Title: In the Beginning
Scripture: Genesis 1:1-5
Speaker: Nate Pickowicz
Today we begin the book of Genesis. And I'll be honest, coming to this study, I'm coming with great trepidation, but also a great deal of excitement. There really isn't anything quite like the book of Genesis in that it is the only eyewitness account of the beginning of the cosmos, the earth and of all humanity.
Ever think about that? This reason, however, no single document and no book of the Bible has been more contested, more interrogated, more attacked, and more misinterpreted than Genesis. The amount of literature written to dismantle and disprove Genesis's claims is staggering. So fierce, in fact, is the opposition that we have whole ministries that have been built to defend the book of Genesis.
Just a couple answers in Genesis. The Institute for Creation Research, ICR, Creation Ministries International, I mean, the list goes on and on and on. Why the opposition? Well, I think it has everything to do with what Genesis teaches, particularly the origin of the universe, the origin of humanity, the truth of personal identity, the purpose of marriage and family, the origin of law and government, and the establishment of the nation of Israel.
Because the fallen world has their own agenda for these things, and because of that, they attack this book. But I also believe it goes a little deeper than that. Genesis also tells us that God is the author of all things.
And as the author of all things, he possesses all inherent authority over what he has made. But in their wickedness, sinful humanity simply does not want to submit to God's authority. In fact, Romans 1.20 speaks to this, declaring, for since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse.
For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened. And in their spiritual darkness, Romans 1.18 says that they suppress the truth in unrighteousness. They wanna cover it up, they wanna stop it.
And one of the ways that they do that is by going to war with the book of Genesis. However, we are blessed with the mind of Christ and we've received the spiritual gift of illumination that we might peer into the window of human history and behold the glory of God. And that's our ultimate goal.
We wanna understand, we wanna see God's glory through this book. And so we're gonna talk about it. Go ahead and you can turn to the book of Genesis if you haven't already done so.
As for the title of the book itself, Genesis, the Jews have referred to this by the Hebrew word of Bereshith, which is literally in the beginning. They take the very first word of the Hebrew text and they've given that the title. Our title of Genesis comes from the Greek word, Geneseos, which is, as you can imagine, the word Genesis.
As for the authorship of Genesis itself, it really has become more contested over the last couple of centuries for all of Jewish history as well as church history up until the 19th century. It was universally recognized that Moses was the author of Genesis as well as Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. In fact, the first five books of the Bible make up the Hebrew Torah, also referred to as the Pentateuch in Greek.
It's been believed that Moses wrote these books after the Red Sea crossing during the wilderness wandering sometime around 1400 BC. We don't know the exact year, but sometime in that period. Again, this fact is both accepted and uncontested for nearly 3,500 years of religious history.
You might ask the question, well, what changed? Why is this now on the chopping block? Well, during the 19th century, the academic world saw the rise of something called higher criticism, higher criticism. And higher criticism sought to undermine the foundations of Christianity and Judaism by attacking the Bible. Perhaps the most famous attack on the foundations of Christianity came through Charles Darwin's 1859 book on the origin of species, which really launched the theory of evolution into popular thought.
The tendrils of it were already kind of there, but that book really was a black mark. It really shoved it into the conversation into the public sphere. And really, this book was positing this idea of opposition to the fact that God created the world in the way that the book of Genesis presents it.
Of course, one of the ways that you attack a document is by calling into question the author and its origin. And we see those kind of tactics today. If you wanna go after something, you go after the founding document or the founding event.
We see that with American history. One of the ways people wanna undo our civilization is by attacking the foundations, attacking the documents. So that's what they do in the Bible as well.
One popular theory known as the documentary hypothesis. Yeah, that won't be on the test, don't worry. But this hypothesis posited the idea that Moses was not the author of Genesis, but rather that there were later compilers that grabbed a bunch of other documents and sort of cobbled them together.
This is also known as J-E-D-P theory. Each of the letters representing one of these documents that began to be assembled hundreds of years after Moses' death. But the problem with that is that there's no actual proof of this at all.
None of these supposed documents exist. It's just a theory, as my son would say, a Bible theory. Inside joke, I apologize.
