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So it is a great privilege to lead off this series on great Old Testament texts that give to us the redemptive plan of God, and I have the honor of teaching, preaching on what is really the foundational text of the whole Bible, the Old Testament and New Testament, and that is Genesis chapter one, and I’ll dip a little bit into chapter two as well. Dr. Madison Grace will be preaching on the creation of humanity, and so stay tuned for that. This is entitled “God the Creator.” I have organized the text as an introit: creation by division, creation by furnishing, and the cessation of creation. Now, an introit to a traditional Eucharistic liturgy indicates an entrance to worship, and the entrance of creation from nothing calls us to adore its Creator. So we’re going to spend most of our time with the introit, especially the first verse.
The introit to Genesis says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light, and there was life.”
So the first evidence for creation is found in the first book of the Torah. The Greek title for the book, Genesis, means origin, beginning, or birth. Genesis one through two reveals the truth about that first divine act, ad extra. That is to what is not God. It reveals both the origin of created realities and the one reality of the Creator. Later biblical texts comment on this foundational text and deepen our knowledge about the birth of the world. These later texts also tell us about the fall of humanity into sin, and that God has planned to redeem His creation, as we just sang through His Son. God’s economy—that’s the language for His work, considered in its totality—God’s economy to restore human beings in the entire created world, as summarized in Romans 8:22 and 23, presumes creation was a work of God, and these later texts also tell us God is taking His creation toward a goal. Scripture also tells us that nature and conscience reveal this initial glorious act of God.
Now, the first word of the introit, the compound Beresheth, in the beginning, refers us to the economy of creation. Both Basel and Augustine agree. The beginning here refers to the beginning of time, and so do most commentators. But Beresheth also forces us to peer beyond the dawn of historical reality. Now there is no creature or time before the beginning. There is only the one who created in the beginning. Genesis one takes us to the absolute dawn of time, then beckons or waves beyond that temporal point to say there is the pre-existent One who created all things. He is God. The Scripture does not begin with an ontological description of God. Rather, it focuses on His first divine act, and through His creative act, we learn of His reality.
God wants us to know Him first as Creator and later as Provider, Redeemer, and of course the Consummator. Aquinas’s first natural proof for God’s existence said, “Everything that is moved is moved by another.” That makes sense. You move something, it moves. We know every act requires an agent to initiate it, and God is the first agent. He initiates the acts from which come all subsequent acts. God is the mover who set all other things in motion, so He is transcendent, standing before creation and from without He instigated creation. So God is eternal, and He alone can commence energy, and space, and life. One inspired commentary found in Isaiah 46:10 reinforces this truth about God initiating the progress of the cosmos. The Lord says, and I quote: “I declare the end from the beginning, and from long ago, what is not yet done, saying, ‘My plan will take place, and I will do all my will.’” This indicates God’s absolute disposition over beginning and end.
And so, from the perspective of His eternal present, God pre-exists all things, plans all things, and He guides all things toward Him. A similar claim about God’s standpoint before, under, and after the words “fell us” to describe the universality of God points to Christ as the beginning and the end, and the one who upholds all things, Colossians 1:16, the Holy Spirit, who inspired both Genesis one and these later biblical commentaries developing Genesis one, intends us to discover truths not only about the origin of the world and most katisiologies or doctrines of creation are really concerned about you know creation itself. That’s true. That’s revealed, but we are also intended to know about the reality of the one who originated creation.
The truths we learn about God in creation include the fact that God creates in correspondence with His character, creation reveals who God is. It reveals His perfections, His attributes, and so on, including, and I have a list here for you: His assiety, His transcendence, His goodness, His personal relationality, His eternal and eschatological wisdom, as well as his simple unity, his incomprehensibility, his sovereignty, and much else. So I’d like to summarize the first five truths about God, then develop the remaining truths as we proceed.
Now, in the published version of this lecture, I’m going to give a lot more, so I’m going to be skipping or just assuming you know some texts. At least I hope you do. So assiety, God is a sei, that is of Himself. So God within Himself is sufficient, and He creates as a pure, overflowing, abundant act of His unitary and dynamic nature, God always acts from the basis of His essence, which is love, and He is the one who is named the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and out of His Trinitarian love, He creates. He didn’t need creation; creation needs Him. But God created simply because He is love.
Another truth about God: transcendence. God creates without diminishing Himself. That is, his otherness grounds the creator/creature distinction in both its ontological and its epistemological aspects. What do I mean by ontology? One must always remember that God is not to be equated with humanity. His reality is not our reality. Hosea 11 nine, “For I am God and not man.” So make that strong reality difference between God and man. Epistemologically, that is by knowledge, we must recall that we were not there when God began to create the world. Job had to learn this lesson.
