Genesis 1 — In the Beginning, God

How to read the first page

Open the Bible and the first thing it does is sing. Genesis 1 is not a laboratory report and was never meant to be read as one. It is a hymn of origins, told in measured refrains by a people who knew the Maker long before they ever tried to count the days. That does not make it less true. It makes it true the way a wedding vow is truer than a marriage certificate. The certificate has the date. The vow has the meaning.

So we will not press the chapter for the mechanism or the timetable — the how, or the how long. Faithful readers who love this text have divided over the days for centuries, and Genesis itself never settles the argument, because settling it was never its errand. Its errand is larger. It is here to tell us whose world this is. Read it for that and the first page gives up its treasure. Read it for geology and it goes quiet, like a poem cross-examined for its footnotes.

The vertigo of the first sentence (1:1 – 2)

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Sit in that sentence before you move past it. There is no argument for God here. No warm-up, no defense. He is simply there before everything, and everything else is simply made. Basil of Caesarea, preaching through this chapter in the fourth century, admitted he could not get past the opening line without stopping: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. I stop struck with admiration at this thought. What shall I first say? Where shall I begin?"^* The right response to Genesis 1:1 is not analysis. It is vertigo.

The verb is bara, and in Hebrew it is used only ever with God as its subject. People make and shape and build; bara is his alone. And what he begins with is not tidy nothing but tohu wa-bohu — "formless and void," a wild, watery, trackless waste. Over it the Spirit of God — ruach, the same word as wind and breath — hovers on the dark face of the deep like a bird over its nest. Nothing is shaped yet. But God is already there above the chaos, and he is not anxious. The whole chapter is the patient turning of that waste into a home.

Creation by the word (1:3 – 25)

Then God speaks, and the speaking is the point. "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light." Ten times the phrase comes back — and God said — until it beats like a refrain. He does not wrestle the darkness or fight rival gods for the raw material, as the other creation stories of the ancient world had it. He says, and it is so. Between his word and the world's obedience there is no gap at all.

Now watch the shape of the six days, because the shape carries the meaning. On the first three days God separates: light from dark, the waters above from the waters below, the sea from the dry land. On the next three he fills what he separated: sun and moon for the day and night, birds and fish for the sky and sea, animals and man for the land. Days one to three build the rooms. Days four to six move in the tenants. This is not chaos barely held down. It is a house being built and furnished, room by room, for someone who is coming.

And over it, again and again, one verdict: "and God saw that it was good." The material world is not a prison, or an illusion, or a regrettable second-best. It is good — graded so by the only One with the authority to grade it. Calvin loved to call this world, exactly as it stands, "this most beautiful theater," and told us not to hurry past it but "to take a pious delight in the clear and manifest works of God."^* Every sunrise is a line the Maker still calls good.

The image of God (1:26 – 28)

Then the chapter slows, and its language changes. For everything else God had said "let there be." Now he says something almost deliberate: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." The plural is mysterious — an early hint, the church came to see, of the God who is one and yet not alone. And the word is tselem, image. In the ancient world a king would set up his tselem in a distant province to mark whose land it was. That is what a human being is. Every one of us is God's image, set down in his world, a living marker of whose it is.

Feel how level that makes the ground. Not the pharaoh only, not the strong or the clever or the free — every human being, male and female together, carries the image. Irenaeus said it in a line no one has bettered: "the glory of God is a living man, and the life of man is the vision of God."^* A human being fully alive is what God gets glory from. That is the dignity this chapter hands us, and it is handed to everyone or to no one.

With the dignity comes a task: "have dominion." But read it in the light of the theater we just walked through. We rule as the image of a God who made this world and called it good, so our dominion is a gardener's and not a looter's. We are set over a world we did not make and cannot replace, to keep it the way its Owner would. To bear the image is to be trusted with the house.

The seventh day, and the verdict

At the end God looks at the whole of it — the light, the seas, the swarming and flying and walking things, the image-bearers — and the verdict rises one final degree. Not merely good now, but "very good." Then he stops. "On the seventh day God rested." Not because he was tired; the God who spoke galaxies does not need a nap. He rested the way a builder rests when the house is finished and fit to live in — the rest of a work that is done. The Sabbath is not an afterthought tacked onto the week. It is the summit the week was climbing toward: a world made, blessed, and at peace with its Maker.

The New Testament opens its own first page by reaching back to this one. "In the beginning was the Word," John writes — echoing Genesis on purpose — "and all things were made through him." The One who said "let there be light" was the eternal Son. Every and God said in this chapter was spoken through the Word who would one day be made flesh and pitch his tent among us. The world was made through Christ. It was also made for him.

And the voice that first called light out of darkness has never fallen silent. Paul says that when God saves a person, he simply does Genesis again: "the God who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shone in our hearts." The new creation runs on the old machinery — a word, and light, out of a formless dark. The Spirit still hovers over the waste and makes it live.

Even the seventh day was pointing ahead. The rest God entered when his work was finished is the rest he means to bring us into — a finished work, a house made ready, a people at peace with their Maker at last. Genesis 1 ends in a rest that Genesis 3 will shatter and the last page of the Bible will hand back. The story that opens "in the beginning, God" closes with the same God, a new heaven and a new earth, and the verdict spoken over it all one more time.

:::pastor An illustration. Notice that God's first move against the chaos is not force but a word. He does not wrestle the darkness. He speaks, and the darkness gets no vote. It is worth remembering when a life feels tohu wa-bohu — formless, dark, trackless. The God of Genesis 1 is not intimidated by a mess. His characteristic move over the deep is to speak into it and begin, patiently, to make a home.

From history. The church has read these "days" in more than one way for a very long time, and it was not modern nervousness that made it so. Augustine, sixteen hundred years ago, thought the six days were not ordinary days at all but a frame for a creation God accomplished in a single instant — and no one called him an unbeliever for it. The days have held faithful readers who differ. What has never been in doubt is the sentence they frame: God made it, and it is his. source

Worth quoting. "The world is charged with the grandeur of God." — Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur" (1877) :::