But more plausible and historical to this idea is the notion that God actually called Moses to write the Torah, which included the book of Genesis. Now, in composing Genesis, even conservative scholars believe that Moses likely collected these various historical and genealogical writings into the book. So there would have been other documents that the Israelites were carrying with them.
He would have grabbed everything and began to work. And they believe this because there are actually clues within the book itself. Namely, there is a word, a Hebrew word, toledoth, which translates the word generation or history.
And we see that word punctuated throughout the entire book of Genesis. It's repeated many, many times, and it's repeated at many key points in the narrative. And scholars have actually noted at least 10 key toledoth sections that divide up the book of Genesis.
Let me just illustrate this to you. And if you have your copy of scripture, you'll find these as we're going through. But in Genesis chapter two, verse four, it begins with this phrase.
This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created. Now, that sentence functions as sort of an introduction to a new section. When you're reading the book of Genesis, you'll find that you have the, you know, the narrative kind of comes to an end, and there's a new introduction.
And that's one of those newer introductions. Chapter five, verse one, that's another one. Chapter five, verse one says, this is the book of the generations, toledoth, of Adam.
And then it follows a long genealogy after that. Chapter six, verse nine. I'm not gonna do all of these, but chapter six, verse nine, these are the records of the generations of Noah.
And then we see the flood narrative. So again, 10 key sections of the book of Genesis. And what do they outline for us? What do they show us in the narrative? Well, we see the introduction of the creation account in chapter one, verse one, all the way to chapter two, verse three.
We then see the early history of humanity beginning in chapter two, verse four. The genealogy of Adam, that's a whole section. And then Noah and the flood is another section.
The sons of Noah, the line of Shem, the line of Terah and Abraham. Then a very brief account of Ishmael's line. And then the story of Isaac, Jacob, and Esau.
And then Esau and the Edomites. And then finally, Jacob in Egypt, which extends over to Joseph. I should say Joseph in Egypt.
So we have 50 chapters by our number, 50 chapters, and perhaps 10 or so key sections inside of that, spanning over 4,000 years of history, depending on the date of creation. And so you have this monumental document, this monumental work, a titanic collection of writings and compilation. This would have been a monumental work for Moses, and yet we also understand it's a minuscule effort made by an omnipotent God.
This was nothing for God to inspire this. But another hot topic in the discussion in academic circles is the question of interpretation. How do you read Genesis? Because there are those who assert that there are whole sections of the Bible that are written poetically and ought to be interpreted allegorically.
In fact, when I was being ordained for ministry at my ordination council, a council is pretty much just like a whole bunch of pastors in a room that just grill you for three hours. It's fantastic, it's so much fun. At my ordination, I remember I was being asked by a pastor to defend my view of a literal reading of Genesis 1 and 2. I remember him citing, he says, oh, well, Bruce Waltke says it's da-da-da-da.
And I'm thinking, I don't care what Bruce Waltke says, even though I respect him greatly as a scholar. But I remember having to defend my belief that Genesis 1 and 2 are meant to be taken literally. But that's the question.
Is Genesis figurative or poetical or allegorical? Well, if you read the text itself, we really have no reason to treat it as anything except a firsthand eyewitness account of historical events. Furthermore, you might ask the question, well, how did Jesus interpret Genesis? That's a good question to ask, right? What did Jesus do with it? In every instance, when Jesus is treating this book, he talks about it literally, as true history, as foundational to life. Just a couple examples, in Matthew 19, Jesus upholds the creation itself.
See, humanity, the creation of marriage, all these things he upholds as true, authoritative, and binding. He treats Adam, Abel, Noah, and Abraham as real historical people. He treats the events of the garden, the fall, the flood, the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah, all as historical events as well.
He does not mythologize, he doesn't allegorize anything from the book of Genesis. So if Jesus doesn't do it, then why should we do that? We gotta treat the Bible, the book of Genesis, as it is. And so again, with that, let's go ahead and look at Genesis chapter one.
We're gonna look at this together. Contrary to the rumors I've heard, we are gonna cover more than one half of a verse today. We're gonna move a little bit quicker, I think, through this book of the Bible, even though there's so much here.
And I just, by preface, to say, you probably, many of you have studied this book before, and there's gonna be things that we don't cover in this series. Frankly, there's just so much information, it's really staggering. But I wanna just do due diligence and try to bring us through this exposition in a way that is helpful and insightful and encouraging to you.
