Two Ways News is a weekly collaboration between Phillip Jensen and Peter Jensen – a newsletter and podcast on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today (subscribe at twoways.news).
In Genesis 1 we are confronted with a ruler who is over and above every empire and nation because he is the Creator of all things. In this episode Peter and Phillip discuss the meaning and implications of the opening words of Genesis 1.
The previous episode is The Foundations of Genesis Part 2 the next episode is Christ and Creation.
CREATOR, KING AND COUNTRY
The importance of the first five words.
Phillip Jensen: Peter, in the previous episode, you mentioned our older brother and that he told you about the opening verses of Genesis.
Peter Jensen: Yes, “In the beginning God.”
Phillip: What did he say about that and what struck you back then?
Peter: It was as if that sums up the Bible in a way. Go back as far as you like, and God is there. And that’s gospel. That is really good news.
Phillip: But that’s not what struck you as a teenager.
Peter: What struck me as a teenager or as a child actually was, “In the beginning God.” Your telling me God is the all-powerful in this world? I thought the British Empire was the most powerful thing in the world. The British Empire for which we fought in the Second World War or at least our uncles did.
I’ll never forget the arrival of the Queen in 1954 on the HMS Gothic, coming in through the heads to what was a quarter of the population of Sydney spread out around the Harbour to welcome her in.
Phillip: It’s hard to imagine the British Empire as so important now, because we’re now anti-imperial, anti-colonial. The idea that we would do anything for the Empire is almost unimaginable. But we don’t have an Empire now, do we?
Peter: It turned into the British Commonwealth of Nations and who’d fight for that? The Empire captured our imagination and we were trained to sing the national anthem, God Save the King, God Save the Queen. We were trained to honour the monarch. When our troops went to fight, they went to fight for the Empire.
Phillip: We see it in the war memorials. They fought for God, Empire, and Country. Empire even came before Country. We were part of the Empire. The Empire was our life. We were part of this incredible thing that covered the world.
Phillip: The Empire was a purpose of life, a significance, what we contributed to, when all our goods and services went to serve the Empire prior to the European Common Market.
Phillip: But what was our elder brother saying?
Peter: He was saying that the most important words are “In the beginning God.” God overruled. God was far more important as a power than the Empire. It’s not that the Empire denied God because we were taught “God and Empire” but the two things ran together as though God smiled at the Empire and in any case was less important than the Empire. Whereas we may give our lives for the Empire, serve and honour the Empire, in fact our true service, our true praise and honour belongs to someone else.
Phillip: I think the fifth word is more important than the first four. Because in a sentence, the verb is the heart of the sentence. And the verb of the sentence is ‘created’. “In the beginning, God created.” God without creation is not the God of the Bible. He is the Creator. That very first verse sees him as being the Creator of all things. Now, there are other things you could say about God. He is the Father. He is loving. He is kind and just. The very first thing is that he is the Creator, and that is how we’re to relate to him.
Peter: My view would be a slightly different one. What those first four words gave me was a sense of the essence of things before we get to the doing of things. So, I would say: essence before action. What “In the beginning God” spoke to me about was that there is something, not nothing. You can live in a world in which you think there’s nothing. There’s no reason for the world. The explanation for the world is just nothing. You can live in a world in which there is nobody, whereas this verse says to us there is somebody. Essentially, there is one, not many. You could see the world as a theatre of competing agencies, of conflict between agents who are powerful, spirits for example. But I found out when I heard that verse, that there is one, there is someone, and that is very good news because in the end, you don’t have to deal with 50 spirits, you’re dealing with one, and one who’s consistent. Something, not nothing, someone, not nobody, one, not many, but also present, not distant. From the beginning, there is God.
Phillip: But that one God is the Creator. There is one God, and his creation is out of nothing. The word “create” itself is an interesting word used here in the Hebrew. It occurs about 40 times in the Old Testament. It’s always God as the subject. He is the Creator, and he, in his actions, is bringing something into being. He initiates its existence.
Peter: If you and I create something we’ve always got to use something to create it. We have to have an object. We have to have something to create out of. Whereas “In the beginning God” speaks to us of a God who has created from nothing. It is the beginning before all things. He creates the world as we know it. He creates by speaking. He speaks things into existence. That is again an indication of creation, what’s called technically “ex nihilo,” creation out of nothing. There are several verses in the New Testament which point in the same direction There’s a verse in Hebrews, for example chapter 11. There’s a verse in Romans that speaks to the same point. We can read John 1 in the same way as well.
Phillip: Revelation 4:11
“Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.”
It’s quite explicit. He brings into existence all things, which makes him the sovereign Lord and master of all things, the owner of all things, the person who creates things. They are his. They are his, for his purposes too. Why did he create them? That’s his choice. The creation doesn’t tell the creator why the creation is there. It’s the creator who could tell the creation why it’s there, because he makes it for his purpose. But when he makes all things and brings them into existence, it means there’s nobody else whom he is answerable to. There’s no other part of the universe that he’s answerable to. He is the sovereign Lord, master, king of the whole universe because he’s brought it out of nothing. That flows from the meaning of it.
