Westside Church of Christ

It takes just four words in the opening chapter of the Bible to set us on the right track, “In the beginning God…” Readers often leap to the middle, or even worse to the last chapter, and are totally befuddled. Revelation is no place to start. Neither is Acts. No, we must begin in the beginning. It all flows from those four simple words.

The creation tells quite a story. It’s impossible to imagine nothing, but that’s what we have prior to the first sentence. There were no stars, sun, moon, animals, lakes, people, not even space or time. There was just God. We look at all of this wondrous world with everything that surrounds it and forget that it had a starting point. The great Creator was before it all and caused every bit of it. It tells us a lot about our amazing God.

Addressing the darkness was His first order of organizational business. He made the raw materials and then put them into a functional form by the sheer power of His will expressed when He spoke, “Let there be…,” and suddenly there was. We are but five verses into His book when we see the transformative power of His words. We learn that things change when He speaks, and we have His words in our hands.

He saw the change that He had spoken into existence. He saw the light. Yes, He sees the world. He looks deep into people. He assesses what he sees. The light was good in His sight. Remember, there was no source of that light except Him. The sun and moon were not yet in existence but He is light and creates light by commanding it into existence. It obeyed. God speaks and observes the response. He approved of what he saw.

God separated the light from the darkness. Those two cannot occupy the same space at the same time. They don’t mix and mingle. Either we’re light or we’re darkness. God separates. We choose. We neither straddle the fence nor avoid it altogether. He makes light through His word and everyone without it is in the darkness. His declaration of goodness is only on one side.

God designated one to be day and the other to be night. He named them, and from the description it sounds like our twenty-four-hour day. There was evening and there was morning, not millions of years of evolving creation. How could darkness evolve into light anyway? The theory faces stiff challenges in the first chapter of the word of God. Evolution and creation are incompatible explanations for all that exists.

God created and spoke. Things changed. He saw, approved, separated and named, and that was just the first five verses describing one day. That’s a lot to absorb, and it is only the beginning. Imagine what we can learn when we read the rest of His book.