But these opening verses are perhaps some of the most well-known verses ever written, ever existing. And I don't wanna gloss over these too quickly. So let's just look at Genesis chapter one, verses one through five together, one through five together.
So here's the book of Genesis as it begins. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep.
And the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, let there be light. And there was light.
God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening, and there was morning one day.
Now again, these first three words that we translate in the beginning is the Hebrew word of Bereshith, which we mentioned earlier. We might also ask, well, when was this beginning? Yeah, this is another hot topic of discussion. When did the cosmos, when did everything come into existence? Now, just looking up some random data on the internet, which is always infallible, of course, but the most recent scientific hypothesis is that our solar system is 4.5 billion years old, and they say that the universe itself is 14 billion years old but of course, that number keeps on getting revised and elongated every time they discover how complex everything is.
In earlier days, however, the date of creation was much more of a recent date. Most early Jewish scholars believe that the earth was created somewhere around 3760 BC. In fact, according to the Jewish calendar, even the calendar used today, we are currently in the year 5787.
And so by that counting, which they trace back to the beginning of creation, and by that estimate, it puts the date, just based on the Jewish calendar alone, it puts the date of creation as October 7th, 3761 BC. Astronomer Johannes Kepler calculated the date was more like 3993 BC. 17th century pastor and scholar James Usher used the chronology in the Bible to go and calculate the ages, and he arrived, I love this, he arrived at October 22nd, 4004 BC at approximately 6 p.m. Breaking with convention, Jewish historian Josephus believed the date of creation to be 5555 BC.
Now, with everything I just said, there's a lot of variation with these dates and it's all based on calculation and when this happened and when that happened. But even all these modern calculations, conservative calculations, still hover around the same basic idea that the Earth in all of existence came into being somewhere between six and 10,000 years ago, give or take. But all of these estimates really differ with a matter of a few hundred or even a few thousand years.
This is not a matter of millions or billions of years. Of course, some might just say, well, let's just add up the genealogies and we'll get there, right? Theoretically, that would work, except that if you start with Abraham's birth, which is 2166 BC, we know that date, that's established. If you work backwards, it would make sense you could find it, except that in some places there's actually gaps in the genealogy.
Now, those aren't mistakes, they're really just more of like edits because they're trying to show relationships to certain individuals and so they're not worried about exact numerical data, they're more worried about connection. So that's why there's some of the gaps there. But again, this accounts for a few hundred years here and there, but certainly not millions or billions.
And this begs the question, well, couldn't the universe be millions or billions of years old? Certainly could be, God could do anything he wants, but when you start thinking about it, the biblical text does simply not lend itself to that conclusion. When you read the Bible at face value, we don't get that kind of data. Rather, the hypothesis of millions or billions of years is derived from a principle known as uniformitarianism, uniformitarianism.
That will be on the test, by the way. This concept of uniformitarianism was popularized in the 1830s by a geologist named Charles Lyell, and he argued that the Earth's features were formed and developed through a very slow methodical process. But uniformitarianism does not take into account any kind of catastrophic or cataclysmic events.
It doesn't take into account volcanoes and floods and eruptions and earthquakes and things like that. We have video of Mount St. Helens erupting, and in the matter of about 10 or 15 seconds, you have half the mountain disappear into the woods. That did not happen over millions and millions of years, even though if you go up and you look at it and carbon date it and all that other stuff, it seems like it'd be a lot older, but we know it happened in a matter of seconds.
So instead, this looks at what exists and tries to wind the clock back gradually, which has led scientists to keep on winding and arrive at billions of years and not thousands of years. And yet we know that God uses cataclysmic and catastrophic events to bring about creation. We think about something like the flood, which did quite a bit of damage and re-figured everything in the world.
We'll talk about that when we get to the flood. But the most cataclysmic or life-changing event happened at the very beginning when God said, let there be light. That was not a gradual process.
That was instantaneous. Furthermore, we see that God creates everything in the beginning, but let's not get too far ahead. Let's go and actually look at the text again.
Genesis 1.1, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. This word here for God is Elohim. It's a masculine plural noun.
Now, right off the bat, seeing this word sitting right here in Genesis 1.1, it dispels several errors. It dispels atheism, that all of existence just came into being through its own, which is ludicrous. Nothing can come into being without an outside force.
