Genesis 1 (Creation)

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

The first line of the Bible is arguably the most important, for it establishes two essential facts about God.

First, if God created the universe, then He is clearly separate from the universe and everything in it. This is important because belief in pantheism--the idea that God is within each of us and that we are a part of God--is growing, especially now that Oprah is endorsing this exact belief. But the Hebrew word for “created” (as used in this sentence) means to construct something out of nothing, or to fill (something that is empty). It is impossible to create (out of nothing) something that is part of the creator and already exists. I can’t create my own leg, for example, because it is a part of me and already exists, just as I do. The idea is absurd. So if God created the universe, and everything in it, then He is clearly not a part of it, and it is not a part of Him.

Second, if God created the universe, then He has the ability to control everything within it. Just as an inventor knows how--and why--every part of his invention works and knows how to fix those parts when they break, God knows exactly how everything in the universe works--from the revolutions of the planets, to the tides of the oceans and the jet streams in the sky. And if He knows how and why everything works, then He also has the ability to fix and alter things for the better--in the world, and in our own lives. Nothing is hopeless or impossible for Him, which means that we can take any problem, any hurt and any concern, and we can know--absolutely--that God can “fix it.”

And because we know that God is not a part of us or within us, we also know--absolutely--that we, alone, can’t “fix things” without God’s help. We need to turn to Him, just as a child needs to turn to his parents for advice and help.

Before I discuss the creation of man (the second most important aspect of Genesis 1) here is a quick summary of God’s creations:

Day 1: Light
Day 2: Sky and water
Day 3: Sea and land
Day 4: Sun, moon and stars
Day 5: Fish and birds (although I’ve read that the original translation was not birds, but “flying creatures” which could encompass things like Pterodactyls.)
Day 6: Animals and human beings
Day 7: God rested

I know some people will look at this and question how God created light before He created the sun and the moon. The answer, I think, lies in quantum physics, a relatively new branch of science that examines the earth at the sub-atomic level. (My father taught physics at the NJ Institute of Technology, and he had a particular interest in Quantum physics.) Light, quantum physicists discovered, has an interesting quality: it is neither a wave nor a particle, but has characteristics of both. They call this the wave-particle duality. This means that while it acts a wave--in the sense that we look at the sun and “see” the waves of light coming towards the earth, it also exists independently as a particle (like a tiny particle of dust). So it is entirely possible that God created particles of light at the sub-atomic level on the first day, then gave it wave qualities when he created the sun and the stars on the fourth day to “mark off the seasons, days and years.” (Genesis 1: 14)

Versus 26-28 describe the creation of man, in which God says, “Let us make man (human beings) in our image, to be like us.” This is a powerful statement, again, for a couple of reasons.

First, God uses the word “us,” which is the first reference to the trinity: God the Father, Jesus the son and the Holy Spirit. This is made evident by the fact that the word used in this sentence for God--Elohim--is plural, yet it is used with singular verb forms, adjectives and pronouns. (http://www.hebrew4christians.com/).
Second, God says that humans are to be created in His image. Some people think this means that our physical appearance is similar to that of God, but most scholars interpret it to mean that we can relate to His feelings: happiness, joy, sadness, anger, jealousy, etc. In this way, we should never feel bad about our feelings; it’s the motive behind those feelings that should concern us!

(Incidentally, elsewhere in the Bible, God refers to creating humans in His likeness, which means we were given a “like” role: just as He has dominion over the heavens, we have dominion over the earth. And I thank my good friend Annie for that insight.)

Another conclusion I came to after reading this sentence is that His love for us is more than I can ever understand. A parent loves a child, for example, but parents don’t have a choice as to what that child is going to look like or how the child will develop. Likewise, an artist creates and loves his work, but that inanimate piece of work will never love the artist in return or be able to thank the artist for creating it. God, therefore, is so much more than a parent or an artist, just as we are so much more than a child or a painting. We are the beautiful children He created, and that relationship is something that many people find difficult to understand. I know I struggle to understand that type of love.

But I also know that my knowledge is limited, and I realize that I don’t have to understand everything to know that God loves me.