We continue to examine the first verse of the Bible, Genesis 1:1. Last time I mentioned that we needed to understand that at least four things are taught by "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." We're going to look at the first two of these in this edition of B.I.B.L.E., There was a beginning and God was already there.
The claim that there was a beginning is not that controversial today. Most scientists who study cosmology (the science of the origin and structure of the universe) agree that the universe does have a beginning and use the Big Bang theory to explain the beginning of the universe. This means that the universe is not eternal, that is, the universe has not always been here. It has existed for a very long time, but not forever. The question really is this, "What was there before the beginning?" Science doesn't have an answer. The Bible does, and that is where the claim that God was already there comes in.
The claim God was already there at the beginning is controversial. However, that claim is what the Bible teaches. If this claim is true, it means that God must be eternal. It can't mean that God is just a little older than the universe, otherwise the beginning would not really be the beginning! If God is just older than everything else, it would mean that at some time before the beginning God came to exist from nothing! It would literally mean that one moment there was nothing and then the next moment, poof!, there was God! I would say that this sounds a lot more like magic than anything else, but even magic requires somebody to perform it! I don't know about you, but that sounds just plain silly to me.
Next time we will look at the claims from the second part of Genesis 1:1, God made the "heavens" i.e. all of the universe except the earth, and God made the earth.
Your Joyfully Loquacious Believer,
LEE
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