It doesn't just show up. And so it dispels atheism. Something cannot come from nothing.
It's scientifically, philosophically, and actually impossible. It also dispels polytheism, that they were somehow many gods in the beginning, the god of the moon and the god of the sun and the god of the oceans and things like that. No, God, Elohim, the one true God, created it all.
Third, it also dispels pantheism, that God is in the creation or that he is the creation. Here we see God acting independently outside the creation and by his power, affecting that which came into being, that God created the heavens and the earth. And so God here is creating everything ex nihilo, out of nothing, by divine fiat.
He did not form the creation out of preexistent material. This word create is from the Hebrew word barach. Again, by divine fiat.
It wasn't and then it was because of God. Well, what did he create? Moses notes two things here, which really represent sort of a summary of everything we're about to read. The heavens, which comes from the word shamayim, which refers to just generic space.
And it's from the perspective of the ground that Moses is writing this and he's looking up and he's looking down, he's looking everywhere. And everything above and beyond us is the space, is the heavens, which will include everything in the subsequent days that God is going to create, things like the moon and the sun and the stars and beyond. But then he also notes that God created the earth, eretz in the Hebrew, which is the ground or the land.
Again, he's gonna expound on this in later verses. But for now, this is a general statement about God's creative act. Now, if you're reading the text again, the last couple hundred years, another theory has come into vogue, a popularization of a theory that involves a supposed space between verse one and verse two, that there was something happening in the white space between verse one and verse two.
There's some kind of a gap there. This is what's known as the so-called gap theory, that over the course of this little tiny space between verse one and verse two, there were thousands or even millions of years. Now, this gap theory was popular because it was a way for conservative biblical scholars to make way for the evolutionary theory without violating the reading of the text.
That somehow God used an evolutionary process, maybe theistic evolution, and did so in the gap between verse one and verse two. Now, we're gonna talk about evolution in the coming weeks here, but it's important to note that if you just look at the grammar of the verses, that doesn't support any kind of gap between verse one and verse two. In Hebrew, verse two begins with the word vav, which is the word and in English.
And by inserting that word, it continues the narrative flow of the text. Furthermore, this word and or vav appears consistently throughout the entire narrative. So if you're reading Genesis, this word and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened, that's grammatically designed to show us that this is a continuation of a narrative passage.
Now, some translations, including the one we're using, the New American Standard, it begins verse two without that word. It just says the earth was formless and void. But if you are using like a King James Version, it's actually retained the original grammar.
King James or even the American Standard Version says, and the earth was without form and void. So it retains that grammar. Again, grammatically, there's no gap between these two verses.
So what do we see in verse two? Look at verse two. It says here the earth was formless and void and darkness is over the surface of the deep. And the spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.
So now we know that God doesn't create the ground until day three, but at the point of verse two, it gives us a general sense of what is there. In a word, all we see in verse two is chaos, utter chaos. Moses notes that the earth was formless and void.
He uses two Hebrew words here, tohu and bohu. Tohu gives the sense of emptiness or confusion, nothingness, even vanity just spiraling out of control. And then this word bohu means desolation or waste, emptiness, void.
So he's not talking about preexistent matter. He's just making a general statement about there was just chaos and nothingness and emptiness. Furthermore, he says there was darkness over the surface of this deep.
Emptiness, nothingness, and now darkness residing over tehom, which is the ocean or the abyss, this deep abyss of something or nothingness. This picture that's pointed out is that this place of emptiness and chaos, and in the midst of this abyss of chaos and emptiness, God creates life and order and beauty. Yet, all here we see that God is poised to act.
Again, we're not seeing preexistent matter. Moses is painting a picture here. And then we see, Moses includes, the spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water, some translations say the deep.
In the midst of all this darkness and desolation, the spirit of God is preparing, he's ready. In fact, he's already moving. The Hebrew word that's used here refers to a shaking or a fluttering or a vibrating.
Some translations will render this that he was hovering over the surface of the deep. So he's hovering and he's poised and he's vibrating, he's ready to spring into action and to do something here. Now what's interesting from verse two is that we already have this generic term for God, Elohim, in verse one, and then in verse two, we now have the spirit of God.
