God’s introduction of himself to the whole world is the creation story starting in Genesis 1:1. Since this is how God chose to introduce himself to everyone who would read or hear the creation story, including you and me, we ought to sit up and notice.
If you ever thought that the creation story was just a story without implications for your own life, you would be tragically mistaken. God chose to display his glory and his character in the creation story, and he also introduced us to the themes that would embrace the human race and carry us all the way to the end of time as we’ll know it.
Satan’s war against God, Salvation through Jesus Christ, the seven year tribulation and God’s final judgment are popular topics from church pulpits, but the story of the creation of the earth is most conspicuous by its absence at the pulpit.
Here’s one example of how God ties the creation story together with man and his need for salvation, with Jesus as our Savior and the coming White Throne Judgment. Looking at the first word of the first verse of the first book of the Bible, in Genesis 1:1, the word in Hebrew is “Barisheet.”
Barisheet in English is translated “In the beginning,” but Hebrew is a far more descriptive language than English or any other language. Hebrew is often called God’s language, because of its extraordinary detail and depth in expressing thoughts in the Bible. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and many early church fathers postulated that Hebrew was the first language.1The sixth century Joannes Malalas wrote that Adam spoke in Hebrew. Procopius of Gaza believed that Hebrew at the tower of Babel was the only one to preserve the first language of Hebrew because he resisted participating in the building of the tower. The theory does not stop at the sixth-century. The eighth-century historian and theologian, Bede, believed the initial language was Hebrew until the flood. The tenth-century Oecumenius, Bishop of Trikka, believed when Christ spoke to Paul on the road to Damascus, it was in the Hebrew language. The eleventh-century philosopher-theologian, Michael Psellos, referred to an ideology that placed Hebrew as the first common language. He also postulated that Pentecost could have been the speakers vocalizing in Hebrew while the audience heard it in their own language. He does not necessarily endorse either of these views. He was expressing a number of possibilities to interpret the Pentecost text found in the Book of Acts. Another eleventh-century writer, George Kedrenos, borrowing from the same tradition that Malalas subscribed to, suggested that the only language Adam knew was Hebrew. [Source: Charles Sullivan]
Hebrew consists of three primary methods of communicating: 1.) pictographic meanings with 22 pictograms or symbols to form ideas, 2.) numeric meanings which have meaning based on how that number is used in the Bible, and 3.) phonetic meanings.
Here’s what is so amazing. In the Hebrew there are five words nested within the single Hebrew word Barisheet. The five nested words within Barisheet in Hebrew include these expressions: 1.) inside a tent, 2.) son, 3.) created, 4.) head person or prince or the first, and 5.) strong destruction by fire.
In other words, what you have with Barisheet is one word with the meaning “in the beginning” and multiple words or meanings expressed within Barisheet.
Allow me to summarize this for you. “In the beginning” in Genesis 1:1 means in the full Hebrew expression that in the beginning God created the Heavens and the earth, that Jesus Christ is the prince and the savior who later we learn in the scriptures is the firstborn and that he is also the creator, and Jesus is also the beginning and the end, and Jesus will bring judgment in the form of fire in the end. Within these nested words is deep doctrine revealed in the rest of the scriptures, but clothed in the Hebrew in Genesis 1:1.
I don’t want to spend any more time on the Hebrew, because it’s not our primary focus here, but if you would like to walk through the exact Hebrew and the five Hebrew words nested within Berisheet, I recommend a one hour video entitled “Is the End of Days Prophesied in the First Word of the Bible?” by Rock Island Books.
My point in mentioning the full meaning of the first word in Genesis 1:1 is to jump start your mind so you will be open to learning about the creation of the earth as you never have before. My premise here is that there is much more to the Genesis story than you have learned in church.
God’s Themes All Tie Together
God ties all of his great themes together, including creation, the war Satan wages against God, salvation through Christ, and the final judgment—all of this in the very first word of the Bible, but that’s just the beginning of what God actually reveals about creation.
The whole Bible is interconnected and must be understood comprehensively as it is intended to fit together to display God’s master plans and purposes for the earth and for man.
The consistency of the Bible from Genesis through Revelation, and the extraordinary way God communicates is beyond anything humanely possible, and this is what makes the Bible so exciting to study. Just when you think you understand a chapter or parable, you discover another deeper connection to God’s Word in another book of the Bible, explaining or affirming doctrine or prophesy, or showing you that you have misunderstood something.
Reading the Bible without a deep understanding of the creation story would be like walking through one closet of a beautiful mansion and deciding what the rest of the mansion is like without seeing any more.
