During the early part of the 20th century most secular scientists believed that the universe had neither a beginning nor an end – that it was in a steady state condition. Of course, if the universe always existed, there was no beginning to worry about. 

About that same time, however, Albert Einstein was developing his General Theory of Relativity which, to his surprise, required a starting point to the universe. Einstein was so troubled by the God implications of a starting point that he modified his relativity equations to take the starting point away. It is obviously not very scientific to change mathematical equations just to make them fit your worldview. It was reported that Einstein later called it “the biggest blunder he had made in his entire life.” Today, the vast majority of scientists believe that the universe, indeed, had a beginning.

And that is where the Bible starts: “In the beginning.” There was a beginning – the beginning of the world; the beginning of God’s self-revelation as Creator and, ultimately, Redeemer; and the beginning of your story and mine. In fact, the very first proposition of the Bible about us is that you and I are here on purpose. We are not cosmic accidents or the random products of the blind forces of the universe. We were created by a powerful, intelligent, loving God who imprinted us with His own image and breathed His own life into us. We therefore have value as human beings that no prevailing philosophy or politically correct prejudice could ever take away from us.

The Israelite audience that Moses was writing to in Genesis would have been exposed to quite different kinds of creation stories from other nations. Many of those creation ‘myths’ involved self-centered, lazy deities who created human beings to be little more that slave labor or playthings. But that is not the story of Genesis 1 and 2. In fact, nowhere in religious literature is there a higher view of God and or a higher view of human beings than here in the first two chapters of the Bible.

Although these chapters may raise questions as to how and when God created, they more importantly reveal who God is and why we are here. Those are the important questions and of those truths we can be certain.