In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth Genesis 1:1

In the Beginning…

This words are so well known, they has been so quoted, so debated and questioned. This words marks the beginning of the Book of books, a Library if you will, to the most translated , sold (not necessarily read), and even sometimes badly used text from human history. Clearly I’m talking about the Bible, God’s book, the Word of God, Holy writing, or just writings as many people know it. This set of texts, and I mean by set of text that the Bible is actually a collection of writings from a variety or authors separated by centuries but yet link together by a main theme, are the solid base of the Jewish and Christian faith.

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Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. John 17:3

Today we are going to analyze the book of Genesis, book of the beginning (reshit means beginning in Hebrew, so the first phrase of the book is be-reshit or in the beginning, hence the name of the book).

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Traditionally attributed to Moses who is a very important character of the Hebrew and Christian history because it was him who said to the most powerful man at the time “let my people go”. This book can be divided in two big parts: Chapters 1-11 talks about the creation of the universe and development of civilization and how this one was going down into a spiral of death away from God, then chapters 12-50 deals with the origins of God’s people staring with one man, Abraham.

Everything has an origin and an originator

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As I mentioned all the civilizations of the world has some sort of history, legend, myths about their beginnings, it is common to find this kind of stories in ancient cultures: Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, romans, Greeks and so many others.

Although it up to debate the fact that it was actually a beginning, this is a very old claim by the way, for us is almost natural when we see everything to think that it must be. Even science has the beginning of everything in the Big Bang Theory whether there is or isn’t a cause for that beginning. So we say, there is a Beginning of EVERYTHING.

The book of Genesis register in his first eleven chapters an account of the beginning of the universe, the earth, life, civilization, and all we know. From a very specific perspective the author records how everything came to be. The book starts with everything starting from nothing, it doesn’t start speculating about the origins of the gods or GOD, or anything like it, rather than that it starts assuming that GOD already exist and always existed and that He is the originator of everything that he, the man, sees.

It is interesting that this is a very provocative claim for the time because in those days the worldview was the whole creation was some sort of divinity. An example of that is the Egyptians who believed that the Nile was a divinity , so was the sun, like many other people of the time the starts, the moon, the earth, and humans was considered gods. For the author of Genesis all those things were created by the one true God, Yahweh.

Let there be Light

In the account of Genesis God uses his Word the create, in fact verse 3 in the original Hebrew tell us something that is miss in translation which is that as God said it, it was done.

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And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

This could be like and God said, Light be, and light been. Or something like that. The same graphical form that God pronounce became real, in this case light. So the rest of things, earth, heavens, water, animal life, human life, grass, trees, etc., all that by the power of His Word. John in his gospel comments:

1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2. He was with God in the beginning..
3. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.
4. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.
5. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

John 1:1-5

When we read Genesis 1 we learn that God made everything from nothing, there is not a primary source outside of God as a starting point, even chaos and disorder (a common element in ancient creation myths) are created in the beginning by God. So God takes what is in disorder and void (expression that comes from two rare Hebrew words Tohu and Bohu which may be words that onomatopoeically express the idea of something bad and ugly) and turn it into something beautiful and fill of life. God makes order from chaos.

Creation ex nihilo is what we mean when we refer to God creating from nothing, this is something very difficult to understand for human bean who are used to things coming from something else and if we don’t believe in an all-powerful God creator of everything things get more complicated. Yet we know that there is some theories and discussions about it but when we take into consideration the existing of a God as the one from the Bible the account from Genesis is more logic and plausible.

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Of course this is based basically on faith but not only, there is a logical part in that: If there is no God then certainly the account of the Bible lack of sense and we can do pretty much whatever we want with our lives because there is not such a thing as a creator and a moral judge for mankind. But if God is real and He is the creator of everything then this story has a lot of sense and its implications are huge.

I want to highlight that it is not in my argument the topic of days and its duration, if they are 24 hours days or they are symbolic expressing some major period of time, maybe years, centuries or millennia. Or if they are just a period mark by a beginning of an act of creation, there was evening, and the end of the act of creation, there was morning, with not any length of time what so ever. Now, it is true that if the days are literal, 24 hours days, there is somethings that would make more sense, like how is it possible for grass and vegetation to survive until the sun appears, but there is other things that may not. Again, all this issues, although stimulating and interesting as they are, miss the point and the core of the subject that is in verse 1.

Is interesting that each one of the days of creation relate to the rest in a fabric of the creation, so God creates something in one day and a related thing in other.

It's created first	It's related to
Day 1: Light and Darkness(1:3-5)	Day 4: Th Sun, the moon and the stars (1:14-19)
Day 2: Waters and the sky (1:6-8)	Day 5: Birds and fish (1:20-23)
Day 3: Seas and the ground (1:9-13)	Day 6: Animals and Humans (1:24-31)

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Regarding what we may believe about the days and we all of us that agree in verse 1 are in harmony with the idea that:

Everything has an origin and an originator.