Thank you, worship team. We’re kicking off a journey through the book of Genesis. This will be a deep dive. Sometimes we will go fast. Other times, we will go slow. A treasure trove of truth awaits, and it will challenge us all.
CONTEXT
Moses wrote Genesis about 3400 years ago (Hebrews 7:14 assumes Mosaic authorship). However, the events occurred well before that. It records events that truly happened, not myth or an epic poem like the Odyssey with a shadow of facts. It is history. At the same time, we can’t read it like a modern textbook.
ELEPHANT
Let me talk about the elephant in the room when it comes to Genesis. I was running yesterday morning and this came to me. Several people are excited about us teaching it. One person asked me about this touchy question concerning the age of the Earth. I am going to make this short. I was an old-earth Christian. Those categories are not mutually exclusive categories. A few decades ago, a friend of mine challenged me. How many of you believe in miracles? Raise your hand. Okay, Christianity is built on miracles, and the most stunning one was Jesus rising from the dead. How would you define a miracle? We could say it is an act of God that goes against the laws of nature. It defies logic. A person is healed. Food is materialized out of nothing. What was Jesus’s first miracle? Do you recall? He turned water into wine. How do we get wine? We get it from grapes. Grapes that have grown on vines over the course of a year. Then those grapes are picked, pressed, bottled, and aged. The account of his first miracle tells us Jesus made good-quality wine. The vine would have been decades old. But Jesus instantly turned 150 gallons of wash water into wine. The wine had an apparent age, but it was only seconds old. In the same way, God can make the sun, moon, stars, and Earth with apparent age if he wanted to. I believe in the Bible and miracles. God could have made the world in six earth days starting before there was a Sun and Earth or metaphorical. Our view of the age of the Earth isn’t a litmus test for Christianity. Nor is that the point of these five verses. What is? How do we know? To figure that out, let’s look at three things this morning:
What it actually says,
Who it was written to, and
What does the rest of Scripture say about the subject matter?
CONTEXT PART 2
The Bible says God inspired Moses to write the book of Genesis. The original audience was a group of traveling Israelites seeking the land that God had promised their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The book’s purpose was to help them grow in their understanding of God, themselves, and each other. Its job was to point them ultimately to their Messiah. The title Genesis comes from the Greek for “beginnings.” It is our origin story. It is the story of the universe, the world, humanity, and the chosen family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It teaches God’s nature, about good and evil, and the hope of the world.
OVERVIEW
Chapters 1 and 2 detail the first week of life, with each day marking significant events. The focus moves quickly to humanity.
Chapter 3 details the Fall from a utopian Garden of Eden. God punishes the first people for disobeying, and he promises a corrective, a male descendant, who will one day destroy the source of temptation, the serpent. This raises the question, “Whom will he be?” And each time a boy is born, we can ask, “Is he the one?”
In Chapter 4, we learn that Adam and Eve have two sons. However, there is immediate disappointment and the murder of the other son. It leads to the death of his innocent brother.
Chapters 5 through 11 detail the next series of sons and begin to demonstrate that evil is not diminishing but increasing. Things go from bad to worse. It gets so horrible that God seeks a global reset. He picks a righteous man named Noah for round three. God wipes out creation with a global flood, and Noah and his wife and three sons and their wives try again. However, blameless Noah grows a vineyard and gets drunk, tarnishing his record. Noah is not the Savior. The people must wait for a hero, as both their descendants and evil fill the earth once again.
In Chapter 12, God chooses another man, Abram. He is not perfect. He lied to protect himself. But he has faith in God. And God had mercy on him. God makes a covenant, a promise to Abram to give him a land, a people, and a blessing to all nations. But Abraham was not the one to crush the tempter; his son Isaac got the blessing, but he was not the one to end temptation either, and his son Jacob received the same promise. However, he, too, was not the one to save us. The story concludes with a cliffhanger. One of Jacob’s sons, Joseph, rescues his family from starvation and, in a sense, the world too. God’s promises are being fulfilled, but not all of them. God’s people didn’t have the land, and temptation and sin continued to have free rein to work in people’s lives. And like all cliffhangers, Genesis ends by driving readers to want to know what happens next. How did God’s people go from being in a prominent place to slaves? How do they get out of slavery? How do they get the land that God promised? How does evil end? Who will be this son of Adam and Eve promised in Chapter 3?
MAIN IDEA OF THE BOOK
How do we summarize all these stories? There is so much in them. We pastors, came up with this sentence: Hope in the God who overcomes evil by preserving his promise through his wayward people. Let me repeat that. Hope in the God who overcomes evil by preserving his promise through his wayward people.
RETURN TO CHAPTER 1
Circling back to the first two chapters, look at this table. In the first three days, God brings three groups of things into existence, and in the next three days he fills them. On the last day, he rests. This is beautiful symmetry. You can see how intentional and poetic some of this history is.
