Genesis 1:1-2
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2The earth was without form [tohu] and void [bohu]. and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
The last two posts over this passage on January 23rd and 25th covered two of four things Matthew Henry observes from this passage. First there was the effect produced, i.e. Creation happened and it happened at the very word of God. Second, He pointed out the author and cause of this effect…God (Elohim) and noted the name for God (Elohim) used signified His power and plurality. See those two posts for more on those. Today we will look at the third observation: The manner in which this work was effected.
Matthew Henry: “(3) The manner in which this work was effected: God created it, that is, made it out of nothing. There was not any pre-existent material out of which the world was produced. No artificer [craftsman] can work, unless he has something to work on. But by the almighty power of God it is not only possible that something should be made of nothing (the God of nature is not subject to the laws of nature), but in the creation it is impossible it should be otherwise, for nothing is more injurious to the honour of the Eternal Mind than the supposition of eternal matter.”
Clay Miller: God is the Prime Mover, the First Cause. He is the self-existent Being from which everything else gets its being. He created out of nothing (ex nihilo). This is hard for us to comprehend and naturalistic evolutionists would rather attribute this to “nothing” or “eternal matter” that is dead than to an eternal intelligent Being. Of course the same evolutionist would say you were absurd to declare New York City as not created but evolved by itself over years and years of mutations and spontaneous generation. Yet that absurdity is infinitely more probable than the human body doing the same with all its complexity, not to mention an entire universe with all its contents. Reason goes out the door…all in attempt to free themselves from a God to whom they would have to be accountable to…and will be anyway. The account of creation is succinct in Genesis and says much about God…That He is wise, all-knowing, and all-powerful. It shows us He is the God of nature (what we see as natural) and nothing is supernatural to God because nothing is above His own nature. He is above our nature and all we observe, so He is supernatural to us, but nothing is supernatural to Him that He should search it out to find His own meaning. This is our Creator and we can know Him. See previous posts to see how.
