The God Who Speaks

Read Genesis 1:1–2:3 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light!
— Genesis 1:3

Genesis 1 is one of the most concentrated chapters in all of Scripture. In thirty-one verses, plus the first three verses of chapter two that belong with it, the Bible establishes the doctrine of God, the doctrine of creation, the goodness of created order, the dignity of humanity, the institution of marriage, the rhythm of work and rest, and the foundation of every doctrine that will follow.

We open it now. The series introduction laid out our commitments; Session 1 watched the risen Christ teach the Emmaus disciples how to read these Scriptures; Session 2 oriented us to the book of Genesis as a whole. Now the text itself.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was without shape and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the watery deep, but the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water.

We met verse 1 last session — the four-fold opening claim. A beginning. A God. An act of creating. A totality. Now verses 2 and 3 take us a step deeper.

The earth was without form and void. The Hebrew is tohu wabohu — formless and empty, unfinished, not-yet-something. The earth, as God’s creation begins to unfold, is raw material. It is there, but it is not yet what it will become. Darkness was over the face of the deep. No light. No order. No life. The deep waters cover everything.

And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. The verb is striking. Hovering — the Hebrew merachefet — is used elsewhere of an eagle fluttering over its young, brooding, protective. The Spirit of God is over the unformed earth, present, brooding, on the verge of acting. This is not a deistic God who set the universe in motion and walked away. This is a God personally present at the very beginning, His Spirit poised to bring order out of chaos and life out of nothing.

And then God speaks. And God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light.

This is the pattern of the chapter, and the pattern will hold for thirty-one verses. And God said… and it was so. Ten times in this chapter God speaks, and ten times what He says comes into being. God creates by speaking. Creation is the result of divine speech.

This is one of the most important things the Bible tells us about how reality came to be. Other ancient creation accounts pictured the world being made by gods fighting other gods, by a god cutting up the body of a defeated enemy, by a god giving birth to lesser gods. Genesis 1 has none of this. God does not struggle. God does not contend with rivals. God does not labor. He speaks. He speaks, and the universe leaps into existence at His word. The Word of God is the means by which everything that exists was brought into being.

The New Testament will pick this up explicitly. The opening of John’s Gospel — written in deliberate echo of Genesis 1 — declares: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. John is saying: that Word by which everything was created — that Word is a Person. The Word who spoke “Let there be light” is the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. The agent of creation in Genesis 1 is the same agent who walks the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. The Christ we read about in the Gospels is the One through whom the universe was made.

This is the first commitment of our series, applied to the first chapter of the Bible. Christ is in Genesis 1. He is not predicted there; He is active there. The “Let there be” is His voice. The creation that springs into being is His work. We cannot read Genesis 1 honestly without acknowledging that we are reading about the Christian Triune God: the Father who initiates, the Word (Son) who speaks creation into being, the Spirit who hovers and gives life.

Luther saw this clearly. In his Lectures on Genesis, he insisted that this chapter cannot be read apart from the Trinity. The Father is named first. The Spirit hovers over the waters. The Word — the Son — is the means by which everything is made. The doctrine of the Trinity is not imposed on Genesis 1 from later church tradition; it is there, in the text, for the eye trained by the New Testament to see it.

A Pattern with Purpose

If we step back from the individual days and look at the whole chapter, we discover that Genesis 1 has a deliberate architecture. The seven-day account is not a random sequence of divine acts. It is a carefully designed pattern.

Look at the first three days. Day 1: God separates light from darkness. Day 2: God separates the waters above from the waters below, creating sky. Day 3: God gathers the waters below and lets dry land appear, then fills the dry land with vegetation. The first three days are days of forming. God takes the unformed earth — tohu wabohu — and gives it shape. Light and dark. Sky and sea. Land and sea. The major realms of creation are set in place.

Now look at the next three days. Day 4: God puts the sun and moon and stars in the heavens — the realm of light and dark created on Day 1. Day 5: God fills the sky with birds and fills the seas with fish — the realms of sky and sea created on Day 2. Day 6: God fills the dry land with animals, and finally with humanity — the realm of land created on Day 3.