(Genesis 1–2 Creation Week Overview. Created with Google Gemini (Google, 2026)).
STRUCTURE
As we zero in on the first five verses this morning, the main point is that God created all things by speaking, separating, and naming, beginning with day and night. What these verses say about God and our world should lead us to recognize God’s power, presence, and order in our lives.
Every week we read the Bible, God’s Word, I try to have various willing victims, I mean volunteers, read for us. The passages we preach at times have difficult names. Not this morning. I have a treat for us. I didn’t get one volunteer, but three. And as far as I know, they've never attended our church. In fact, they recorded this reading online. They will read our passage and a few additional verses from some 240,000 miles away, in outer space. Let’s listen to three astronauts from Apollo 8 reading Genesis 1:1 through 10 on Christmas Eve, 1968. Would you please stand with me in honor of God’s Word?
1 IN the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
PRAYER
Please pray with me. Heavenly Father, Creator, Maker, you are amazing! You have made all things. You sustain all things. By your Word, you spoke it all into existence. Thank you. You have ordained this day. Use this message to inspire our hearts. In Jesus’s name we pray, amen. You may be seated.
STRUCTURE
The passage has two parts:
The Summary of the week: God creates everything vs. 1–2
On Day one, God spoke the good light into existence, separating and calling day and night vs. 3–5
What makes Day One different from the others, beyond order? God created the light and made day and night, which become the markers of time in a dark world.Let’s break it down.
The Summary: God creating everything vs. 1–2
Look at verse 1:
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1, ESV).
This tells us that God made everything. Such a statement stands over and against the prevailing thought of the world at the time of writing. It was polytheistic. People believed that many gods made and controlled the world. This verse also plants a flag in the ground, establishing that history has a start. Time is not circular. We are not caught in a time loop or a meaningless multiverse. Nor do things go back indefinitely.So God created all things.
The state of matter and location of God vs. 2
Jump to verse 2:
“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2, ESV).
God was not starting with preexisting material. The Latin phrase you may or may not have heard is Ex Nihilo, out of nothing God created. God needed nothing to create the heavens or the earth. He always existed and didn’t begin with prior substances. Before anything was, he was. When we create, we draw upon other knowledge, experience, and stuff to make things. God did not. The earth was in utter chaos. It was dark and deep. It was rough and unformed.
SPIRIT
This verse also tells us that God is Spirit. God is by nature spirit. He is not physical, although he can take on physical form, as he did with Jesus. He was hovering over the deep waters. Jesus said to a Samaritan woman at a well millennia later,
“God is spirit” (John 4:24, ESV).
Where is God? He was over the face of the deep. He was with his Creation. He didn’t wind up the world like a divine watchmaker, step aside, and let it do its thing. No. He was right there with it. And that hasn’t changed. God is still spirit and, in some sense, present. In other senses, he sits enthroned in heaven; Jesus is at his right hand. But the Bible tells us that the Spirit of God dwells inside of the hearts of his people. And where two or more are gathered in Jesus’s name, his Spirit is there in a sense. God is still connected to his Creation. Now, that is not to say he is the Creation. That is called Panentheism, and it is wrong. All things are not God. He made all things and is over all things. But he is with Creation at the beginning and remains with it later, in some sense, to varying degrees.
The power of God’s Word vs. 3
Go to verse 3. How did God create?
“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3, ESV).
God created all things by speaking. God is so powerful that he can speak light into existence. He is a speaking God. He is personal, present, powerful, and speaking. He didn’t have to spend years, months, or weeks in a laboratory working up the right design for the wavelength of visible light; he just spoke, and it was so. Who does that?
APOSTLE JOHN
In the New Testament, the apostle John wrote,
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made…. [Who was this word? Vs. 14]
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
(John 1:1–3, 14 ESV)
God inspired John’s pen to write this down for us in 2026. Jesus was in the beginning. He was with God. And, mysteriously, he was God. John says that God made the world and everything through Jesus, his Son.
PSALM
The psalmist doubles down on God’s ability to create heavens with a word,
“By the word of the LORD the heavens were made,
and by the breath of his mouth all their host” (Psalm 33:6, ESV).
APOSTLE PAUL
Another apostle named Paul wrote,
“Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6, ESV).
