Genesis 1 Devotional
By Pastor Lawrence

In Hebrew, the very first verse of the Bible contains exactly seven words, the number of perfection. They are not large and complex words nor are they difficult to understand, yet they speak volumes, and many volumes have been written in order to try to explain them. They speak of God and of His first great work of creation. These words don’t try to prove the existence of God; they assume his reality based on the evidence of his great work. His creation is all the evidence He needs.

You know, whenever you begin reading any narrative it is only natural to look for the main characters in order to understand something of the plot. Of course, some books mention too many names at first and at times it is hard to remember which character did what? But the Bible isn’t like that. Only one character is mentioned in the very first verse. In fact, he is mentioned 35 times in the first 33 verses of the Bible. And it’s interesting; Moses never uses a pronoun to refer to him in these verses; instead, he repeatedly mentions God by name to signify his importance. He says, “God created. God said. God saw. God separated. God set. God called, God blessed, God gave, God finished and God rested. And throughout the rest of the Old Testament, it is the same. God is mentioned over and over again, some 2800 times.

The third question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism asks: What does the Bible primarily teach? The answer: The Bible primarily teaches what man must believe about God and what God requires of man. But before we get to the duties that God requires of us, we first must know something about God. We must know something about his character, his names, his attributes and his works. And the Bible gives us just that. There are at least four things that we can learn about God based on this passage: that he is the Almighty God, the Alpha and the Omega, the Lord of Heaven and Earth and the God in Three persons.

We see something of God’s great might when he merely speaks and the universe comes into existence. Who else can create new things out of nothing? We also see that God is the author of the story, the one who causes it to have a beginning, the one who has a very definite purpose and plan, and the one who can and will bring that story to a wonderfully satisfying conclusion. Additionally, because God is the Maker of Heaven and Earth, he is also the Lord of Heaven and Earth. The very fact that God causes the sun and the moon to rule over the day and the night and commands men made in his image to exercise dominion over the rest of the creatures surely signifies that He himself has the power and authority to grant such lesser powers in this way. Thus, the reader is not only confronted by an all wise and powerful God but also a God with complete authority over His creation.

Finally, although it is not fully seen or understood in the opening chapter of the Bible, there are hints that this God is much more complex than any man made in His image. Prior to creating man, unlike with the rest of the creatures whom God simply spoke into existence, He enters into His heavenly counsel expressing His desire to create man uniquely, saying “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Is He merely thinking out loud, or is He speaking to another? From the very beginning, this God who is neither explained nor defined is both wonderful and mysterious in His ways. He is our Maker who has revealed Himself to us that we might know Him and love Him, for He has made us for Himself and for His own purpose.