Genesis 1:1 (The Beginning)
Genesis 1:1:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
John 1:1-3:
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 came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.
Rev 22:20-21:
He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming quickly.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen.
Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the A and the Z, the beginning and the end. Like the two covers of a book, in Him all things hold together. Presently we will be looking back toward the beginning. But as we do so it is good to remember that the universe, the Bible, and the gospel don’t begin with Jesus as a starting point only to move on to something better. There is nothing better than Him. The Beginning is also The End.
In the beginning
Starting from its first words, the Jewish Scriptures set up a framework in which Jesus Christ can most perfectly be revealed, and in Him God can be most fully known. Genesis 1 lays the foundation that puts, for example, John 1 in context. John is able to move rapidly from “In the beginning was the Word” to “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us” only because of all the background that God prepared in advance.
Genesis 1:1 in the Greek Septuagint and John 1:1 both start with “en arche”, “in the beginning.” Christ is revealed the Arche in Col 1:18, Rev 21:6, and Rev 22:13. It is not only a statement of His chronology, but also His preeminence (the same root is used for “principalities”). Christ is above all; He is first in time, first in power, indeed He simply has “first place in everything” (Col 1:18).
Just as The Way is more than a road, The Truth is more than a set of propositions, and The Life is more than an inanimate force, likewise The Beginning is more than a point in time. He is a person, the Arch-Person. It is in Him that all beginnings begin. This helps to explain why Scripture says that Jesus IS the Beginning as opposed to merely saying that Jesus WAS the Beginning. (Likewise, He already is the End, and He always will be the Beginning and the End.) As Michael Card puts it in song:
In the beginning was The Beginning, in Him it all began …
The Beginning will make all things new, new life belongs to Him
He hands us each new moment, saying,
My child begin again
My child begin again
You’re free to start again
God
God’s revelation of Himself to mankind has been progressive. All of humanity, including pagan tribes with no prophets and no Scriptures, can know Him as the Divine Eternal Power (Rom 1:20). He has left witness of Himself as the Creator and Sustainer of all nations of peoples (Acts 14, Acts 17). To know about God only with reference to His relationship to creation is enough to make us creatures accountable to worship Him. But clearly God is not dependent on what He Himself has brought into existence (e.g. II Chron 2:6, Acts 17:25) so somehow there is more to God as God than just God as Creator.
If full comprehension of God as Creator is infinitely beyond our grasp, then how much more mind-boggling it is for a creature to try understand God without reference to His creation. But God does desire His children to know Him as He is, so over time He has gradually opened more and more windows of revelation into what is like for God to be God in the beginning. One such window into the nature of God within Himself is in Genesis 1:2, which we will look at soon. But most great Christian theologians have agreed that another window comes even earlier, here in verse 1, when the singular God is referred to by the plural noun Elohiym. Here we have an implicit tip of the hat to the fact that God did not create the world to satisfy an emotional or relational need, i.e. loneliness. He was fully satisfied within Himself from all eternity as the One God with plural nature. But only as He opened more windows into the depth of His nature could we begin to appreciate how that could be so.
Turning now to John 1:1, we see the apostle makes a very bold move by using the same language as the opening sentence of the Bible. Genesis 1:1 is sacred ground. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is the fundamental truth from which all other revelation and right understanding of Creator and of creation — that is, everything — flows. Indeed John himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit, is the one who warned us all of the plagues and judgment that will come upon anyone who adds or takes away from God’s book (Rev 22:18-19). If no pious man would dare to tinker with I Chronicles 9:27, then how much more would Jesus’ beloved apostle certainly approach Genesis 1:1 with reverence toward God.
Thus the opening to John’s gospel is striking not just for the fact that it claims to speak about the beginning with as much authority as Genesis does, but also because of what comes next. Genesis follows “In the beginning” with “God created”, but in John we find, “was the Word, and the Word was with God.” So John focuses attention in on “the Word” as his subject even before getting to “God”! It is as if John has gone back to Genesis and, without taking anything away, has filled in the gaps:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him God created the heavens and the earth.
To dare to “fill in the gaps” of a Scripture so fundamental as Genesis 1:1 is staggering. It is a glorious reality, but also a staggering one not to be taken for granted by those of us who have grown too “familiar” with the privilege of living in this late stage of God’s self revelation.
