The God of Beginnings

Back in the early days of journalism, a young newspaper reporter was sent to cover a local story. This was his very first assignment, and he wanted to impress his editor, so he submitted a report of the story that was 12 pages long. His editor took one look at the sheaf of paper and said “Cut it in half”.

The reporter went away and came back an hour later with six pages. The editor said “Cut it in half again, son.” An hour later, the frustrated reporter was back with a three-page story. The editor said gruffly “Now, pare it down to one page.”

The young reporter began to protest, but his boss calmly replied. “Young man, do you realize that when God reported on how he created the universe, he managed to do it in just ten words?”

The first ten words of the Bible state: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And like any good newspaper story, Genesis 1 answers several important questions:

• When? – in the beginning

• Who? – God

• What? – created the heavens and the earth

• How? – that’s what the rest of the chapter is about

• Why? – that’s what the rest of the Bible is about

The book of Genesis was written by Moses, who lived approximately 3,500 years ago. It expresses profound truths, but it does so in fairly simple terms. Some people think that because it is so old, the book of Genesis must be completely at odds with the findings of modern science. But actually, the book of Genesis was far, far ahead of its time. Take the opening statement in Genesis 1:1 for example.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Scientists did not discover the fact that the Universe might even have had a beginning until quite recently.

Let me take you back 300 years to a time when modern science was still in the cradle. In the year 1687, Sir Isaac Newton—a brilliant, but difficult man—wrote an amazing book. Scientists today still call it perhaps the greatest scientific textbook ever written. It was called the Principia Mathematica. In that book, Newton described the mechanical laws of motion and gravitation that held the planets in their orbits around the sun.

Because of the work of Newton, people began to realize that the universe was an orderly place. There were natural laws that governed its behavior—laws which we could discover and understand and apply.

At about the same time, the first astronomers, following the lead of Galileo, made powerful telescopes that helped them to see farther into the universe than ever before. And those early astronomers found that the Universe was an incredibly huge place—so vast that it seemed to stretch on forever. Everywhere they pointed their telescopes, they saw more and more distant stars that had previously been invisible.

These two ideas—an orderly, mechanical universe and an incredibly vast universe—inspired a German philosopher named Immanuel Kant to propose that perhaps the universe was infinite. Perhaps it had always been here, existing unchanged for eons and eons of time. And because it was infinite, you could never get to the end of it—because it didn’t have an end—it just stretched on and on forever.

So in the 18th and 19th centuries, Kant’s idea of an infinitely large, infinitely old universe became the accepted view of the scientific community. Scientists concluded that it was pointless to speculate about what might be outside of the universe, because there was no outside—the universe was all there was. And it was pointless to speculate about what might have been before the universe, because there was no before – the universe had always existed.

And scientists who believed these things looked at Genesis 1:1 and said, “The Bible is obviously wrong. The universe had no beginning.” And so science and theology began to drift apart.

Now one of the implications of the belief that the universe was infinite was that time was also infinite. In other words, time never had a beginning, and time never ends. There had been an infinite amount of time during which the various atoms and molecules of the universe could bang into each other—could come together and form combinations. And those combinations would be purely random—dictated by pure chance operating through the mechanical laws of motion that Newton discovered.

So it is not surprising that, operating from those prevailing mid-19^(th) century assumptions, a British naturalist named Charles Darwin formulated the theory of evolution. In 1859, he published a book called the Origin of Species. In that book, which was to become extremely influential over the next 150 years, Darwin claimed that life on earth was ultimately the product of chance combinations of molecules that had come together over vast amounts of time.

And that viewpoint, the theory of evolution, put even more distance between science and the Bible. Because the Bible states very clearly that that is NOT how life came to be. So science and theology grew even farther apart.

That, in a nutshell, is where things stood until the year 1905, when a remarkable man named Albert Einstein came along. Over a period of ten years, between 1905 and 1915, Einstein developed a new theory about the way the universe operated. It was called the Theory of Relativity. It proved, among other things, that Newton’s dependable mechanical laws of motion didn’t apply when you got down to the level of the basic building blocks of the universe. This was a revolutionary development. Perhaps the universe wasn’t as predictable as scientists had thought.

During the time that Einstein was developing his Theory of Relativity, astronomers were making some startling discoveries. An astronomer named Vesto Melvin Slipher worked at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. He discovered, by analyzing the light spectrum from distant stars, that they were actually receding from earth at great speed. Here was another new idea: maybe the universe wasn’t static after all—the stars seemed to be in motion, and the really odd thing was that they were all moving away. Slipher never discovered a star that was moving toward us.

