God: Genesis 1:1-5
In the beginning, God. This is one of my favorite ways to frame any attempt to think deeply about the Bible. I don’t remember how old I was the first time I heard a sermon focused on just these four words, but I remember thinking how important it is to understand the first four words of the Bible before attempting to read anything else the Bible has to offer. In fact, it is important to understand these first four words before attempting to read the rest of the sentence!
In the beginning, God was there. The beginning of our story does not coincide with the beginning of His. Before we had any recognition of time, He already was. It was the snap of His fingers – or His proverbial plucking of the cosmic strings – that brought our universe into existence. Before the first beam of light came into existence, He was there. Before the first amount of gravitational force pulled clouds of gasses into primordial suns, He was there. When our universe was the size of a single atom ready to explode out into a universe that is no less than ninety-three billion light years across, God was there. He had the whole universe in His hands.
God’s first act was an act of order. God took creation and began to sort it. The Bible tells us our universe was formless and void. God’s Spirit hovered over the formless and began to work.
The first act of ordering the universe was to make light, which He determined good. God separated the light from the darkness. He is ordering the universe in this act. He is categorizing things. The things that fall into the category of light go here, and that which is not light go with the darkness.
Note that God never calls the darkness bad. Certainly, there are other places in the Bible where light is made analogous to good and darkness is made analogous to bad. But darkness itself is not bad. Think about darkness what darkness does for us. Darkness allows us to have an easier time to sleep, and sleep is fundamentally necessary for us to learn, to reset our biological rhythms, to consolidate memories, and to replenish our energy. While darkness may be made analogous to evil elsewhere, God does not call the darkness bad here.
God’s act of creation is not an act of separating good from bad. God’s act of creation is about forming identity. God gives the light a name: Day. That is its identity. God gives the darkness a name: Night. That is its identity. God’s act of creation is about teaching characteristics, qualities, and identities. He is not separating good from bad. Everything God creates is good.
God creates different things, but it is all God. His hand does not make mistakes. His hand does not produce error. Everything in creation is good because it came from God. In the beginning, God.
