Free Bible Commentary
“Genesis 1:1-8”
Categories: Genesis“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. Then God said, ‘Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so. God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.”
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James Burton Coffman wrote concerning Genesis chapter one: “This marvelous chapter is not history, for it provides information concerning events that antedate all history. It is not myth, because it carries within it a credibility that never belonged to any myth. It is not science, because it deals with the BEGINNING, which no science has ever even attempted to describe. It is INSPIRATION, a revelation from Almighty God Himself; and the highest and best intelligence of all ages has so received and accepted it.”
Moses wrote Genesis 1:1 under inspiration of the Holy Spirit around 1500 B.C. In 1820 A.D. a scientist named Hubert Spencer gave us five scientific principles to study the unknown by: Time, Force, Energy, Space and Matter. We see them present at the creation of the Universe in the first verse of the Bible:
· "In the beginning" – Time
· "God" -- Force
· "Created" – Energy
· "The heavens" – Space
· "And the earth" – Matter
In the beginning, God, the only uncreated, beginning-less Being, created the heavens (the “far expanse” or outer space) and the earth – the totality of cosmic creation. Only Yahweh can call into being that which previously did not exist (Romans 4:17). The Bible neither explains nor defends the existence of God, but only expresses that He is the all-power, eternal Creator. Some things simply cannot be adequately explained and should need no defense. Someone or something has always existed because something exists now. The only thing that can produce nothing is nothing and the only thing (or person) that can produce something is something (or someone). An omnipotent and omniscient spiritual Being is the best and most logical explanation for the existence of the Universe and all its orderly, complex, intelligent design.
The complexity of the human genome demands that an intelligent designer exists because only a supremely brilliant code writer would be capable of writing an infinitely complex gene code. Code does not and cannot write itself. To quote Dennis Prager: “To be an atheist is to believe the universe came about by itself, life came from non-life by itself, and consciousness came about by itself. On purely rational grounds – the grounds on which I believe in God – the argument for a God who created the world is far more intellectually compelling than atheism."
We learn from John chapter 1 that Jesus was there in the beginning, with God, existing as God, creating the universe that He would later visit in the form of human flesh. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being… And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:1-3, 14) In today’s verses we learn of God the Father (verse 1), God the Spirit (verse 2), and God the Word (Jesus the Son in John 1) are the three personalities that comprise the one infinite Creator “God” (Hebrew, Elohim – a plural noun joined to the singular verb “created”).
On the earth being “formless and void,” Nahum Sarna wrote in his Jewish Publication Society commentary on Genesis: “That God should create disorganized matter, only to reduce it to order, presents no more of a problem than does His taking six days to complete creation instead of instantaneously producing a perfected universe. The quintessential point of the narrative is the idea of ordering that is the result of divine intent. It is a fundamental biblical teaching that the original, divinely ordained order in the physical world has its counterpart in the divinely ordained universal moral order to which the human race is subject.”
On day one God created light. Or did He? Since the Bible tells us that God is Light (Psalm 104:2; 1 Timothy 6:16; 1 John 1:5), I’m uncertain whether He called light into being or called it forth from himself to shine in the darkness of the bleak, formless, void earth. Either way you look at it, light was indispensable in supporting and sustaining the rest of His Creation. It is interesting to note that God created or called forth light before He spoke the Sun, stars and moon into existence, proving that light is independent of these powerful energy sources and superior to them.
On day two God created the earth’s atmosphere in the complex and orderly fashion that we know it. He separated the waters on the earth from the waters (gasses, vapors) above the earth and placed those upper waters in the “firmament” or sky. James Burton Coffman wrote: “Jamieson pointed out that the term ‘firmament’ carries the meaning of ‘an expanse ... the beating out as of a plate of metal,’ suggesting the utility of a shield, an apt figure indeed when it is recalled that the earth would long ago have been destroyed by showers of meteorites (as upon the moon) had it not been for the protection of our atmosphere… Men should marvel indeed at this creation, when it is remembered that millions and billions of tons of water are constantly suspended in the atmosphere in the form of clouds; and of course being much heavier than the atmosphere, only an act of creation could have accomplished such a thing. The patriarch Job marveled at this wonder: ‘Dost thou know the balancing of the clouds, the wondrous works of Him who is perfect in knowledge?’ – Job 37:16”
God “saw” or “perceived” that the light and all of His creation was “good”. “Reality is imbued with God’s goodness. The pagan notion of inherent, primordial evil is banished. Henceforth, evil is to be apprehended on the moral and not the mythological plane” (Sarna)
By the way, these “creation days” must be literal 24 hour days and not indefinite periods of time. While it is true that the word “day” can mean different things in different situations, the wording of the context strongly suggests literal days. The passing of an evening and a morning constitute a day in the shortest, literal sense. The wording of Genesis chapter one, where evening precedes mornings, is also the reason that in the Jewish method of time keeping, a day begins at sunset and not midnight.
Let us marvel with the Psalmist as he is awe-struck by the contemplation of God’s greatness expressed when He spoke the universe into existence in Psalm 33:6-9 – “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of His mouth all their host. He gathers the waters of the sea together as a heap; He lays up the deeps in storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.”
Please read Genesis 1:9-19 for tomorrow.
Have a great day!
- Louie Taylor
