In the Beginning—God
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
Any talk of Genesis usually has in mind the Bible as science or the Bible as history. We should never shy away from the sense in which Genesis communicates those matters to us. As Francis Schaeffer once observed: It’s true that the Bible is not a scientific textbook, but it does indeed speak of science.1 Just like any other subjects it speaks about, it does so on its own terms. It can give perfectly true knowledge without it giving exhaustive knowledge. What gets lost in the shuffle too often is what the early chapters about Genesis might have to say about God. That’s where we’re going to start because that’s where the Bible starts.
There is actually a lot of theology in those first words. Before there could be a story at all, there must be an Author with an imagination. In a more technical sense, there can be no effects without a cause being first—and this cause has to be sufficient to explain all of the effects. In this case, the effects are “all things.” John opens off his Gospel applying these words to Christ:
“All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (Jn. 1:3).
But this also sets us up to understand the real place of this first book. GENESIS comes from a Greek word that means “beginning,” and it got that name when a group of Jewish scribes in Alexandria, Egypt first translated their Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. Before that, the title of the book was simply the first few words in Hebrew (bereshith), or “In the beginning.” And Genesis is in the beginning in several ways. We will only mention the big three.
Genesis is the beginning of cosmology.
Genesis is the beginning of history.
Genesis is the beginning of theology.
The overarching principle we are to take from this beginning of the whole Bible is that either God will come first in our thought and life, or else everything will be disordered and destroyed.
Genesis is the beginning of cosmology.
That first Hebrew word I mentioned (בראשית) is a plain preposition-noun construct, which can only rightly be translated, “In the beginning.” The attempt to make this a temporal clause by some modern translations—as in, “When God began to create”—is forced and fanciful. The verb which follows is the finite verb bara’ and it is not preceded by the infinitive construct form which would render it “to create.”2 So that just won’t work grammatically. About that second word, the verb בָּרָא, there is another Hebrew word meaning “to make” or “to do” (עָשָׂה). This word בָּרָא carries the stronger sense of “create.” However, that can be inflated in importance. Both words are used to describe God’s making of many things—like man (Gen. 5:1 and Isa. 43:7), or the sea creatures (Ps. 104:22, 30), and even the whole heavens and earth (Gen. 2:4). So the word by itself will not get us to the most accurate concept.
For many people, their only interest in the first chapter of Genesis is what it is supposed to say about the origins of the universe in general, and the earth and its various forms of life in particular. And of course it does tell us about God creating “the heavens and the earth” (v. 1). There is no mistaking what is meant by the EARTH (הָאָֽרֶץ), though we will want to keep in our back pocket the Hebrew word that can mean “earth, land, or territory.” Here it clearly means the whole earth. The more debated concept is what is meant by HEAVENS (הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם). Is this the typical way of describing what we moderns started to call “outer space,” and so meaning the whole universe? Or is this speaking of the angelic realm, as often the word refers to the courts of heaven? Or, are we wrong to separate those two to begin with? I am not going to settle that today. A single Psalm makes use of both of these concepts with the same word with that plural (-im) ending. Psalm 33,
“By the word of the LORD the heavens were made” (v. 6)
“The LORD looks down from heaven; he sees all the children of man” (v. 13).
However God’s purpose here was not to satisfy our every curiosity. Much less was it to answer to the arrogance of the way that modern Western man writes his scientific textbooks.
By cosmology I mean something more general than a natural science that describes the cosmos. Here we mean something like an ultimate explanation. And any explanation that only speaks about the first moments is simply not big enough. We are speaking of an explanation of God’s total relationship to all that He has made. If you try to explain the universe being here without God being there “in the beginning,” well, then you will not be able to account for why the universe goes on as it does now, or why you and I are here. This isn’t simply about power, but about purpose. This isn’t to say anything bad about the material sciences. Science has its own purpose, and it is a very helpful one. But a science which is outside of a story is like a brain that has been removed from a man’s head. There is more to mind than tracing out descriptive behavior on the surface of the material world.
As long as we keep that in mind—and our own brains inside our heads, and connected to our hearts and our whole real life—what we do find in the visions that God gave to Moses in Genesis 1 is a world of wonder. Six days of the real “Greatest Show on Earth” or beyond. As Calvin called it, a “theater of God’s glory”; or as David put it:
“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Ps. 19:1).
Many people saw that earlier this week with the eclipse. But, in the structure of verses 2 through 25 we see six frames, with (if I can get you to picture it) a column of three on the left, labeled Days 1, 2, and 3, and another column with three on the right, labeled Days 4, 5, and 6. On the left column we have three stages all ready for their actors to be written into the play; and on the right column we have waiting backstage, the actors, each corresponding to their appropriate stage as the Author has fit them: so that Day 1 will set the stage for the actors of Day 4; Day 2 will set the stage for the actors of Day 5; and Day 3 will set the stage for the actors of Day 6.
Genesis is the beginning of history.
By the beginning of history I mean three main things: (i.) the beginning of man as an individual, (ii.) the beginning of human beings existing together (or what we call “society”), and then, once it becomes clear that human beings mess everything up in sin, (iii.) God starts over both with man as an individual and his life together with others. We call this latter history “redemptive history.” And that begins in Genesis also. So the gospel starts in Genesis. Paul says so about an actor that we will meet later on named Abraham. He said,
“And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed’” (Gal. 3:8).
