The God of Beginnings

The very first words of the Bible declare: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” But the idea that the Universe even had a beginning did not dawn on modern scientists until quite recently.

Let’s go back 300 years to a time when science was still in the cradle. In the year 1687, Sir Isaac Newton—a brilliant, but difficult genius—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—that there were predictable, natural laws which governed its operation—laws which we could understand and discover.

At the same time, the first astronomers, following the lead of Galileo, made powerful telescopes to probe farther into the universe than ever before. And they 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 stars.

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

So in the 18th and 19th centuries, the idea of an infinite universe quickly took hold in the scientific community. Scientists increasingly 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. So science became increasingly alienated from theology.

Now because the universe was thought to have existed forever, that meant that time was also infinite. In other words, there was an infinite amount of time during which the atoms and molecules of the universe could interact—could come together in random combinations. And these combinations would be purely random—dictated by pure chance operating through the mechanical laws of motion.

So it is not surprising that, operating from those 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, Darwin claimed that life on earth was the product of chance combinations of molecules which had come together over vast amounts of time.

And that, in a nutshell, is where things stood in science until 1905, when a 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 mechanical laws of motion didn’t really apply to the basic building blocks of the universe.

During the time that Einstein was developing his Theory of Relativity, astronomers made some startling finds. 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 a new idea: maybe the universe wasn’t static after all—the stars seemed to be in motion, and 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 hazy-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 they were going.

So here was a strange phenomenon where 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 phenomenon acts that way? 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 was the product of an explosion. It had a beginning. So they began to abandon the Steady State theory of the universe in favor of what they called the Big Bang theory. And that theory has been confirmed over and over throughout the last 50 years. Here’s one of the proofs…

If you are baking some chocolate chip cookies in your oven and then you turn the oven off and open the oven door, what is going to 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, that heat energy from the oven is going to dissipate into the rest of the room and raise the temperature a couple of degrees. Well scientists found that the same thing happened in the universe.

In 1964, two scientists, Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias, discovered that intergalactic space wasn’t totally cold and void and empty as you might expect it to be. There was a kind of simmering radiant energy out there. It wasn’t very much—only about 5 degrees above absolute zero. But it was out there. And it was everywhere throughout the universe.

Why is that background energy there? Well, very simply, it is there because it is “left over” from the initial enormous explosion of energy when the universe began. It’s called cosmic background radiation. And it points back to the initial Big Bang.

Meanwhile, theoretical physicists like Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University were using these discoveries to calculate backwards as to what kind of explosion this might have been and when it might have taken place. They found that the universe, with its billions of stars and galaxies, began as a single point of zero volume—something they call a singularity. In other words, the universe started out as nothing.

And furthermore, that is when time began.

Now the book of Genesis has said for 3,000 years that the universe, and time, had a beginning. But the scientists are just coming to that realization now. And the book of Genesis says that God created the universe out of nothing.

The word “created” in verse 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 the scientists of 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 which can never be influenced by anything (or Anyone) outside of it. A pure naturalist refuses to accept any reality beyond the tangible, the physical, the measurable.

But here’s the problem: All the scientific evidence about the universe demonstrates 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 that is 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 outside of the universe had to have created the universe. There must be some great intelligence out there beyond the universe, because:

1. the universe exists

2. the universe shows signs of having been designed

Let’s imagine that an old friend from out of town comes to visit you. And while he’s here, you drive him over to see our church. As you drive into our church property, he exclaims “Oh, look at the wonderful new building that’s going up! Tell me all about it.”

So you proceed to explain to him that what he is seeing is merely the product of blind chance. One day, the steel beams and the stone blocks just materialized on our property as a random combination of molecules. Then, over the next few weeks, these pieces of building material began to move around and fall into place under the influence of the impersonal forces of nature—the wind, the rain, gravity, and so forth.

Obviously, your friend is going to conclude that a brick must have fallen on your head. The evidence of design always indicates the presence of a designer.

