In the beginning…
In the beginning…
Genesis 1:1-2 Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start…
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.”
Genesis 1:1-2 NASB1995
I knew eventually God would point me to the beginning of it all — the beginning of the universe and of the Bible, Genesis 1:1-2. When I began my research on this familiar set of verses, I found that there were literally volumes of commentary for Genesis 1:1-2. For that very reason, I’ll be examining the two verses over a few days.
I must confess that in my days of being a non-believer, I thought that Genesis 1 was a simplistic view of the creation of the universe. As I have become more wise in my knowledge of physics, astrophysics, and especially the Bible, the lack of a coherent answer from the world of science as to how everything began has made Genesis the only reasonable solution.
The Bible never presents arguments for the existence of God. Instead, it informs us on how we can know He exists because of what we observe in the universe around us. This is called the “teleological argument” or the “intelligent design argument” — an argument for the existence of God through the evidence that complex functionality in the natural world that looks designed is evidence of an intelligent creator.
That complex functionality, from the tiniest subatomic particles to the observable universe as a whole, is what finally pushed the “there was light, and then everything we see formed from that by random chance over billions of years” argument out of my head. I’m sure that if some of my engineering/scientific nerd friends and colleagues were to read this, they’d disagree and tell me to “believe the science”. Yet even among the greatest scientific minds today, there is no consensus on what exactly caused the Big Bang that started off the commonly held theory of how everything came into being.
It gets even worse when looking into the details of how the universe began, according to modern theories. We observe the universe expanding, but there isn’t enough mass (galaxies, starts, planets, humans, mosquitos, Higgs bosons) in the universe to account for the rate of expansion… so physicists made up the idea of “dark matter” and “dark energy”, which they can’t find enough of to make their models fit their observations. Hmmmm. Odd that they are standing by something they can’t see and can’t prove — that almost sounds like faith!
To my mind, a being who is outside of space and time willing everything into existence makes a lot more sense than theories that attempt to cobble a universe together out of nothingness, or science that falls apart the closer it is studied. The latter is almost like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle being acted out on a universal scale.
Well, I got that out of my system. I want you, beloved readers, to know just how much my thinking has changed since the days I thought I knew everything. In my next writeup in two days, I’ll begin digging through these two verses in a more traditional manner, including doing word studies of the original Hebrew, providing quotes from Bible commentators, and connecting Genesis 1:1-2 to other explanations in scripture.
Heaven On Wheels Daily Prayer:
Today’s prayer on Genesis 1:1 comes from Knowing Jesus:
Loving Father, as I see Your great wisdom reflected in Your wonderful creation, I want to praise You with my whole being. Thank you for the creative Word of God Who not only spoke the world into being from nothing but died for me so that I could have life – everlasting life and life more abundantly. Thank You, in Jesus' name, AMEN.