In the Beginning
Notes
Transcript
Handout
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
Introduction:
If you are going to journey through Scripture, the most obvious starting point is Genesis. There are fifty chapters in the Book of Genesis, and it covers thousands of years. This is merely a bird’s-eye view of this amazing book. We hope this will serve to help you begin your own journey through Genesis.
The name “Genesis” literally means “beginnings.” It’s the beginning of the Old Testament. Genesis is the beginning of the Law of Moses or the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible). It’s the beginning of all of Scripture. Genesis is the beginning of God’s revelation of Himself.
Main Events
Main Events
There are many ways to study the Book of Genesis. For example, we could study it based on the main events found in the Book of Genesis. Genesis 1-11 covers four main events:
The Creation of the World.
The Fall of Man.
The Worldwide Flood.
The Tower of Babel, or the confounding of languages and the scattering of nations.
Main Characters
Main Characters
Beyond the first eleven chapters, Genesis 12-50, is based on four main characters. We refer to them as the Patriarchs of Israel – Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and then the book ends with the story of Joseph.
It’s wonderful to see all that began in the heart of God; all that God did on the first pages of Holy Scripture. Author J. Sidlow Baxter wrote, “The major themes of Scripture may be compared to great rivers, ever deepening and broadening as they flow; and it is true to say that all these rivers have their rise in the watershed of Genesis” (Explore The Book, p.23).
In other words, if you trace all of the great doctrines of the Bible back upstream, you find this fountain flowing from this Book of Beginnings. Someone has even gone so far as to say that all the major doctrines of the Bible are introduced in the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis. At least in seed form, you’re going to find the beginning of so many wonderful things as you study the Book of Genesis.
Genesis is not simply ancient history.
It is the beginning of theology.
It is the foundation of redemption.
It is the explanation for why the world is the way it is—and why God’s grace is necessary.
And Genesis opens with one of the most powerful, faith-shaping sentences ever written:
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
The Bible does not begin with an argument.
It does not begin with a defense.
It does not begin with man searching for God.
It begins with God revealing Himself.
Before there were questions—there was God.
Before there was chaos—there was God.
Before there was sin—there was God.
If we get Genesis 1:1 right, much of the rest of Scripture falls into place. If we get it wrong, everything else becomes distorted.
Would you notice 5 monumental truths we find in the Beginning…
I. GOD IS ETERNAL — “IN THE BEGINNING”
I. GOD IS ETERNAL — “IN THE BEGINNING”
Genesis begins with time, but it assumes God already exists.
Derek Kidner, one-time warden of Tyndale House, Cambridge, has pointed out that it is no accident that God is the subject of the first sentence of the Bible because his name here, Elohim, dominates the whole chapter—occurring some thirty-five times in all, so that it catches the reader’s eye again and again. Kidner’s point is that this section and indeed the entire book of Genesis is about God from first to last—and to read it any other way is to misread it.
God was there in the beginning. And here the context means “the beginning” of time itself, not sometime within eternity. Later Moses would give God’s presence at the beginning wonderful poetic expression when he sang,
2 Before the mountains were brought forth, Or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.
God is not part of the universe.
God is not bound by time.
God does not evolve, develop, or improve.
That matters because we live in a world obsessed with beginnings:
Where did I come from?
Why am I here?
What is my purpose?
Genesis answers all of those questions by first answering this one:
Who was there before everything else?
God was.
He was not lonely.
He was not incomplete.
He was not searching for meaning.
God is eternally self-existent.
“The only proper way to interpret Genesis 1 is not to ‘interpret’ it at all. That is, we accept the fact that it was meant to say exactly what it says.” - Henry Morris
When your life feels unstable, remember this—God is not figuring things out as He goes…
He is eternal, settled, and sovereign.
II. GOD IS SUPREME — “GOD CREATED”
II. GOD IS SUPREME — “GOD CREATED”
The verse does not say God shaped something that already existed.
It says God created.
God created everything out of nothing. “It is correct to say that the verb bara, ‘create,’ contains the idea both of complete effortlessness and creatio ex nihilo, since it is never connected with any statement of the material”
3 Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
Moses’ assertion that nothing existed before God spoke it into existence was an attack on the polytheism and pantheism from which his people had just escaped. Today it stands as the answer to philosophical materialism and naturalism, which hold that the only real things are material, physical things—or as the opening line of Carl Sagan’s best-seller Cosmos puts it: “The cosmos is all there is, or has been, or will be”—
As we all know, this worldview (God Doesn’t Exist) has dominated the sciences for the last one hundred years. And it is defended, by some, against all logic—for fear that a Divine Foot might get in the door…
Matter is God! “Matter functions as ultimate reality—nothing exists beyond it.”
No raw materials.
No borrowed power.
No cosmic struggle.
God simply speaks—and reality obeys.
“Created” is only used of God in the Bible. Only God creates. And in Genesis 1 the verb “created” is reserved only for the most crucial items in God’s plan: the universe (1:1), animate life (1:21), and man (1:27
the words “heavens and earth” is also very specialized. It is a merism (a statement of two opposites to indicate a totality), so that the sense is, “In the beginning God created the cosmos.”17 God created everything there is in all creation.