And yet this is the explanation that the naturalist gives for the intricate design and order we see in the universe. He says “There was no designer. In fact, it is irrational to believe in a designer.” People who believe in a Designer are irrational. They are superstitious.

How ironic! The naturalist claims that the only way that a rational personal being like a scientist can understand the universe is to operate from the assumption that the universe was produced by irrational, impersonal forces.

But this is not what the Bible says. Genesis 1:1 says that a rational, personal Being created the heavens and the earth.

In doing so it refutes the doctrine of:

• atheism - which says that there is no God.

• polytheism - which says that there are many gods

• pantheism - which says that God is in the universe and part of the universe

• materialism - which says that the universe is all there is

• uniformitarianism - which says that the universe has always existed

Genesis 1:1 tells us that God is transcendent—he is above the universe, he is beyond the universe. He is not limited by our space/time dimensions.

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

This tells us that God is not limited to our space/time dimensions. And it may even help us to understand some of the most difficult doctrines of the Bible.

The Trinity, for example. How can God be one person and yet three people? Well, he can if he is not limited by our classical space-time dimensions.

Or the whole question of predestination. How can we have a free will if God has already decided what’s going to happen? Well, that’s no problem if God exists outside of our space-time dimensions.

Time for us is a single dimension—actually it’s more like a half-dimension, because it’s a single line on which we can only move forward. We can’t go backwards. But suppose that time, like space has several dimensions? That would mean that God could move sideways, and forwards, and backwards and up and down in time. He could see and deal with time from far more perspectives than we can.

Genesis 1 tells us that God is self-existent. If he is the ultimate Cause that brought all other things into being, that means that 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 like Stephen Hawking 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 insights to us. And the fact that it has done so for 3,000 years, and that it came from an unsophisticated, unscientific little group of people—the nation Israel—tells me that it came to them from the Creator himself.

Now in the remainder of our time, let’s look at Genesis 1:2.

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 this verse. Is it simply a description of the earth as God was in the process of making it? Or does it reveal something more—perhaps a hidden message about a very significant event?

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, caused the earth to become a formless void. How long it stayed that way is a matter of conjecture, but in verse 3, God takes that formless void and re-creates the world as we know it.

This view of verse 2 is called the Gap Theory, and it has enjoyed a certain amount of popularity in evangelical circles. Many noted Bible scholars and teachers have adopted 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 recommended this interpretation in the study notes of the Scoffield Bible.

What makes the Gap Theory attractive? Well, for one thing, it has a certain amount of exegetical weight to it. Without going into a lot of detail, 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 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 good place to locate the fall of Satan in the Bible—we know that he fell before Genesis 3, but we just don’t know when.

And finally, if there is such a gap maybe this could explain all those millions of years of geological strata, and fossils, and dinosaurs that seem to be required by the findings of modern science.

So 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 tell you why:

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 by Moses was not creating the world at all—he was only 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 an original creation not a reconstruction 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 an anticlimax.

2. The Gap Theory depends on you taking the secondary meaning of certain Hebrew words. The word “was” in v. 2 can mean “became” on 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. You can’t build major doctrines on speculations like this.

3. If we are to understand that the ages of geology and fossils and dinosaurs, etc. somehow fit into the gap between v. 1 and v. 2, then that introduces a theological problem of major proportions. That would mean that death had visited earth before the Bible explicitly tells us it did as a result of man’s sin in chapter 3. So the Gap Theory actually creates a bigger theological problem than it solves.

No, verse 1 and verse 2 are meant to be understood as a prologue, or an introduction to the whole chapter—that’s why they stand apart. And 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. Then he fills it with life and activity. 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 you had form, then you had fullness.

On Day Two, God separated the waters in the atmosphere from the waters on earth. Then 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.

So verses 1 and 2 introduce that 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 friends with the Designer. To get to know him. To have a relationship with him. That’s fullness. That’s why God put us here, and that’s what we really yearn for at the bottom of our hearts.

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