Genesis
Creation
The beginning of everything I need to know about life and salvation
It was a great day in my life when I realised that in this book is the beginning of all I needed to know about life and salvation. Read these chapters looking for seeds — the beginning of the universe, of man, of marriage, of sin, of nations, of God’s promise of rescue and of the nature of saving faith. Every great theme in Scripture starts here.
In the beginning God created heaven and earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep water. The Spirit of God was hovering over the water.
Genesis 1:1–2 · God’s Word
God’s first recorded action is to make a world. Everything else in the Bible follows from that one sentence, and so does everything in your life: we are created beings, made by a loving Creator, for a purpose. If that is true, meaning is something you discover. If it is not, meaning is something you invent.
Watch the shape of the six days
The order is not random. In the first three days God forms three empty realms. In the next three He fills each one, in the same order.
| Formed | What | Filled | With what |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day One | light and darkness | Day Four | the lights of day and night |
| Day Two | sea and sky | Day Five | sea and sky filled with creatures |
| Day Three | earth springs out of the seas | Day Six | the land filled with creatures, and given to man |
Day one is answered by day four, day two by day five, day three by day six. The account is telling you something by its architecture: this is not a mess that happened, it is a house being built and then furnished.
And chapter 2 is not a second, competing creation account. It is the same event, told again with the camera much closer in — on the making of man.
The six days — how I read it
I take the creation narrative as literal history, and the six days as six days. Let me tell you why, and then let me tell you where the argument is weakest.
First, because it is what the text says. Each day is closed the same way, with a phrase that is the ordinary Hebrew way of marking a twenty-four hour day:
God named the light day, and the darkness he named night. There was evening, then morning—the first day.
Genesis 1:5 · God’s Word
Second, because the rest of Scripture treats it as plain fact. The Sabbath command does not rest on a metaphor. It rests on an event, and says so with a flat past tense:
In six days the LORD made heaven, earth, and the sea, along with everything in them. He didn’t work on the seventh day. That’s why the LORD blessed the day he stopped his work and set this day apart as holy.
Exodus 20:11 · God’s Word
And again in Exodus 31:17: “because the LORD made heaven and earth in six days.” The word because is doing real work there. Take the six days as figurative and you have to explain what the command is now resting on.
Third — and this is the honest reason, so I will say it plainly. It makes sense to me. Read this way, the material hangs together. The dating works. The genealogies work. And what can actually be established as history fits this reading better than it fits the alternatives, at least as I weigh it.
That is a claim you can check rather than a feeling you have to accept. Two of the charts on this site are the evidence for it: Lineage from Adam to Jacob, which shows the lifespans overlapping far enough that Noah could have heard the creation account from men who had it first-hand, and the Old Testament Timeline.
And that reason is itself a judgement, so it gets the same treatment as everything else here. Other people look at the same genealogies and the same history and weigh them differently, and they are not being dishonest when they do. “It makes sense to me” is a reason. It is not a proof, and I am not going to dress it up as one.
Many sincere readers take it differently, and their readings are not evasions. Some hold the day-age view, that each day covers a long epoch. Some hold the framework view, that the six days are a literary structure — the forming-and-filling pattern in the table above — teaching who made the world rather than how long it took. Some hold that the text answers a different question than the one we are asking of it. Weigh it yourself. This is one of those places where I will tell you what I think and then hand you the text.
Two things I want to say against my own corner. I am not a scientist, and I am wary of arguments that need me to be one. And when God says “Let there be light!” and there is light (1:3), I am perfectly willing to believe that was an event of cosmic proportions — a big bang, if you like. God spoke, and it was. As someone put it far better than I can: the Bible tells us the why of creation; science tells us the how.
Made in His image — and made to image Him back
Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, in our likeness…” So God created humans in his image. In the image of God he created them. He created them male and female.
Genesis 1:26–27 · God’s Word
Being made in God’s image is not only a statement about your dignity. It is a statement about your capacity. You were made in His image so that you could image Him back, in loving relationship. Children carry the likeness of their parents; mankind was made to carry the likeness of the Creator.
I think you can still see it, most obviously in a family. The love of a parent for a child is not really explicable on any other account. I would argue that is the image, showing through.
And it comes with a commission:
God blessed them and said, “Be fertile, increase in number, fill the earth, and be its master.”
Genesis 1:28 · God’s Word
The purpose was partnership — that we would join Him in carrying His goodness and His purpose across this whole planet. Hold on to that sentence, because it is the one the rest of the Bible keeps coming back to. It is repeated word for word to Noah after the flood (9:1), and it is what the tower at Babel was built to avoid.
And God saw everything that he had made and that it was very good.
Genesis 1:31 · God’s Word
All of it set in goodness, and intended for goodness. If you read Genesis 1 and 2 and knew nothing else, you would expect a happily-ever-after story.
Man was made on a Friday afternoon
Heaven and earth and everything in them were finished… On the seventh day he stopped the work he had been doing. Then God blessed the seventh day and set it apart as holy.
Genesis 2:1–3 · God’s Word
Count it out. Man is made late on the sixth day — a Friday afternoon. So the first full day of his existence was a day of rest.
We have it backwards. We work all week toward a weekend; we say thank goodness it’s Friday. God intended that we begin in His rest, and move out from His rest into the work. That is a different way to live, and the difference is not small.
The garden was the first temple
The garden is a place made for man to be in fellowship with God — God walking there “in the cool of the evening” (3:8), Cain and Abel bringing offerings there, and afterwards cherubim set to guard the way to the tree of life.
Which is why the last pages of the Bible read like the first ones. A river, a tree of life, and the thing Genesis 3 made necessary finally undone: “There will no longer be any curse” (Revelation 22:1–3).
One more thing hidden in day four
Then God said, “Let there be lights in the sky to separate the day from the night. They will be signs and will mark religious festivals, days, and years.”
Genesis 1:14 · God’s Word
Before there was a nation, before there was a law, the sun and moon are given a job description — and marking the appointed festivals is in it. The feasts are not a later religious invention bolted on at Sinai. They are set in the rhythm of creation, and the law given at Sinai simply wrote down what was already there. See Feasts and Festivals.
Who was doing the making
The New Testament looks back at Genesis 1:1 and tells you who was there:
In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God… Everything came into existence through him. Not one thing that exists was made without him.
John 1:1–3 · God’s Word
And “everything has been created through him and for him. He existed before everything and holds everything together” (Colossians 1:16–17). The One who steps into the story later is the One who began it.
Where to go from here
Read the text itself: Genesis 1 and 2 in one sitting, watching the forming-and-filling pattern. About seven minutes.
Read next: Genesis for the shape of the whole book — because what happens in chapter 3 changes everything in this one.