Philosopher and atheist Bertrand Russell once said, "There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our thoughts." As so often happens, here the truth is confused with error. The poverty of Russell's thought begins not with the idea that all things must have a beginning but his own failure to see the value of that beginning.

Unfortunately, many Christians today find themselves spiritually impoverished, if not bankrupt, because they, like Russell, devalue Moses' account of the Creation. Impoverishment comes to those who fail to mine Genesis 1 for the theological treasure buried there just below the surface. Bankruptcy falls upon those who, in a bid to be intellectually acceptable, belittle the Creation account, who doubt the veracity of the account, who give the text no more credence than they would Aesop's Fables. Both approaches fail to appropriate the riches of Genesis 1 because they have, like Bertrand Russell, mistakenly assumed that the story of the beginning is valueless.

The account of God's creating the world comes first in the biblical record for greater reasons than simply explaining how the world came into being. The Creation is the opening act of God's redemptive play. The Creation introduces the reader to the key players in this great drama. It sets the theological stage upon which the rest of history will be played out. Thus, there is no understanding the remainder of Scripture, if we don't understand the beginning.

In the beginning God is introduced. God, Moses writes, "created the heavens and the earth" (Gen 1:1, ESV). He is Elohim, the creator God. This is the God with whom the Israelites would have to deal and this is the God with whom we must deal today.

If we stop there, if we think no more deeply about God than the fact of the creation, we've missed the point. Moses has something profound to say about the character of this God who creates.

He is God alone. He needs no help to create.  He requires no consort as did the gods of the Canaanites. Instead, God operates according to His own will and creates according to His own great power. Moreover, this verse tells us that God is preexistent. He was before the universe. He was before time. He created them both. He created them ex nihilo, out of nothing - no big bang, no primordial soup, just God, His divine imagination, and His boundless power. Now that's a God worth worshiping.