Ex. Men like hawking and hubble…
Cambridge University physicist Stephen Hawking, who has been called “the most brilliant theoretical physicist since Einstein,” says in his best-selling A Brief History of Time that our galaxy is an average-sized spiral galaxy that looks to other galaxies like a swirl in a pastry roll and that it is over 100,000 light-years across—about six hundred trillion miles. He says, “We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars.”
It is commonly held that the average distance between these hundred thousand million galaxies (each six hundred trillion miles across and containing one hundred thousand million stars) is three million light-years! On top of that, the work of Edwin Hubble, based on the Doppler effect, has shown that all red-spectrumed galaxies are moving away from us—and that nearly all are red.
Thus, the universe is constantly expanding. Some estimates say that the most distant galaxy is eight billion light-years away—and racing away at two hundred million miles an hour. Finally, the fact of the expanding universe demands a beginning, before he died Hawking doubted that a Big Bang was its beginning.
ex. The majority of our oceans have not been explored…
Not only that—God created every speck of dust in the hundred thousand million galaxies of the universe.
Creation is not accidental.
It is intentional.
Ordered.
Purposeful.
25 To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal? saith the Holy One. 26 Lift up your eyes on high, And behold who hath created these things, That bringeth out their host by number: He calleth them all by names By the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; Not one faileth.
The force of Moses’ words, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” was not lost on the children of the exodus. The night skies of Sinai, the diaphanous veil of the Milky Way, the paths of the comets, and the intermittent meteor showers sang to them of an omnipotent Creator who cared for his people.
No wonder the poetry! How we need to rise above the congestion and smog of our existence and see our Creator, our cosmic caregiver.
ex. Meteor falling…
If God is Creator, then we are accountable creatures.
Worship is not optional—it is the right response.
III. GOD IS DISTINCT — “GOD… CREATED THE HEAVEN AND THE EARTH”
III. GOD IS DISTINCT — “GOD… CREATED THE HEAVEN AND THE EARTH”
Genesis immediately establishes a crucial truth:
God is not creation—and creation is not God.
Genesis does not blend God into nature.
God is not:
The sun
The stars
The earth
The forces of nature
He speaks, and they obey.
This guards us from two errors:
Idolatry (worshiping created things)
Self-worship (placing ourselves at the center)
8 I am the Lord: that is my name: And my glory will I not give to another, Neither my praise to graven images.
1 I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, From whence cometh my help. 2 My help cometh from the Lord, Which made heaven and earth.
The heavens and the earth are magnificent—but they are not divine.
18 For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, He created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the Lord; and there is none else.
God stands above:
Nature
Nations
Cultures
Kings
He is not shaped by creation—creation is shaped by Him.
We do not redefine God to fit our preferences.
We submit to God because He is Lord.
IV. GOD BRINGS ORDER OUT OF CHAOS (GENESIS 1:2)
IV. GOD BRINGS ORDER OUT OF CHAOS (GENESIS 1:2)
Verse 1 declares creation.
Verse 2 describes its condition:
“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep…”
The Hebrew of “without form and void” is rhythmic (tohu wabohu) and served as a common expression for a place that is disordered and empty and therefore uninhabitable and uninhabited—the very opposite of what the earth would be after the six days of creation.
Formless.
Empty.
Dark.
Darkness is impenetrable to man but transparent to God.
12 Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; But the night shineth as the day: The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.
God was there. And under the darkness and covering the earth was “the deep,” the primeval ocean.
But notice what happens next:
“And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
The verbal picture comes clear in the final Psalm of Moses where he uses the same word to describe “an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young” (Deuteronomy 32:11).
We have seen it when a bird suspends itself stationary in the sky by fluttering its wings…
The Spirit of God fluttered like a nurturing bird over the dark in preparation for day one.
The beauty and spiritual symmetry of the Bible’s opening words become even clearer as we see that the word “Spirit” in Hebrew also means “breath.” God’s creative breath hovered over the water, and on day one his breath would come forth as speech—his word. Psalm 33:6 makes this connection:
6 By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; And all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.
The Spirit is to God’s word as breath is to speech. On day one the miracle would begin with God speaking light into existence and that light shining in the darkness.
Throughout Scripture, God brings:
Light into darkness
Order into confusion
Life out of emptiness
And He still does.
6 For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
No matter how disordered your life feels, God specializes in beginnings.
V. CHRIST IN THE BEGINNING — A GOSPEL CONNECTION
V. CHRIST IN THE BEGINNING — A GOSPEL CONNECTION
Genesis begins with creation.
The Gospel begins with new creation.
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The same was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
The Creator of Genesis is the Redeemer of the Gospel.
17 Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.
The God who spoke light into darkness:
Speaks hope into despair
Forgiveness into guilt
Life into death
Creation points us forward to redemption.
CONCLUSION
The Bible begins with God because everything depends on Him.
Before your story started—God was there.
Before your failure—God was there.
Before your salvation—God was there.
Genesis 1:1 teaches us that life makes sense only when God is at the center.
FINAL CALL
FINAL CALL
If God is Creator → He deserves your worship
If God is Sovereign → He deserves your trust
If God is Redeemer → He deserves your life
11 Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.
