The God Who Speaks

Read it: Genesis 1–2

Every story has to start somewhere, and the Bible starts with God. Not with a world that was already there, not with a war between gods, not with an accident. Just this: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).

Before anything else existed, God did. He didn’t need a universe. He wasn’t lonely or bored. He made it because He chose to, and everything that follows in the Bible, all sixty-six books of it, rests on that first sentence. If God made everything, then everything belongs to Him. And everything, including you, is here on purpose.

Spoken into being

The chapter opens on darkness and emptiness: “the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters” (Genesis 1:2). Then God speaks: “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3). And there was light.

That pattern repeats like a drumbeat. God said ... and it was so ... and God saw that it was good. Over six days He shapes what was formless, separating light from dark, sky from sea and sea from dry land. Then He fills what was empty: plants and trees, sun, moon and stars, fish and birds, animals of every kind. Other nations in the ancient world told creation stories in which the sun and moon were gods to be feared. Genesis calmly calls them “two great lights” (Genesis 1:16), lamps God hung in the sky to mark days and seasons. Nothing in creation is God except God.

You may have heard Christians argue about these days. Some believe they were six ordinary days, not many thousands of years ago. Others read the “days” as long ages, and others again see the week as a framework the writer used to arrange the account, the way an artist frames a picture. Faithful Christians who love the Bible hold each of these views. What they all agree on matters far more: God alone made everything, by His word, and He made it good.

Made in His image

On the sixth day the rhythm changes. Instead of “Let there be,” God says, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). Then: “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27).

In the ancient world a king might set up statues of himself in the far corners of his land, to show whose land it was. Being God’s image means something like that. Humans are God’s living representatives on earth, made to reflect what He is like and to care for His world on His behalf. That’s why His first words to them are a blessing and a job: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28).

Every person you will ever meet carries that image: the popular kid and the one nobody sits with, the baby not yet born, the old man who can no longer remember his own name. That is where human worth comes from. Not from looks, grades or followers. From God.

At the end of the sixth day God looks at all of it, “and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). On the seventh day He rests and blesses that day (Genesis 2:2–3). Not because He was tired, but because the work was finished.

The garden

Genesis 2 zooms in and tells the story again, close up. “Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). Notice how personal that is. Dust and breath. We are made from the same stuff as the earth, and yet we live because God breathed into us.

God plants a garden in Eden and places the man there “to cultivate and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Work is not a punishment; it was part of paradise. There is one boundary. Adam may eat freely from every tree except one: “you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17). God is generous, and He is also God. Living well in His world means trusting that He knows what is good.

Then, for the first time, something is “not good”: “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). So God makes the woman, and the man bursts into the Bible’s first poem: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23). They belong together, and they stand before God and each other with nothing to hide: “the man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25).

Hold on to this picture, because the whole Bible keeps coming back to it: God and people living together in one place, in friendship, with no fear and no shame. In the very next chapter it breaks. The rest of the story is God’s long, patient work to bring it back, and on the Bible’s last page there is a garden-city with a river, and beside it “a tree of life” (Revelation 22:2).

Where Jesus is in this

John begins his Gospel by deliberately echoing Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). The word God spoke at creation, John says, was not just a sound. It was a Person. “Through Him all things were made, and without Him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:3). Paul says the same of Jesus: “All things were created through Him and for Him” (Colossians 1:16).

Jesus is also the true image that Adam was made to be. “The Son is the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). When we look at Him we see what God is like, and we see what a human being was always meant to be. And the God who spoke the world into being would one day step into it Himself: “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us” (John 1:14).

Think about it: If every person you meet carries God’s image, who do you most need to start treating that way, and could that include yourself?

Go deeper: The Key Teachings of Andrew Murray — Murray’s most searching books begin not with sin but with creation, and this chapter explains why: we were made to depend on God every moment, as a stream depends on the fountain that keeps pouring into it, and our true glory is not independence but being filled by Him. Start with chapter 4, “The Glory of the Creature”.