“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” which is to say “At the start, God made everything.” With these words begins the most compelling and important story ever written, the story that we are all living in. In the first verses of the Bible we are given the foundations of our very existence, captured succinctly and profoundly in a short creation poem spanning seven miraculous days. Questions like “Who is God?” or “What is the nature of the universe?” are answered clearly and directly, inviting us into a heart-transforming perspective on life, the universe, and everything.
The opening chapters of Genesis make up what is often called the “Primeval History”; a history of the most basic and ancient truths about our nature, our place in creation, and our relationship with the Creator. One significant theme in this history is that of origins. What happened at the beginning? Where did we come from exactly? People, at all times and in all places, deeply desire to know their origins, because origins are the foundation of identity. 23andMe, a company that traces ancestry through genetic testing, boldly proclaims on their branding “Welcome to you.”
Who are you? This is an important question to answer, and not an easy one to answer at that. In Genesis, we encounter the beginning of the fullness of that answer. From the first moment that God’s Spirit is breathed into the nostrils of the human, in spite of the catastrophe of the Fall, fundamentally, humans are image-bearers: representatives of God, in his creation, for his glory. Everything that ensues in human history springs out of this identity, and is at the heart of all of our struggles.
Because we are made in God’s image, what we do matters, and another significant theme in the Primeval History is the origin and effects of sin: the way in which we fundamentally rejected our God-given identity as his image-bearer. God proclaimed that the creation of mankind was very good, and yet evil slithered onto the scene, and we rebelled against God in our hearts, and in our actions, with eternal consequences. The alienation and wickedness of sin took hold so quickly, that within only a handful of generations, the world was so corrupt, God is grieved that he made us, and vows to wipe creation out with a cataclysmic flood.
But the purpose of God’s judgement is always for restoration, so that his image-bearers would be refined and restored to healthy, life-giving relationship with him. Those whom he loves he disciplines. This is why even at the very beginning of our mistake, as we turned from God and fell under the curse of sin and death, God laid the foundation for the one who could truly and fully bear his image, crush the serpent, conquer death, and lead us into life everlasting. In this descendant of Adam, all the peoples of the earth would be blessed, and God glorified, just as he intended.