Or it would be like living your whole life in a remote village in a 900 square foot cabin without electricity or plumbing and assuming that people in the rest of the world live exactly the same way. That is how I grew up as a boy, and when I went away to college and saw how the rest of society lived, I was amazed.
Not knowing the creation story in detail and not knowing how it is connected throughout the rest of the Bible would be like going to an antique art auction and bidding on a painting without seeing the whole image and without knowing who the artist was. You would never do that, but Christians draw ultimate conclusions and form beliefs on major subjects without fully knowing the author of the Bible or what he intended.
Would you seek to understand God without knowing God’s introduction of himself? Would you expect to understand the great themes of the Bible without knowing the author? Should not that be the starting point?
Do You Know The True Creation Story?
Most Christians don’t know the true creation story, although they would swear on their mother’s grave they do. And it is a tragedy that almost no pastors in America preach the true creation story. They preach a blended version with some ideas from the Bible and some ideas from NASA. What I will share with you directly from the Word of God will shock you about how God actually described his own creation of the earth.
Scientism has crept into the pulpits and taken a pre-eminent role over the scriptures. Pastors who are totally sincere and devoted to the Lord don’t even realize how they have been deceived their entire lives about creation, and so they endorse and teach anti-biblical arguments from pseudo-science combined with a false religion called scientism. To learn how even pastors can be fooled, I urge you to read a book entitled, Destroying Strongholds of The Mind and a book entitled Scientism in The Pulpits.
Pseudo-science, parading as true science, has given people a reason to say, “Why do I need God? We know the beginning, and we know all the answers, and man is in control.” Do you recognize echoes of Satan’s temptation of Eve? The creation story preached and taught in America is Satan’s creation story, not the true creation story God described with great specificity in the Bible.
Satan Has His Own Creation Story
Whoever controls the narrative controls the people. Main street media2Main Street Media is one of many evil fronts that masquerades as an independent source of news and information. They work together with the rest of the evil alignment, which includes the vast majority of politicians, most of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the American government, most Federal agencies, most state governments at every level, most regulatory agencies at all levels, Universities and Colleges, the largest high tech corporations in America, hundreds of military defense contractors, some of the biggest non-profits in the world, the entire democratic party leadership and much of the republican party leadership, many cults and churches, and the list goes on and on. Satan has been busy organizing the world as the god of this world for thousands of years, and American Christians have done very little to slow him down. in America has controlled the narrative for decades, and the God haters of science who work with a frenzied passion to persuade people there is no need for God, have used every political and financial means to keep people from believing in the One True God.
To that end, Satan has his own creation story, and the world’s resources have focused on promoting that story since Copernicus.3Nicolaus Copernicus (19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was a mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon, who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. In all likelihood, Copernicus developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier. The publication of Copernicus’s model in his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres just before his death in 1543, was a major event in the history of science, triggering the Copernican Revolution.
The vast majority of Christians do not realize how incredibly detailed God’s description of his creation of earth really is. The Bible starts with the creation story in Genesis 1:1, expands its themes throughout the Bible based on the creation story, and in the final days of the tribulation near the end, God again emphasizes his creation in Revelation 14:7.
Fear God and give Him glory, because the hour of His judgment has come; worship Him who made the heaven and the earth, and sea and springs of waters. (Rev 14:7 NASB 2020)
In the last hours of the earth when God’s judgment has come, what is the number one expression of God’s glory that God chooses to emphasize to every creature in Heaven and earth? His creation of “the heaven and the earth, and the sea and springs of waters.”
The creation story at the front and the end of time are the bookends of the Bible, or you could call them the bookends of God’s glorious story of the earth. Ignore God’s own explanation of how he created the earth, and you ignore what is most important to God in his own introduction and his own words.
Don’t forget how amazing this written account of creation is starting in Genesis. God himself was present at creation, and no man was there to witness creation, yet we have a first hand account of the creation of the earth! This account is God’s own account, reliable, accurate, amazing, and in his own words!
We have it because God chose to reveal it to Moses, and Moses wrote it down for us exactly as God gave it to him. This reality causes me to bow my head in humility and wonder that God would invite us to see how he created the earth. How extraordinary is this?
Creation Invited Satan’s Deception
Knowing the importance of the creation of earth to God himself, you must also realize this immediately made the creation story a critically important target for Satan’s deception and manipulation.
Since the heavens declare the glory of God, Satan had to change the creation story so it would not declare the glory of God, but the glory of man, which is really the glory of Satan.
Remember, Satan intends to be glorified when, in his evil mind, he defeats God and the Heavens and the earth worship Satan. He cannot stand the idea that God is glorified in creation, so Satan created his own version of creation so he could take the glory away from God and ultimately to himself.