Now don’t get me wrong. I am not implying (because John is not implying) that the Word existed before God, or that the Word of God is above or greater than God the Father Himself. Indeed, Jesus said, “The Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). Yet the same time, what we see demonstrated here is that the three Persons of the Triune God delight in one another’s glory without the slightest competition or envy. Christ is pleased for Genesis 1:1 to read, “In the beginning God created”, and the Father is pleased for John 1:1 to read, “In the beginning was the Word”.
In the absence of a better term, I might try to emphasize the point by saying that John “puts” Jesus right into the forefront of Genesis 1:1. But that’s not really right, because it is not John’s place to “put” Jesus anywhere that Jesus isn’t already. Rather, Jesus certainly is already there in the beginning, because indeed He IS the Beginning. Thus the Holy Spirit through John is simply revealing the layers that are already there in Genesis. He is beginning to unfold the mystery, pull back the veil, and make the God of Genesis 1:1 known in a measure of fullness that is only possible through the gospel of Jesus Christ the incarnate Word of God. “He who has seen the Son has seen the Father”, and, “No one has seen God at any time, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made Him known.”
created
First, note that everything God created, He created by His spoken word. There is nothing that God created except by the power of His Word. So just as we can say that God Himself created everything, we can just as well say that everything came into being by the Word of God. Not only did the New Testament authors observe this fact (Heb 11:3, II Pet 3:5), but the saints who came before did as well (Ps 33:6). We’ll look at this more later.
Second, compare the verb in Genesis with that of John. Both Hebrew and Greek put the verb before the subject here, so Genesis word-for-word reads, “In the beginning created…,” and John word-for-word reads, “In the beginning was… .” Genesis starts off with an action verb — immediately we see God working. John starts off with a stative verb — immediately we God being. I believe this is significant because, as noted above, it is only in the Trinity that light is shed on the mystery of what it means for God to be God without reference to creation or anything else. In His initial stages of revelation, God is content to be known primarily as the God who created. But to His beloved chosen ones, He wants to reveal Himself more and more as the God who is (e.g. Ex 3:14, Rev 4:8).
The reason that the universe we live in is hard-wired for relationships is because, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The reason we live in a universe at all is because, “In the beginning God created.”
the heavens and the earth.
Someone could try to argue here that the heavens and the earth were not made by the “word” of God. They might say that first God created the heavens and the earth (vs. 1) and only later He began to speak (vs. 3).
My first response to that would be, as above, to point to other passages in the Old Testament as well as the New that confirm the heavens and the earth themselves were made by the word and the Spirit of God (e.g. Ps 33:6, Ps 148:4-5). Every time we read of God’s creative work, He does it through His spoken command. So even if God’s word is not explicitly mentioned in verse 1, we see no other means by which God created.
Second, although the Greek concept of “Logos” in John 1:1ff includes the concept of “word”, it is much more than that. Logos fuses the concepts of Word, Wisdom, Understanding, and Power. This fact then opens up an even larger collection of Old Testament testimony to the role of God’s Logos in all the work of creation (see notes on Prov 8:22-31).
Third, I believe that verse 1 is actually a header and does not chronologically precede verse 2. Moses has divided Genesis up nicely into major sections, and given each section a summarizing heading (see Gen 2:4, Gen 5:1, Gen 6:9, Gen 10:1, Gen 11:10, Gen 11:27, Gen 25:12, Gen 25:19, Gen 36:1, Gen 36:9, Gen 37:2). Like the headers in this document they summarize what is coming next. Unlike the headers in this document they are not separate from the text but flow with it. (Incidentally, most of these headers come in the form, “These are the generations of… .” Extrapolating this pattern backwards, we are reminded that before there were any generations of men, there was the beginning.)
Genesis 1 verses 8 and 10 strongly support this view. It is in the second and third day that God actually creates and names the “heavens” and the “earth” themselves, as summarized in verse 1. (If you are reading from the NIV, note that “sky” in verse 8 is the same word as “heavens” in verse 1.) Likewise 2 Peter 3:5 says, “[the] earth was formed out of water and by water,” from which I conclude that it is proper to say that the earth was formed on the third day rather than prior to the first day. Therefore the word, “Let there be light,” really was God’s first act of creation. Subsequently the heavens came into existence and the earth was formed by His command.
The Scriptures are consistent. Of all that has come into being, nothing came into being apart from the Logos of God.