Spirit is ruach in the Hebrew, which also means breath or wind. Of course, when you consider the New Testament teaching about the nature of God, we start to see something of what's going on here. Because even right here in verse one, in verse two, we see two members of the divine trinity.
Deuteronomy 6.4 is emphatic that there is only one God. And yet the word for God here in Hebrew is Elohim, that's plural. The word for God in the very first verse is a plural noun.
A little later in Genesis 1.26, God says to himself, let us make man in our image and likeness. Again, this hints at the point of the triune nature of God, even from the very beginning. But already here in verses one and two, we have God, we have the spirit of God, and as Christians that we are, reading the Bible, we say, well, where is Jesus, right? Turn over to John chapter one in your Bible.
John chapter one. Any chance I get to sneak to John on a Sunday morning or a Sunday afternoon now, I wanna do that. But this is really helpful, I think, in understanding the passage.
The purpose of John's prologue here in chapter one is to establish the identity of Jesus Christ, both as God and eternal being. And so John, in a very brilliant way, he seizes on the language of Genesis 1. He knows his Bible, and he showcases the reality that Christ was not only present in the beginning, but he himself was instrumental in the creation. So we're gonna read the first five verses here.
This is John 1.1. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and apart from him, nothing came into being that has come into being.
In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. Now, there's so much here.
We're not gonna unpack all of this, but I just wanna draw some parallels here and give some illumination. Here, we have Christ who is called the word, the logos of God, and we know that it's talking about Jesus because of what's said later on in verse 14, 17, 18. The word here is Jesus Christ pre-incarnate.
But we see here that Christ is in the beginning with God. Well, why is he with God? Well, because the Bible says he was God and is God. Verse three then tells us that everything came through Christ.
The whole creation came through his able hands. Verse four, he's the author of all life, and then in verse five, he is the light that shines in the darkness. We know this because Jesus says of himself in John 8, 12, I am the light of the world.
So, if you were to synthesize John 1 and Genesis 1, you get this marvelous picture of the creation account, and it might go something like this. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and in the beginning, there was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God.
All things came into being by him, and apart from him, nothing came into being that has come into being. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
And the spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. So again, both Genesis 1 and John 1, they testify of the triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit were present and active in the creation account. Let's move on to Genesis 1, 3 here.
Something remarkable is now taking place. We read here in verse three, and then God said, as we're gonna see throughout the course of this whole narrative, that this is God's desired method of creation. He speaks things into existence.
We know this from Psalm 33, six, that says, by the word of the Lord, the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth, all their host. So this is what God does. He speaks, and the creation responds.
And that's what we see here. God speaks and says, let there be light, and there was light. Now, we know that he doesn't create the sun until day four, but here's the thing.
You don't have to have the sun to have light. In fact, John 1, 9 says that Jesus is the true light, right? He is the light of the world. But light itself, the particles and waves that illuminate matter, God is the ultimate source of that.
In fact, if you travel from creation to recreation in Revelation 22, verse five, talks about the new heavens and the new earth, and it says this. This is the end of the book, Revelation. There will no longer be any night, and they will not have need of light, or of a lamp, nor of the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them, and they will reign forever and ever.
And so, whereas God doesn't need the sun at the beginning, he doesn't need the sun at the end either, because he is the light. And so again, God is both creator, and ultimate source of light, which he speaks into existence in verse three. And then we have verse four, where God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.
This is the first time we read about God's moral judgment over what he has created. He calls the light good. He says it's good.
He'll do this six more times regarding various aspects of the creation, deeming them to be good, and then the totality of the creation at the very end in verse 31, he calls it very good, very good. And then Moses tells us that God separated the light from the darkness, verse five, and he called the light day, and called the darkness night. What's he doing here? What is all this talking about now? Well, by separating darkness and light, he's creating, and he says this in the text, evening and morning.
What is God doing? He's creating a cycle now. He's moving in a cycle. This is the dark light cycle, day night cycle.
So it goes dark light, dark light, dark light, and he's gonna keep on doing this. It's the beginning of the earth's rotation now, the clock as we know it. If you look down the page at verse five, eight, 13, 19, 23, we see this cycle of there was evening, and there was morning, and then it comprises a day.
