God is….a creator

Anyone who’s ever picked up the Bible is probably familiar with the creation story in Genesis 1.

Six days in which God created the heavens and the earth, and then the seventh day on which he rested. For each day the writer describes a different aspect of the material world: light and darkness; sky and sea; land and plants; sun, moon and stars; aquatic and bird life; and finally terrestrial life including human beings.

It’s one of the best-known stories in the Bible and one that you’ll likely be familiar with even if you’ve never been to church in a long time, or at all.

What does this story tell us about God?

Most people probably read these opening chapters of the Bible and think that the writer intended to give us a description of how God made the world, the miracles he performed to get from nothing at all to the planet as we know it, and how long it took.

Some people argue that this means the world and everything in it were created in exactly six 24-hour days, roughly 6000 years ago. Other people suggest that these ‘days’ are meant to be symbolic for much longer time periods, perhaps thousands or even billions of years, which might accord with what science suggests about the Big Bang and the origin of the universe.

My view is that Genesis 1 isn’t trying to tell us either of those things. I don’t think it was ever intended to teach us how God created the world or how long it look. Those are not questions which people at the time Genesis was written would have had any interest in knowing the answer to.

It’s likely these questions wouldn’t even have occurred to them. It’s only really been since the scientific revolution that people have been concerned about having a material explanation of the creation.

So if that’s not the lesson of Genesis 1….what is?

One of the major themes of the Old Testament – one which features heavily in God’s commandments and in the narratives of God’s people trying and often failing to serve him faithfully – is that Yahweh is the only true God.

The other nations’ gods were presented early on in the Old Testament as weak and powerless in comparison to him, and later on (as the people’s understanding of monotheism became more mature) these ‘gods’ were presented as not existing at all.

I’m going to suggest that theme is what’s being taught in Genesis 1. For a Christian (or a Jew or a Muslim) living in 2025, monotheism is taken for granted. There’s only one God and he’s in command of everything. The natural world was created by him to serve his purposes and remains entirely under his control.

The people living at the time Genesis was written did not have those same certainties. They were surrounded by other cultures who thought that natural entities such as the sun and moon needed to be worshipped, otherwise they might stop shining, or that the spirit of the local river needed to be appeased, otherwise it might dry up.

They believed these things either were gods or were controlled by gods – and these were not kind, loving gods who wanted to provide for humanity. These were capricious, fickle deities who didn’t care one jot about human beings, but if given the right sacrifices could sometimes be persuaded to give us what we needed.

Enter Genesis

Genesis 1, I suggest, was written specifically to counter those beliefs. It shows natural elements such as the sun, moon, stars, weather, fresh water and animals – things which humans needed for their daily survival – were not gods, but were created and controlled by the one true God.

Not only that, but they’d been created and appointed specifically for the purpose of maintaining human life.

If you wanted the sun to shine or the rain to fall on your crops, instead of worshipping the sun god or the rain god, you’d appeal to the one true God who was in charge of both sun and rain.

This also taught that these natural elements were not random or liable to disappear for no reason. They were part of a predictable, consistent, orderly creation, the result of a logical and rational mind.

The reason why the scientific revolution took place in Christian Europe and not elsewhere in the world is specifically because Christian Europe had the worldview that nature is ordered and rational and follows intelligible and predictable laws which we can observe and calculate.

One Christian thinker has observed “People expected to see law in nature because they believed in a divine law-giver”.

Modern science would never have happened if we still believed nature was entirely random or controlled by capricious deities.

For me, Genesis 1 is not a story about how the world was created or how long it took, but about WHO created the world and appointed it as a place for humans to live, and how that God is very different from any of the other ideas people had about gods at the time.

In the modern day most people completely overlook this because those ideas of randomness and caprice in nature simply don’t exist any more.

This fits in perfectly with the theme of Yahweh being the only true God, a theme which – as I said earlier – is found right throughout the rest of the Old Testament.

Suggesting that Genesis 1 is trying to describe the material origins of the universe sets it apart from the rest of the Bible, since that’s never a concern anywhere else in the scriptures, and has no real relevance to God’s message of salvation.

So

God is a creator. That means the world we live in is a reflection of his own ordered and rational mind. It means he’s given us this world to inhabit and enjoy (and take care of!). It means that the natural sciences are simply a way of investigating the world God created and the laws he put in place to govern it.

We should never be afraid that a scientific discovery will somehow oppose or contradict our faith in God. Why would it? We’d only be discovering something he created long ago. Genesis 1 was never intended to give a proto-scientific description of how it was done.

God is a creator – but this world we live in now is not the pinnacle of his creation. He’s going to create a new, even better version of it when Jesus returns. And if we have faith and repent of our sins, we can be there, as newer and better versions of ourselves.