2. IDENTIFYING THE MAIN STRUCTURE OF GENESIS 1:1-25

Genesis 1 is carefully structured as a piece of literature. Two main steps may be observed. First, in verses 1 and 2 – ^‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 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’ – the movement is from heaven to earth, from God to the reality he creates from nothing. Verse 2 opens with a bleak image: ‘the earth was without form and void,’ an expression of emptiness and desolation. This emphasises the fact that without God’s action, the earth had no shape, no substance, and no inhabitants. It reinforces the comprehensive and dramatic nature of God’s sovereignty in the act of creation. The intended direction and Divine nature of this heaven to earth movement is repeated again and again in Genesis 1:1-2:3. God spoke, God saw, God separated, and God called. God created everything out of nothing. God is the dominant actor. Yet, the text makes it clear that this action is not at a distance; it his direct and personal work. At the end of verse 2, it is in Hebrew ruah, literally the ‘breath’ of God (translated as ‘Spirit’) hovering over this void. And immediately, God’s breath carries his Word – ‘God said’ – and then repeatedly and throughout the following days of creation (10 times in 1:3-31).  

The second step to notice in Genesis 1 is that God forms the universe in the first three days and then fills the universe in the next three days. And, as can be seen in the table below, there is a striking parallel between days one and four, days two and five, and days three and six.¹The rise of modern science has raised again for us the question of the meaning of ‘day.’ Pre-modern theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas also questioned whether we were meant to read the six days here as six literal twenty-four-hour periods of time and have been joined by nineteenth and twentieth century defenders of orthodoxy, B.B. Warfield, J. Gresham Machen and others (cf. R. Kent Hughes, Genesis: Beginning and Blessing (Crossway, 2004), 23-24). Gordon Wenham notes, ‘There can be little doubt here “day” has its basic sense of a 24-hour period. The mention of morning and evening, the enumeration of the days, and the divine rest on the seventh show that a week of divine activity is being described here. Elsewhere, of course, “in the day of” and similar phrases can simply mean ‘when’ (e.g., 2:4; 5:1, etc.). Ps 90:4 indeed says that a thousand years are as a day in God’s sight. But it is perilous to try to correlate scientific theory and biblical revelation by appeal to such texts’ (Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, Thomas Nelson, 1987, 19). Wenham observes (39-40) that chronological sequence in our modern sense and scientific explanation are not the author’s purpose. The key point Genesis 1 is making is that God, in person, directly by his word, created everything, and in an ordered way that is good. This goodness flows from the goodness of God himself, who is the source of all being and meaning in the universe. Cf. Kenneth A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11 (Holman Reference, 2021), 89.

Over those six days, then, far from being without form and void, God formed the world and filled it. For example, God created light and dark on the first day and then on the fourth day, God created the sun and the moon as lights for the day and the night. So, we see in verse 16 – ‘And God made the two great lights – the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night…’ – God created the sun and the moon and then, in a great throw-away line, ‘… and the stars’! It is estimated that there are up to one septillion stars in the universe – that is a 1 followed by 24 zeros! Our galaxy, the Milky Way, alone contains more than 100 billions stars, including the sun.²NASA Star Basics, accessed on 30 April 2024, https://science.nasa.gov/universe/stars/#:~:text=Astronomers%20estimate%20that%20the%20universe,-studied%20star,%20the%20Sun. And God created them all. Nothing in material creation is outside of God’s good purposes for us.³In a future GT Exposition, we will examine Gen 1:26-2:3 and marvel at the creation of man and woman, the crown of God’s creation. Humanity uniquely bear God’s image. We are made to know God and enjoy a relationship with Him, living in life-giving dependence on God even as we rule over creation on his behalf. And after each day, God saw that what he had created was good – in other words, it was fit for purpose, the job was done. Mission accomplished. God had created the heavens and the earth, and he had done it directly, in person, without working down a mediating chain of other spiritual beings.

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• 1
  The rise of modern science has raised again for us the question of the meaning of ‘day.’ Pre-modern theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas also questioned whether we were meant to read the six days here as six literal twenty-four-hour periods of time and have been joined by nineteenth and twentieth century defenders of orthodoxy, B.B. Warfield, J. Gresham Machen and others (cf. R. Kent Hughes, Genesis: Beginning and Blessing (Crossway, 2004), 23-24). Gordon Wenham notes, ‘There can be little doubt here “day” has its basic sense of a 24-hour period. The mention of morning and evening, the enumeration of the days, and the divine rest on the seventh show that a week of divine activity is being described here. Elsewhere, of course, “in the day of” and similar phrases can simply mean ‘when’ (e.g., 2:4; 5:1, etc.). Ps 90:4 indeed says that a thousand years are as a day in God’s sight. But it is perilous to try to correlate scientific theory and biblical revelation by appeal to such texts’ (Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, Thomas Nelson, 1987, 19). Wenham observes (39-40) that chronological sequence in our modern sense and scientific explanation are not the author’s purpose. The key point Genesis 1 is making is that God, in person, directly by his word, created everything, and in an ordered way that is good. This goodness flows from the goodness of God himself, who is the source of all being and meaning in the universe. Cf. Kenneth A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11 (Holman Reference, 2021), 89. ↩︎
• 2
  NASA Star Basics, accessed on 30 April 2024, https://science.nasa.gov/universe/stars/#:~:text=Astronomers%20estimate%20that%20the%20universe,-studied%20star,%20the%20Sun. ↩︎
• 3
  In a future GT Exposition, we will examine Gen 1:26-2:3 and marvel at the creation of man and woman, the crown of God’s creation. Humanity uniquely bear God’s image. We are made to know God and enjoy a relationship with Him, living in life-giving dependence on God even as we rule over creation on his behalf. ↩︎