Genesis 1 claims that God created a universe of both space and matter, heavens and earth, bound in time with a beginning. And on what would be the first day, God adds the way that we would measure time and great distances: He creates light. It’s easy to imagine in the modern age that we know most of what there is to know about the universe. But in just five verses the Bible reveals how little we actually know. Senior NASA astrophysicist Dr. Deb Haarsma who is a Christian and former president of the BioLogos Institute says, “data from the W-MAP and Planck satellites has shown that 27 percent of the universe is dark matter, a scientific mystery that does not emit, reflect or absorb any light. We can detect it only by its gravitational effect on visible matter.” Dark matter is what holds galaxies and large cosmic structures together by providing the extra mass needed for them to form and spin without flying apart. But that’s just dark matter; the greatest part of the universe—68 percent of it—is what we call dark energy, an even more mysterious substance that drives how the universe expands. “For all our advances in physics and chemistry,” she says, “what we can see and know can only describe 5 percent of the universe. For the remaining 95 percent of the universe, we have no current explanation.” It turns out we understand light way better than we understand the darkness. But Genesis says that God understands them both, that He separates them for the blessing of His creation and that He names them both. And ultimately, the fact that God names them both shows us that God has authority over both light and dark; what He has made He has control over.

Last week we learned that Genesis 1 is all about authority. If God made all things, then He is in authority over all things. He tells us how to best use the things He has made, and in humility we submit to His design. And that humility, that comes from the authority and majesty of God in creation, is what leads us into wonder at God’s creation. When was the last time something in God’s Creation led you into wonder? The universe contains enough wonder to captivate us all and it is wonder that drives us to remember our place in it. In Job 38, God uses the creation to remind Job that he has forgotten both authority and wonder. Later on Job responds in wonder at God’s authority which leads him into wonder at creation itself. Throughout the first part of our Genesis series we will talk about science and creation. When properly used, studying God’s creation through science leads us into wonder which is good. But science was never meant to be our ultimate authority. Those who misuse science say that human reason alone is to be our ultimate authority. But Genesis 1 says that God alone, the One who gave human beings our reason, is to be our highest authority. It’s a tragedy that science and Genesis 1 have been pitted against each other, that they are seen as competing narratives where only one is possible. Science can never fully prove or disprove the Bible, and the Bible was not written to counter and disprove science. But as we will see this morning, it is the Bible itself that launches, grounds and sanctifies science. It is Genesis 1 that makes science even possible. The Bible is not a science book but it is not an unscientific book. It calls us to get wisdom, to get knowledge and to get understanding not just of spiritual things but of the world our Father created. The Bible invites us to observe and to wonder in humility; Proverbs, Psalms, Job, Ecclesiastes are all scientific in their nature. They call us to observe and catalog how things are made and how they work, and from that observation to come to the right conclusion of why we were made and how life works.

We are starting a new series through the book of Genesis. Genesis isn’t just book one in a series of 66 books in the Bible; Genesis is the foundation of every idea, every promise, every instruction, hope and truth found in all the books that come after it. We cannot fully understand ourselves without understanding Genesis 1:1. We cannot fully understand God without understanding Genesis 1:1. Nor can we truly understand sin or redemption or brokenness or identity or purpose or wisdom or goodness or justice or anything else. It is vitally important, if we are to ever really fully understand anything in the Bible or in the world in general, that we first understand the full meaning of Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”