In the Beginning, God

Before your alarm went off this morning, before the coffee maker started gurgling, before the first worry of the day found you, there was God. That is where the Bible starts. Not with you. Not with me. Not with Israel or the church. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Before we learn anything else about Him, we learn that He was already there, and that He made everything else.

The name used here is Elohim, the most common word for God in the Old Testament. Watch how often it shows up in this chapter. God created. God said. God saw. God separated. God called. Every verb in the opening scene belongs to Him. Nobody helps. Nobody advises. Nobody hands Him the materials. The God you are about to pray to this morning is not a God who is trying to keep up with the world. He is the God who called it into being.

Look honestly at verse 2. The earth was formless and void. Darkness was over the surface of the deep. Genesis does not pretend the dark was never there. But it also tells us that the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. The same Hebrew verb shows up in Deuteronomy 32:11, where an eagle hovers over its young. God was not absent from the chaos. He was right there, over it, before He said a single word.

Then He spoke. “Let there be light,” and there was light. No struggle. No second attempt. No committee meeting. His word was enough. Then He did something quiet and wonderful. He separated the light from the darkness and gave each one a name. Day. Night. Evening and morning. Even the night was put on His schedule. Even the dark has to answer to Him.

Some of you woke up feeling like verse 2. Formless. Empty. A life that has no shape right now. A marriage that has gone quiet. A diagnosis you did not see coming. A job that ended with a phone call. Hear me. The God of Genesis 1 does His best work in exactly that kind of place. He does not need you to bring Him something to work with. He made light where there was none.

And the chapter does not stop at light. By the end of it, Elohim does something He did with nothing else He made. “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” You are not an accident and you are not a number. You bear the image of your Maker. So does every person you will meet today: the cashier, the coworker who gets under your skin, the guy who cuts you off on the way in. They carry a dignity you did not give them and cannot take away.

Now here is where the morning gets good. The New Testament reaches back to Genesis on purpose. John opens his gospel with “In the beginning was the Word,” and then tells us, “Through Him all things were made.” That Word is Jesus. The Creator did not stay at a safe distance from His broken creation. He stepped into it. He lived the life we could not live, died on a cross for our sins, and rose again on the third day. Paul ties it all together: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made His light shine in our hearts.”

That means salvation is creation work. You do not fix yourself any more than the dark fixed itself. You trust the One who speaks light. “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” If God can make a universe out of nothing, He can make a new heart out of yours. That is not a pep talk. That is the gospel.

So start your day where the Bible starts. Before the inbox, before the news, before the to do list, say it out loud: In the beginning, God. He was here first. He will be here last. And everything in between, including today, belongs to Him.