Genesis 1:1

Our minds simply can’t grasp “The Beginning”. I can understand that infinity exists but can’t understand infinity. I can’t understand timelessness, eternity. Yet I know it exists. I believe that God is eternal and therefore outside of our earthly time dimension, but I find it impossible to really grasp. It’s beyond my capacity, to grasp with my limited faculties.

You can’t go back any further in time than “In The Beginning”.

For as long as God alone existed, there was no time. And even that statement reduces our eternal God to time as soon as we used the word “long”.
It doesn’t matter if you believe as some do, that the account of Genesis from creation until today only covers about six or seven thousand years. It doesn’t matter if you believe as many bible scholars do, that the earth was recreated after a great and terrible judgement at some time in the past, possibly many millions of our time years in the past (and we’ll look at this shortly).

No matter how you cut these arguments you just cannot get any time before “The Beginning”. Before “The Beginning” is eternity, the dimension which is the realm of God and eternity never began and will never end. To try thinking that one out and fully understanding it with our natural mind is hopeless. As we’ll see shortly in our Genesis study there is but one way to “see” this and that’s through the eye of faith!

The next word we come to in this, the most all-encompassing statement ever made to man, is “God”.  There is now, always has been and always will be Almighty God. Unless we believe this we can never know Him and, as a result, we can never know the creation account. If we don’t believe this our entire existence and that of our universe is only speculation. In fact, we can never know anything with any certainty without believing in the existence of God and His relationship to the universe and each one of us. We should never fall into the deception that science and evolution can explain the origin of everything we know in existence today.

Science and evolution cannot possibly explain how something came into existence from absolutely nothing. As soon as we say there was a chemical, a gas, or a minute cell or piece of matter that everything we know came from we haven’t gotten back to “The Beginning” yet no matter how many billions of years we attribute to that starting point.

The original Hebrew word here for God is Elohim. Now, even those of us who have no education in the Hebrew language instinctively know that Elohim is a plural name. Within this name is all the mystery and majesty that human language can possibly describe. The name describes one God, and yet it’s plural. Throughout the Bible we‘ll see God as One God, who is adamant that we understand that and refuse, even to the point of death, to worship any other gods than Him.

Elohim is a human name that we’ve used to attempt to explain God. The best we can do is understand that he is what’s known as a composite unity. That is one God with three distinct personalities that can be apart yet are never separated. He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is just as impossible for our human minds to grasp as eternity or timelessness but we should never let our failure to understand what cannot be understood be a reason to doubt God’s exitence.

The Jewish name for God is “Yahweh” first used in the book of Exodus but there’s no English language word for this name that was to the Jews too sacred to even say out loud.

Over time Elohim, Lord and Adonai were used when speaking of God.

The name that God Himself gave to Moses when Moses asked Him his name in Exodus 3:13 was I AM THAT I AM. He instructed Moses in Exodus 2:14 to tell the people when they asked that I AM sent him.

In the Gospel of John 8:48, the Jewish religious leaders are questioning Jesus. We, as gentiles can easily miss the spectacular answers that Jesus gives to them. In  verse 51 Jesus says  to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, if anyone keeps My word he shall never see death.” In fact, He was claiming a direct link between Himself and the ancient prophetic words spoken by Abraham and the prophets.

In answer to this claim, the Jews tell Jesus He’s not yet 50 years old so how could he relate directly to Abraham and the prophets?

Then the kicker came, the statement that sealed His fate and assured His journey to the cross of crucixion. In John 8:58  Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.”

As we’ve already noted, we as gentiles can easily miss the significance of this statement. The Jews did not!

He was stating that He was the I AM who revealed Himself to Moses on Mount Sinai all those years ago. He was saying He was God!

No wonder the Jews who failed to see the reality of this were incensed to the point of murder.

God is completely whole within himself, and he’s eternal. He has always existed, and He always will. He’s the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.

And he is the only one in existence who can be described this way. The rest of us need a huge range of things that all must work in perfect unison in order for us to exist and to even take our next breath.

The most powerful human on earth is still at the mercy of his health and the environment that he lives within.

