Genesis 1:1,2 - In the beginning God

1:1

“In the beginning God ...”. The Biblical focus in this chapter is God. This is possibly the chapter in the Bible with the greatest number of times that “God” appears, thirty five times in all. So we must come to this chapter with God as our focus, otherwise we are missing the point. If we come to this chapter to “disprove” the Bible, as an atheist might, then we have clearly missed it. But if we come to the chapter to prove a particular theory on creation, or to show that Genesis is consistent with a scientific theory we have missed it. It might be very interesting to do these things, possibly even helpful, but it must not be our primary focus.

Everything is dependent upon God, everything derives from Him. The various pagan myths tended to have gods fighting over things, and creation being a sort of by-product of the chaos. These myths are actually starting with something. The Bible starts with nothing but God. The most basic philosophical question is “why is there something rather than nothing?”. The answer of the Bible is God. God created the heavens and the earth, absolutely everything was created by God. Without God, there is nothing.

1:2

The earth was formless and empty. Some writers focus on function, and urge us to look at creation in Genesis as God giving function or purpose to elements of creation. I tend to think such approaches are maybe an attempt to make Genesis consistent with scientific theories. Now God does give function and purpose to things, and that is part of the purpose of Genesis, but it is not limited to that. When writing Genesis God did not think “what these guys really need to know is I completed the whole of creation in six days flat”. What we do see is an order and purpose to everything. Things were created deliberately. “The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters”. In the New Testament we read that all things were created through Christ. Here we see the Spirit of God being involved. Creation was a trinitarian action, involving Father, Son and Holy Spirit.