A few years later, in 1924, another astronomer, Edwin Hubble focused on some distant fuzzy-looking stars. He found that they weren’t stars at all—they were galaxies made up of billions of stars. Over the next few years, Hubble discovered that those galaxies were also moving away from us and moving away from each other at a tremendous rate of speed. And the farther away they were, the faster the galaxies were going.

So here was a strange thing – all the parts of the universe seemed to be moving away from each other at a high rate of speed. The scientists scratched their heads and asked: What kind of thing acts that way? And the answer they came up with was very simple—an explosion.

Scientists began to realize that the universe wasn’t the static, stable, infinite place that they had assumed it to be. It began to look like it was the product of an explosion. It had a beginning. So in the 20^(th) century, scientists began to abandon the Steady State theory of the universe in favor of what they call the Big Bang theory. And that theory has been confirmed over and over throughout the last 50 years. Here’s just one of the proofs…

If you bake some chocolate chip cookies in your oven and then you turn the oven off and open the oven door, what will happen in your kitchen? Well, apart from a delicious smell permeating the room, your kitchen is going to get a little warmer, isn’t it? Over the next hour or so, the heat energy from the hot oven is going to radiate into the rest of the room and raise the temperature a couple of degrees. Scientists found that the very same thing must have happened in the universe.

In 1964, two scientists, Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias, made a stunning discovery. Some have called it the most important scientific discovery of the 20^(th) century. They discovered that intergalactic space wasn’t totally cold and void and empty as we might expect it to be. There was a kind of simmering radiant energy out there. It wasn’t very much—only about 3.5 degrees above absolute zero. But it was there. And it was everywhere throughout the universe.

Why is that omnipresent energy there? Very simply, it is there because it is “left over” from the initial enormous release of energy that happened when the universe began. Wilson and Penzias called it Cosmic Background Radiation. And it points back to the explosion that started the universe.

Over the next few years, theoretical physicists like Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University used these discoveries to calculate backwards as to what kind of explosion this might have been and when it might have taken place. They extrapolated backwards and found that the universe, with its billions of stars and galaxies, with its enormous distances of light years, began as a single point of zero volume—a point they called a singularity. In other words, the universe started out as nothing. And that is when the dimension of time came into being.

Hawking wrote a popular book about it. He called it “A Brief History of Time”.

Now let’s go back to the book of Genesis. The Bible has said for 3,500 years that the universe, and time, had a beginning. And it says that the universe came into being out of nothing. But it took modern science over 300 years of observation and calculation to come to that same realization.

The word “created” in Genesis 1:1 is the Hebrew word “bara”. It is a word that is only used in the Bible in reference to God—because it means to create something out of nothing. To make something totally new. And that’s something that only God can do.

So when the Bible says that God created the heavens and the earth—in other words, the entire physical universe—he was creating something totally new—he didn’t use any pre-existing material to do it.

Now that’s where many scientists today find themselves in a dilemma, because modern science is based on an assumption called Naturalism. Let me give you a definition of naturalism. Naturalism assumes that the entire realm of nature is a closed system of cause and effect. It can never be influenced by anything (or Anyone) outside of it. A pure naturalist cannot accept any reality beyond the tangible, the physical, and the measurable.

But here’s the problem: All the scientific evidence about the universe now points to the fact that the universe began from a point of zero volume. It came from nothing! So the obvious question facing the naturalist is: “How could this be? If matter is all that there is, how can we account for the beginning of a universe full of matter when there was no matter to make it out of?”

And that’s a question that he cannot answer if he insists on being a pure naturalist. The only way he can answer it is if he becomes a supernaturalist and admits that someone or something outside of the universe had to have created the universe. There must be some external Cause outside of it, because the universe exists, and came into being from nothing.

Now what must this Cause be like? Is it a random, impersonal Force (such as in Star Wars?). Or is this Cause more like a personal being with intelligence? Well, there is a whole line of evidence that indicates that indeed there is a great Intelligence behind the Universe.

The more scientists have learned about the makeup of our Universe, the more they have come to realize that the Universe has been intricately balanced and constructed so as to support the existence of life on planet Earth.

If certain conditions had been just slightly different – if the galaxies were clumped more closely together, if the force of gravity had been just slightly stronger, if the distribution of matter had been slightly different, it would never have been possible for a planet like Earth to exist, let alone for there to be life on that planet.

It all points to a Designer – a Designer of masterful intelligence who had a purpose and a plan. And that’s the dilemma that a lot of scientists are struggling with today. The more we find out about the universe, the more it points to a design. It’s almost as though we are being backed into a corner by the evidence.

