Genesis Series

Genesis 1:1–2 CSB

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.,

2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters

Before the Bible gives you a command… Before it gives you a promise… Before it gives you a covenant, a miracle, a prophecy, or a Savior… It gives you a scene.

A scene so mysterious, so massive, so foundational that the rest of Scripture hangs on it like a door on its hinges.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.”

These are not soft words. These are not children’s‑storybook words. These are cosmic words.

Genesis 1:1–2 drags you back to the moment when there was no “moment.” No time. No matter. No light. No sound. No story. Just God—eternal, uncreated, unthreatened, unchanging.

And then Moses shows you something shocking: Before God forms anything, He faces what is formless. Before God fills anything, He confronts what is empty. Before God speaks light, He hovers over darkness.

This is not just the story of creation. This is the story of how God works.

He steps into chaos without flinching. He moves into emptiness without hesitation. He hovers over darkness with intention. He is not intimidated by what is broken, barren, or bleak.

Genesis 1:1–2 is the announcement that God does His best work in the places that look the most hopeless.

And if that’s how the Bible begins, then maybe—just maybe—the places in your life that feel formless, empty, or dark are not the end of your story. They might be the beginning of God’s.

God created the heavens and the earth: If God created the heavens and the earth, then we must forever put away the idea that anything happens by chance. “Chance” merely describes the statistical probability of something happening. Chance itself can neither do or perform anything.

 Some intelligent people may fall into this delusion. Jacques Monod, a biochemist, wrote: “Chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution.”

 But assigning such power to chance doesn’t make sense. Chance has no power. For example, when a coin is flipped, it has a 50% chance of landing heads; however, chance does not make it land heads. Whether or not it lands heads or tails is due to the strength with which the coin is flipped, the strength of air currents and air pressure as it flies through the air, where it is caught, and if it is flipped over once it is caught. Chance doesn’t do anything but describe a probability. God created: Inherent in the idea of God is that He is an intelligent designer. Only an intelligent designer could create a just-right universe, not chance. Our universe is a just-right universe. According to Hugh Ross in his book The Fingerprint of God:

The universe has a just-right gravitational force.

· If it were larger, the stars would be too hot and would burn up too quickly and too unevenly to support life.

· If it were smaller, the stars would remain so cool, nuclear fusion would never ignite, and there would be no heat and light.

The universe has a just-right speed of light.

· If it were larger, stars would send out too much light.

· If it were smaller, stars would not send out enough light.

 The universe has a just-right average distance between the stars.

· If it were larger, the heavy element density would be too thin for rocky planets to form, and there would only be gaseous planets.

· If it were smaller, planetary orbits would become destabilized because of the gravitational pull from other stars.

iv. The universe has a just-right polarity of the water molecule.

· If it were greater, the heat of fusion and vaporization would be too great for life to exist.

· If it were smaller, the heat of fusion and vaporization would be too small for life’s existence, liquid water would become too inferior a solvent for life chemistry to proceed, ice would not float, leading to a runaway freeze-up.

 We could conclude that there is no chance that such a universe could create itself, apart from an intelligent designer.

The earth was without form, and void: Some translate the idea in this verse as the earth became without form and void. Their thinking is the earth was originally created not without form and void, but it became without form and void through the destructive work of Satan. However, this is not the plain grammatical sense of the ancient Hebrew.

 The Hebrew phrase translated formless and empty implies a desolate, uninhabitable place. Why would the author describe God’s new universe like this? Some believe God intended to show us his progressive approach through creation. The following verses certainly do show God using a process.

But it seems that something else has happened between verses 1 and 2, because disorder and darkness do not reflect the character of God. Someone else arrived on the scene, and his name is Satan. We get few details of Satan’s fall in this chapter (Ezek 28 and Isa 14 provide more), but it appears that his rebellion plunged the earth into darkness (see Luke 10:18). Fortunately for humanity, even when Satan is active, God has a plan to save. The Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters, ready to bring order out of chaos.

Luke 10:18 CSB

18 He said to them, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like lightning.

The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters: When God began to transform the earth into something beautiful and compatible with His great plan, He started with the work of the Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit begins every work of creation or re-creation. We see God’s redemption in the first 2 verses of the Bible.