In the Beginning, God Created
In the Babylonian tablets called Enuma Elish, Marduk creates the earth when he rips apart the body of the sea goddess Tiamat, using the two halves to create the sky and the world.
In Norse mythology, Odin and his brothers slay the proto-giant Ymir, using elements from his corpse to shape the universe.
One Hindu creation account has Brahma using three parts of a lotus growing in the belly button of Vishnu to create the heavens, the sky, and the earth.
The ancient Chinese believed that elements of the universe had sprung from the dead body of the horned giant Pangu, who created the earth and the skies (and yin and yang) by forcing his way out of an egg.
In so many ancient creation accounts, the cosmos is a byproduct or an afterthought. The material is already there—a cosmic ocean, an enormous egg, a warring pantheon—and, somehow, the world as we know springs out of it.
A divine accident, a whim of fancy—and then, suddenly, us.
The Bible’s story is different.
In the Genesis account, God isn’t fighting for supremacy among rivals. He isn’t working against the living embodiment of chaos, or waiting for the goddess of darkness to lay an egg with material He can use.
The Father and the Word simply exist—supreme, unchallenged, and in perfect harmony. They aren’t born in the middle of a cosmic ocean—in fact, they create the ocean.
They create everything.
They don’t repurpose something that was already there. They don’t slay some preexisting monster and use its guts to shape the stars.
There is nothing, and then there is something—because God speaks.
That’s all it takes. No cosmic struggle. No divine squabble. No lesser gods wrestling for ascension.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
The earth isn’t a god. The heavens aren’t a god. The deep waters aren’t a god. They are created things—created by the God.
That might not strike us as profound, but in a world where literally everything could be conceived of as a fragment of divinity, this kind of claim was revolutionary.
Even when God creates the sun and the moon, they’re introduced to us as “two great lights” (Genesis 1:16). It’s not that Hebrew lacked a word for these two celestial bodies—it’s that those words had already become associated with false gods. By the time of the kings, we see priests burning incense “to Baal, to the sun, to the moon, to the constellations, and to all the host of heaven” (2 Kings 23:5).
The first chapter of the Bible is being abundantly clear:
God didn’t create any other gods.
He created things. The universe around us is made of things—not the slain bodies of divinity, not a pantheon in disguise—just things, called into existence by the greatness of the God we serve and no one else.
The day and the night exist because He decreed it. The waters were divided because He told them to divide. He set the stars burning in the sky, He pulled the dry land from the depths of the ocean, He filled His creation with living things—He called it all into existence when there was no existence.
I am the LORD, and there is no other;
There is no God besides Me.
I will gird you, though you have not known Me,
That they may know from the rising of the sun to its setting
That there is none besides Me.
I am the LORD, and there is no other;
I form the light and create darkness,
I make peace and create calamity;
I, the LORD, do all these things. …For thus says the LORD,
Who created the heavens,
Who is God,
Who formed the earth and made it,
Who has established it,
Who did not create it in vain,
Who formed it to be inhabited:
“I am the LORD, and there is no other.”(Isaiah 45:5–7, 18)
It’s easy to read right over one of the most important messages of Genesis 1:
When God created the heavens and the earth, He did so intentionally and of His own volition. The earth was not some accidental playground He stumbled across, but the express result of His divine will and power.
He did not create it in vain.
He did not create you in vain.
He is the LORD, and there is no other.
Until next time,
Jeremy