Imagine something with me…

Let’s suppose you go for a walk in the woods. In the course of your hike, you stumble upon the remains of small building. It has been dug into the side of a hill, the doorway is framed in wood and stone. You open the unlocked door, and descend a couple of stairs into the dark interior. There you find a few unbroken jars of tomato preserves. You have no idea how long they have been there, or how old the structure is, but it looks very old. It obviously has served as a pantry, or a root cellar of some sort.

Now there are two possible explanations for the presence of that root cellar in the woods.

You could suggest that, through long eons of time and under the forces of nature, the stone and the wood gradually assembled themselves into that configuration. The glass jars were formed by incredible heat produced by volcanic activity acting on nearby sand deposits. Then they were shaped by gravitation to form those perfectly clear containers, which then rolled into this natural shelter. The tomatoes were obviously grown more recently and, after ripening, had fallen off their vines and into the glass jars. You would then have to come up with a theory as to how the glass jars were tightly sealed with metal lids.

That’s one possible explanation. The root cellar came into existence through a combination of blind natural forces over a long period of time.

The other explanation is that someone—an intelligent, purposeful being—built the root cellar, grew the tomatoes, canned them, and put them there for a purpose. Why? Because the whole scene gives evidence of design.

Now which explanation is more plausible?

Why do many people today, when confronted with the obvious evidence of design in the Universe, refuse to consider the possibility that there must have been a Designer?

They say, “There was no designer. It is irrational to believe in a designer. People who believe in a Designer are superstitious fools.”

Isn’t that rather ironic? A conscious, rational, personal being attributes his very existence to unconscious, irrational, impersonal forces. To me, there is something profoundly wrong with that explanation!

Genesis 1:1 says that, indeed, a rational, purposeful, personal being created the heavens and the earth. In doing so, it rules out:

• Atheism - which says that there is no God.

• Polytheism - which says that there are many gods

• Pantheism - which says that God is the universe and the universe is God

• Materialism - which says that there is nothing but the universe

Genesis 1:1 tells us that God is transcendent—he is above the universe, he is beyond the universe. Our space/time dimensions do not limit him.

Did you know that scientists have theoretically traced the universe back to within 10⁻³⁷ seconds of its beginning? In this incredibly brief instant after the universe had come into being, under enormous pressures and temperatures, our laws of physics completely break down. Instead of there being three dimensions of space and one dimension of time, there are at least nine different dimensions.

This tells us that God is not limited to our space/time dimensions. And this realization may even help us to understand some of the more difficult doctrines of the Bible, such as God’s omnipresence, His omniscience, the relationship between His sovereignty and our free will, even the doctrine of the Trinity.

Genesis 1 implies that God is self-existent. If he is the ultimate Cause that brought all other things into being, then he himself had no cause. He is not dependent on anyone or anything else for his existence. He doesn’t need us. But he chooses to be involved with us.

And he is eternal. Physicists have proved that time had a beginning. Time began when the universe began. But God existed before time. He is eternal.

The Bible is the only book in the world that reveals these incredible insights to us. And it has done so for 3,500 years! It came from an unsophisticated, unscientific little group of people—the nation Israel. They knew less about theoretical physics than you or I do! And yet they passed down to us this book. How did they get this knowledge? Where did they get this book? I think they got it from the Creator himself. He gave it to them.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

Many people have wondered what to make of verse 2. Is it simply a description of the earth as God began to make it? Or does it reveal something more—perhaps something we need to read between the lines to understand?

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a Scottish preacher named Thomas Chalmers began to teach that there was a gap between verses 1 and 2. God had created the world to be a perfect place in v. 1, but a great catastrophe happened and the earth became formless and empty, as it is described in v. 2. (Those of you who are using an NIV Bible will note that there is a footnote for v. 2 which says that the word “was” could possibly be translated “became”.)

Chalmers speculated that this catastrophe may have had something to do with the fall of Lucifer. Perhaps Lucifer had been placed in charge of planet earth (after all, the Bible does call him the prince of this world). But when Lucifer rebelled against God, God judged him, and in the process, ruined the earth, causing it to become “formless and empty”. Then in verse 3, God took that formless void and re-created the world as we know it.

Bible scholars call this view the Gap Theory, and it has enjoyed a certain amount of popularity in evangelical circles. Many noted Bible scholars and teachers have espoused it, including A.W. Pink, Harry Rimmer, Donald Grey Barnhouse, M.R. DeHaan, C.S. Lewis, and Francis Schaeffer. Perhaps the most influential advocate was C. I. Scoffield, who advocated this interpretation in the study notes of the Scoffield Bible, which came out in the early 1900’s.

