The opening verse of Genesis is one of the most consequential sentences ever written: ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’ In four Hebrew words — b’reshit bara Elohim — the Bible establishes the fact that determines everything else: before anything else existed, God was. And from that prior existence, God freely and powerfully brought the universe into being.

What Genesis 1:1-25 teaches about God is the basis of the entire Bible. Three truths in particular demand our attention: God alone is eternally Triune; God alone is Creator; and God alone is Sovereign.

God Alone is Eternally Triune

The chapter’s opening expression, ‘In the beginning, God,’ tells us that before anything else existed, God was and always had been. Unlike everything else, God was before creation. God is eternal. God was not made. And while everything else depends on God, he himself depends on nothing.

Genesis 1 also hints at a true and personal differentiation within the eternal God. In verse 2, God’s breath (Spirit) hovered over the waters. In verse 26, God says ‘let us make man in our image’ — a remarkable plural that suggests both Word and self-reflection within God. As the Bible’s plotline unfolds, it teaches us that the breath of God is his eternal Spirit and the Word of God is his eternal Son. The one and only eternal God has a name — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This has the deepest implications. It means God is not a distant monad — a single undifferentiated supreme reality of the kind taught by ancient Neoplatonism or contemporary Buddhism. Monism insists that pure divinity must be a simple ‘one’ that we cannot truly know. But Genesis and the rest of Scripture teach that the eternal, real God has from his eternal Triune being created a universe that fosters and supports relationships, with God and with each other. Through Jesus, we can be lovingly led to the heart of God: ‘Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest’ (Matt 11:28).

God Alone is Creator

God alone is Creator. He created everything, out of nothing, by his Word. This is why early Christians addressed God as the Sovereign Creator of ‘the heavens and the earth and of the sea and everything in them’ (Acts 4:24). Genesis 1 reveals both the almighty power of God in bringing the universe into being and his good character, since creation is so beautifully good and perfectly ordered.

Against polytheism, Genesis 1 insists that God himself directly created the world, in person, without working down a mediating chain of other spiritual beings. God has himself created the world and done so without intermediary. Creation is good because God made it that way and in and through his Son, God continues to sustain and direct it to its perfect end.

Against accidentalism — the view that everything is the result of pure chance — Genesis 1 insists that the universe bears the marks of a purposeful Creator. Even Charles Darwin once wrote: ‘the Universe is not the result of chance.’¹ John Lennox has demonstrated that many claims of committed accidentalists are not the results of scientific method but are, in fact, statements of faith — a faith that resists the evidence of design in the universe.²

God Alone is Sovereign

‘God is depicted as autonomous Master who has by his uncontested word commanded all things into existence and ordered their design and purpose.’³ God simply speaks and the whole universe comes into being. Verse 3 is literally: ‘And God said: Let light be … and light was.’ The cosmos created in four Hebrew words. And each of the six days starts with ‘And God said: Let there be,’ — and whatever God says, happens.

God’s sovereignty leaves no vacancy for tribal gods, territorial gods, or the current secular individualism of the self-determined modern person. It reveals the hubris of humanism — the idea that there is no God and we are at the centre of the universe. As the poet Charles Swinburne declared: ‘Glory to man in the highest for man is the master of things.’⁴ After all we have seen in Genesis 1, the arrogance is breathtaking — and its consequences, as history shows, almost immeasurably painful. Genesis 1:1-25 is a powerful antidote to small-minded thinking about God. It introduces us to God as our eternal Triune Sovereign Creator, and drives us to adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and praise. The staggering truth that God is our Sovereign Creator should lead us to love God more deeply, and to long to live in God’s world, in God’s way, and for God’s glory.

1. Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 13230,” available at https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-13230.xml. ↩︎
2. John C. Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Lion Hudson, 2007). ↩︎
3. Kenneth A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11 [Christian Standard Commentary] (Holman Reference, 2022), 65. ↩︎
4. Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Hymn of Man,’ in Songs Before Sunrise (Heinemann, 1917), 93-104. ↩︎