“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.“
No historian was here to witness creation, so skeptics naturally assume the early parts of Genesis were cobbled together from a variety of ancient myths.
There are good reasons to be skeptical of ancient cultures’ creation myths. Most of them are wildly imaginative and physically and logically impossible.
But the Hebrew Bible is different. In every other culture throughout the ancient world, from the very earliest to the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans, they worshipped a multitude of gods. To ancient peoples, everything about nature was related to a god, starting with the sun, moon, planets, and stars. Those were followed by dozens more gods who controlled thunder, rain, fertility, the harvest, every important aspect of their lives that was out of their control. Even though they thought their gods could control nature, no culture in the world believed their gods had created matter and nature.
And this brings us to what’s so different about the Hebrews and their Bible. It was natural for people to believe in gods that animated and controlled nature. It was the only way for them to try to make sense of their world.
It was certainly not natural and not expected for one small group of nomadic herders, alone in all the world, to believe in one God, Yahweh, who created the natural world including all of life. And it wasn’t natural to believe the world had a beginning when the rest of the world, without exception, assumed the world had always existed.
After years now of working through my questions and doubts, I’m confident that the Bible has been inspired by God and the Genesis creation story could only have been written by God, through Moses. It contains all the truth we need to understand about creation, expressed just as God wants it.
Prose works to explain things like science, or processes like how to bake a cake. Deeper concepts need symbols and pictures, so God described the process of creation using poetry – symbolic language and word pictures.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
Genesis 1:1-5 NIV
In just the first five verses of Genesis, we find three important word pictures: God Created the World out of Nothing, Creation Began in the Mind of God, and Creation Separated Light from Darkness.