What makes the Gap Theory attractive? Well, for one thing, it has a certain amount of exegetical weight to it. The Hebrew word that is translated “was” in verse 2 can sometimes mean “became”.

And when you look at the overall structure of Genesis 1, it seems that verses 1 and 2 do stand apart from verse 3 and following, where God describes the six days of creation. So maybe verses 1 and 2 are meant to be understood separately?

Also, the phrase “formless and empty” (the phrase is “tohu wabohu” in Hebrew) seems to infer a sense of calamity or loss such as would happen as a consequence of divine judgement. And that does not seem to square with Isaiah 45:18, which says that the Lord did not create the earth to be a formless waste.

From the standpoint of theology, the Gap Theory provides a convenient place to locate the fall of Satan—we know that he fell before Genesis 3, but we just don’t know when.

Finally, if there was such a gap, perhaps it could explain all those millions of years of geological strata, and fossils, and dinosaurs that seem to be indicated by the findings of modern science.

For these reasons, many Christians have embraced the Gap Theory. But is it a good theory? Is it accurate? I don’t think so, and I’ll try to explain why not:

1. It puts the rest of Genesis 1 in a rather peculiar light. If the Gap Theory is true, then what God was doing in the six days of creation as described in the rest of chapter 1 was not creating the world at all—he was actually re-creating it. He was re-forming a world that he had already created and judged.

But that is not the impression we get from the rest of Scripture. The Biblical authors understand the six days of creation to be the original creation not a reclamation project. And that is how the majority of Christians and Jews down thru history have understood this passage. The Gap Theory makes the rest of Genesis 1 a major anticlimax.

2. The Gap Theory rests on us applying a secondary meaning of certain Hebrew words. The word “was” in v. 2 can mean “became” on some occasion. But far more often in the Bible, it simply means “was”. The words “tohu wabohu”—formless and empty—do not have to mean that a divine judgment took place. That’s reading far too much into the text. That phrase simply means that the earth was empty and not yet habitable. We cannot build major doctrines on speculative interpretations like this.

3. If we conveniently place the ages of geology, fossils, and dinosaurs, etc. into a supposed gap between v. 1 and v. 2, then we introduce a theological problem of major proportions. This would mean that death must have visited earth before the Bible explicitly tells us it did as a result of man’s sin in chapter 3. So the Gap Theory creates a bigger theological problem than it solves.

Verses 1-2 are meant to be understood as a prologue—an introduction to the whole chapter—that’s why they stand apart. Those verses introduce a theme that we see repeated through the rest of the chapter—the theme of Form and Fullness.

It’s a pattern—Whenever God creates something, first he gives it form - organization. Then he fills it with life and activity - animation. In fact, there is a beautiful parallelism that runs through Gen. 1.

On Day One, God separated the light from the darkness. On Day Four, he filled the light and the darkness with heavenly bodies—the sun, the moon, the stars—some to govern the day, others to govern the night. First there was form, then there was fullness.

On Day Two, God separated the waters in the atmosphere from the waters on earth. On Day Five, God populated those areas. He filled the sky with birds and the sea with fish. Form then fullness.

On Day Three, God separated the dry land from the oceans. Then on Day Six, he populated the dry land with animals, and finally with man. Form then fullness.

And even when he created man, he followed the same pattern. First he made his body out of the dust of the earth—that’s form. Then he breathed the breath of life into him—that’s fullness.

You will see this pattern repeated throughout the Scriptures – it’s almost like God’s fingerprint – form and fullness. For example, a healthy church has both form and fullness. It has organization, but it also has inspiration – it’s alive. Another example is worship. Biblical worship has both form and fullness. Jesus said that we should worship God in spirit and in truth. Truth provides the structure, the organization, the form; the Spirit of God breathes into our worship life and vibrancy—the fullness.

So Genesis 1 introduces this pattern. God created the heavens and the earth, but at first they were dark and empty. So he went to work and filled them with light and life and motion. Form was followed by fullness.

And as we reflect on these incredible verses, we have to realize that that is God’s pattern for our lives as well. We live in a universe that has been intricately designed and balanced by God to support human life. We are not the product of random chance.

There is a form and a structure to our existence that gives evidence of a great Designer who has made us in His image. We’re here for a reason—a purpose.

And our purpose is to be in personal relationship with the Designer; to get to know him, to have a friendship with him. That’s fullness. That’s why God put us here, and that’s what we really yearn for from the bottom of our hearts.

And the rest of the Bible is about how that relationship—which once was lost—can be regained.