Another truth: his goodness. Jesus declared, if you remember, that there is no one good but God. So Jesus hereby reveals that God is good in the perfect sense. And by comparison, the things which God creates are made to be individually good, as we saw in our reading just now, and corporately in verse 31 of Genesis 1, very good. The Creator is perfectly goodness; He is perfect goodness. So, how then do creatures, do creatures become good? God communicates or shares His goodness with his creation. God is good, and he makes things good. Therefore, they are created good. Creatures are thus only dependently and derivatively good, while God is perfection of good.
What about his personal relations? For some Christians, this is absolutely new, even though it’s in the text, and it is Christian orthodoxy. The divine essence is characterized by what are known as eternal relations of origin. The Gospel of John and the Book of Hebrews reveal the relation of the Father to the Son is one of eternal generation. We don’t know what generation means, except that the fullness of the reality of God is the fullness of the reality of the Son, and it is occurring eternally. Jesus reveals that the relation of the Father to the Holy Spirit is what we know as eternal procession. He proceeds from the Father. No creature proceeds or is generated by the Father. This is an eternal reality within God. In other words, God, in the perfect unity of His nature, has eternal relations between the three divine persons. We should not be surprised. Therefore, that God also creates by granting His creatures their own fitting relations. For instance, He makes the living creatures, as we saw, according to their kinds, and He creates man in His own image, the male and the female. So there are created fitting relations.
Now there is a correspondence between the personal relations of God and the fitting relations of created creatures. However, John Webster rightly warns against the contemporary and I would argue increasingly dangerous theological fad of assigning to the divine persons certain roles, the eternal relations, says Webster, are not simply conjoint operation. Rather, the one God acts indivisibly from His one nature by His one will. The persons working appropriately. Everything that the Father does, so does the Son, so does the Spirit. God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit create, redeem, and bring things to their final end. Anything else approaches heresy.
God then communicates to His creatures some fitness redolent of His relational unity, but our fitting relations do not delimit his perfect eternal relations. We, you will remember, are created in God’s image. He is not created in our image. Remember the difference.
God also has eternal and eschatological wisdom, God creates from His own plan derived in eternity, Ephesians 1:11, and for the purpose or end that He wills for the world, Proverbs 16 four. His eschatological purpose is ultimately that His eternal glory becomes manifest, Romans 11:36, and then ultimately that his creatures be blessed, and that’s all over Scripture. In other words, God’s act of creation was for a planned act of consummation. However, because of our sin, the consummation requires also his act of redemption through the incarnation, resurrection, ascension, and eternal reign of the God-Man Jesus Christ. The centrality of redemption in Christ is the mystery of the divine economy, a wisdom crafted before the world was and hidden from man’s knowledge until God revealed it in the appropriate time.
God created us with eternal and eschatological wisdom. He created the world, including humanity, and He redeems the world through the death and the resurrection of the God-Man to bring the world to its appropriate end, its final consummation in Christ’s eternal kingdom. Creation, in other words, precedes redemption, which is followed by the consummation, all of which was planned eternally by God.
I know I’ve given you a lot, and I discuss these truths in Theology for Every Person. I also want to mention the work of John Webster, his volumes “God Without Measure,” overgo some of this. Some of this sounds new to many of you, but it’s actually quite old and quite biblical, and it’s because during the Enlightenment, so much of our concern for who God is in Himself was taken, and this is true not only for liberals; it is true for them. It is also true for many evangelicals who are more concerned about sociology than they are about theology. We must turn our minds and hearts back to knowing God. So that’s why I am focusing on God at this time.
Now that’s the first word. The second word in Scripture, bara, is a singular verb indicating that the subject of the verb is one, and the action of the verb is unitary. This second word bears much theological weight. In chapters 40 through 55 of his inspired commentary on Genesis one, the prophet Isaiah used bara 16 times, and each time the subject is, as you would expect, singular. Both Moses and Isaiah present God as the unique Creator, only He creates. Now, before hearing more from Isaiah, I want to differentiate bara as unique originative act from other verbs of creation like Asa, Bana, and Yatsar, and we have a list here. Bara, and you can read later about these. Bara means created, and it’s that act where there’s nothing, and then there’s something, and it is an act that only God does. The others, Asa means made, Bana means something like crafted, yatsar, formed. These other verbs are used in Genesis one, but they are used in such a sense that we know that that original creative act, where there is nothing and then there is something, that is bara, and that means that God created From nothing, you can see this developed further in Isaiah 40 and Isaiah 45 verses 5 through 7 and Isaiah 45:18. For the sake of time, I’m going to move past those, but I highly recommend that you take a look at these texts.
