God created the heavens and the earth

Geoff Thomas

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. With these words the Scriptures begin. God is both the subject and the author of all that follows. He is responsible for everything, both seen and unseen. These ten words in verse one, translating just seven Hebrew words, are a kind of formal introduction to the work of creation. The sentence tells us four things:

When everything else began God was already there. Time and space and dimensions and matter all commenced, but God did not commence. He was the unbegun one; the unoriginated one. Everything else of which we've had any experience had a beginning. There is nothing that exists that did not have an origin; all things can be traced back to Genesis chapter one and verse one. This is the ultimate explanation of the beginning of everything, of all creatures great and small. The Creator, however, is different from every other kind of being. He never began. We can compare him to nothing at all. He is sui generis, and in the beginning he gave to everything else form and substance, structure and life. So our world's history had a starting point. In other words, its history is linear not cyclical. This first verse of the Bible is saying, "The beginning of time and space and matter came about in this way, God created the heavens and the earth." And if it had a beginning will it not also have an ending?

God devised it and its entire engineering was his alone. Both the plan and the accomplishment of the universe were his. There was nothing and nobody else making any suggestions to him, let alone helping him. There was God alone purposing, designing and finally firing the starting pistol and the human race within God's creation began. That was it. God said to job, "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the world?" job was absent as were we all. God did it because he chose to do it. The common name for God is elohim, and it is the masculine plural form of the Hebrew el, and it means 'strength', and 'might.' Although the noun 'God' is plural in the original language the verb 'created' is singular. So right from the beginning there is the suggestion that there is more than singularity in God. There is 'withness' in the Godhead. We flood Genesis chapter one with the light of John chapter one, where the first three verses echo our text and amplify it in this way, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made." While here in Genesis 1 :2 we are told, "the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." Here is the God who speaks in verse 26 and says, "Let us make man in our image. " The Father, the Word, and the Spirit are solely responsible for creating all things. Here is a personal God; one who speaks, and loves, and is compassionate. He is the one who makes himself known like this, "I am the God of Abraham."

God created the heavens and the earth.

There was nothing at all before Genesis chapter one verse one except God. Is the anti- creationist view of the origin of the universe credible in any shape or form? "In the beginning was chance plus a speck." -that is their creed. Yet we have this world of order and interdependence and beauty. We affirm that in the beginning there was nothing whatsoever save for the living God. We can't imagine nothingness, the absence of a millionth of a proton. ...simply nothing whatsoever. A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom. A proton is so small that in the dot on top of the letter 'i' on your hymnbook could be gathered something like five hundred thousand million protons -just in that dot. The anti-creationist speaks of the eternal existence of a billionth of a proton referring to it as a singularity, and says that in the beginning that singularity was all there was. There was no space, no darkness, no dimensions. There was no time. There was just this speck in the beginning, and then one day it exploded, so he claims, in a big bang and that made the universe. In that speck was Mozart, and Einstein, and Hitler, and Leonardo da Vinci, and Shakespeare, and Jesus. In that speck was love and patience and forgiveness and hatred. In the beginning was the speck, and today Wales is worshipping that speck.

The Bible says that in the beginning there was nothing whatsoever. There was God alone, and everything that man has discovered, all that is known, and all that is yet unknown, was, made by acts of the living, speaking God. No speck is eternal; no I speck was there in the beginning, and every speck there is was made by God. Today there is not a single proton in the entire universe that can pipe up and claim, "I at least was not made by God." The Lord God made them all. The Bible has no word for 'universe' or 'cosmos': it simply talks of, "the heavens and the earth" and that embraces all there is everywhere whether you go out and out and out, or down and down and down, or in and in and in. Outer space as well as all that's in this world, everything in heaven itself and everything on, under and above the earth was created by God.

That is what these opening words grammatically are emphasising, that in the beginning God created the heavens and especially the earth. That is the meaning of the opening words of the Bible. We have all been made aware that our earth, considered in terms of size, is an average sized planet circling the sun. The earth is dwarfed by the size of four of the other planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, which are all gas giants. Neptune is in fact 318 times bigger than planet earth, and yet it is not Neptune but the earth that is the focus of God's attention. Then consider our sun which is a part of a great galaxy of similar suns, and this galaxy is called, of course, the Milky Way. Nobody knows how many stars or suns there are in the Milky Way; Estimates range from sixty billion to perhaps four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. The Hubble telescope has so far detected 80 billion other galaxies in the universe. So it is not a hyperbole to compare the number of planets in the universe to the number of grains of sand on the seashore. Yet Genesis chapter one and verse one says that in the beginning God created the heavens and that especially he created the earth. God has given man a geo-centric view of reality. God's interest was focused on our world and its inhabitants, the men and women whom he made in his own image. The rest of Genesis chapter one and the remainder of the Bible concentrates on this unique planet of ours, the only living people in the whole universe, as far as we know, and Scripture looks at the rest of the cosmos as the backcloth to ourselves who inhabit a divinely created world which has been planned, and tested, and spoken to and visited by God's angels and by God the Son.

Such a geo-centric view of reality is deplored by many non- Christian intellectuals today. Carl Sagan, the American astronomer who steadily opposed the Christian view of creation, was interviewed a decade ago on the US TV programme Dateline by Ted Koppel. That interview was to be only a few days before Sagan's death, though Sagan didn't know that he had less than a week to live. Koppel asked him if he had any closing remarks, any words of wisdom he would like to share with the people of the earth and this is what he said: 'We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up the universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering.' Those were his closing despairing words. They are saying this:

We came from nowhere.
We are going nowhere.
There is no purpose in anything that we see around us.
'Life' is meaningless.
Humans are not special in any sense.

How different is the perspective of Genesis chapter one.

There is a Creator.
Mankind has a Maker:
God designed the universe with the world at its heart.
He especially made the earth amongst all the billions or stars in the cosmos.
Humans are very special, made in his image.
Our maker is not silent but speaks to us by his servants and his Son.

When you believe that then you have a very different outlook on life. You say that the lives of men and women count in the sight of God their Creator and Judge, and they had better know him and do his will. So our world is being confronted by two opposing world views.

If you are searching for a reason for your existence -and you should -and the explanation for mankind's incredible achievements, his spirit of self sacrifice and creativity, and also why the world is in the state in which it's in, then you must read the opening chapters of Genesis. The New Testament is fascinated with the book of Genesis. It refers to it about 200 times and half of those references are to the first eleven chapters of Genesis. The Lord Jesus Christ quoted or referred to each of the first seven chapters of Genesis.

So that is what I wanted to say about these inexhaustible ten words with which the Bible begins, the most widely read words in all literature. If you really believe that they are truth then I think you will have little difficulty in believing the rest of God's word. These words are the end of atheism: 'God was in the beginning', they affirm. They deny the polytheism of Hinduism and its many gods. There is one God alone. They refute the pantheism of the new age movement which makes everything we see to be god. They blow to pieces the theory of dualism, that there are two gods, one good and one evil, at war with one another. These words challenge humanism because they enthrone God as King of the universe not man. This God of Genesis One is the living God, and so let us worship and adore him; let us make it our chief end to glorify him and enjoy him for ever.

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