Theme Of Creation In The Bible

Introduction: In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Growing up in a fairly evangelical fundamentalist home, I was raised to read the Bible, especially the creation narrative(s) literally. God created the world in six days and then rested. In combatting the prevalence of Darwinian and evolutionary theory, my Christian educators expected

“Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.” Alistair McGrath observes how three of the predominant Hebrew Bible literatures—historical, wisdom, and prophetic— emphasize God’s creative acts. Job 38, for example, is arguably the oldest text in our Scriptures and details God’s intentional creative acts:

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have

The details of how that came about are perfectly vague, whether that be a Big Bang or cosmic spark. What matters is that God intentionally formed creation in God’s time and ordered in a specific cosmological way. In doing this, God established an order for how creation was intended to be. Additionally, to avoid the possibility of Gnosticism or Deism, I must address the way in which God created. Instead of God forming the world from pre-made matter, or out of chaos—such as was the case with Ugaritic gods such as Baal—God made creation ex nihilo or out of nothing. The Belgic Confession confirms this, saying: We believe that the Father, when it seemed good to him, created heaven and earth and all other creatures from nothing, by the Word…” The Hebrew people intentionally instructed, in their narrative, that YHWH Elohim was not working with preexistent matter. Rather, the Supreme Being, above all other gods, created everything and it came into being. This proved additionally helpful during the time of the Platonists when matter and forms were considered evil. As the notion of the dualism of matter and the ethereal bounced around among the ideologues, Christianity has understood God to have created everything good and without malicious intent as noted in Genesis 1:31 notes. “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” In