I had never really sat and thought about which verse in the Bible would be the hardest to believe. If you had asked me, I would probably have said it would have to be one of the controversial ones that divide camps among evangelicals. Maybe the passage that some use to prove predestination while others use it to prove pre-knowledge of the freewill of man. Or maybe the book of Revelations with all of the supernatural depictions of the end times. Perhaps the one about salvation being so simple that it makes it hard for people to accept. I don’t know what I would have answered but it would probably have been somewhere along those lines.
But as I was listen to a sermon recently, the pastor said something that really caught my ear and gave me a light-bulb moment. He said that the most difficult verse to accept as truth was the very first one and, seemingly the most simplistic; “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”.
This struck me hard and deep because I have had many talks with loved ones recently that have centered around science and the Bible. The conflicts between the two seem insurmountable to the logically minded. A few of the endless lists of questions are:
- If it takes tens of thousands of years for the light from a star to reach earth, how can we see starlight from a supposedly 6000 year old planet?
- If the sun had been held still in the sky during Joshua’s battle, how did the earth not burn up on one side and freeze on the other?
- How is it reasonably possible for a single vessel to house all of the animals of earth and the food they would require to survive?
and so on and so forth…
But here is the foundational point that makes Genesis 1:1 so difficult to believe:
- If God created it, God can control it.
It’s as simple, yet as complicated to accept, as that.
If God is the author of nature, He is not bound by it’s rules. He created the rules. If you are going to take the leap of faith that a greater power crafted this world, how hard is it to believe that He can operate outside of the rules when He wills? It would makes less sense to believe that He could create it from nothing yet was unable to sustain the life of a human man inside the belly of a great fish.
There is so much more to this thought, but for now, I think you have to begin at the very beginning. Do you believe that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth? or not?
