A Meditation on the Richness of Gen. 1:1
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (Gen. 1:1)
I am the first and the last (Rev. 1:17)
The Bible commences with a simple yet profound declaration of inexhaustible theological, philosophical, and literary significance. There are two vital truths we can glean just from Genesis 1:1. The first truth is that this is a theistic world. To help better understand the term “theistic,” we should contrast it some other worldviews.
Atheism is the view that there is no God or gods, or as Carl Sagan asserted: “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be.”[1] In this view, since there is no God or gods, the universe itself must be eternal, or matter itself in pure form must be eternal, or there must be some eternally existing thing that somehow brought the universe into existence. Some have gone so far as to suggest that “something” (the universe) inexplicably popped into existence from “nothing.” Brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking has recently counted himself among this number.[2] However, almost every attempt to argue that the universe popped into existence from nothing involves an equivocation on the word “nothing.” In other words, while one uses the word “nothing,” he really means “something.” But nothing is “no-thing,” “non-being,” or as Aristotle put it, “what rocks dream about.” In fact, if there were ever was truly nothing (absolute “non-being”) then there would still be nothing, because non-being cannot cause being. Or to put it another way: nothing cannot cause something because nothing is nothing. But something does exist, so it stands to reason that something has always existed. The theist would argue that “something” is in face a Someone: God.
Pantheism is the view that all is God and God is all. There is no distinction in being (“ontology”) between God and the universe. There is only One. This is the view that undergirds many forms of Eastern religion, Christian Science, and the New Age. The first statement of Genesis contests pantheism by unequivocally claiming an ontological distinction between God and the world that He created. God and the world are not the same being: one exists eternally, the other came to be; one is uncaused, the other an “effect,” owing its existence to another; one is necessary and absolute, the other is contingent and relative.
Polytheism is the view that there are many gods, not just one. This was the dominant view of the ancient, and one that is making a comeback in our own day. This is the false ideology most often opposed by the pages of Scripture because in the ancient world, polytheism was the dominant rival to Hebrew monotheism. Biblical apologetics, beginning with Genesis 1:1, attacks polytheism head on.
Deism is a relatively recent view, peaking in seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century America. Minus the Trinity and miracles, a deist would affirm much of the same classical attributes of God as the theist. But notably, deism rejects God’s “immanence,” that God is present to and involved with His creation. The deist believes that God created the world, and then let it go. He wound up the clock then left it to tick off time all on its own. The God of deism never interacts with His creation. Therefore revelation, intervention, and interaction are all eliminated. There is no prophecy, no Scripture, no miracles, no virgin birth, no incarnate Son of God, no resurrection, no consummation of history. The god of deism falls well short of the God of the Bible.
Finally, there is theism, the view that there is one God, who exists from all eternity, who brought the universe into existence, and therefore is ontologically distinct from the creation. This God exists independent of the creation. The creation adds nothing to the Creator. On the contrary, the creation could not exist without the Creator, and is fully dependent on the Creator for its continued, moment-by-moment existence.
Genesis 1:1 is distinctly theistic. That is the first point to note about this verse. Contra atheism, God is the reason material reality exists (not to mention immaterial reality such as souls, minds, ideas, and angels). Over and against pantheism, God is not the world, and the world is not God. There is God, and everything else. As opposed to polytheism, God alone is Creator and Sovereign. He has no rival and does not share His glory with another. And finally, unlike deism, the theistic God exercises providential care for His creation and intervenes at His pleasure and discretion, without thereby “violating” the laws of nature that He Himself established.