The third word of Scripture, Elohim, is plural but most often treated as singular. Why? Well, that’s not clear to scholars. It is simply the case.
A singular meaning is established by the accompanying verb or the accompanying adjective. Even history of religion scholars like Helmer Ringgren recognized the plural Elohim might, however, indicate some measure of plurality, even with the singular use, although he preferred a mere intensification. But classical theologians long ago concluded that while Elohim remains singular, he is nevertheless plural in some sense. The remainder of the creation account pushes us toward a sublime plural singular portrait of God, who is later clearly revealed to be Trinity.
Now, never forget the creator creature-divide. Ancient pagans imagined creation was an act involving either eternal forms like Plato or pre-existent material like Aristotle. Refusing to be misled by Hellenistic philosophy, patristic theologians followed the apostles to affirm creation is out of nothing. Here, the inspired apostolic commentary on Genesis one, Paul in Romans 4:17 said, “God is the one who gives life to the dead and calls things into existence that do not exist.” The author of Hebrews concurred: y faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.” Likewise, the 24 elders proclaimed before the eternal throne, “Our Lord and God, you are worthy to receive glory and honor and power because you have created all things, and by your will they exist and were created.”
That is, by God’s will and nothing other than His will, things come into existence. There are not two eternal principles. If you don’t have creation from nothing, you will end up with two eternal principles: God and the world. There is just one eternal principle, a principle of all life, and He is God. Jesus said that God the Father gave this principle eternally to the Son, John five, and to the Spirit, John six, for He too gives life from Himself. Only the Father, the Son, the Spirit, the One God gives life. The three persons of the one God act as one eternal principle, the principle of life, the Creator of all things. The whole introit here continues to press us toward arriving at a singular plural understanding of the Creator, God is the actor in verse one. The Spirit of God is the actor in verse two, and God acts by words in verse three.
The second verse about God’s work of creation tells us He is ruach Elohim. Modern critical scholars deny the personhood of Ruach Elihim by reducing its translation to a mighty wind. They often refuse to account for the canon’s progressive revelation of the Spirit of God as a person rather than merely as a power. This is important in an age where most evangelicals today do not recognize the personhood of the Spirit. Modern translations rightly translate Ruach as Spirit, capitalizing the S to indicate he is divine, and for this I am thankful.
The third description of Elohim as a speaker of words is extended in both John one and First John one into the nominal, the noun, the Word. According to John, who like Moses was inspired by the one Holy Spirit of God, the Word is both God and with God. Echoing personified wisdom in Proverbs eight, John places the Word in verse three with God before creation. He, the Word, is God, a pre-existent person, eternal. The apostle deliberately echoes Genesis, revealing the Word is also the one Creator. Now, if we accept these further canonical revelations about God, His Spirit, and the Word, and we should, then Genesis one paints not a radically monotheistic portrait of God, which was developed post New Testament and post Enlightenment.
Elohim rather refers to the one described in the Greek Septuagint and the Greek New Testament as Theos, God, the one name of this Theos in whom new Christians confess their faith by baptism is trifold. It is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God. The final words in the first verse of Scripture, at samayim et eretz, the heavens and the earth. By the way, I normally sit up in the heavens up here in the balcony. In case you wondered, hello, my heavenly friends up there. These words indicate the object of that act of creation. There is one actor as subject, one singular verbal action, but a plural object. This is important. The actor is God. The act is “create.” The object is the heavens and the earth.
Samayim, heavens, refers either to the extension of space to the limits of the cosmos or the sky, or to the eternal abode of God, who is spirit, pure essence. That “heavens” is coupled with the earth, the heavens and the earth, the physical abode of creatures, prompts us to interpret heavens here as the extremities of the created cosmos. So taken together, “the heavens and the earth” indicates the object of God’s creative activity is the entire cosmos. That is, everything but God is created by God, whether body or spirit or embodied spirit. Genesis one lets us know there is a God and that He is the Creator of everything else, which we call creation. Again, the objects of creation are multiple. Creation is characterized by divisibility. The Creator is unitary, indivisible, unlimited, but creation is plural, divisible, definable. Creatures are marked by finiteness, limits, partitions, a lack of simplicity, finitude. Even as God, who is one, remains eternal, infinite, simply one.