Peter: Two things flow out of that. First, it tells us something about us. It tells us something about the created order, and that we are utterly dependent upon this one. And it tells us something about God, that he is not one of us. He does what we could not possibly have done. And therefore, we owe him everything. It is clear from the very beginning that our business is to praise and worship this one God who has done what we could not do and will never be able to do. It’s an indication of the sheer majesty and the wonder of God himself. “In the beginning God created”.
Phillip:
“Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power because you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.”
This truth leads to meaning, purpose, understanding life itself. There are all kinds of alternatives. You mentioned that this shows that he is not part of us. He is over and above us. There’s an alternative view of the world called pantheism, which sees that God is in everything and everything is God, and not creator. The pantheistic kind of sense of God does not have us answerable to him. We’re not answerable because we are God, as everything else is God, as the cows and the monkeys, the trees and the grass are God. There are lots of these alternatives. Polytheism has many different gods who are involved in something of our creation or our ruling and who themselves are answerable to each other and who fight and quarrel with each other. But the one that strikes me as most common for us Westerners is “accidentalism.”
Peter: Is that a word? It’s a good word. Explain yourself.
Phillip: It is the naturalist, it’s the materialist who sees that the whole universe is an accident. It just happened. The Big Bang banged. We do not know what was before it. We do not know why it did. We don’t know where it came from. It is not the work of any personal God like creation is. It just is. The whole universe, and every element of it, is just an accident.
Peter: You’re robbing us of purpose and meaning. You realize that, don’t you?
Phillip: Most people who believe it don’t realize it. The atheist, the materialist, who says there is no God, there is no creator, but then has to explain the world. Many people think the opposite of creation is evolution. Accidentalism is the opposite of creation. Whether God created the world with evolution or without evolution, that’s a mechanism of how the world has developed. But where did it come from? Why is it here in the first place? That’s the question. Is it an accident, or was it created? Here are the two Western alternatives, I’m leaving aside pantheism and polytheism which are other alternatives like that, but for the Western mind there’s the question of whether it is an accident, or it was created. The question you put is absolutely right. If it is an accident, then it has no meaning and no purpose.
The atheistic system which we all know of best is Marxism. And Marxism is very interesting because it provides meaning and purpose. It creates a sense of a utopia towards which we are going, in which all people will treat each other well and where goods and services will be shared equally amongst all. There’s a utopianism which is a sort of, materialistic view of heaven as an eschatology in Marxism. And it’s so powerful that men and women gave their lives for it and gave their lives to it. But it’s all based upon accidentalism.
Peter: The sense of meaning and purpose has to be created to fill the void left by accidentalism.
Phillip: Consider Professor Richard Dawkins. We reach in our search for meaning until we suddenly realize that it is we who actually provide the purpose in a universe which otherwise would have none. He’s an accidentalist and yet he recognizes that humans find meaning and purpose. But the meaning is the Marxist one. We just make it up. Professor Thomas Nagel is a philosopher of New York University and law school. In 1987 he said in one of his books What Does It All Mean?
What’s the point of being alive at all? There is no point! It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t exist at all or if I didn’t care about anything, but I do. That’s all there is to it. It’s ridiculous to take ourselves so seriously. On the other hand if we can’t help taking ourselves so seriously perhaps we just have to put up with being ridiculous. Life may not only be sorry, life may not only be meaningless, but it is absurd.
Here is the philosophy of accidentalism because if we’re an accident we have no meaning we have no purpose. But, we are so built with meaning and purpose, that we’ve become ridiculous. In fact we become absurd because we’re trying to live a meaningful purposeful life when there is no meaning and purpose. We would be better off being like the animals that don’t actually ponder the purpose of life.
Peter: If it’s true that there is a creator, and if it’s true that there is but one creator, and if it’s true that he’s not human, if he’s not just a sort of us projected into the heavens, then what do we owe him?
Phillip: Everything must be the answer.
Peter: We’ve got to understand the reality of who we are and that flows out of the reality of who God is. Isaiah 45:18-19
For thus says the Lord who created the heavens (he is God!) who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it empty, he formed it to be inhabited!): “I am the LORD, and there is no other.
I did not speak in secret, in a land of darkness; I did not say to the offspring of Jacob, ‘Seek me in vain.’ I the Lord speak the truth; I declare what is right.”
That is interesting because it shows God has purpose.
Phillip: We intuit that there is purpose and meaning and morality, but the basis for it, the intellectual basis for it, is in the creation. And my problem is with the people who so glibly want to get rid of God, but do not realize that in the process, they are getting rid of any intellectual basis for morality and therefore for law and society and the rest. There is this fundamental philosophical question of how you move from the ‘is’ to the ‘ought’. This is not being answered by how I want to think. People don’t want God. That’s a profound rejection of God that lies at the heart of this atheism. So Thomas Nagel wrote further in a book in 2000 called The Last Word:
I’m talking about the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience being strongly subject to this fear myself. I want atheism to be true, and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God, and naturally hope that I’m right in my belief, it’s that I hope there is no God. I don’t want there to be a God. I don’t want the universe to be like that.
Peter: That is so honest. That’s why I say that “In the beginning God created” is the gospel. It is one of the most wonderful sentences ever written because it tells us what the meaning of this world is and that the one who has made the world has purpose.
