Gen 1:1 The Sound of Music

Gen 1:1

Time to make a start. It's now or never. The bible. Chapter 1. Verse 1. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth".

Last term at King's we preached through the first few chapters of the book of Genesis. I had the privilege of kicking it off with this verse. I remember the excitement. I thought "I may never get to preach on this verse again in my life". There are so many verses in the bible, 31,103 in fact, and all of them God's word and therefore worth preaching but surely there is something extra significant about the first. I really wanted to do the best I could with it. I started with a very familiar song from the sound of music. Julie Andrews introduces it like this:

Let's start at the very beginning
A very good place to start
When you read you begin with A-B-C
When you sing you begin with do-re-mi

She was right, the beginning is a very good place to start and that's why the bible starts there. I decided to leave the controversial stuff about the evolution of female deer, and the arrival of drops of golden sun to Toby the following week and linger on this first amazing verse in this amazing book. It declares the most basic truths that are as simple and as fundamental as ABC. If we don't start here we get nowhere.

This passage tells me several things. The main one though is that it's all about Jesus. God is the Hero of the story and as we read through to the NT we discover him fully revealed in the person of Jesus. It's not "in the beginning Marcus" although I can sometimes think as if it did. It doesn't start "in the beginning money" although I sometimes spend like that, or even "in the beginning my family" although they are so important to me. All these things, me, money, marriage find their proper place as I focus on Jesus. "In the beginning God".

I read a brilliant thing by John Piper recently: "keeping first things first makes second things better". (He was actually talking about marriage and how "staying in love is not the first task of marriage", its keeping the promises we made before God to one another. As we do that staying in love is "the happy overflow of covenant keeping for Christ's sake."). It's a great principle and means that as I put Jesus first and focus on him everything else gets to be the best it can be.

Everything was made by God, and for God, or as the NT puts it "by Jesus and for Jesus" (Col 1:16). That includes me except that now I belong to God not just because he made me but because he bought me back with his blood. This Jesus who made me for himself, was prepared, even after I had forsaken him, to buy me back with his very life. The one who created me was prepared to become a man himself and step into his creation to rescue me.

What a start!