{"id":5010,"date":"2025-11-04T08:41:14","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T13:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5010"},"modified":"2025-11-04T10:03:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T15:03:13","slug":"genesis-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/11\/04\/genesis-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Genesis 1:1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n


\u00a0Each day this month we\u2019re looking closely at one of the 1:1 verses of the Bible \u2013 exploring what we can learn from chapter one \/ verse one of various Old and New Testament books.<\/em>

\u201cIn 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\u2019s 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<\/strong><\/em>\u2026

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 \u2013 as in absolutely nothing<\/em>?

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 \u2013 including himself \u2013 by discovering that the fuzzy patches on his photographs of the night sky were not \u201clocal\u201d entities, but colossal galaxies that were exceedingly far away.

And they weren\u2019t 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 \u2013 a number of them kicking and screaming \u2013 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 \u201cyesterday\u201d (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\u2019t 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<\/em>, 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\u2019t that happen? Or, to put it another way, why is there anything here at all?

\u201cAll of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,\u201d said the team\u2019s 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, \u201cOur existence is one giant, inexplicable head scratch.\u201d

That takes us to the next word in Genesis 1:1: God<\/strong>\u2026<\/em>

The Bible\u2019s 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<\/em>, astronomer Carl Sagan points to an exquisitely beautiful snapshot of some galaxies and exults, \u201cThis is what hydrogen atoms can accomplish, given enough time.\u201d

With all due respect, even as some astronomers continue to proclaim that \u201ca quantum flux somehow made all this happen,\u201d 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. \u00a0

Next we come to Genesis 1:1\u2019s powerful action verb: created<\/strong><\/em>\u2026

That\u2019s a translation of the Hebrew word bara<\/u><\/em>. It means more than just \u201cmade\u201d or \u201ccrafted\u201d or \u201cput together.\u201d Old Testament scholars suggest that bara<\/u><\/em> signifies creation ex nihilo<\/em>, or \u201cout of nothing.\u201d 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\u2019s means of creation? His voice. \u201cAnd God said, \u2018Let there be light,\u2019 and there was light\u201d (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 \u2013 or maybe just cosmically lonely?

According to the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish<\/em>, which dates from about 1100 B.C. and is widely regarded as the world\u2019s oldest creation story, the god Marduk invented humans so he and the other gods would have minions to serve them. Marduk says, \u201cI shall bring into being a lowly primitive creation\u2026so that the gods may have rest.\u201d

According to the Enuma Elish<\/em>, we are slaves. According to the first three chapters of Genesis (see especially 1:26-27), we are made in God\u2019s image and invited into God\u2019s 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 \u2013 against all odds \u2013 you would one day come into the world. \u00a0

After all, when you think about it, you really shouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s womb, you won<\/em>.

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 \u2013 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.

\u201cThanks.\u201d<\/em>
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here \u00a0Each day this month we\u2019re looking closely at one of the 1:1 verses of the Bible \u2013 exploring what we can learn from chapter one \/ verse one of various Old and New Testament books. \u201cIn the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1) We begin with what… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5011,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1029,1031,217],"class_list":["post-5010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-11-series","tag-big-bang","tag-creation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5010"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5013,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5010\/revisions\/5013"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}