In the Beginning

I’m going to spend the next couple of days looking at thevery first verse in the Old Testament.

In the beginning Godcreated the heavens and the earth. - Genesis 1:1

The first four words speak volumes. God was there at that point our feeble finiteminds would call “the beginning”. However, God is beginning-less.

Have you ever tried to wrap your mind around eternity? C.S. Lewis described it in Mere Christianity using a brilliantanalogy dealing with ink on paper. Mortal life is the ink; time is the paper; and God is the one holdingthe pen and paper. Eternity is a weightythought that when contemplated heavily can actually lead to doubt in somemeasure because we really cannot fully grasp it. It is so beyond our capacity to understand.

I once asked a room full of people to define eternity for m eand started getting words like; forever, never ending, and endless, but eternity is more than time, and God is eternal.

That all sounds great in my head or as I read and reread it back to myself, but what kind of implication does it have for me today? If God must come before the “beginning”, He will most certainly endure beyond the “end”. I find great comfort in the notion that in spite of all my failed attempts to comprehend—He still is.

In essence, we can’t really grasp Him with our minds, luckily we can seek Him with our hearts. Knowing that God was before beginning gives me a steadfast faith in His unyielding sovereignty and that can only be a good thing.

If I were to write my own story, it wouldn’t start with “in the beginning Nathan,” that would be preposterously presumptuous; but God did because He was, is, and will be. “In the beginning God” might be some of the most comforting words we could ever hear.