Genesis 1 — In the Beginning, God

How to read the first page

Before we ask what Genesis 1 says, we have to ask what kind of writing it is — because we read a poem differently than we read a police report, and the Bible expects us to know the difference. Chapter 1 announces itself as neither myth nor manual but as something closer to a hymn: measured, patterned, sung. "And God said… and it was so… and God saw that it was good… and there was evening and there was morning." The refrains fall like the strophes of a psalm; the days are arranged in a deliberate architecture, the first three forming realms (light, sky-and-sea, land) and the second three filling them with rulers (lights, birds-and-fish, animals-and-humankind). This is a true account of the world's origin, but it is not a technical one, and it never pretends to be. It tells us, with unmatched authority, who made the world and whose it is; it does not hand us the mechanism. We will honor the text most by letting it be the elevated, hymnic prose it is — measured and cadenced, but never a science report — and by holding the questions of process and timescale with an open hand, the way faithful readers across the church have long and honestly differed over the length of the days and the age of the earth. As Calvin observed, Moses writes "in a popular style what all ordinary persons… are able to understand," describing the world as it appears to the eye, not as a treatise for astronomers.^*

"In the beginning, God" (1:1–2)

Everything hangs on the first four words: "In the beginning, God." Before the verbs, before the light, there is the bare, unargued fact of God — no rival, no consort, no prior chaos he must defeat. The Hebrew verb is bara, "create," a word the Old Testament reserves for God alone; no human being ever baras. The earth begins tohu wa-bohu — "without form and void," a wonderful pair of rhyming Hebrew words for waste and emptiness — and over that dark deep the ruach of God, his Spirit-wind, hovers like a bird over a nest. The scene is not God struggling against the dark but God brooding over it, poised to speak.

Creation by the word (1:3–25)

And then he speaks. "Let there be light, and there was light." There is no effort, no battle, only the sovereign word and its instant answer — the whole cosmos strung between God's let there be and the world's and it was so. Ten times he speaks; the universe is spoken into being. Gordon Wenham notes the quiet polemic in it: the neighbors of ancient Israel told of sun-gods and moon-gods and monsters of the sea, but Genesis will not even name the sun and moon — it calls them merely "the greater light" and "the lesser light," two lamps God hung and switched on. The sea monsters that terrified the nations are here just tanninim, creatures God makes and calls good.^* The poem is quietly dethroning every false god by the simple act of listing them among the made things.

The image of God (1:26–28)

Then the tempo changes. "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." For the only time, God deliberates, and speaks of himself in a strange plural that the church has long heard as the first whisper of the triune life. The word is tselem, image — and in the ancient world an image was what a king set up in a far province to say this land is mine, and I rule here. To be made in God's tselem is to be his living statue in the world, made to represent him, to reflect him, to rule as he rules — "male and female he created them," the image borne equally by both. We are not an afterthought of the cosmos; we are its appointed stewards, dust that carries the likeness of God. And that plural — “let us make” — tells us something about the God whose image we bear. The church has long heard in it the fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit: the one God who is eternally three-in-one. It means God did not make us out of loneliness or need; he was never alone. Before there was a world there was already love between the persons of the Godhead — “God is love,” John will later write, and love must have someone to love. C.S. Lewis put it unforgettably: “God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.”^* To be made in the image of that God is to be made for relationship — for friendship with him and with one another. The likeness we carry is not only rule and reason; it is the capacity to love and be loved, stamped on us by a God who is himself a communion of love.

The verdict, and the seventh day

Six times God looks at his work and calls it tov, good; over the whole, with humankind in it, he says tov me'od, very good. This is the deepest note of the chapter and the one we most need: the material world, the body, the sea and the soil and the animals, are not a prison or an illusion but the good handiwork of a good God, and he delights in them. And then the poem breathes out into rest — the seventh day, blessed and hallowed, creation's Sabbath, the goal toward which all the making moved.

We cannot read "let there be light" as Christians and not hear the echo waiting in it. John opens his Gospel with Genesis's own words — "In the beginning" — and tells us who the speaking God was speaking through: "In the beginning was the Word… all things were made through him." The One who said let there be light is the One who would say "I am the light of the world," and the God who once brooded over the dark to make a world now shines "in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." Paul dares to call it a second Genesis: "if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation." The first page of the Bible is not only about how the world began. It is the opening bar of a song that ends in a new heaven and new earth, spoken into being by the same Word.

:::pastor An illustration. Read Genesis 1 aloud and you will feel your shoulders drop. That is not an accident. It is built like liturgy — the same phrases returning, the same steady verdict, "and it was good" — the way a parent's voice steadies a frightened child by its very cadence. The chapter is doing to us what it describes: speaking order over the formless and void, quieting the deep with a word.

From history. Israel sang this hymn surrounded by neighbors whose creation stories were tales of war among the gods — the world hacked out of a slain monster's body. Genesis quietly refuses all of it: no combat, no rival deities, the sun and moon demoted to "the greater light" and "the lesser light," the dreaded sea-monsters listed calmly among the good creatures God made. It is less a myth than the unmaking of every myth. source

Worth quoting. "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible." — The Nicene Creed :::