THEREFORE, THIS IS A THEISTIC WORLD
The world is theistic because the God who created the world is infinite, personal (not a mere “force”), transcendent, immanent, omniscient, sovereign, and good. It is a theistic world because, as Gerard Manley Hopkins memorably penned, the world “is charged with the grandeur of God.”[3] The world is orderly, full of beauty and purpose, and reveals the moral nature of the Creator. C.S. Lewis famously recounted how he once rejected God because of the suffering and injustice in the world. It at last dawned upon Lewis that he could only identify injustice if he had some idea of justice. But where had he gotten that idea of justice? How does one know that a stick is crooked unless one has some concept of straightness? He eventually realized that in order to call anything “unjust,” there must exist an ultimate standard of “Justice,” and that could be none other than an Ultimate and Moral Person: God.[4]
GENESIS 1:1 REVEALS AN ETERNAL GOD
The second vital truth we learn from Genesis 1:1 is this: God is eternal, and this reality should keep us in perpetual awe. This is clear in the ontological contrast between God and the world. The world had a beginning; God did not. Psalm 90:1-2 reads as follows:
A prayer of Moses, the man of God…. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
God is a dwelling place in all generations. God is not just the God of the old, or the God of the young, or the God of the medieval monks, or the God of the pilgrims, or the God of the apostles, or the God of the ancient Israelites. He is the God of all generations, a dwelling place for all who seek refuge under His wings. This speaks of the boundlessness of His duration: He is not a temporary God, but an eternal God. The seventeenth century English Puritan Stephen Charnock put it this way: “Thou hast always been God, and no time can be assigned as the beginning of Thy Being.”[5] God neither began in time nor will he expire with the end of it. That is what it means to be the eternal God. Eternity describes a permanent and immutable state. And with specific reference to God, eternity is a perfect possession of life without variation.
God, as eternal, has no beginning. If God had a beginning one of two things would follow. He either had His beginning from Himself or from another. But God could not have His beginning from Himself, for self-creation is a logical absurdity and metaphysical impossibility. For something to create itself, it would have to exist and not exist at the same time and in the same way. It would have to exist in order to bring itself into existence, an obvious absurdity. On the other hand, if God had His beginning from another Being, then that Being would exist prior to and therefore be greater than God. And no being is truly supreme if it owes its being to the power of another. So it cannot be true that God, the greatest of all possible beings, owes His existence to a greater being. There cannot a greater than the greatest.
Neither does the eternal God have an end. God always was, is, and will be what He always was, is, and will be. His nature is “to be.” Consider another psalm that highlights the startling contrast between Creator and creation.
Of old you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away, but you are the same, and your years have no end (Ps. 102:25-27).
While creation perishes, God remains. As none has given Him life, so none can deprive Him of it – He has no end. God has no “yesterday, today, or tomorrow.” Eternity is not something. Rather, eternity describes the mode of God’s being – I AM, an unbounded sea of Being.
THREE REASONS THIS MATTERS
1. Sin is Utterly Irrational
Sin offends an eternal God. Charnock observed: “There is in the nature of every sin a tendency to reduce God to a not being.”[6] In the psychology of sin, there is a tendency, often subconscious, for the sinner to act as if God doesn’t even exist. Yet, the exact opposite is true: He is eternal; He has never not existed. Therefore sin is utterly irrational. It is folly for us to love a temporal, perishing thing with the same or greater affection than we love the eternal God.
2. The Unrepentant Hater of God Has Much to Dread
Very few people think they actually hate God. But the Bible says that until we are born again and forgiven of our sins through faith in Jesus Christ, we are in fact His enemies (Rom. 5:10; Eph. 2:1-2). Charnock therefore warns: “His eternity makes the punishment more dreadful than his power; his power makes it sharp, but his eternity renders it perpetual.”[7]
3. The Lover of God Has Much to Offer Him Comfort
What hope and consolation would we have if God if He had an expiration date? It is under His everlasting wings we take refuge. He is a “dwelling place in all generations.” This provides true comfort against all present distresses. The Apostle Paul encouraged us to think this way: “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Cor. 4:17). It is when we perceive our temporal circumstances in light of the eternity of God that we can consider those afflictions to be light. And we take great comfort that the pleasures of God will be as fresh and spontaneous after ten thousand years of eternity as at the first.
A DEVOTIONAL TAKE-AWAY
If everything is to be valued according to the greatness of its being, then what should be our valuation of the eternal God compared with anything else in creation? As Charnock wrote: “In devoting ourselves to God, we serve Him that is, that was, so as that he never began; is to come, so as that he never shall end; by whom all things are what they are; who hath both eternal knowledge to remember our service, and eternal goodness to reward it.”[8] In devoting ourselves to God, we accomplish what is our very first duty, to which we turn next.
[1] Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), 4.
[2] Hawking claims: “because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” See Lennox, John (2011-02-18).God and Stephen Hawking (p. 16). Lion Hudson. Kindle Edition.
[3] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur.” The poem in its entirety can be found here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44395. Last accessed 12/10/2016.
[4] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: MacMillan, 1952), 45.
[5] Stephen Charnock, “On the Eternity of God” in The Existence and Attributes of God, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996), 277.
[6] Charnock, 277.
[7] Charnock, 277.
[8] Charnock, 309.