In The Beginning God Created Series

In The Beginning God Created

Genesis 1:1

By Dr. R. Bruce Montgomery

Introduction

• Where did we come from?

• How did our universe around us come into existence?

• When and how did animate life begin?

• Why are we here?

• Are we merely the products of chance, or is there a purpose and plan behind our existence?

Questions about the mysteries of life and its origins have always fascinated thinking people. Where shall we go for answers?

Leave such inquiries to science, some would say. That is not the domain of faith and religious inquiry.

There was a most interesting article in March 1998 National Geographic entitled The Rise of Life on Earth. It encapsulated the latest scientific views of prominent scientists about life’s origins.

They’ve narrowed the kind of place life began into three possibilities:

• Either a ball of ice

• Or a pond . Interesting that Charles Darwin never addressed the question in Origin of Species. All we have is a letter he wrote in to a friend in 1871 suggesting that simple organisms might have arisen from a mixture of organic chemicals in a "warm little pond" over eons of time

• Or a cauldron.

Doesn’t that give you a lot of confidence, to know that science can look back and be that contradictory re. the kind of environment in which life began!

Problem = not science, but presuppositions and prejudgments made by those who would call themselves scientists.

If approach from a perspective that rules out even the possibility of God, have to look for other alternatives. Reduced to "silliness."

Problem, of course, is that none of us were there when it happened.

Like God asks Job in Job 38:4ff. “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. 5Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? 6On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone – while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?”

No, we weren’t there. If we had been, we couldn’t have seen it before it came into existence.

No video, no CNN or FOX reports. What reliable sources do we have?

Have in Genesis the most reliable source of information there is – first hand eye-witness account written by the Creator himself.

If we want to know where we came from and why we’re here, Genesis 1:1 is the proper place to start.

What we know

• about God

• about creation

• about ourselves

• about salvation - all begin in Genesis.

As commentators and preachers and missionaries have stated in various language for the past 2,000 years, Genesis provides the foundation upon which we build a biblical theology.

As we noted last week, the focus of the Bible, beginning in Genesis 1:1 is on God. His name, Elohim, dominates this first chapter of Genesis, appearing 35 times. Not just this section, but the whole book of Genesis is first and last about God. To read it any other way is to misread it.

We saw last week that the mystery of the triune nature of God is discovered in the first phrase: Bereshith bara Elohim, because the name “God” Elohim, is plural and the verb bara, created, is in the singular.

God was there in the beginning – at the beginning of time, and this universe as we know it. As Moses expressed it in Ps. 90:2 Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting you are God.

Whether we look back, or look ahead, to the vanishing points of beginning or end, God is there already and forever.

Continue with verse one this morning. In the beginning God. Doesn’t stop there. In the beginning God did what? created the heavens and the earth. Science begins with what we have now, and attempts to work backwards. The Bible begins at the beginning – the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of matter itself was when God called it all into being.

Hebrews 11:3 By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

Did you ever wonder why, In Hebrews 11, that famous “hall of faith,” why is faith in God as creator mentioned first? The doctrine of God as creator is perhaps the most basic conception of God we know. Therefore extremely important to understand it and believe it.

Hebrew word for “create” is אּרּבּ barah This Hebrew verb occurs 49 times in the OT. It is greatly limited. It describes a unique event. Barah is used to express clearly the incomparable nature of God’s creative work. It is in contrast to all secondary products and likenesses made from existing material.