God stands alone in needing nothing, in being wholly self-sufficient. He certainly does not need man. He needs nothing from us. That simple fact can be very offensive to our human nature – that part of us that wants to be somebody special, somebody needed.

There are over 1000 different names for God throughout the Bible and we could study them and the person of God for an eternity and never fully grasp His power and majesty.

It’s enough in this study that God has given us the best revelation of Himself and Who and What He is in the Lord Jesus Christ.

This whole study, no matter how long it takes, will always be nothing more than a journey to discover Him.

Let’s look at “Creation”. The word used in the bible for created is a different word than for “made” even though there are similarities. The word for created is Bara. The word for made is asah.

The difference seems to be that Bara means giving being to that which before was not or bringing something out of absolutely nothing whereas asah seems to mean making something out of something else that already existed but in another form.

There are only three times this word bara is used in the creation account. Three times God created something from nothing.

The first time was His creation of the heavens and the earth.

The second time was when He created the sea creatures and the animals and the third time was when He created man.

Now just a side note here. In Genesis 1 we have these great statements but God keeps them simple. However, in Genesis chapter 2, as we’ll see when we get there, more detail is given.

What are “The heavens and the earth”?

What was there before the heavens and the earth?

The heavens here doesn’t necessarily include heaven, the dwelling place of God. There are three heavens described in the Word of God, the heavens where the birds and the clouds exist, and the heavens where the stars and planets exist that we know as space. And then there’s what’s referred to as the third heaven which is the realm of God.

The heavens and the earth refers to the first two.

Within the creation of the heavens and the earth we would have had, as a by-product the creation of matter, gases, chemicals and all the countless elements necessary to sustain life. All the hopelessly complex equations as to the orbits of the planets, atomic interactions and the precise measurements of every chemical mix required to make our universe exist as we know it would have come into being.

People may say, “That’s ridiculous, How could God make all that happen”?

Well, try making it happen through evolution!

What was there before the heavens and the earth were created?

Absolutely nothing that had the dimensions that we live in today.

Now, really, this is all God has given us about creation.

We do have the creation of man and the animals later on from verse 20, but this first sentence of the bible IS the creation story and a very brief story it is.

Now we need to ask ourselves what was God’s purpose, and what did he have in mind when he gave us this powerful yet simple account of the creation of the universe?

Did God mean to give us a scientific and geological study of creation?

If He had decided to explain creation to us in this way the space that would be required would fill the earth more than even the current mountains of books that try to explain it in terms that fit with our natural minds.

Even with all those books condensed and added into Genesis we as humans simply could not understand it. The concepts, the dimensions and the scientific knowledge required to understand the mechanics of how everything was put together from absolutely nothing would be beyond the understanding of the most intelligent genius ever to have lived on earth.

Certainly, even the most intelligent and learned men of Moses’ day could not possibly have understood it. As intelligent as they were (and many think far more intelligent than us today) they had no idea of even the most basic things that we know today from a view through a microscope.

No, the Bible was not written for learned professors but for simple folk of every age, every background, and every language in every land.

However, Genesis 1:1 has started more violent and passionate arguments and wild theories than any other subject, ever.

These arguments and theories are, of course always the result of man’s reasoning and they are, without exception, built on speculation which, for the most part, doesn’t factor in an all-knowing, all-intelligent, all-mighty God. These theories and arguments have certainly drowned out the clear voice of God.

Perhaps the loudest voices in these theories and arguments are from the part of society that believes, beyond doubt, that science explains everything in the universe and these voices don’t come from truly great scientists alone. Many ordinary folks accept anything that’s spoken by a person in a white coat in a laboratory as being beyond dispute.

The fact that science is constantly changing as discoveries are made every day doesn’t phase these people.

Even though their science has achieved fantastic things and has explained the mechanics behind so much of our universe, it fails dismally to explain the origins of that universe.

Science can’t explain the steps from absolutely nothing to something.

Then it fails to explain how that something changed from inorganic to organic, in other words from a piece of dead matter to a living organism. Then it can’t explain how that something took on intelligence and choice and the ability to reason and love and hate.

Despite this, these voices cling to their belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing science.

