Lord’s Library contributor Jared Helms offers a Genesis 1:1 meaning to help you meditate on the first verse of God’s Word. Check out Jared’s YouTube channel and two blogs: A Light in the Darkness and Blind Faith Examples. Lord’s Library’s Ministry Leaders Series is a collection of contributed articles written by ministry leaders on key Christian topics.
Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
The first verse of Scripture tells us a lot about life, the universe, and everything. For starters, it tells us in no uncertain terms that there is a God who transcends our understanding of existence. You see God is already on the scene before there even was a scene to be on. That means God has no need for physical space, or for time, or for anything else: just like Paul told the Athenians.
It means that God is so much bigger than everything we know, or even could know. It means in the simplest possible terms that God is big, you just wouldn’t even believe how incredibly big He really is.
Oh, you might affirm the vastness of God intellectually, but we all find it hard to really believe how big God is in our day-to-day lives. We demonstrate our struggle to believe when we fret, stress, and come apart over our problems; those problems that are so much bigger than we are. Well, God really is infinitely bigger than all of those put together. He can get all around them no matter how huge they appear to us. He is always around us as well. We cannot go anywhere He is not. We can never catch Him at a bad time, because time has no hold on Him.
This really is wonderful news for those of us who have a relationship with God through the free grace provided by the death and resurrection of the second person of the Godhead Jesus Christ. We can rest knowing our God is in a position to help us, and that is just one of the truths we glean from this opening verse of the Bible. I look forward to sharing more insights from Genesis 1:1 below.
Genesis 1:1 Meaning
Before there was anything, there was the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God then created everything that is out of nothing. To have created the entire cosmos out of something would have been an unimaginable display of sheer power, but to have created the entire cosmos out of nothing is simply beyond anything we could fathom.
Nothing created could ever begin to match the power of the creator. There is no one equal to the awesome might of the Almighty. God’s first feat demonstrates beyond any doubt that He can do whatever needs to be done. There is no situation in which God is not powerful enough to deliver us. Even the immense weight of sin could not bar Him from those who trust Him for salvation. How wonderful a consolation to us in our struggles today.
In the beginning, God created, and there was an order to it. The following verses in Genesis show us that the act itself was orderly, and our own observations along with such passages as Psalm 19 tell us that order in the creation itself. It is immensely complex; we have struggled for centuries to come to an understanding of it.
The very fact that we look for order testifies that there is order, and where there is order there is a mind behind it. The mind of the Creator is perfect. The reason of the Almighty defines our own sense of reason. Two plus two equals four because God made it so, and we are powerless to revoke His reason. We can however reject it.
When we reject the order of creation, we are like a foolish person who tries to use a hammer as a screwdriver. Things were made to work in one specific way. It is better than any alternative way we could come up with. It must be as if God has been perfectly acquainted with His own design from eternity past. Let the doubting reader ponder Job 38-42.
God needed nothing in eternity past. The Holy Trinity existed in a perfect community, totally self-sufficient. Therefore, God had no need to create. He lacked nothing. Nothing could be added to His perfection to make Him somehow more perfect. Why then did God create?
Simple, He wanted to. He wanted to reveal Himself, to express Himself, and we are the happy result who are privileged to know God revealed to us in perfect steadfast of the Father through the Son by the Holy Spirit.
We see our own smallness and insignificance in transcendent existence, perfection of power, and understanding revealed in this very first verse of Scripture. Then we find ourselves raised far beyond our station by a God who desired us, and so brought us into being.
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