IN THE BEGINNING
Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
For the purpose of these blogs, I will be using the New Kings James Version. On this first blog, we will start from the Book of Genesis, the Book of the Beginnings. Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
God does not have a beginning. God is eternal always existed, but God introduced in the beginnings creating a space for the beginnings to exist for humanity. The Book of Genesis is attributed to Moses as the author of the book. The word Genesis comes from the Greek language, meaning beginning or origin. In Hebrew, the phrase, in the beginning, is B’resheet. The phrase, in the beginning, appears in the Bible ten times in ten verses, six times in the Old Testament, and four times in the New Testament.
There is an intrinsic desire that humans have, and that is the desire to know our beginning. Before God created, there was no time. God did not need time, but when God created, time became essential for humans that today humans live under a time to live and to work. Yet, God does things in His timing, not on the timing of humans.
Today there are different views of creation, such as Theism, which accepts that all things were created ex nihilo or from nothing. Another view is Pantheism, which believes that the material universe arose ex deo or out of God. Another view is Materialism who affirms creation ex materia or out of pre-existing material. Atheists do not believe that God created the universe because they do not believe in God’s existence.
The word created in Hebrew is bārā’, which means to create, to shape, to form. Even though it does not necessarily mean that it was created from nothing, it does prove in the verse that an original event, in the beginning, took place, such as creation. God introduced a space such as in the beginning to create.
When we read the first verse of Genesis, in the beginning, God created”. We understand that God created the universe out of nothing. Even more in looking at this verse confirms the conception of the monotheistic view. The patriarchs such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob believed in monotheism, while other Ancient Near Eastern cultures were polytheism. A great example is Job’s story, which is set in an ancient pre-Mosaic period, and it demonstrates a monotheistic view of God, such as in Job 1:1.
Genesis 1:1 confirms that the universe had a beginning. Ancient views accepted that the universe was eternal, but again the Bible teaches us that it had a beginning. God is eternal. The universe is not eternal but has a beginning from an eternal being.
Today, many scientists agree with the Big Bang Theory. Robert Jastrow, who was an agnostic astrophysicist, wrote a book called God and the Astronomers, where he provides three pieces of evidence that the universe had a beginning, such as;
- The Motions of the Galaxies,
- The Laws of Thermodynamics, and
- The Life Story of the Stars.
Even science confirms the inerrancy Word of God, the Bible, that the universe has a beginning. For us Christians, it confirms that this beginning of the universe only proves that Genesis 1:1 holds the truth that God created the heavens and the earth and that the universe has a beginning.
I leave you with Psalms 19:1, which says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork.”
Blessings!
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