“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
These are the first words of the Bible. It goes on to tell the most important story in the world. The Bible is human history presented from God’s point of view.
The Old Testament begins with the sentence, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Then it goes on to tell the magnificent story of how God created the entire universe, just by speaking it into place.
In the Bible, God tells us the story of how He has been pursuing and seeking a loving relationship with humanity…the people He created for Himself. He has been at it through all of human history. He created the universe to be the home of the human race.
Try to picture this in your mind. Everything is darkness and chaos and confusion, an abyss of nothingness. But the Spirit of the Living God began to move, hovering and gliding over the mass of chaos like the flow of wind. He moved quietly through the spaces, bringing order, forming the structure of the earth and preparing the way.
There are many explanations for the beginning of the world. Scientists tell us that it all started with a Big Bang. They use their measurements to see that the universe continues to expand outward from a central, cosmic level explosion that brought everything as we know into existence.
When God spoke most of the universe into place, it took five days (See here and here for more details). It was an abundance of creation: light and darkness, the sun, moon, and stars, the boundaries of land and ocean, the flourishing of plant life, the birds winged in flight, the flashing of the fish in the sea…
Let’s think for a minute about what God did when He created the first humans. There are very few things that truly deserve to be called marvelous, but this is one of them. It is worth going over and repeating in our minds.
The first pages of the biblical text give us God’s account of how He created the universe. We learn that from the immensity of His greatness and power, He simply spoke it all into existence out of nothing.
In the first chapter of the Bible, we are given the description of how God created the entire universe. There were bright, breathtaking outpourings of light and power. The range of what He made is stunning, from the sheer atomic might of the stars to the microscopic cells within a blade of grass.
According to Scripture, every aspect of our universe came bounding out of the perfect will of God in an outpouring of energy, beauty, and the substantial, concrete things that make up our Reality.
When God created the first man and woman, they were the high point of all Creation (see Story 7 and Story 8 for the details). They were made in the image of God and given the high honor of acting as His appointed viceroys over His created order.
God had made the first man and woman in His image, and now that sweet relationship was broken. The mother and father of the human race had joined the enemy of God in a mutinous rebellion in His Garden Temple.
The first man and woman brought a terrible curse upon themselves and upon the world. They would live in bondage to sin and their lives would end in death (see Story 7, Story 8, and Story 9 for the details). But when we continue to read their story, we see that the first man still had faith.
The God who created all of the universe and made it good had created a special Garden for humanity, those special creatures who were made in His own image.
After having Seth, Adam and Eve had more sons and daughters. All of them had many sons and daughters as well. The world was filling up with these humans that were made in the image of God. But there was a problem.
All was not well in the world. The members of the human race were living in malice, greed, and violence towards one another. The people that were meant to live in perfect peace in a glorious garden had disintegrated into a society of terrors.
God told Noah to build the ark and fill it with the creatures of the earth. Then he sent the rains. The downpour came for forty days and forty nights. The waters rose up above the treetops. It rose above the hills.
God did a remarkable thing. He promised He would never bring another worldwide flood. He said, “You can trust that I will never do this again.” He made a special covenant, or promise, with Noah and his sons.
The chapter of Genesis that comes after the flood is fascinating. It is called the Table of Nations. It tells of the people on earth that came from Noah’s three sons.
The Table of Nations tells us how the human race grew and spread across the earth after Noah and the flood. After telling about Noah’s son Japheth, the Bible teaches about Ham’s sons. Remember, Ham was a man who rejected the ways of his godly father.