Then you have the voices that don’t bother to ask questions for themselves but blindly accept the preferred opinions of the day. A great many teachers and professors along with millions of everyday people from every walk of life just accept without question the voice of an incomplete science that knows much less than we believe.

I remember how this was demonstrated to me one day during my encounter with cancer. My doctor, who is one of the greatest men I know, put me on special medication. I asked him how the medication worked and he remarked, “We simply cannot explain it. We don’t know. We just know that it gets results.” This man is a highly educated surgeon but his wonderful humility leads him to admit that all he knows just makes him realise how little he knows. He freely acknowledges that his scientific understanding is incomplete.

One great blessing we have is that many scientists delight in the study of God’s creation and see His hand in all that they study but these people are seldom found in popular media.

And talking of media, we’re bombarded today with documentaries that show the most stunning images of nature and the animals living on this earth. Even the most intricate and the hopelessly complex among those creatures all bear the label of evolution.  That is, they were once a simple piece of matter and they took on life by themselves and somehow developed themselves into the impossibly complex creatures we see in the docos. To question this view is to receive an angry, often violent rebuke about not being smart enough to understand science.

Nowhere are the real questions asked or answered.

Here are just two examples that science does not explain.

The difference between fractals and design.

A fractal is a shape that’s formed from the environment around it. Some examples in nature are snowflakes, trees branching, lightning, and ferns. The shape of a cliff that is subject to the weather and other natural forces such as the ocean is a fractal.

Murphy’s haystacks in South Australia are fractals. These massive rocks that look like old haystacks suddenly appear within an otherwise flat and uniform landscape. These tourist attractions are the effect of ancient forces of nature and are fractals.

A design, on the other hand, is formed by someone’s mind guiding their hand.

For example, a cliff face exposed to the weather may have a random shape that’s interesting but you’d never say that the faces of four US presidents carved in a cliff face in the Back Hills of Dakota were a random shape carved by the weather. We, humans, have an inbuilt mechanism that instantly recognises the difference between something random and a design.

Another type of fractal could be formed if you’ve been working on your computer on let’s say a word document. Then you leave the room for a coffee or something and your cat starts walking up and down on your keyboard. When you return, the page is full of text but it is completely random. You would never question that this was randomly generated but if you saw a written chapter from a famous novel on the word document you would never believe they got there randomly. You would just know instinctively that someone had written the words. It was by design.

And yet we’re prepared label the impossibly complex design in the universe random chance!

Creatures and plants of the earth, the solar system and the planets, the chemical systems that make our earth fit for habitation and wonders seen through the microscope have no design but are just random fractals. So the random fractal that is a human can invent machines, love and hate, and write and read and understand the ideas of others. Come on!

Another example of what science fails to explain is irreducible complexity.

This is a fancy term that covers the fact that a thing mostly does not work until it’s complete.

Take a human brain for instance. Science and evolution says, the brain developed from a tiny piece of inorganic matter and then through millions of years evolved little by little until, eventually, it was a complete brain. How could that possibly have happened seeing that it had to be fully complete, instantly to be a working brain and the complexity required cannot be gradually and randomly put together. The same goes for the human eye. Some 10,000 working parts make up an eye and that’s only the parts we know about. As with the brain, the absence of any of these complex parts means the eye doesn’t work. Now, couple that with all the other members of the human body, along with all the uncountable exterior factors of the environment, the atmosphere and chemical compounds needed for the human body to live and gradual development through evolution becomes, well just silly.

There are, sadly, other voices that rise within religious circles where someone believes they’ve discovered how God did it and they write a book and hold conferences to explain their intricate knowledge of God’s creative power. They regard the great bible scholars of the past and present as intellectual dwarfs compared to them.

We can find God’s answer to all these people in the oldest book of the Bible, Job.

God had a little chat with Job personally and we can see that recorded in the book of Job chapters 38 to 41. God really works poor old Job over in these chapters and, of course, it’s not only Job who gets worked over but you and I also. We know God is talking to us as well as Job because of 2^nd Timothy 3:16, All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. And also Romans 15:4  For whatever things were written before were written for our learning, that we through the patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.

