static event, it is a dynamic process of bringing forth the image of God in humankind and the world at large. The Genesis stories of creation show that the realms of the divine and creation overlap. God is powerful, but not exclusively so, as creation unfurls. Creation has power too, a certain degree of independence and freedom built in God’s very acts of creating.
“God moves over, as it were, and makes room for others. Creation [results in] . . . openness and unpredictability wherein God leaves room for genuine decisions” on our part as we exercise our God-given free will. But the way God has given - and is giving - his creation its being and power also commits him to relationship with us. God is no laborer on a factory floor, churning out worlds that mean nothing to him once they roll out the door. There is only this one created order, and God never waves it goodbye, never simply wishes the best for it. God remains in it.
But God’s will is not the only will in place or at work in the world. We have a will also, and evil prowls, thwarting creation. God’s sovereignty in creation is not absolute divine control, but one that gives power to the created order to some degree.
Yet at the end, God’s will does prevail, according to the Scriptures, and creation really is brought to perfection. In the beginning, God, and in the end, God. And always, the grace of the Son and the work of the Spirit, by which we are given life and life eternal. Creation is an ongoing process. I think it is reasonable to say that creation is not finished until the prophecies of the book of Revelation are fulfilled, when God’s justice is established over all the created order, evil is finally overcome and death is defeated. Our calling as a people of God is to assist the divine creativity. Discipleship is a cooperative work of creation with God. We are, like the world, a work in progress, moving on to perfection.
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