Although Paul distinguishes between Jesus and God the Father, both are responsible for all things, including our existence. How can that be? They are two persons but one God. We bump into mystery. We can only get so close to a transcendent truth. The Bible says it; we believe it. Paul wrote to another church something similar:
For by him [Jesus] all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Colossians 1:16–17, ESV)
AUTHOR OF HEBREWS
The author of Hebrews concurred,
Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, (Hebrews 1:1–3, ESV)
So John wrote, “The Word made the world; the Word was God; and the Word was Jesus.” The psalmist in the Old Testament agreed that God created the world by speaking. Paul wrote that Jesus made the world, and the author of Hebrews wrote that God the Father made the world through Jesus. Genesis tells us that the Spirit of God was there at the time. Genesis says, “God spoke, and it was so.” From the rest of the Bible, we can deduce that there is one God and three persons. Long ago, Christians came up with a word to describe this confusingly true concept: the Trinity.
The nature of Creation vs. 4a
Let’s look closer. Turn to the first part of verse 4.
“And God saw that the light was good” (Genesis 1:4a, ESV).
Here we see the goodness of creation. And this is not the last time. Some religions deny the goodness of the material world. That is not what the Bible is teaching. God is declaring that this material world was inherently good, not neutral or evil. That sets up a question the text answers later: “Why is there evil?”
The God of order vs. 4b
Let’s move on. Look at the next part, verse 4:
“And God separated the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:4b, ESV).
God created all things, speaking and separating. In God’s separating, he was bringing order to disorder.
PHYSICS
One of my sons is studying physics. He is smarter than I am. But I remember one thing about physics: the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It basically says that in a closed system, things go from order to disorder, not the other way around.
ENTROPY
My garage is an example of this. Over time, it gets worse and worse and worse. I am to blame. But it is also true about the nature of a home we build. Eventually we will need a new roof, the walls will need repainting, and the landscaping will need refreshing. Things move from order to disorder. And God was bringing order out of the disorder. How? By separating the light from darkness. How? Keep reading.
The God who names vs. 5a
Go to verse 5:
“God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” (Genesis 1:5, ESV).
God created all things, speaking, separating, and naming, beginning with day and night. God brought order by naming. When you were born, the doctors came and asked your parents, what do you want to call you? They chose your name; you didn’t choose your name. You didn’t name your parents. God asserted his power, position, rule, and authority by naming, and eventually he will delegate that power to people. So we see God’s order in separating and calling. These five verses challenge our hearts with God’s Supremacy, presence, power, and order.
APPLICATION
From these five verses, we can deduce that God is:
The Creator
Supreme
Before all things
Spirit
Present
Powerful
Orderly
We can also deduce that time has a direction and matter began as good.
That being the case, so what? God is the main character; we play supporting roles. If that is true, then we must acknowledge it in our lives. People in Moses’s day were tempted to have other gods in addition to, in front of, and beside God. Are we? If we were living in Nepal, where Marian Prince visits and this massive mudslide was this week, or India, where some of our friends live, I would say there is a strong possibility we would be tempted to have more than one god and to have gods that were more important than the Creator God.
NO GODS BEFORE ME
However, I don’t think we are tempted to have idols like those from other cultures and times. But I do think we have other gods. We don’t see them as gods. Let me explain. What is a god? It is something we attribute power, value, importance, and worship to. We serve those gods. We seek to appease those gods. Not everything we give power, value, importance, or praise is a god. Not everything we seek to serve or appease is a god. But as one dead pastor once said, our hearts are idol factories. We mass produce alternatives to God in a myriad of ways, even unconsciously. We exchange the created things for the creator. We let our desires, things, and people have so much power, value, importance, and praise in our lives that they functionally operate like gods.
BED TIME GODS
For example, I really value reading in bed before I fall asleep. If a kid or my spouse comes in and interrupts me, I can get crabby and say something rude. If I am rude, that is not what God wants for my life. I violate a simple prohibition because of competing desires: my desire versus my family’s desire versus God’s desire. Instead of working through what is going on in my heart, I take a shortcut and sin. And in sinning, my desire becomes a functional idol. I am worshipping my reading time, not the Creator of the universe who reigns supreme. That should not be.
And in the same way, we unconsciously craft billions of other gods that compete for the driver’s seat in our lives.
Do we truly understand God’s supremacy? I think we forget. I do. What would it look like to remember God is supreme and God’s power this week?
GOD’S PRESENCE
Another takeaway from this passage is that we can see God’s presence. He hovered over the waters. And he didn’t stop interacting with his creation. He is here. He is involved in the world. He is aware of all things. He doesn’t need Flock cameras or people with cell phones recording videos to know what we think and do. We can’t hide from him. We must live in the light. He sees all and knows all. He is God. Where do you need God to meet you?
GOD’S ORDER
Finally, these verses show that God is orderly. Where is there chaos in your life? Let God bring order to that chaos. Let him be in your life. Let him rule your life. He is good, gives good gifts, and creates good things. Let’s repent of the little gods we’ve made to take God’s place. Let’s ask God to meet us like he did the waters. Let’s ask for him to help bring order to our chaos. Let’s pray.
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