G
en enesis
is about Jesus: Jesus our Creator, Jesus our Sustainer, Jesus our
Redeemer. Writing millennia after the Genesis text itself had been penned by
Moses, and reaching back across those ages to the patriarch’s very words, the
apostle John reveals Jesus in the Creation account: “In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with
God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that
was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:1–4, NKJV).
What did John write here? “In the beginning” all things that were made, all things
that once didn’t exist, came into existence—by Jesus. All creation—from galaxies
hurtling across the cosmos in staggering pinwheels of fire and light to the meticulous
DNA woven miraculously into the cell to quantum waves—Jesus created and sus-
tains it all. And the book of Genesis is the first story in Scripture of both this creation
and the redemption of this creation. Here, in this book, is the world’s only “official”
account of our origins.
The English word “Genesis” is derived from the Greek genesis, which means
“beginning,” itself derived from the Hebrew bere’shit, “in the beginning”—the first
word of the book (hence, the first word of the entire Bible!). Genesis gives us the
foundation, the base, upon which all the following scriptures rest. Because it is first,
and so foundational to all that comes after, Genesis is probably the most quoted or
referred-to book in the rest of the Scriptures.