The God Who Creates

Paul Bellamy, the late editor of the award-winning newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, passed by a reporter’s desk one evening as he was preparing a story for the next day’s edition. As the editor read the story, he quickly concluded that it was too long—especially for a subject that would be of little interest to readers anyway. “Cut it down!” Bellamy ordered. “After all, the story of creation was told in Genesis in just 282 words.”

The reporter shot back, “Yes, and I’ve always thought we could have been saved a lot of arguments later if someone had just written a couple of hundred more.”

Any serious student of the Bible can probably sympathize with the reporter’s observation. The creation account found in Genesis 1-2 leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Yet, as we are going to discover today, the purpose of these first two chapters of Genesis is not to explain how the world was created, but who created the world. 

I believe that every word of the creation account is true, but it is also incomplete. That may shock some of you—to say that God’s Word is incomplete. But the Bible itself admits that—in John 21:25, the apostle wrote that there were many more things the Lord did that were not recorded in the Bible. In other words, Scripture does not tell us everything we want to know about Jesus’ life, but it does tell us everything we need to know.

That is certainly true about creation. Imagine for a moment that the creation account had been written in scientific terms. First, it would take an immeasurable number of books to explain the creation process. One scientist notes that to give a complete description of the position of the groups and bonds of a single virus would take a 200-page book. Can you imagine how many books it would take to explain the creation? 

And yet Moses uses only 76 root words in Genesis 1 to describe the origin of the universe. 

If, indeed, Moses had explained creation in scientific terms, who in his day—or in our day, for that matter—would have been able to understand it? Only a privileged few. 

But the account in Genesis 1 is written both accurately and simply so that anyone can understand. The important concept in this chapter is not how the world was created, but who created it and why. 

In terms of grammar, creation is only the object of this passage—the subject of the passage is God—you find His name 32 times in the first chapter of Genesis alone. Someone has well said that Genesis 1 is the doorway through which we have to walk into the Bible. You must believe that He is your creator before you can appreciate that He is your Savior. 

Among conservative Christians, there are a variety of ways to interpret Genesis 1, and I want us to have a good understanding of both the strengths and weaknesses of three of the major interpretations.

1. Biblical Theories of Creation

• The Literal Theory

Many people who believe this believe that the earth is far younger than the billions of years of age that is commonly assumed. If you believe that everything in the universe was created during these six days, then the entire universe could not be but a few days older than the first man. Furthermore, if you believe you can date the age of mankind by adding up all the genealogies of who begat and come up with 6,000 years of age, as Bishop James Ussher did in the 1600s. Then you believe the entire universe is no more than 6,000 years old.

• The Gap Theory

The Gap Theory says that Genesis 1:1 records the original creation of the universe—God created everything perfect. But between verse 1, in which you have a perfect world, and verse 2, where the world is described as empty and void, you have a gap, an interval of time, that could have lasted hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. Those who believe in this theory say Lucifer was cast out of heaven during this time because of his rebellion against God. And one result of his being cast from heaven to earth was that the earth was turned into a waste place. Verse 2 could read “the earth became (rather than “was”) formless and void.” “Formless” and “Void” were the result of Lucifer’s fall, which God remedied with the re-creation of the world. Thus, beginning in verse 3, what you have is not the original creation of the earth, but the recreation or reconstruction of the earth as we know it. 

• The Day-Age Theory

The Day-Age Theory says that the days in Genesis 1 should not be taken as literal 24-hour periods of time but as long periods of geological formation, lasting thousands if not millions of years. Such a theory appears to harmonize with what we know from the world of science. As you know, for many years, scientists believed in the “steady state theory,” which said that the universe has always existed and that new matter is being created continually. 

2. The Pattern of Creation (Genesis 1:3-31)

• The First Day (Genesis 1:3-5)

Creationists go to great lengths to explain from the world of physics and science how such a thing could be. All I need to do, however, is turn to the last chapter of the Bible, Revelation 22:5: “And there will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them; and they will reign forever and ever.”

• The Second Day (Genesis 1:6-8)

It is hard for us to imagine, but originally, there was no separation between the water above in the atmosphere and the water of the seas. So, the first thing God did was to separate the waters above from the waters below—a perpendicular separation.

The word translated “firmament” in the KJV and better translated “expanse” in other translations is the Hebrew word “raqia”—it means to hammer out. If you have a ball of copper and want to make it into a thin sheet, you “raqia” it—you hammer it out. 

And figuratively speaking, that is exactly what God did. He took this ball of water, and He hammered out an atmosphere so that there was a distance, a separation, between the waters above in the atmosphere and the waters below on the earth.

• The Third Day (Genesis 1:9-11)

After God separated the waters vertically, He next separated them horizontally. That is, He created land. 

Also, on this day, you have the beginning of vegetation, not marine life. Again, vegetation would be necessary to support human life since man was a vegetarian until after the flood. You also find in verse 11 the first mention of the phrase “after its kind”—repeated 10 times in Genesis. 

• The Fourth Day  (Genesis 1:14-19)

On the fourth day, you have the appearance of the sun and the moon. It may be their original creation, or it may be that the clouds covering the earth have adequately subsided to make them visible.

• The Fifth Day (Genesis 1:20-23)

The fifth day brought the creation of the creatures that would inhabit the atmosphere—birds—and those that would inhabit the hydrosphere, the waters. They did not come from the plant life; they were “created” after their kind. They did not appear gradually; they were teeming with swarms of living creatures. 

Included in the inhabitants of the waters were “sea monsters,” sometimes translated as dragons. So much appears in secular literature about dragons and monsters that these creatures should not be thought of as mythological. Whether the writer had in mind dinosaurs or something else, it is evident that at one time there existed large creatures that are now extinct. 

• The Sixth Day (Genesis 1:24-31)

The final day of creation was an especially busy one. First, we see the creation of animals. Boice points out three general groups of animals: those that can be domesticated (cattle), those that creep across the earth (reptiles, squirrels, and such), and beasts—those animals that cannot be domesticated.

• The Seventh Day (Genesis 2:1-3)

Why did God stop after six days of creation? Was he tired? Had he run out of ideas? Obviously not. There is no limit to the number of plants, animals, trees, stars, even humans, He could have created—why stop at two!

But I believe He stopped, and he rested for one main reason. To teach us an important lesson—that there is more to life than work. There comes a time every week—I think even every day—when we say “Enough.” It is not that I have done everything I need to do or could do, but I have done all that I should do. It’s time now to enjoy the life that God has given me. 

The whole reason for the Sabbath day in the Old Testament was predicated upon this creation account.

3. The Meaning of Creation

As the Psalmist put it, “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.” The meaning of the creation story can be summed up this way. Behind everything there is a thought. And behind every thought there is a thinker.

God is the one who created this entire world. And when He did so, He had a thought in mind—that thought was you. You will never understand the reason for your existence until you acknowledge your creator. 

The story of Genesis 1 tells us not only what life is all about, but more importantly, Who it is all about. As Paul said in Acts 17:28: “For in Him we live, and move, and have our being.”