The pattern is unmistakable. The first three days form the realms. The next three days fill the realms. Forming, then filling. Days 1 and 4 belong together. Days 2 and 5 belong together. Days 3 and 6 belong together. The chapter has a structure as deliberate as the dome of a cathedral.

What does this tell us? It tells us that creation is ordered. Creation is not a chaotic accident. Creation is the work of a designer who knew what He was doing — who set up the spaces and then filled them with the inhabitants suited to each. The universe is the work of intentional design, not random shuffling.

It also tells us about the One who designed it. The God of Genesis 1 is a God of order, of beauty, of intention. He is not careless. He is not random. He does not improvise. He builds.

And then there is the refrain. Seven times in this chapter, God evaluates what He has made and pronounces it good. And God saw the light, that it was good. And God saw that it was good. And God saw that it was good. The refrain runs through the chapter like a heartbeat. And at the end, on Day 6, when God looks at the totality of what He has made, the evaluation intensifies: And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.

This is a foundational claim. Creation, as God made it, is good. The material world is good. The physical body is good. Food and drink and sleep and work and rest are good. Marriage is good. The earth is good. The sky is good. The animals are good. The stars are good. All of it is good, because God made it good.

The Lutheran tradition has held this with great seriousness against every form of teaching that would deny it. Against the Gnostics, who taught that the material world was a mistake or the work of a lesser god — Genesis 1 stands as the reply. Against the medieval ascetic traditions that treated the body as an enemy of the spirit — Genesis 1 stands as the reply. Against modern materialism that treats the universe as the meaningless product of chance — Genesis 1 stands as the reply. The creation is good. It is good because God made it so, and God does not make bad things.

Luther’s Small Catechism, in its explanation of the First Article of the Creed, captures this in the warmest possible terms: I believe that God has made me and all creatures; that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still preserves them. The doctrine of creation is not abstract. It is the doctrine that this body, this breath, this day, this food, this family — all of these are the gift of a Giver. Genesis 1 is the foundation of that confession.

When the fall comes in chapter three, sin enters the world and the goodness of creation is wounded. But it is wounded, not destroyed. Even after the fall, Paul will write that everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving (1 Tim 4:4). And when Christ comes to redeem creation, He does not abolish the material world; He renews it. The new heaven and the new earth at the end of Revelation are still heaven and earth. The goodness of Genesis 1, marred but not erased, will be restored.

In Our Image

Day 6 begins with the creation of land animals — and then takes a remarkable turn. Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”

Three things to notice immediately.

First, the deliberation. Every other act of creation in this chapter is performed by simple speech: Let there be… Let the waters… Let the earth bring forth. But here, before God makes humanity, there is a pause. Let us make man. The deliberation signals that something special is about to happen. Humanity is not just another category of creature. Humanity is the climax of the six days of creation, the act for which the whole chapter has been building.

Second, the plural. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Who is the “us”? The rabbinic tradition has sometimes read this as a “plural of majesty” — a way for God to speak about Himself with grandeur. The Christian tradition, reading Genesis with the New Testament in hand, has heard something more. The “us” is the Triune God: Father, Son, and Spirit, deliberating together. Luther read it this way, as did the church fathers before him. The Word who spoke “Let there be light” — the Son — is included in this divine consultation. The Spirit who hovered over the waters — is included. The Father — is included. The God of Genesis 1 is a community, an “us,” even before there are any creatures to be in community with.

Third, the image. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. The Hebrew words are tselem and demut. They overlap. Both convey the idea of resemblance, representation, likeness. Humanity is to be like God in some unique way — a way that the rest of creation is not.

What does the image of God mean? Volumes have been written. The major historical answers fall into a few categories. The image is rational — humans have minds that can think, reason, and know. The image is moral — humans have a conscience, a sense of right and wrong, an answerability to God. The image is relational — humans are made for relationship, with God and with each other; we are not solitary creatures but communal ones. The image is vocational — humans are placed in the world to do something, to rule and steward and cultivate.

