4. IDENTIFYING THE DOCTRINAL ISSUES AND IMPLICATIONS IN GENESIS 1:1-25

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. God is self-existent and independent. 

Contrary to many religions, Genesis 1 also indicates that there is a true and personal differentiation in the eternal God. So, verse 2, God’s breath (Spirit) hovered over the water and, verse 26, ‘let us make man in our image’ suggests that there is both Word and self-reflection in 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. To us poor self-blinded sinners, Jesus reveals that the one and only eternal God has a name – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – one God in three Persons has always existed for eternity. And the clarity of the eternal Triune God’s self-disclosure also means that God is not hidden, mystical, impersonal, or unknowable. 

The reality that God is clearly and eternally Triune has several implications. For example, Genesis 1 reveals that God’s eternal Triune being is not a distant monad (a single supreme reality or source from which all things emanate), as taught by ancient Neoplatonism or contemporary Buddhism and some forms of Hinduism. Monism insists that pure divinity must be understood as a simple, undifferentiated substance which we cannot know. It argues that the word or thought of God is divine, but only in a secondary sense. For ‘God’ and his ‘word’ or his ‘self-thought’ are two things, and pure divinity must be a simple ‘one.’ In monism then, the divinity of God’s thought must be conceived of as ‘divine,’ but at a step down from pure divinity, only in a secondary sense. Monism thus means that in all the different revelations of divinity we see in the world, whether Hindu or Christian or other, we do not know the real “God,” God in himself. But Genesis and the rest of Scripture teach that the eternal, real God has from his eternal Triune being created a universe which fosters and supports relationships, with God and with each other. Hindus respect Jesus as an enlightened one and will listen with respect to his Scriptures. Yet as we, and they, listen to Jesus, we can be lovingly led to the heart of God: ‘All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest’ (Matt 11:27-28).

Furthermore, the eternity of God also means that materialism is mistaken because it claims that only matter has existed for eternity. Carl Sagan, the cosmologist, opened his TV series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, with this grand assertion: ‘The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.’¹Available at https://youtu.be/AUFlLBX9Bq0?feature=shared [accessed 18 April 2024]. That is the message of materialism. It says that there is no God, no spiritual realm. It argues that matter is all that matters! So, the Nobel Laureate, Francis Crick asserts: ‘“You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”’²Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (Simon & Schuster, 1994), 3; emphasis added. Of course, the key words are “no more than.” Scientists who believe in Jesus Christ also believe our thoughts have something to do with electrons moving around inside our brain, but Crick wants us to believe that we are reducible to that fact. He would argue that therefore we have no purpose, no reason, no soul; we are merely electronic interactions. And if philosophical materialism shapes how people see the world, then it cannot but impact the way that they live. As the Apostle Paul points out in Romans 1, when we fly in face of all the evidence about God in the world around us, we end up living for created things rather than living for our Creator. But the Bible tells us that it is our Sovereign Creator who has existed for eternity, and not matter.

God Alone is Creator

God’s eternal nature is underscored by a second glorious truth Genesis 1 tells us: God alone is Creator. As we saw earlier, the Bible tells us from the outset that God created everything, out of nothing, and by his Word. It is, therefore, unsurprising that we see early Christians addressing God as the Sovereign Creator of ‘the heavens and the earth and of the sea and everything in them’ (Acts 4:24), and observe the apostles preaching about a God who, having ‘made the world and everything in it,’ is ‘Lord of heaven and earth’ (Acts 17:24). Genesis 1 reveals the almighty power of God in bringing all the universe into being through his will as expressed in his Word. It also underlines God’s good character since creation is so beautifully good and perfectly ordered. This should lead us, as part of his creation, to adoration, honour, praise, and thanksgiving in equal measure.³D. Broughton Knox, Selected Works, Volume 1: The Doctrine of God (Matthias Media, 2000), 176-177.

The exclusive Creatorship of God has several implications. For example, it exposes the problem with polytheism and the error of accidentalism. 

(1) Against the pressure of polytheism to see spirits or divinities, either good or evil, determining how the world around us works and how it impacts us, we can instead see that God is the one Creator of all. God has himself directly created the world and he has done so in person. And our incomparable God is eternally good and eternally sovereign in securing the future of that creation. To that end, we see God’s role and claim as the one, the only Creator, exercised against sin, death, and the devil in the death and resurrection and present heavenly rule of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the incarnate Word of God, by whom the Father created and upholds the universe. We do not have to appease spirits or evil as it tempts us to acknowledge its false claim of power, but just say ‘no’ to them (James 4:7. Cf. 1:12-15). A ‘Christian’ demonology is a contradiction in terms. Paul tells us to ‘remain innocent of evil’ (Rom. 16:19). 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.

(2) The truth that it is God who has created the universe exposes the error of accidentalism. This is the view of those, like Bertrand Russell, who believe that everything in the world is the result of no Creator, no guiding hand, but rather the result of pure chance. A big bang? Just chance, they claim. Natural selection? Random accident, they argue. Richard Dawkins, a prophet of natural selection, argues that natural selection, ‘has no vision, nor foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.’⁴Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (Longman, 1986), 5. And yet even Charles Darwin himself once wrote in a letter to William Graham on 3 July 1881, ‘Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance.’⁵Darwin Correspondence Project, ‘Letter no. 13230,’ available at https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-13230.xml [accessed 18 April 2024].