He repeats this over and over again, and so what do we have now? This is the beginning of the space time continuum, this daylight cycle, this dark night cycle. And ever since this point, ever since day one, this day night cycle has continued uninterrupted. It hasn't stopped ever since.
Now, there have been times when those have argued, well, Moses penned the word day, but he's not meaning a literal 24-hour day because the word day can mean lots of different things. Day can be a general span of time. It could be an event.
It could be all kinds of things, and this came to be known as the day age theory that when Moses uses the word day here, he's talking about a long age of time, but he uses this Hebrew word yom, which is day, over 400 times in the Old Testament. Now, there are times when day refers to a broader category of time. So, for example, there's a phrase known as the day of the Lord.
That's a specific event in future history, but most normal usages here refer to a 24-hour span of time. What about here? Did God create the universe in six literal 24-hour days? Well, the Bible actually tells us that he did. There's no guessing game at all.
Exodus 20 actually gives us the reason. Exodus 20, if you know your Bible, know that that is the place where we first encounter the 10 Commandments. Well, how do we remember that? Well, Exodus 20, it's the 10 Commandments.
God wants you to remember, so he wants you to write down twice. 20 divided by two is 10, and you make sense, right? So Exodus 20 is the 10 Commandments, and in Exodus 20 here, verse eight, it records God's command to Israel to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy, remember the Sabbath and keep it holy, to work six days and then to rest on the seventh, right? We understand that that's one of the 10 Commandments. It's a general principle for us, but where do we get that principle? Where do we get the rationale for that principle? Verse 11 tells us, again, Moses is writing this.
He says, for in six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Why did God rest on the Sabbath day, the seventh day? It's not as though God was tired, right? God doesn't need to rest.
He's an eternal being. He did it to establish a pattern of life for the creation. Frankly, he did it on some level for us, and we see this pattern repeated over and over again, so this first day was just that, it was a day, and Moses even says it many, many times.
He says there was evening and there was morning, one day, one earth cycle. Interestingly enough, there's a man named Dr. James Barr who was a professor of Hebrew at Oxford University. He wasn't himself a young earth creationist at all, but he wrote about this account.
He writes about the language, the grammatical language of Genesis 1. This is Dr. James Barr, quote, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer of Genesis 1 intended to convey to their readers the idea that creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience, end quote. Hebrew scholars say that that is the intention. Now whether they believe that to be true, that's a different story, but what's written down? What did Moses intend to write? In short, what Moses wrote is what he meant.
He meant it, he believed it, he intended for us to read it and believe it as well. Now the universe did not come into existence through a series of long random chance events. It did not simply just break forth from chaos all of a sudden into order.
We'll talk about this probably in the future at some point, but that violates the laws of thermodynamics, it violates the laws of entropy. You don't go from chaos to order without acting upon it, right? But the Bible tells us over and over again that God created all things by the word of his mouth. Furthermore, Colossians 1, 16 and 17 says of Jesus Christ, for by him all things were created both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through him and for him.
He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. We can praise our Lord God that he has made everything that's here, he didn't just make it, set it and forget it, he is present. Not only is he present, the Bible tells us again, he is holding all things together.
He holds the matter, the energy, every single atom and molecule inside your body, he holds it together. And we can rejoice, we can worship and praise him for his wonderful creation. Genesis chapter one, verses one through five.
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for your word. Lord, even in just a couple of verses, we just see the power, the magnitude of what you've done.
And Lord, this account is so very simple, literarily. We can just read it at face value and see what you're doing, but to even get into your mind and intention behind how and why you did this, oh Lord, it blows our minds. And yet, this is cause for us to worship you, this is cause for us to marvel that simply by the breath of your mouth, you caused all things to come into being.
And Lord, we're so grateful that you did because we're here because of your special creation. So Lord, as we move forward, we're just dipping our toe in the water tonight, but as we move forward, oh Lord, would you bless the study? Would you give us ears to hear and eyes to see? Would you help us understand the great mysteries? And Lord, even though I know that we're not gonna cover all that could be covered, would you please help us, oh Lord, that our faith and our wisdom, our understanding would grow more and more through this study. We thank you, Lord, for giving us this wonderful book and pray that you'd bless our time moving forward.
And we pray all these things in Jesus' holy name, amen.