GENESIS 1:1 – 2:3                                                  CREATION

The story of the Bible begins with God. It begins with God creating a universe so magnificent and vast that we stand amazed before it. It is a creation that cannot contain God, for the Creator is greater than His creation. God existed before creation. He is self-sufficient. He does not need anything. So why did He create? Paul gives at least a partial answer:

The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us. (Acts 17:24-27, English Standard Version)

God does not live in temples made by man – but some have compared the world He made for a habitation for man to a temple in which He dwells. As we will see as we continue the story, God came to this temple for fellowship with man – to walk and talk with humankind in the cool of the evening. Later in the story we read of a man, Enoch (Genesis 5:22), who “walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” This is the only man in that genealogy of whom it is not said “and he died.” Was this God’s original intent for man? He did tell the earth’s original inhabitants to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…” (Gen 1:28). He obviously intended for them to reproduce. Had they continued in the way in which God created them to live, would they have lived, walking with God, until a time when God would take them to be with Him always?

It is easy for us to worry more about how God created than that it was God who created. Genesis does not tell us how. If it had, would we have been able to understand it? Rather, in a simple, almost poetic way, Moses describes for us the days of Creation. Look at the symmetry of his account:

DAYS OF SEPARATION                                                                             DAYS OF FILLING

Day 1 – Separation of Light and Darkness                                        Day 4 – Light Holders to fill the Sky

Day 2 – Separation of Waters               and Sky                                               Day 5 – Birds & Fish to fill seas & sky

Day 3 – Separation of Sea & Land                                                        Day 6 – Animals & Man to fill the Earth

THE DAY OF CONSUMATION

Day 7 – God Rested (and Began His Fellowship with Man)

Thus the Earth began as well as our habitation on it. God put the Earth into the hands of man, who was in God’s own image, to serve as a care-taker of the Earth. He gave Adam dominion, or rule, over the fish, the birds, and all that is on the earth – not to rape and pillage it (as we have often done), but to work the land and subdue it as a careful tenant in fellowship with God Himself.

The next part of our story will tell how our early parents treated this task God gave to them.