The Three Beginnings Part 1

The 3 Beginnings Pt. 1

Hello everyone. Welcome to this Elders Bible Study. My name is Randy Puckett and I am one of the Elders here at Clovis Christian Church and I'm glad to be with you today as we look into the word of God together. So, let's see what God has in store for us today…If you have a bible then feel free to get it out and turn to the first page of the first book of the bible, Genesis chapter 1 verse 1. That is where we will begin today as we study the 3 Beginnings!

You know, we all have beginnings: beginnings of life, school, relationships, careers, seasons, pain, sickness, death... you can probably think of a beginning that wasn't mentioned. While reading through the bible, I found it interesting that there are three books of the bible that actually start at 'the beginning'. Genesis, the first book of this compilation of books we call the bible, starts at the beginning of everything, take a look:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. (Gen 1:1-3)

 Now some people may have a problem with me saying that God is the beginning of everything, the creator; however, that debate is for another discussion, for now we will assume that all of us are of the understanding that God is the beginning of all things. What I want you to see here is that what this verse tells us is that God not only created everything, God himself wasn't part of this creation, he couldn't be. You see, to begin something you necessarily must exist yourself, so God, being 'in the beginning', must have existed prior to the beginning: outside the beginning if you will. He is the uncreated creator to borrow an expression. 

Next we will notice that this first verse of the first book of the bible says that God  made the heavens and the earth: now that's remarkable! Well, it's remarkable because no one or nothing except God could do this and the way he does it is even more amazing. Now we could jump around to other books that speak of the way God created, but just staying right here we get the hint, take a look: "The Spirit", notice that the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit of God, is involved here. Now why would the Spirit be mentioned as 'hovering over the face of the waters' if He wasn't involved in the creation of it all? But God the Spirit- it actually talks about this in another book of the Bible- is the one doing the creating here and if we would take the time to look at another book in this collection of books called the bible, we would find that there was another person, or God-man involved in this creation as well (we may look at this at a later time but not at present), suffice it to say and be clear that God the Holy Spirit was here in the beginning, creating something from nothing. Notice the first spoken words in the scripture- had you ever thought about that, these are the first words that were spoken for us, "Let there be light", and what does it say? "and there was light."! Wow!  God speaks and it happened, there was light. Now men have learned how to make light from fire, coils, gasses, etc. but they have never made light from nothing! And that is exactly what God does, he created the light by simply saying it- and if you continue reading through this first chapter of this first book of the bible you will find that He creates everything in the same way- He speaks it into existence from nothing! 'Creatio ex nihilo'

This is the God we serve, it is the Creator with a capital 'C'. There is no other Creator, and no other God. 

There is another detail that I don't want you to miss here in this first of the three beginnings: it is that Light was the first thing that is mentioned as being created- notice that before light, everything was void-nothingness- and there was darkness over it all. Now, it does give reference to 'earth' and 'water'; however, Light is the first thing that is spoken by God to give order in this mass of nothing! And light is what we all need isn't it. Without light, we couldn't exist as we do. Would we even be able to exist at all? Only God would know, and He created light first, that should answer the question. The other thing about light is that there is more than one kind of light, there is the physical light that we get when we turn on the lights or when the sun comes out; however, there is also the spiritual light that comes on when we hear the gospel of Jesus. We will see as we progress in this study, that Jesus is the beginning of and the very essence of light to a dark world- not a physically dark world, but to a spiritually dark world- but I'm getting ahead of myself- suffice it to say that the amazing thing about 'light' being the first thing spoken into creation, is that it is also where the gospel begins: 'In the beginning..."  If you doubt this, then follow along as we look into 3 beginnings. 

Next time we will see the 2nd beginning as we turn to the book written by one of Jesus' apostles, the book that was given the name, The Gospel of John.