Again, through that sentence structure, the subject, the verb, the object, God created the heavens and the earth. God reveals a divide between Himself and His creatures, an infinite gulf of nature, to use the language of Webster. And this chasm prompts wise theologians to bow in humility before approaching the subject of God, recalling both our limited minds and our fallen hearts, the Creator-creature distinction requires us to recognize the radical otherness of God in ontology and epistemology. We do not know what God is in His substance, and anybody who tells you they do, run. Even as we do know by revelation that God is, and that His character has perfections, again by revelation.
So now that we have listened to the first three verses, which reveal truths about the Creator and His creation to us, let’s incorporate some other truths about God from His revelation in the remainder of the first creation account, His simplicity and comprehensibility and sovereignty.
Theologians have long noted the orderliness in the creation account. You may have caught it simply by listening. God created by separating his creatures from one another, even as he fittingly related them to himself and to one another, God created by endowing creation with increasing complexity and division and ornamentation. The first three days are marked by division; the last three by furnishing. So, first of all, creation by division, and here the text has been read. So, as you read the text on your own, let me talk about it a little bit.
The division of creation is into multiple diverse multiplicities by God, who Himself remains one. On the first day, light is created by God, who is in Himself described as light. So God is, if you will, uncreated light, and created light does not have eternal unity like God, but is separated, but all made distinct from the darkness. This distinction allowed creation to progress temporally and visually from day to night, and evening to morning.
On the second day, the Lord made a rakia, an expanse, a stamped extension of space between the water above and the water below. God called this separation “sky,” and on the third day, to these distinctions of light and space came a separation into two realms necessary to maintain life by the growth of vegetation and for the development of different forms of wildlife, one dominated by water, one by earth. The other days are also marked by division, but they do not change the basic operating laws of the universe. Created separations are necessary to provide sustenance for creaturely life, which is multiple, and for procreation, which is the expansion of life among these creatures according to their kinds.
Now, Victor Hamilton rightly comments that separations also come after creation, but these were caused by our sin-the separation of humanity from God, of human beings from one another, and even ultimately of our bodies from our souls. So the original division of creation into parts is necessary. For no being other than God can be perfectly whole, simple unity. The Creator is the greater reality, and God makes room for Himself or for us within Himself, according to Paul in Acts 17.
Another truth, a seventh truth about God, is His incomprehensibility. This term related to divine transcendence and the Creator-Creature distinction reminds us that some truths about God cannot be rationally demonstrated to the human mind, but must be believed by way of divine revelation. God, in His nature, is beyond our comprehension. Isaiah 55, God warns us: “My thoughts are not your thoughts.” Let that sink in for a second. You think you understand God? God says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways,” He continues, “Are not my ways. For as heaven is higher than earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
And Paul warns: “Be careful that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit based on human tradition, based on the elements of the world rather than Christ,” your only captive—the one who captivates you—ought to be Christ, not the things of your mind.
So why do I believe in both the oneness of the being of God and the threeness of His persons? Why do I also believe in the personal union of both God and humanity in Jesus Christ. These are the two most important, non-negotiable, and necessary dogmas of the Christian faith: Trinity and Christology. I believe them not because I can demonstrate them by human reason, but because they are revealed in the Word of God, and as a result, they are true and therefore fundamental.
Thirdly, he created by furnishing. After that dynamic temporal energy of light and darkness is created, he focused it in the fourth day, points of light, and you have the greater light and the lesser light and the other lights, and they mark the progress of time and the movement of energy in space. God created out of that vertical extension of space on the second day, and the expanse of the sky on the fifth day. He furnished it with a multitude of winged life. He also furnished the depths of the sea with a multitude of sea creatures, and then on that sixth day, he took the earth and began to populate it with animal life, and then with the most exalted of his physical creatures, humanity, man and woman.
Finally, I want you to notice this: he stopped creating. So the heavens and the earth and everything in them were completed on the seventh day. “God had completed His work that He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work that He had done.” God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, for on it He rested from all His work of creation. So completed, kala sabat, rested or ceased. God is the only one who can create, and this tells us that He stopped. He stopped creating right there. He didn’t need another instrument to help Him create. Although He gives us the power of procreation among ourselves, God alone is the Creator. He wills, speaks, and he completes creation.
Creation, to bring it to a summary, is the first work of God, a work completed in that first seven days, and the other major works continue after His creation, and He governs history through his sovereignty, he does it by carrying out his divine plan. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. After our fall and because of our need for redemption, his plan moved on to redemption. He moved on to our redemption, and he did that in Jesus Christ. And finally, at the very end, he is going to take the world and bring it to its proper conclusion. That’s what God set out to do. And the amazing thing is, it’s revealed in the Old Testament and the New Testament. You get the Gospel in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. That’s for another lecture, another time. Thank you.