So expect to run into the gospel very early on.
Now if we circle back to those first two meanings to the beginning of history, we see man in himself, and as he exists with other human beings. So we have an individual person and we have a society, or community. In both cases, we have what verses 26-27 of this chapter go on to call the “image of God,” and we will have a lot more to say about that when we come to it. But for now just catch this: Even an “image of” God is about God. We will see that God made human beings to speak about himself. In fact, human beings will speak even louder about God than all of the other things that he created.
Now about this thing called HISTORY, it may be a bad bit of etymology, but if we slow down over the word history, we will notice that it is “his-story.” True, the Latin historia has nothing to do with gender; but on the other hand, it is also true that no account of history is ever impersonal. This will shape how we see the whole book of Genesis. For example the outline of this book. The book may be divided into two main sections. And we call these: 1. Primeval history; 2. Patriarchal history.
That first word “primeval” just means anything having to do with the earliest ages in the history of the world. That second word, from the word “patriarch,” for father, will cash out to mean the “headship” or “rule” of the fathers; and when God started over with human beings, after they rebelled against Him, He naturally started with men and then their whole families. We will talk a lot about both of these “histories” or two human lines, or as Augustine called them, the “two cities.” In other words, back to that outline, first God creates and covenants with an old world in Adam (Ch. 1-11); and then, with the fall and the curse, God begins a new human family after Abraham (Ch. 12-50).
Genesis is the beginning of theology.
This is the main thing going on in the first chapter. ‘In the beginning GOD’. By theology, we mean something like “the study of God,” or even the “science of God.” Most people today do not know this, but the word “science” comes from the Latin word scientia, which simply means “knowledge.” That’s the other reason I called that first word “cosmology,” as people always used to know, up until about a century-and-a-half ago, that it is more accurate.
So we have a “theology of beginnings.” What I mean is that the very idea of what comes first, and what comes last, and what is holding us all up at every point in between—all of this cries out for explanation. And the Bible is always reminding God’s own people of this: “I am the first, and I am the last” (Isa. 48:12). Three times in Revelation, the last book of the Bible, he uses an expression from the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet to say the same: “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (1:8); “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (22:13; cf. 21:6). Or back in Isaiah,
“I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose” (Isa. 46:9-10).
So what should we think when we see God creating all of the things we see in Genesis 1? There are many things this will make us think of, but surely the most important of them is God’s sovereign power over the whole creation. The One who makes all things is obviously Lord, or Master, over all of those things:
“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers” (Ps. 24:1).
It has been said that if we get Genesis right, we will be on track to understand the rest, and that if we get it wrong, well, then the reverse will happen. Let me give a few examples: What sort of a God-Man might we recast if we sever the very connection between God and man that Genesis makes? And what if we were to reduce it all to mere allegory? Should we reject the primacy of man over beasts? Or downplay that male and female are designed with different natures and not given merely arbitrary roles? And what does any of that have to do with the nature of God anyway? All of this doctrinal freight is carried forth from this starting point all the way to our final destination in Revelation. We read Genesis amiss, and do not really read it at all, if we do not start with its theology.
Practical Use of this Doctrine
Use 1. Instruction. Our contemplation of God being there before anything else is meant to set our thinking back, like a factory reset. Being redeemed in Christ comes with a redeemed mind. John Stott once put things very well by saying,
“In the beginning God.’ The first words of the Bible are more than an introduction to the creation story or to the book of Genesis. They supply the key which opens our understanding to the Bible as a whole. They tell us that the religion of the Bible is a religion of the initiative of God. You can never take God by surprise. You can never anticipate him. He always makes the first move. He is always there ‘in the beginning.’ Before man existed, God acted. Before man stirs himself to seek God, God has sought man. In the Bible, we do not see man groping after God; we see God reaching after man.”3
So we must take inventory of the order of our thoughts. Does our fundamental thinking have in the beginning God? I don’t mean this in some superstitious way, as if our very sentences have to be prefaced with these words! I am talking about our basic presuppositions.
Use 2. Correction. What is the flip side of this coin? What happens when man does not start with God? In my Big Idea I used the two words “disordered and destroyed” for what happens by not putting God “in the beginning.” Paul gives us a diagnosis of mankind who would not start with God in their thinking, where he says that, “since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done” (Rom. 1:28). Likewise, where he says,
“because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.(2 Thess. 2:10-12).
Disordered and destroyed.
All around us are people who are disordered in their thoughts and therefore have destroyed their lives. Many of those people grew up in the church. Many of those people have loving Christian parents who are praying for them. The church is called on a rescue operation for these; and a big part of that is to cultivate a language amongst ourselves that is able to bring broken souls back to the beginning. The first few chapters of Genesis especially are crucial.
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1. Francis Schaeffer, No Final Conflict (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1975),
2. cf. Douglas Kelly, Creation and Change: Genesis 1:1-2:4 in the Light of Changing Scientific Paradigms (Ross-shire, UK: Christian Focus Publications, 2017), 84.
3. John Stott, Basic Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, ), 13