All of these are true, and all of them follow from the text. Male and female he created them, the next verse will say — already the relational dimension. And let them have dominion, the verse after will say — already the vocational dimension. Humans are made like God in ways that no animal is.

But the deepest answer to what the image of God means waits for the New Testament. He is the image of the invisible God, Paul will write of Christ in Colossians 1. Christ is the true image of God. Christ is what humanity was made to be. The image we bear, marred by the fall but not erased, is the image that Christ bore perfectly — and Christ came to restore the image in us. To be a Christian is to be remade in the image of Christ, who is Himself the image of God (2 Cor 3:18; Rom 8:29).

The doctrine of the image of God is the foundation of human dignity. It is why human life is precious from conception to natural death. It is why no human being, regardless of race or ability or age or station, can be treated as less than fully human. It is why slavery is wrong, why murder is wrong, why dehumanization in all its forms is wrong. In our image, God said. The dignity of every human person rests on those four words. And Christ, the true image of God, dignifies humanity by taking humanity into Himself — the Word made flesh, dwelling among us, sharing our nature, restoring our image.

Male and female he created them. The image is not borne by males only or females only but by both, equally, fully. The complementarity of male and female is built into the original design. Marriage will be developed in chapter two; the equality of male and female before God as image-bearers is established here in chapter one. Both bear the image. Both are blessed. Both receive the dominion mandate.

Fruitful and Faithful

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply! Fill the earth and subdue it! Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that moves on the ground.”

Three commands follow the creation of humanity. Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion. These are humanity’s mandate in creation. They are not optional. They are the work humanity is made for.

Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The first command is about marriage and family. Humanity is to have children, to grow, to fill the earth with image-bearers. This is the divine charter of marriage and family. Children are not a burden imposed; they are a blessing commanded. The Lutheran tradition has held marriage in high honor partly because of this mandate. Luther himself, in marrying Katherine von Bora, embodied his conviction that marriage and family were not lesser callings but high callings — perhaps the highest. The Augsburg Confession in Article XXIII defends the freedom of clergy to marry on the basis, in part, that marriage is a divine institution given at creation. Genesis 1:28 is the verse behind that argument.

Subdue the earth. The second command is about cultivation. The unformed earth of verse 2 has been formed and filled; now humanity is to take it further, to develop it, to make something of it. Civilization, agriculture, architecture, science, art, technology — all of these are downstream of this command. Humanity is made to work, to build, to create. This is not a curse; the curse comes later. Work is part of the original design, given with God’s blessing.

Have dominion. The third command is about stewardship. Humanity is placed in authority over the animal kingdom. But this dominion is not license to exploit. It is the dominion of a steward, not a tyrant. The God whose dominion is the model is a God who creates and pronounces good and blesses and gives. The dominion humans are called to exercise is to mirror God’s dominion — gentle, productive, beneficent. The earth is humanity’s responsibility, not humanity’s possession. We will give an account.

And then comes the climax of the chapter. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. The seven-times-repeated good of the earlier days is now intensified to very good on Day 6. The whole of creation, with humanity at its crown, is pronounced very good by the God who made it.

There was evening, and there was morning, a third day.

The Seventh Day

The heavens and the earth were completed with everything that was in them. By the seventh day God finished the work that he had been doing, and he ceased on the seventh day all the work that he had been doing. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he ceased all the work that he had been doing in creation.

The seventh day is different from the others. The pattern and there was evening and there was morning, the X day breaks. The seventh day has no evening or morning recorded. The seventh day stands by itself.

God rested. The verb is shabat — to cease, to stop, to keep sabbath. God does not rest because He is tired; the eternal God is not exhausted by speaking the universe into being. God rests because His work is complete. He has finished what He set out to do. The world He intended is now made. He stops because there is nothing more to do.

This rest is not idleness. It is the completion of a work. It is the satisfaction of the artist who has finished the masterpiece, sat back, and seen it done. The seventh day is the day of completion, of fulfillment, of accomplished design.

God blessed the seventh day and made it holy. He sets the seventh day apart. The other six days are good and very good; the seventh day is holy. It is consecrated. It is given a status different from the working days.

