Genesis 1: The Ten Sayings and the Word Who Spoke Them

Today's Doxa Daily Lift stands on one claim, that God speaks and what He speaks is so. It points at John 1 and leaves the door ajar. Here is the room behind it.

How many times does God speak in Genesis 1?

Count the speaking in Genesis 1 and a pattern shows up that the writer built on purpose. Ten times a form of the Hebrew wayyomer Elohim (H559), and God said, opens a fresh act of creation. Later rabbis named these the ten sayings of creation and set them beside the ten words spoken at Sinai: a world made by ten utterances, a covenant given in ten. Creation and commandment come out of the same mouth.

The opening line carries two loaded words. Bereshit (H7225), in the beginning, names a real start, a point before which there is only God. Bara (H1254), created, is a verb the Hebrew Bible keeps almost entirely for God as its subject. People make and form and build; this particular making belongs to God alone. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1) is a sentence no creature could stand at the front of.

The ground is then called tohu wabohu (H8414), formless and void, with ruach Elohim (H7307), the Spirit of God, "hovering over the surface of the waters" (Genesis 1:2). That verb for hovering turns up elsewhere for a bird brooding over its young. Before a single command, God is already near the dark, near the deep, watching over it the way a parent leans over a cot.

What does and it was so mean in Genesis 1?

Two refrains carry the theology. Wayehi ken (H1961), and it was so, lands after command after command, the writer pressing home that the distance between what God says and what exists is nothing at all. And ki tov (H2896), and it was good, comes seven times, until the final look widens to tov meod (H3966), very good (Genesis 1:31). Good here means fit, ordered, doing exactly what it was spoken to do. A world that answers its Maker's voice.

Hold that against the older stories the first readers grew up on. In the Babylonian Enuma Elish, the world is hacked out of the corpse of a defeated goddess, order won through a war between gods. Genesis has no war. God speaks into the dark and the dark obeys. The sun and moon, worshipped as gods across the ancient Near East, are given two plain jobs and a lowercase description, "the greater light" and "the lesser light" (Genesis 1:16), lamps hung by the God who made them. The chapter is quietly taking every rival god apart by showing each one as a thing that was spoken into being.

What does it mean to be made in the image of God?

At the summit of the six days God says, "Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness" (Genesis 1:26), and "in the image of God He created him" (Genesis 1:27). In the surrounding cultures the image of a god was a temple statue, or the king by himself. Genesis hands that dignity to every human being, male and female together. We are made to carry the likeness of the One who speaks.

This is where the New Testament reaches back and takes hold. Paul calls Christ the image of the invisible God, and says that in Him all things were created and in Him all things hold together (Colossians 1:15-17). John opens his Gospel with Genesis on his lips, the same in the beginning, and tells us the Word was with God and was God, and that through Him everything came to be (John 1:1-3). Hebrews says the God who once spoke through the prophets has now spoken by His Son, and that the Son keeps all things in being by the word He speaks (Hebrews 1:1-3). Set those side by side and the ten sayings of Genesis 1 have one Voice behind them. Every and God said is the Word who would one day be born in Bethlehem.

How does the light of Genesis 1 reach Revelation?

Follow the light and the whole Bible lights up at both ends. On day one God speaks light before there is any sun to carry it (Genesis 1:3), so the first light of creation comes straight from God's own word. Paul draws the line himself: the God who spoke light into that first darkness is the God who has now shone in our hearts with the light of the knowledge of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6). And on the last page, the city needs no sun and no moon, because the glory of God gives it light and the Lamb is its lamp (Revelation 21:23; 22:5). The light of day one and the light of the new creation are the same light, and His name is Jesus.

So the small connection today's Doxa Daily Lift makes turns out to be the spine of the whole book. Genesis 1 is the record of how the world began, and it is the first place we hear the voice that speaks all the way through Scripture and finally speaks as a man. When you write down a word God has given you, you are keeping something made of the same stuff as the light of day one: His speech, which always does what it says.

Tomorrow, Genesis 2, and the God who kneels down to shape one man out of the dust and breathe His own life into him.

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Keep Reading

• How to Hear God's Voice: A Practical Guide for Believers
• When God Speaks, He Does Not Just Give Instructions
• Yada: What the Bible Means When God Says 'Know Me'
• Your Daily Verse Is Deeper Than You Think

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