Let’s take a small part of this chat between God and Job. Look at chapter 38 verse 4 and I’m reading. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. God says to man, “You talk about the origin of the universe yet you don’t even know where you were when I laid the foundations of the earth!” Obviously, it’s a question that no man who has ever lived can answer other than believing God’s account of it.

The simple truth is that if we’re going to talk about origins we’re reduced to only two simple choices, speculation or creation!

And, we can’t talk about science proving evolution. Evolution is not science it is theory and there are a great many theories within that theory.

This is overwhelming proof that either these many different camps have not seen the scientific proof that confirms their particular theory yet or there just isn’t any.

Also, there are large numbers of brilliant scientists that reject the theory of evolution outright so we simply can’t use science to prove evolution in a two plus two equals four formula. Speculation is just that, an unprovable point of view with no outright, confirming scientific evidence.

Interestingly a leading biologist of the 1940s, Edwin Conklin, summed up evolution this way. The probability of life originating from an accident is comparable to the probability of the Unabridged Dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing factory.

The great challenge man has is to explain how you can get something from nothing and then how to get a very simple piece of inert, lifeless matter to take on life by itself and then grow slowly, by its own resources, into impossible complexity. The only way we can do that is by faith or speculation.

There are many things that were scientific facts up until very recently but are now not. Us oldies were taught many scientific facts from our textbooks in school that are now no longer scientific facts. What is science today simply may not be science tomorrow.

There are many theories relating to the origin of life and it seems more are being thought up every day. None of them finds universal acceptance by scientists from the fields of geology, biology, chemistry, etc.

Even the so-called evidence of the caveman has long since been proven fraudulent or simply not provable. The evolution from an ape to a human which was regarded by so many as a scientific fact a few years ago is now not heard of as much today. As more knowledge about DNA and gene and cell reproduction is known these old theories that were once regarded as fact look a bit dodgy today.

Unfortunately, modern science appears to have another motivating force. That is the desperation to try and prove there is no God. Many scientists along with the countless numbers of people who accept science as infallible are just the same as any other atheist or agnostic in that they violently reject the mere thought that there is a God who will one-day demand absolute justice and will judge every person who ever lived. Many people who fall into this category whether they are top-shelf intellectuals or everyday common people, will come up with the most absurd theories as to the origins of the universe and themselves.

Debating creation against science can be futile unless the person we’re debating with is a genuine searcher of the truth and refuses to let popular opinion dominate that thirst for truth. These people are a great pleasure to talk to whether they agree with us or not, but they are few and far between in today’s world. Most people simply do not want God to exist and refusing to look at the plain evidence before them is one way by which they can convince themselves that there’s no God. Many will look at the Genesis account purely from their natural human thinking and unfortunately, man’s natural mind will never be big enough to grasp the magnitude of a Holy, Almighty God.

Then we have creation as the other choice. The only possible way that we can accept the creation account is by faith. God designed it that way.

Look at Hebrews chapter 11:1  and I’m reading, Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good testimony. By faith, we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.

The purpose of God writing through Moses the creation account in Genesis 1:1 was simply not to give secular scientific details but for our instruction and to give us certainty through the force of faith. Again let’s use the Apostle Paul’s letter in 2^nd Timothy 3:16, All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. Additionally, we’re told in Romans 10:17 that the faith required to see what is unseen comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.

The Genesis creation account is not written to teach us geology or biology. It was written to show man’s relationship to God and what a man must do to be saved from the sin that condemns him to death.

You could write a banner over this part of Genesis that reads, “What must I do to be saved?”

Let’s leave this telescopic view with the words that Job spoke to God after God had finished setting him straight.

In Job 42:1-6  and I’m reading from the New Living Translation just so we can see Job throwing up his hands in surrender.

Then Job replied to the LORD: “I know that you can do anything, and no one can stop you.

You asked, ‘Who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorance?’ It is I—and I was talking about things I knew nothing about, things far too wonderful for me.

You said, ‘Listen and I will speak! I have some questions for you, and you must answer them.’

I had only heard about you before, but now I have seen you with my own eyes.

I take back everything I said, and I sit in dust and ashes to show my repentance.”

Until next time may God bless you and keep you, my friends.

The next episode covers Genesis 1:2-25.