This is the foundation of the Sabbath that Israel will later be commanded to keep. The fourth commandment in Exodus 20 will explicitly look back to this: Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God… For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. The pattern given at creation becomes the pattern given at Sinai. The rhythm of work and rest is built into the very fabric of the world by the One who made the world.

Christians have, from the earliest centuries of the church, gathered on the first day of the week — the Lord’s Day, the day of resurrection — for worship and rest. The Lutheran Confessions are careful here. The ceremonial Sabbath, with its specific day and its strict legal requirements, was fulfilled in Christ and is not binding on Christians as law. But the principle behind it — six days of work and one day set apart for worship and rest — remains a gift given at creation, honored in the church’s Lord’s Day pattern from the beginning.

The seventh day also points forward to something larger. Hebrews 4 picks up the Genesis 2 language and applies it eschatologically. There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Genesis 2:1–3 anticipates a rest that is more than weekly cessation of labor. It anticipates the final rest of God’s people in Christ — the rest that comes when the work of redemption is finished and the new creation begins. Jesus, after His finished work on the cross, rested in the tomb on the seventh day. He rose on the first day of the week — the eighth day, the beginning of the new creation. The seventh day of Genesis 2 is therefore a pointer forward to a fuller rest that is still being entered into, and that we will only fully know in the resurrection.

The chapter that began with the formless void ends with the holy rest. From tohu wabohu to qadosh — from chaos to consecration. The God who began the work has finished it. He has made everything good. He has set humanity over it. He has given the pattern of work and rest. And He has anticipated, in the seventh day, the final rest that Christ would secure.

Christ in the First Chapter

We commit to reading the Old Testament for Christ. The Emmaus road of Session 1 grounded that commitment in the practice of the risen Lord himself. But what does it look like, concretely, when we read Genesis 1?

It looks like seeing the Word through whom creation was made. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. The opening of John’s Gospel is a deliberate exposition of Genesis 1, with the christological identification made explicit. The God who spoke “Let there be light” in Genesis 1:3 is the same God whose Word would become flesh in John 1:14. The creation is the work of the Triune God, with the Son as the agent through whom everything was made.

Paul says the same. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Col 1:15–17). Christ is the agent of creation, the goal of creation, and the sustainer of creation. He is the for him of every “and it was good” pronouncement.

Hebrews makes the point a third time. In these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world (Heb 1:2).

This is not Christian decoration of a Jewish text. This is what the apostles, taught by the risen Christ on the Emmaus road and elsewhere, have come to see in Genesis 1. Christ is in Genesis 1. Not as a predicted figure in scattered verses, but as the active agent of every divine word that brings creation into being. The chapter that establishes the doctrine of creation is, at the same time, a chapter about Christ.

This is also where the doctrine of the image of God lands its deepest point. We are made in God’s image. Christ is God’s image. To be remade in Christ is to be restored to what humanity was made to be in the first place. The whole drama of redemption — Christ becoming flesh, dying our death, rising for our justification, sending His Spirit, working His likeness in His people — is the recovery of the image that was given on Day 6 and damaged by the fall. The first chapter of the Bible and the work of Christ form a single continuous arc.

When we read Genesis 1 with risen eyes, we do not see less than the text actually says about creation. We see more. The history is real. The doctrine of creation stands. And — at the same time — Christ is there. The Word is there. The image is there in its original form, awaiting both its damage and its restoration. Genesis 1 is the foundation of the whole story, and Christ is at the foundation.

Gathering the Threads

Genesis 1 establishes more theology in thirty-one verses than most chapters of Scripture do in a hundred. The God we meet here is the eternal God, who creates by His Word, with His Spirit hovering, in the beginning. He speaks, and the universe leaps into existence. He forms the realms in the first three days and fills them in the next three. He pronounces His work good, and very good. He creates humanity in His image — male and female together — to be fruitful, to cultivate, to exercise dominion as His stewards. He rests on the seventh day, blessing it and making it holy, setting the pattern for human work and worship.

