Introducing God - Genesis 1:1

Alfred the Great was the king of England at the end of the 9th century A.D., the 800s. During the time of his reign, he led England to war against the Vikings, who attempted unsuccessfully to conquer England.

There’s an old story about Alfred. It’s hard to say for sure if it’s true, but it was definitely possible. The story goes that during the war, Alfred was on the run from the Vikings and he hid in the home of a common English woman, a woman who did not know who he was. Alfred needed time to think and make battle plans, but the woman asked him to watch some loaves of bread that she was baking over the fire.

As he was lost in thought, the bread burned. When the lady returned and saw the ruined bread, she let him have it, scolding him, completely unaware that he was her king. She did not recognize him. Granted, he did not tell her who he was. But she did not honor him as she should have and, no doubt, as she would have if they had been properly introduced.

In a similar way, the Scriptures teach us that we need to be introduced to God. We do not inherently recognize Him for all that He is. What I mean is, we do not innately render to God the respect that He deserves. We are perhaps aware of God, but we do not naturally honor Him as we should.

Our sinful nature keeps us from seeing the whole truth about Him, and our self-centeredness drives us into all sorts of desires and behaviors that put us at odds with our Creator. And so, as a result, the devotion that belongs to God alone, we often give to other things. The honor that should be directed only toward God, we divide between God and something else. The worship owed to our Creator, we naturally give to created things.

Each of us is guilty of this, from the greatest of us to the least. In fact, the Scripture says, “No one does good, not even one....all have sinned.” It seems like a hopeless situation. But the one true God is a God of hope. He has not abandoned us. He has told us and shown us what we need to know about Him.

He has introduced Himself to us. We have all that He has made; we have the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, but above all, God has introduced us to Himself through the person and work of Jesus Christ. In Colossians 1 in the NT, the apostle Paul writes that in Jesus, “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” Pastor John Calvin helps us understand this. He writes that in Christ, “God has fully revealed himself, so far as God’s infinite goodness, wisdom, and power, are clearly manifested in Him.” Jesus made peace between sinners and God by the blood of His cross so that those who trust in His perfect life and receive His righteous record by faith in Him can know God.

Through Jesus, we are introduced fully to God and can begin to honor Him as we should; We can give to God the worship that He deserves. But when we are introduced to God, what will we come to know about Him?

This first sentence of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, chapter 1, verse 1, begins to answer this question for us. You can find an outline of this sermon on page 6 of your worship guide. When we are introduced to God, we come face-to-face with the reality that God is the only one whose existence is self-dependent, whose ability is incomparable, and whose dominion is absolute. And as the truth about God becomes clearer to us, He will transform us into people who truly honor Him. So let’s look at each of these together.

Now, to understand Genesis we have to keep in mind who wrote it and when it was written and how the original listeners and readers understood it. We need to think about the original purpose that Genesis served. We recognize that Moses wrote not only Genesis, but also the next four books of Scripture. He was active as the leader of Israel around the 15th century B.C., and during that time, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Moses wrote down these things, and scribes would later update some of the grammar and add some names and places for historical clarity.

Jesus confirmed that Moses wrote Genesis, and the apostles understood this as well. They also understood the manner in which God gives His Word, including Genesis, to His people. I referred to this last Sunday. The apostle Peter explained it this way: “No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along (or moved inwardly) by the Holy Spirit.” Paul agreed, stating “All Scripture is God-breathed,” inspired by God.

So through Moses, God gave His people the book of Genesis. He gives it now to us, but He first gave it to the Israelites through their leader. We learn in the second book of the Bible, called Exodus, that the Israelites were once slaves in ancient Egypt. God saved them from slavery, not because of anything they had done, but because of His grace. God appointed Moses to lead them out of Egypt and to form them into a nation, leaving behind the false gods of Egypt to know and worship the one and only true God.

God introduced Himself to the Israelites. Through His miraculous works, and through their experiences after leaving Egypt, and through all of that put into writing, along with the history that led to their salvation from Egypt, God introduced Himself to them. God taught them who He is. Having been born and grown up in Egypt, they had many false ideas about God.

And so they did not honor God as God. God had to teach them, and so He began, you see there in verse 1, “In the beginning.” This tells us a lot about God. God created our world at the beginning of time. God was there at the beginning, and so, before the beginning, there was God. God was already present. No one made God.For us to honor God as we should, we must see, first of all, that God is the only one whose existence is self-dependent. He is self-existent. His existence, His being, is not dependent on any one else.

Dr. R.C. Sproul, a wonderful scholar and pastor now gone on to be with the Lord, talks about this. He writes, “What makes God different from people, from the stars, from earthquakes, and from any other creaturely thing is that God, and God alone,...exists by His own power. No one made Him or caused Him. He exists in and of Himself. This is a quality that no creature shares. People are not self-existent; neither are cars or stars. Only God has the concept of self-existence.” As a result, God cannot not be. He has always been and will always be. God’s power to be exists within Himself.

As you approach God in a worship service, or as you pray, or as you read His Word, do you consider that you approach the only one whose very existence depends on no other? He was here not just before the universe began, but before time as we know it began! So there was God, before the beginning of time, existing, having always existed; and then, notice the next words of verse 1. Moses writes, “God created.”