Isaac Newton, considered one of the greatest and most influential scientists in history, was also in fact a convinced believer in God, and once built a model of the solar system to help him with his studies. The story is told of how an atheist friend came to visit him one day, admired the model and asked Newton who made it. Newton could not resist replying that nobody had made it and it had appeared by accident. When his friend objected and pointed to the evident craftsmanship of the model, Newton explained the purpose of his answer. If he could not convince his friend that this replica of the solar system had occurred by accident, how could his friend believe that the real solar system, with its far greater complexity and design, could have appeared by chance?⁶Kent Hughes, Genesis, 32.

Contemporary scientists who believe in Christ have demonstrated some of the more obvious flaws with accidentalism. For example, John Lennox has shown that, although Dawkins and others argue that scientific belief and religious faith are different because the former is based on evidence and the latter lacks any evidence, many of their claims are actually much more like statements of faith.⁷John C. Lennox’s God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Lion Hudson, 2007). See also John C. Lennox, Gunning for God: Why the New Atheists are Missing the Target (Lion Hudson, 2011), 37-50. For a more popular analysis of the ‘New Atheists,’ see David Robertson, The Dawkins Letters: Challenging Atheist Myths (Christian Focus, 2007). I am indebted to conversations with Revd Dr Andrew Sach about the relationship between Science and Christianity. Science, fundamentally, is a way of discovering things about the world. So, scientists observe the world, formulate a hypothesis to explain what they observe, and then, by experiments, seek to falsify that hypothesis and to refine it accordingly. There is nothing, per se, in the means of enquiry known as science that necessitates an atheistic worldview or that argues against Christian belief. Nor is there any data that has been discovered by the scientific method that argues against the claims of Jesus Christ. 

The real conflict that exists, then, is not between science and Christianity but between different philosophies, different worldviews or, dare one say, between different ‘faith’ positions. There are certain aspects of accidentalism that are not the results of a scientific method but are, in fact, beliefs that are brought to the table that are part of their atheistic worldview. A truly scientific approach would instead look at the evidence for the fine tuning of the universe, for example, and ask whether it supports accidentalism or a view of God as the Creator. 

Recently, confronted with the mass of data for design in the universe, it has been fashionable for those who believe everything was made by chance to pivot to a belief in a multiverse, which argues that if there are an infinite number of universes then it is likely that one would have the conditions necessary for life to exist. However, of course, that view is not something that is an observable, repeatable, or verifiable theory! It may be interesting, but it is not something that can accurately be called a scientific theory. Again, it is something that sounds more like a faith position, whose adherents choose to believe in it because they do not want to exercise their faith in a Creator God.    

The fundamental choice is not between creation and evolution but between creation and chance or accident. And the Bible insists that God made everything. Perhaps the real reason we struggle to accept that God alone is Creator is found in Genesis 1’s third glorious truth about God.

God Alone is Sovereign

God’s awesome power is evident throughout Genesis 1. ‘God is depicted as autonomous Master who has by his uncontested word commanded all things into existence and ordered their design and purpose.’⁸Mathews, Genesis 1-11, 65 God simply speaks and the whole universe comes into being. So, verse 3 is literally: ‘And God said: ‘Let light be … and light was.’ The cosmos created in just four Hebrew words! And each of the six days starts with, ‘And God said: Let there be,’ and whatever God says, happens. It is very compelling.  

God’s sovereignty leaves no vacancies for tribal gods or territorial gods or for the current form of secular individualism, sovereignty of the modern self which determines its own identity, and before which all external reality must bow or be cancelled. Genesis 1 tells us that the true and living God created everything from nothing by speaking and that he alone is the Lord of all and King of creation. 

Grasp those glorious truths and we won’t be surprised to see Jesus Christ control nature in the Gospel accounts as only God can do – able to feed 5,000 people and to still a storm with a word. It is said that you can tell how powerful someone is by the impact of their words. A newly qualified teacher may try to get calm in the classroom but his appeals for quiet can easily fall on deaf ears. However, when the Headteacher walks in and says: ‘QUIET!’, all is calm. You may know someone like that. Well, when God speaks, when Jesus speaks, it is so.

As with the truths that God alone is eternally Triune and God alone is Creator, the sovereignty of God in creation also has significant implications. It reveals the hubris of humanism. That is the view that says there is no God and that we are at the centre of the universe. To a humanist, God is simply the product of our minds and imaginations and so we are the masters of our fate. Here is the poet Charles Swinburne: ‘Glory to man in the highest for man is the master of things.’⁹Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Hymn of Man,’ in Songs Before Sunrise (Heinemann, 1917), 93-104. After all we have seen in Genesis 1, it is awful arrogance, isn’t it? And its consequences are almost immeasurably painful and evil, and unstoppable. As Jonathan Glover made clear in his book, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, to our shame, the last century surpassed all others in torture, displacement, and slaughter.¹⁰Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (Pimlico, 2001). There has been none like it. When God is dead, all things are permissible.