For the Lutheran reader, this chapter is the foundation of the doctrine of God — Creator of heaven and earth, the One we confess every Sunday in the Apostles’ Creed. It is the foundation of the doctrine of creation as the good work of the good God, against every dualism that would treat the material world as inferior to the spiritual. It is the foundation of the doctrine of humanity — image-bearers, dignified, called to vocation. It is the foundation of the doctrine of marriage, given before the fall as God’s good gift. It is the foundation of the Sabbath rhythm of work and rest. And it is the foundation of the christological reading of all of Scripture — for it is the Word, the Son, through whom everything in this chapter is brought into being.

The Lutheran reader will also notice the pastoral note that runs through the chapter. God does not create reluctantly. God creates with joy. God creates with care. God creates with love. The first chapter of the Bible is a chapter of divine generosity. Everything that exists, exists because God gave it being out of His goodness. We are here because God wanted us to be here. The earth is here because God wanted it to be here. The whole of created reality is the gift of a Giver who took pleasure in giving.

Next session we will turn to Genesis 2 — the second account of creation. Where Genesis 1 has stood back and shown us the cosmic scope, Genesis 2 will zoom in and show us the garden, the man and the woman, the trees, the rivers, the first marriage, and the first command. The two chapters belong together as the front porch of the whole Bible.

For Discussion

The following questions are for group discussion or personal reflection.

Genesis 1 tells us that God creates by speaking. The Word goes forth, and what God says comes into being. How does this shape your understanding of the Word of God in your own life — the Bible read, the gospel preached, the absolution spoken?
The first three days form the realms; the next three days fill them. What does this architectural pattern in creation tell you about the God who designed it? How does it speak to questions of order, beauty, and meaning in the world we live in?
Seven times in Genesis 1, God pronounces creation good — and on the sixth day, very good. In what ways are you tempted to think of the material world (your body, your food, your work, your ordinary life) as somehow less spiritual than the “inner” life? How does Genesis 1 push back?
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. What aspects of the image of God in humanity strike you as most important, and why? How does Christ as the true image of God shape your understanding of what humanity is meant to be?
The seventh-day rest of God is the pattern for our weekly Sabbath and a pointer to the final rest of God’s people in Christ. Luther’s Small Catechism explains the Third Commandment by saying that we hold God’s Word sacred and gladly hear and learn it. How does this shape your participation in the Lord’s Day?
Genesis 1 is, when read with Christian eyes, a chapter about Christ — the Word through whom all things were made. What does it mean to you that the Christ you confess in the New Testament is the same Christ who spoke “Let there be light”?

Looking Ahead

Session 4 turns to Genesis 2 — the second account of creation. Where Genesis 1 has shown us the cosmic sweep, Genesis 2 zooms in on a particular garden, a particular man, and a particular tree. We will meet Adam formed from the dust, named by his work, given his vocation; the garden of Eden with its rivers and its fruit-bearing trees; the first command, the only command, given before the fall (you may eat… but you shall not eat); and the creation of the woman from the side of the sleeping Adam — a typology that Paul will pick up in Ephesians 5 as a picture of Christ and the Church. The chapter ends in marriage, and the marriage at the end of Genesis 2 is, in a real sense, the foundation of the marriage we will hear of at the end of Revelation.

Before next session, read Genesis 2 — the whole chapter, slowly. Watch for the rivers, for the trees, for the command, for the naming of the animals, for the side of Adam, and for the climactic bone of my bones speech that closes the chapter.

Closing Prayer

Lord God, who in the beginning spoke and brought light out of darkness, order out of chaos, life out of nothingness — we worship You. You are the Creator, and we are Your creatures. You are the Giver, and we are the recipients of Your generosity. You are the One whose Word called us into being and whose Word holds us in being still. We thank You for the goodness of creation: for sun and moon, for sea and land, for animal and plant, for body and breath, for marriage and family, for work and rest. We thank You for making us in Your image — and for sending Your Son, who is the perfect image, to restore in us what the fall has damaged. Teach us to honor what You have made. Teach us to read this chapter — and every chapter of Genesis that follows it — with eyes opened by Your Spirit, with hearts burning at the things concerning Christ. Through Jesus Christ Your Son, the Word through whom all things were made, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.