The words used here by Moses are fascinating. First, he uses a general word which we translate as “God.” This is not the personal name of God, which we see later in Genesis and pronounce “Yahweh.” But though its a general word, we also have to keep in mind that in our present day, the general word “God” has been emptied of much of its meaning. People use the word flippantly all the time.

But in the context of Genesis, this general reference to God is majestic, used with utmost reverence. To honor God as we should, any mention of God ought to be treated in a special way. This is why Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Father, who is in heaven, hallowed (in other words, deeply respected) be Your name.”

And next there’s this word which we translate “created.” God created. The ancient Hebrew people had many words referring to human actions of making something or forming something. But this word which Moses uses here refers to the act of creating or fashioning which only God can do. This Hebrew word is only used in Scripture when God creates. The reason why is that unlike mankind, who makes things out of what already exists, the self-existent one true God can create out of nothing. And to honor God as we should, we must understand that when we approach God, we draw near to the only one whose ability is incomparable. Out of nothing, God created.

Many years ago my parents had a 1973 Mach 1 Ford Mustang. It was powder blue. and it had an 8-track tape player in it. My dad told me once that when he saw the 8-track, he thought, “Nothing could ever beat that technology.”Of course, it wasn’t too long before cassettes, then CDs, then digital files, and now we stream music wirelessly.

Mankind can and will continue to build and make amazing things. But always, we need pre-existent material. Understand, every basic element and process was spoken into being by God from nothing. Hebrews 11 says, “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God.” Now, that’s power. That is ability.

Among people, we often compare our abilities to one another. Many folks do the same things; some are better than others. But none compares with God. Not even close. No matter what you believe about where the universe came from, you have to acknowledge that the basic components could not create themselves. And follow me here: what I’m saying is that God created out of nothing, but something did exist, actually, not something, but Someone. The self-existent Creator.

Think about what you put your hands to each day, what you apply your energy toward, as you make or do or build or fix or create. All the building blocks you work with were provided by the only one whose ability is incomparable. Do you humble yourself before Him? Do you ever catch a glimpse of the magnitude of what God has made and how much you depend upon what He created? He created it out of nothing! And look at the last words of verse 1, God created “the heavens and the earth.”

Again, I want to talk about the Hebrew language here. This is important. Those ancient people had no single word which correlates to our word “universe,” in other words, “everything that exists.” Instead, they had a group of words to describe that concept. That group of words is “the heavens and the earth.” In the beginning, God created the universe, God created everything.

It is often argued that we cannot know if there is a God or not, because we cannot see Him. Folks ask, “If God is real, why won’t He show Himself to us?” But notice how God is described in this first sentence of Genesis. God is the one who acts. In the coming verses, we see God speak, and we come to understand that He is a spiritual being, not bound within the confines of the physical universe He has made and on which we depend.

One scholar makes a statement about the God of Genesis 1:1 that I believe addresses that question about our ability to be sure of God’s existence. He says of God, “His reality is seen in His acts; He is not an entity who can be conceived of apart from His works.”

This is why, in good conscience, the apostle Paul proclaimed in Romans 1, that because of “ungodliness and unrighteousness” people “suppress the truth” about God. “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

Why won’t show Himself? He has shown Himself in His creation of all things. Creatures cannot logically think of themselves apart from the creation in which the Creator put them. You must understand this if you would honor God as you should, you must recognize that He made everything, and as a result He is the only one whose dominion is absolute. He made all things, and so He rules all things. He is sovereign over all. He is in control of all.

So then, who are we to God? Psalm 100 in the OT says, “Know that the LORD, he is God!

It is He who made us, and we are His.” Why wouldn’t we know that He is God, that He made us, or that we are His? Put differently, why wouldn’t we perceive these things? Why wouldn’t we understand this? Well, we have touched on that throughout this worship service; I reviewed it when I began to preach. Paul said it plainly: we hold back the truth, and so we don’t see the glory of God. We see ourselves and our circumstances, we see our wants and needs, we see our fears and doubts, we see what makes us angry or jealous, we see what might offer us a sense of safety or security or pleasure.

My friends, we must see God. All those things get in the way of seeing God. And maybe you remember what I said earlier, that it is in the person of Jesus Christ that the whole fullness of God dwells bodily. The NT says that Jesus was with God in the beginning, in fact He was and is God come to earth. All things were made through Him, and without Him not even one thing was made. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible. Jesus is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

When we look to Jesus, we look to the one with self-dependent existence, incomparable ability, and absolute dominion. This is why Jesus deserves all of our worship. Not only does He exist in this way, but He came to live life in our place. In his human nature, which He took on in order to be like us, Jesus fully honored God throughout His entire life. He never committed a sin.

But He died unjustly; He died a sinner’s death. Why? To satisfy the wrath of God that you and I deserve. He deserved honor; we deserved punishment. But He paid our debt. The Creator of the universe made peace with us through blood at the cross. This is why Jesus deserves all honor and worship. This is why only as we look to Him will we be changed within by Him.

We must see God, so that we may honor Him. And we see the fullness of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Have you surrendered to God, the only God, who introduces Himself to us by His works, by His Word, and ultimately, through His Son?

Bow with me in prayer.