“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. . . . God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
Genesis 1.1, 27
“Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. . . . So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.
The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.”
Genesis 2:7, 21-22
“So also it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living soul.’The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural; then the spiritual.
The first man is from the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven.”
1 Corinthians 15:45-47
An interesting statement is found in Hebrews 11.3: “By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.” (See also Romans 4.17) This concept of creatio ex nihilo (literally, creation out of nothing) is thought to have originated with Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (d. ca. 202). He and other early church thinkers were reacting to the Greek philosophical idea “that the cosmos had always existed, that there has always been matter out of which the world has come into its present form.”
God’s creative activity holds a special place in Jewish and Christian thinking and theology. In Scripture, creation is always the work of God and never the work of man. Further, when, in Genesis 1, God created, he did bring something from nothing. What did God create? He created the heavens and the earth; the great sea monsters, all living things in the waters of the earth (oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, etc.) and all the birds of the air. Further, God created human beings. Obviously, the creation of humans was so significant, the Spirit saw fit to inspire the writer of Genesis to use the word create three times in describing God’s work of bringing man into being. After the five uses of the verb create in Gen. 12.1, 21 and 27 (3X), all other uses of the word in Scripture refer back to God’s creative work “in the beginning.”
In other places in Genesis 1, we find evidence of something coming from nothing. Such is the case with light (1.3), the expanse of the heavens (1.6), and the sun, moon and stars (1.14-16). In each of these cases, God said, “Let there be . . . and it was so.” One way of thinking about those things Scripture says God created is when something did not fit its context, or could not be explained, the writer concluded God created those entities; God called something into being out of nothing. If the creation story of Genesis 1 is the result of the musings of a Hebrew writer, such an explanation might work. For those who rely on the concept of the divine inspiration of Scripture, such reasoning is inadequate.
Yet, the idea of things “not fitting” or being beyond explanation can help us understand the mystery and miracle of creation. Much of what we see in our world is beyond comprehension. Take, for instance, life itself. Some in the secular world of science are uncomfortable with the current, evolutionary model used to describe how life was generated on this planet. As evidence of this, we see increasing interest in and hope of finding life, or the evidence of life, on other planets. The paradox, though, is the question of the origin of life will remain unanswered even if life were to be found on another planet. Where did that life come from. A similar paradox exists with the Big Bang theory; what existed before the Big Bang? Life and the universe itself seem to not fit, to defy explanation.
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The biblical declaration, “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” affirms the belief some things only God can do. Only the Lord himself can be responsible for what is beyond human reason and comprehension. Such is the case with human life: who and what we are does not fit, and cannot be explained. So, the Spirit, in his work of inspiring the Bible writer, declared, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” (author’s italics) Obviously, God wanted no questions to linger about human beings, neither about their origin nor their nature.
In a paradoxical kind of way, human beings, while brought into being out of nothing, did indeed come from something. Humans came from God himself, from his own image, in his likeness. “For in Him we live and move and exist”
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