If we had to put it in a word, what is the subject of the Bible? The Bible’s first sentence gives it away: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). God is the subject of Scripture, its main character, and the chief actor behind its unfolding story.
What is he like? There’s more to God than what we learn in Genesis 1, but Genesis 1 gets us off to a good start. Here’s as helpful reflection on the Bible’s first chapter by D.A. Carson from his devotional commentary, For the Love of God: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God’s Word, Volume 1.
On the face of it, this chapter, and the lines of thought it develops, establish that God is different from the universe that he creates, and therefore pantheism is ruled out; that the original creation was entirely good, and therefore dualism is ruled out; that human beings, male and female together, are alone declared to be made in the image of God, and therefore forms of reductionism that claim we are part of the animal kingdom and no more must be ruled out; that God is a talking God, and therefore all notions of an impersonal God must be ruled out; that this God has sovereignly made all things, including all people, and therefore conceptions of merely tribal deities must be ruled out.
Some of these and other matters are put positively by later writers of Scripture who, reflecting on the doctrine of creation, offer a host of invaluable conclusions. The sheer glory of the created order bears telling witness to the glory of its Maker (Ps. 19). The universe came into being by the will of God, and for this, God is incessantly worshipped (Rev. 4:11). That God has made everything speaks of his transcendence, i.e., he is above this created order, above time and space, and therefore cannot be domesticated by anything in it (Acts 17:24-25). That he made all things and continues to rule over all, means that both racism and tribalism are to be rejected (Acts 17:26). Further, if we ourselves have been made in his image, it is preposterous to think that God can properly be pictured by some image that we can concoct (Acts 17:29). These notions and more are teased out by later Scriptures.
One of the most important entailments of the doctrine of creation is this: it grounds all human responsibility. The theme repeatedly recurs in the Bible, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by implication. To take but one example, John’s gospel opens by declaring that everything that was created came into being by the agency of God’s “Word,” the Word that became flesh in Jesus Christ (John 1:2-3, 14). But this observation sets the stage for a devastating indictment: when this Word came into the world, and even though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him (John 1:10). God made us to “image” himself; he made us for his own glory. For us to imagine ourselves autonomous is, far from being a measure of our maturity, the supreme mark of our rebellion, the flag of our suppression of the truth (Rom. 1).
Carson provides succinct commentary along these lines for just about every page of the Bible. For the Love of God is a two volume set available on Amazon (Volume 1, Volume 2) or at D.A. Carson’s Blog at The Gospel Coalition. I highly commend it. Both volumes offer commentary on two of the four daily readings based on a Bible reading plan by Robert Murray Mchene.
