In the Beginning

Before there was morning. Before there was ground to stand on, or a sky to look up at. Before there was anyone to tell a story. There was God. And this is how the Bible begins.

The first pages of the Bible were treasured by people who lived close to the land. Farmers and shepherds. People who watched the sun rise over the hills of Canaan and sink into the Great Sea. They knew real darkness. They knew floods. They knew how fragile a harvest could be. And all around them, the nations told their own stories about how the world began. Stories of gods at war. Stories of chaos, and fear. Genesis tells a different story. Listen.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty. Darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God spoke. “Let there be light.” And there was light. No struggle. No battle. Just a word, and light poured into the dark. God saw that the light was good. He separated the light from the darkness. He called the light day, and the darkness night. And there was evening, and there was morning. The first day. On the second day, God made a great expanse, a vault of sky, and divided the waters above from the waters below. Evening. Morning. The second day.

On the third day, God gathered the seas into their places, and dry ground appeared. Then the land began to grow. Grass. Seed-bearing plants. Trees heavy with fruit, each one carrying the seeds of the next. On the fourth day, God set lights in the sky. A greater light to rule the day. A lesser light to rule the night. And the stars as well. They would mark the seasons, the days and the years. On the fifth day, the waters began to swarm. Fish flashed silver in the shallows. Great creatures moved in the deep. And birds lifted off into the open sky. God blessed them. “Be fruitful,” he said. “Fill the seas. Let the birds multiply on the earth.”

On the sixth day, the land came alive. Cattle and wild animals. Creeping things in the grass. And then God did something new. “Let us make mankind in our image,” he said, “in our likeness.” So God created human beings in his own image. Male and female he created them. He blessed them, and he gave them a calling: to fill the earth and look after it, to rule over the fish and the birds and every living thing. He gave them seed and fruit for food, and every green plant for the animals. Then God looked at everything he had made. Not just good, this time. Very good. Evening. Morning. The sixth day.

And then, on the seventh day, God rested. Not because he was tired. Because the work was finished. The heavens and the earth were complete, in all their vast array. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy. A day set apart. A day to stop, and to enjoy what had been made. The whole world, ordered and full and good. And right in the middle of it, people made to reflect the One who made it all.

Here is something worth knowing. Other peoples in the ancient Near East had creation stories too. The best known is a Babylonian poem called Enuma Elish. In it, the god Marduk wins a violent battle against the sea goddess Tiamat, splits her body in two, and builds the sky and the earth from it. Human beings are made to do the hard labour the gods no longer want to do. Genesis sounds very different. There is no battle. The sun and moon are not even named; they are simply lights, placed where God wants them. And human beings are not slaves. They carry God’s own image, and they are blessed. Scholars such as John Walton have shown how sharply these contrasts would have stood out to the first people who heard Genesis.

That story comes from Genesis, chapter one, through chapter two, verse three. The world did not begin in chaos and fear. It began with a voice, and a word, and a God who called it good. So here is something to think about this week. If you were made in the image of God, what might that mean for how you treat the people around you, and the world you live in?