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Each day this month we’re looking closely at one of the 1:1 verses of the Bible – exploring what we can learn from chapter one / verse one of various Old and New Testament books.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1)
We begin with what is arguably the most important sentence in the history of Western civilization. From philosophy to science to metaphysics to what constitutes the meaning of life for you and your next-door neighbors, the Bible’s opening salvo says more in 10 words than the contents of 10 libraries.
A month of reflections would not begin to exhaust its significance. But at least we can hit a few highlights.
In the beginning…
For contemporary cosmologists, this is where research and mystery collide head-on. Was there actually a beginning to everything? Has the universe always been here in some shape or form? Or was there a time when there was nothing – as in absolutely nothing?
Early in the twentieth century, a majority of astronomers felt confident that observations and common sense confirmed a timeless, eternally static cosmos. Then Edwin Hubble surprised everyone – including himself – by discovering that the fuzzy patches on his photographs of the night sky were not “local” entities, but colossal galaxies that were exceedingly far away.
And they weren’t standing still. Hubble discovered that no matter which direction he looked, every galaxy appeared to be racing away from us. How could that be?
By the early 1990s, virtually every cosmologist – a number of them kicking and screaming – had come to the conclusion that the universe was anything but timeless and static. Furthermore, the evidence pointed to some kind of primordial explosion that had happened, in cosmic terms, only “yesterday” (a mere 13.78 billion years ago).
What might account for what came to be called the Big Bang? Suddenly, the opening verse of the Judeo-Christian scriptures was being quoted in both scientific journals and national news shows.
In an interesting twist, recent investigations suggest that we shouldn’t even be here.
That was the conclusion of scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in 2017. According to their published findings in Nature, the explosion at the birth of the cosmos produced equal parts matter and antimatter. Every scientific model that currently exists predicts that matter and antimatter, being perfectly equal, should violently combine and immediately go out of existence.
So why didn’t that happen? Or, to put it another way, why is there anything here at all?
“All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,” said the team’s lead author, Christian Smorra.
Even as physicists apply measurements of radically greater precision, the numbers seem to shout that Reality is impossible. In the words of journalist Lauren Tousignant, “Our existence is one giant, inexplicable head scratch.”
That takes us to the next word in Genesis 1:1: God…
The Bible’s primary actor suddenly and dramatically takes the stage. There is no attempt to prove his existence. There is no explanation for his actions. Towards the end of his celebrated TV series Cosmos, astronomer Carl Sagan points to an exquisitely beautiful snapshot of some galaxies and exults, “This is what hydrogen atoms can accomplish, given enough time.”
With all due respect, even as some astronomers continue to proclaim that “a quantum flux somehow made all this happen,” no remotely plausible models for such extraordinary creativity by inanimate particles have ever been proposed.
The Bible declares that the reason there is a multitude of persons in our corner of the universe who think, love, feel, and care about injustice is that the universe was created by a one-of-a-kind Person who thinks, loves, feels, and cares about injustice.
Next we come to Genesis 1:1’s powerful action verb: created…
That’s a translation of the Hebrew word bara. It means more than just “made” or “crafted” or “put together.” Old Testament scholars suggest that bara signifies creation ex nihilo, or “out of nothing.” When God was inventing the cosmos, he did not use pre-existing materials. The world in which we live and move and have our being was baked from scratch.
What was God’s means of creation? His voice. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3).
The universe is here at this moment because God spoke over nothingness and brought about, among other things, pineapples, wildebeests, the Higgs boson, slime molds, the Crab Nebula, and screech owls.
That is not a scientific formulation. But it does qualify as a meaningful statement about the origin of Reality, at least until scientific research and the book of Genesis are able to grab coffee together.
But why did he do it? Was God bored or anxious or needy – or maybe just cosmically lonely?
According to the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, which dates from about 1100 B.C. and is widely regarded as the world’s oldest creation story, the god Marduk invented humans so he and the other gods would have minions to serve them. Marduk says, “I shall bring into being a lowly primitive creation…so that the gods may have rest.”
According to the Enuma Elish, we are slaves. According to the first three chapters of Genesis (see especially 1:26-27), we are made in God’s image and invited into God’s family.
So why did God create the heavens and the earth? Perhaps the simplest answer is so that you could have the joy of knowing the love of this infinitely great, infinitely good God who knew, from the very beginning, that – against all odds – you would one day come into the world.
After all, when you think about it, you really shouldn’t be here.
Think of all the things that had to happen.
Your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents (and who knows how many previous generations) had to meet, fall in love, become families, work through their first big quarrels, and succeed at helping their little ones survive and thrive in a dangerous world. In the most important competition of your life, where you were pitted against 250 million other lively cells in a winner-take-all race in your mother’s womb, you won.
Somehow all of those improbable things happened. Your life is not an accident. Your existence is not an anomaly.
Just as God spoke distant quasars into existence, God spoke a word of love over all the circumstances of your life – and here you are.
Is there a single word that can help us best respond to the sheer wonder of all that?
Yes, there is.
“Thanks.”