Genesis 1:1 • In the beginning...

Gen 1:1 → In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

• If any one single verse of the Bible could have a life changing impact on a person, this would be the verse for me.

• I was raised in a non-religious home, in a loving family. Mom and dad, my two sisters and I were almost always together. My growing up years were filled with love and security. Our annual vacation was pretty much always to the same place in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. Some of my earliest memories are from that place.

• By the time I was in high school, my dad and I had gone backpacking several times. On a trip between 11th and 12th grade, I remember standing on a trail between two lakes, one at 9,000ft and the other at 10,000ft, trying to catch my breath while I looked out at the view in front of me. At the time, I remember thinking, wrestling in my mind actually, with the concept that all of this beauty before me was all by accident. How could something so perfect, so complex, so huge, just be by some random set of events? This question would stay in the back of my mind for months.

• Back to the real world, my senior year in high school. All my friends the previous year had been seniors, so for my last year of high school I was pretty much adrift. I didn't have that core group of friends to hang out with.

• A couple of guys invited me to play basketball (I wasn't very good at it) at lunch for a few days in a row, and after getting to know them a little bit, they invited me to come to an after school Bible study with them. I was already familiar with the "Jesus freaks" at school. In fact, I sat behind one of them in my Algebra 2 class. Carol was a sweet girl, pretty and friendly. I was thinking that it ought to be somewhat safe to attend the Bible study after school, because these folks were really pretty normal. I mean, they had to be cool because they wore jeans and sandals and had long hair, right?

• I attended a few times, not really fully understanding all they were talking about, but I felt accepted by them. I did notice though, that I was the only one who didn't have a Bible. When I got home one day, I asked my mom if she had a Bible I could use, and sure enough, she did. Having no experience with a Bible, I opened it to page one, just like you would with any other book.

• "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." It was liked a light bulb came on in my head. In my mind, I was back on the trail in the mountains. IT WASN'T BY ACCIDENT!!!

• "In the beginning" - beginning of what I wasn't sure - beginning of time, beginning of mankind, beginning of an era? Based on the context of this passage, at least the beginning of the universe as we know it.

• "God" - the supreme deity? The old bearded guy in the sky? Jesus' dad? How do you understand God when you've only heard his name used as a cuss word? The word in Hebrew, Elohim, interestingly enough is plural - Trinity?

• "created" - now there's a big word! It has the connotation of making or forming something new. As this is possibly a first time event.

• "the heavens and the earth." - this would be an easy way to say everything. Historically, man knew little of what he could not touch. The depths of the seas and the immensity of the sky were only things we could ponder on. We understand the sun and the moon. We've calculated their movements and cycles, and built several types of calendars based on those cycles. We've used the patterns and placement of the stars to chart our course while traveling at night, whether on land or sea. Now that we've grown in our understanding, and have created technology to help us explore, we know so much more about the earth, and the heavens as well. We've got telescopes, even some in orbit, that can see other galaxies. Space ships that have flown by all the planets of the solar system giving us clear pictures of what those planets look like (I still think Pluto is a planet - so sue me). We've even landed a couple of rovers on Mars, and men on the moon several times. And what about the Voyagers. Voyager 1, at this writing, is over 15 billion miles from earth. Launched in 1977, it is still sending info back to earth, even though it is no longer in our solar system.

• So what does this mean to us? - If all of this is true, that a divine essence, the Triune God, powerful enough to create not only the earth, but also the sun, moon, and stars, why do we find it so hard to believe that He can also care for us? If He created us, unique amongst all of His creation, in that we can understand that He exists and can begin to fathom the immensity of His power, why do we disregard Him? Ponder on that for a while.

Photo → Sunset at Morro Beach, Morro Bay, CA on February 27, 2025