The War of The Ages Has Many Fronts
Satan’s War of the Ages against God and the Kingdom of God has many fronts. The war has raged for thousands of years. The majority of the 31,000 verses in the Bible from Genesis through Revelation is the story of Satan’s efforts to pollute and destroy the seed4God was the first to reveal that the seed of the woman and the seed of Satan would be at enmity. Satan’s fellow fallen angels came down to procreate with woman on earth as told in Genesis 6:2 in order to rule the earth and to pollute the DNA of mankind across the whole earth. God ended that with the flood. But when Noah and his wife repopulated the earth, Noah’s son Ham was married to a woman whose seed was downline of the antediluvian Nephilim, so their bloodline continued and filled that land of Canaan. It took thousands of years, but King David killed the last of the Nephilim on earth. Satan still wanted to prevent the Savior from being born and saving mankind, so his efforts to kill the baby Jesus, and later to crucify him all failed. Today we see Satan still working to destroy what’s left of the human race by manipulating human DNA through mRNA in vaccines and in Genome institutes. that was to become the Savior of the World, the one who is Satan’s greatest enemy, and the one who will judge Satan and cast him into the Lake of Fire.
Even when we speak of Jesus coming to earth and dying on the cross for our sins, we cannot get away from the creation story. Satan not only hated Jesus as the Savior of the world and as his arch enemy, but Satan hates the role that Jesus has played throughout eternity. Did you know that Jesus was the Creator of the earth?
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation: for by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones, or dominions, or rulers, or authorities–all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is also the head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross. Colossians 1:15-20 (NASB 2020)
Satan’s hatred for Jesus extends to Jesus’ role in creation itself, so it is no surprise that Satan hates what Jesus represents—the creation of the earth.
You cannot separate God’s glory or Jesus from the true creation story. You cannot understand God’s comprehensive plans for the earth and for mankind if you do not understand the creation story and its doctrinal and practical implications that reverberate to the end of time.
The storyline since Jesus’ death and resurrection, which was the start of the age of grace and the establishment of the Church, is a much shorter story than all that came before. You and I live in the 2,000 year old age of grace, and we eagerly anticipate the coming of our Lord, but the age of law that preceded the incarnate Jesus on earth filled over 4,000 years of history.
The Central Theme of All Time
The central and most important event in all of history is foretold in the Old Testament and then displayed for all the world to see in the New Testament when Jesus Christ was crucified and resurrected.
This event at the cross is the apex of all history and all time. The implications of this single powerful sacrificial act reverberates throughout time, backwards and forwards, to shape the destinies of Satan and his fallen angels, the destinies of all who reject God, and the destinies of all whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.
When we see the big picture of God’s work from the creation of earth to the creation of man, and then through the thousands of years of war that Satan raged against God, to the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ, and finally to the home stretch of the rapture, the tribulation, the recreation of the earth, and God’s final judgment, we then have a comprehensive view that helps us fit all the details in their places. Things that didn’t make sense before, make sense, and doctrine that was confusing is no longer confusing. Out of this big picture, five big themes reveal themselves.
God’s 5 Great Themes
The five great themes that God displays so clearly in the Bible are:
- The creation story of the earth,
- The creation story of man,
- Satan’s War of the Ages against all God’s creation,
- The victory of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and
- God’s Glory displayed in creation, during the War of the Ages, in Jesus Christ, and in his final judgment.
These are the great themes of the Bible that God holds so close to his heart that he told these stories unambiguously in hundreds of stories and parables. He raised prophets to foretell his stories thousands of years in advance, and he fulfilled those stories exactly as foretold.
And now as we find ourselves in the last days, we see all of God’s themes coming together, and like a grand play that started over 6,000 years ago, we anticipate the finale in one last dramatic and violent act in the climax of this War of the Ages.
What is God’s Message to You Today?
Exactly what does God want you and me to know from the Bible and from his central themes? How does that knowledge impact how we make the most of the time that we have been given?
If something is important to God, it ought to be extremely important to us. If something is fundamental to the Character of God and he wants us to know it more than anything else, we ought to make sure we learn that. Such knowledge and understanding would be worth more than gold or silver. Right?
I urge you to read the creation story in Genesis, and study it carefully as it is written. God intended for us to read his words and his description, not some pseudo-scientific anti-God interpretation. What does God’s description tell you about the earth? Notice, I did not ask you what NASA says, or what Bill Nye The Science Guy says. Look to the Bible, not Satan’s puppets.