It is indeed ironic that, as our society seeks to deny God in his goodness as the cause and rationality of all true being, and to assert its own self-made morality and, in particular, a view of self-grounded identity, we discover that it is not content and happy as it does so. On the contrary, we discover astonishing levels of anxiety,¹¹‘It is wholly unsurprising that studies show an increase in anxiety, depression and mental illness in young people today. Rather than being a demonstration of “snowflake”-ism it is a wholly understandable reaction to a world whose complexities have squared in their lifetimes’ (Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019, 177)). a high suicide rate,¹²‘The total age-adjusted suicide rate in the United States increased 35.2% from 10.5 per 100,000 in 1999 to 14.2 per 100,000 in 2018, before declining to 13.9 per 100,000 in 2019.’ In 2019, ‘Suicide was the second leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 10 and 34, and the fourth leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 35 and 44.’ National Institute of Mental Health, ‘Suicide,’ https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide [accessed 18 April 2024]. and a remarkable inability to forgive.¹³Murray cites several well-known cases, amongst them the journalists of the New York Times, Quinn Norton and Sarah Jeong. These cases illustrate both the inescapable polarization and the necessary, perpetual enmity characteristic of contemporary culture. In contrast, Murray argues that forgiveness is necessary, although its cultural return may be difficult. ‘As one of the consequences of the death of God, Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw that people could find themselves stuck in cycles of Christian theology with no way out. Specifically, that people would inherit the concepts of guilt, sin and shame but would be without the means of redemption which the Christian religion also offered. Today we do seem to live in a world where actions can have consequences we could never have imagined, where guilt and shame are more at hand than ever, and where we have no means whatsoever of redemption’ (Murray, The Madness of Crowds, 177).

By contrast, the Bible teaches us that God alone is the eternally Triune Creator, and so God alone is the Sovereign Ruler, not only transcendent above all he has made but legitimately and effectively ruling over it too. We are not masters of the universe; God is because he made it all. The fullness of the revelation of Jesus Christ the only Son of the Father is built on the Creator’s eternal goodness and sovereignty. In that context we can deal with our spiritual insecurities, of whatever type, whether arising in the context of contemporary secular culture or traditional religion. Through Jesus Christ, in the power of the Spirit, the Almighty Father addresses and redresses our spiritual insecurities.

—

• 1
  Available at https://youtu.be/AUFlLBX9Bq0?feature=shared [accessed 18 April 2024]. ↩︎
• 2
  Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (Simon & Schuster, 1994), 3; emphasis added. ↩︎
• 3
  D. Broughton Knox, Selected Works, Volume 1: The Doctrine of God (Matthias Media, 2000), 176-177. ↩︎
• 4
  Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (Longman, 1986), 5. ↩︎
• 5
  Darwin Correspondence Project, ‘Letter no. 13230,’ available at https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-13230.xml [accessed 18 April 2024]. ↩︎
• 6
  Kent Hughes, Genesis, 32. ↩︎
• 7
  John C. Lennox’s God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Lion Hudson, 2007). See also John C. Lennox, Gunning for God: Why the New Atheists are Missing the Target (Lion Hudson, 2011), 37-50. For a more popular analysis of the ‘New Atheists,’ see David Robertson, The Dawkins Letters: Challenging Atheist Myths (Christian Focus, 2007). I am indebted to conversations with Revd Dr Andrew Sach about the relationship between Science and Christianity. ↩︎
• 8
  Mathews, Genesis 1-11, 65 ↩︎
• 9
  Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Hymn of Man,’ in Songs Before Sunrise (Heinemann, 1917), 93-104. ↩︎
• 10
  Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (Pimlico, 2001). ↩︎
• 11
  ‘It is wholly unsurprising that studies show an increase in anxiety, depression and mental illness in young people today. Rather than being a demonstration of “snowflake”-ism it is a wholly understandable reaction to a world whose complexities have squared in their lifetimes’ (Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019, 177)). ↩︎
• 12
  ‘The total age-adjusted suicide rate in the United States increased 35.2% from 10.5 per 100,000 in 1999 to 14.2 per 100,000 in 2018, before declining to 13.9 per 100,000 in 2019.’ In 2019, ‘Suicide was the second leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 10 and 34, and the fourth leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of 35 and 44.’ National Institute of Mental Health, ‘Suicide,’ https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide [accessed 18 April 2024]. ↩︎
• 13
  Murray cites several well-known cases, amongst them the journalists of the New York Times, Quinn Norton and Sarah Jeong. These cases illustrate both the inescapable polarization and the necessary, perpetual enmity characteristic of contemporary culture. In contrast, Murray argues that forgiveness is necessary, although its cultural return may be difficult. ‘As one of the consequences of the death of God, Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw that people could find themselves stuck in cycles of Christian theology with no way out. Specifically, that people would inherit the concepts of guilt, sin and shame but would be without the means of redemption which the Christian religion also offered. Today we do seem to live in a world where actions can have consequences we could never have imagined, where guilt and shame are more at hand than ever, and where we have no means whatsoever of redemption’ (Murray, The Madness of Crowds, 177). ↩︎