There is some consternation in confronting the Creation Story as described in the Bible’s first book, Genesis. With Christians and non-Christians alike. The main difficulty is that the stages of creating the universe as written there do not seem to match the visible evidence of our environment as perceived by scientists throughout the ages. And so the story is either outright discarded or the details are viewed as either a parable or allegory, to be manipulated, altered, or arranged to match what science has articulated.
In the first problems are that Genesis states that there is a God, and secondly that he manufactured all that we see out of nothing, i.e., prior to the time described matter did not exist and then it did exist.
It is easy to understand why non-believers would conclude the impossibility of these events so described, and one even might forgive Christians of coming to similar conclusions about the story. But I propose a conclusion that is simply based on Scripture from the perspective of being a Christian.
First a basic definition. A Christian is a person who believes in Jesus Christ as reported in the book of the Bible. And one believes this because, as explained in both testaments of the Bible, it is the Spirit of God that convinces one that He is and the Scriptures describe his story as fully as God wants us to know. A manufacture’s user manual, as it were. So a Christian reads the Bible and learns about God and his interaction with his creation, including mankind, in whose image man was made.
So my conclusion concerning the Creation Story is that it needs to be understood exactly as it is described, without reading between the lines, without embellishment. It is not a scientific textbook, it is a genuine description of how God made all that we see and experience. The story leads us to the conclusion that there is a powerful God who existed before all things and created everything we see, and that is was good just as he made it. He made the heavens and the earth, he created light, he formed living vegetation, and creatures that fly, that live on land and that swim in the seas all after their own kind, one implication of which things didn’t evolve from amino acids to higher forms of life.
The reason the Christian can believe the story as written is because he believes in the reality of miracles. He believes in the supernatural as detailed all over the narration of the Bible. The Christian believes in the virgin birth, the multitude of healing of diseases described in the Old and New Testaments, he believes that Jesus really did multiply the loaves and the fish, that he really did raise a number of people from the dead, including his own resurrection after dying on the cross and laying for days in a tomb. If one does not believe in any of these things, or of the claims Jesus made for himself, then nothing in the Bible can be believed and it is all a lie; and the creation story can’t possibly make any sense. It is only believed by Faith, as the eleventh chapter of Hebrews defines it as “the assurance of things hoped for.” And that assurance can only come supernaturally as God changed the human heart, and as Jesus says one is “born again.”
Indeed without such a change of heart, without being “born again”, it all seems nonsensical. How can God create something out of nothing? The answer is, the same way Jesus created a multitude of loaves and fish out of nothing. In a word, miraculously.
As Jesus told the multitudes who followed him, “he who has ears, let him hear.”
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Deut. 30:6 “Moreover the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you may live.
Isaiah 32:15 ff. Until the Spirit is poured out upon us from on high, And the wilderness becomes a fertile field, And the fertile field is considered as a forest.
Isaiah 44:3 ‘I will pour out My Spirit on your offspring And My blessing on your descendants’
Isaiah 59:21 “As for Me, this is My covenant with them,” says the LORD: “My Spirit which is upon you, and My words which I have put in your mouth shall not depart from your mouth, nor from the mouth of your offspring, nor from the mouth of your offspring’s offspring,” says the LORD, “from now and forever.”
Jeremiah 32:39, 40 “and I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear Me always, for their own good and for the good of their children after them. I will make an everlasting covenant with them that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; and I will put the fear of Me in their hearts so that they will not turn away from Me.”
Ezekiel 36:27 “I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances.”
Ezekiel 37:14 “I will put My Spirit within you and you will come to life, and I will place you on your own land. Then you will know that I, the LORD, have spoken and done it,” declares the LORD.
Ezekiel 39:29 “I will not hide My face from them any longer, for I will have poured out My Spirit on the house of Israel,” declares the Lord GOD.
Joel 2:28, 29 “It will come about after this That I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind; And your sons and daughters will prophesy, Your old men will dream dreams, Your young men will see visions. Even on the male and female servants I will pour out My Spirit in those days.”
[Scriptures taken from the New American Standard Bible © 1995]