Christ at Verse One

Ordinary Means · A Genesis Study · No. 2

Before we walk the text verse by verse, we need our bearings. What kind of book is Genesis? The question is not idle — how you answer it determines what you will see when you open Genesis 1:1.

Start with where it sits. Genesis is the first book of the Bible, and foundational in a way no other book is. Every doctrine taught later in Scripture has its first root somewhere here. The doctrine of God, in 1:1. Creation, in chapters 1 and 2. The image of God, in 1:26–27. Marriage, in chapter 2. Sin, the fall, and death, in chapter 3 — and the first gospel promise in 3:15. Covenant and justification by faith, in the Abraham narratives. Providence, in the Joseph story. The line of the coming Christ through Judah, in chapter 49. And when the apostles preach Christ, they reach back to Genesis constantly — Paul argues justification from Genesis 15, the Second Adam from Genesis 3; Peter draws baptism from Noah; Jesus Himself grounds marriage in Genesis 2. To know Genesis is to know the seedbed in which the whole Bible grows. To misread it is to start everything else already disoriented.

Then there is the opening claim itself:

Eleven words in English, seven in Hebrew. No preface, no argument, no defense of the author's right to say such a thing — just a declaration, and the most momentous one in the history of human language. And it establishes four things in a single breath. A beginning — reality is not eternal; there was a starting point. God — the verse does not argue for God's existence; it assumes it, and announces that God is the framework inside which everything else exists. God as Creator — the Hebrew verb bara' is used in this chapter only of God, and it names the bringing of being out of non-being. The God of the Bible does not shape pre-existing matter like the gods of the pagan myths; He calls into existence the things that are not. This is creation out of nothing. And the scope — the heavens and the earth, a way of saying everything that exists. Four foundations, one verse. (The Augsburg Confession's first article — on God, the eternal Creator of all things — is simply Genesis 1:1 compressed.)

And here is where reading with risen eyes begins to pay off — at the very first verse. Open the Gospel of John and listen:

John writes in the beginning on purpose. He wants you to hear Genesis 1:1 underneath his words — and he wants you to know that the Christ we confess is the One through whom the heavens and the earth were made. The opening of the Bible's first book and the opening of its fourth Gospel rhyme by design. So before we have even left verse one, Christ is here — not predicted from a distance, but present, the Word through whom God created all things. The God who creates in Genesis 1 creates through His Son.

One more thing to see before we begin: Genesis is not a loose collection of folk-tales stitched together with genealogies. It is a carefully structured book, and the structure sits on the surface once you know to look. The device is a Hebrew formula — elleh toledot, "these are the generations of" — and it appears ten times, each occurrence opening a new section: the heavens and the earth (2:4), Adam (5:1), Noah (6:9), the sons of Noah (10:1), Shem, then Terah and the Abraham cycle (11:27), and on through the book. The toledot formula is the language of record-keeping, not the convention of myth. Genesis presents itself as a structured account of real generations — a history with a spine.

So here is how we will read it: as the foundation on which the rest of Scripture is built; as history, since the book offers itself to us as genealogical record and not legend; and christologically, because John has already told us who the Creator is. We open Genesis 1:1 with risen eyes, knowing the Word through whom all things were made.

Next time we step into the first chapter and meet the God who creates the way no pagan deity ever did — not by struggle or by sex or by accident, but by speaking. The God who speaks.