BEGINNINGS

                                                                Beginnings

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“Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever You had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God” (Ps. 90:2). Only the eternal God is without beginning. Therefore, He is the great Beginner of beginnings. The beginning of time, along with the beginnings of space and matter began when, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light” (Gen. 1:1-3). So, at the beginning time God created space into which He put matter (which includes energy).

The Bible gives a rough date of just over 6,000 years ago. In 1654 Bishop Ussher, from Scripture, calculated that the date of the beginning of creation is 22 October, 4004 BC. This of course is immediately at odds with those who need a billions of years old universe to accommodate their Theory of Evolution (which is still popular in many non-Christian circles today).

What about all those fossils and stuff? Ussher gives the date of the great global Flood as 2350 BC. This was when and why, as Christians like to say, “we find today billions of dead things (fossils) that were buried (rapidly) in rock layers laid down by water (sedimentary rock layers) all over the Earth.” Pick and shovel Christianity finds all kinds of evidence all over the world for the great Deluge. But surely the speed of light travelling from distant stars proves Ussher wrong? What about carbon dating? What about this and what about that? One Christian responded to all these usual and predictable questions by writing a book aptly called “The Answers Book”, now with an updated version called “The New Answers Book” (Ken Ham).

The beginning of the renewing of my mind began in late 1988. Till then I had been your basic garden variety non-Christian who laughed at anyone who didn’t just go with the flow and believe all the Darwinisms we had been indoctrinated with in our state schools. However, like the Apostle Paul, I too grew up. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Cor. 13:11). For, like Augustine, who picked up a Bible upon hearing a child’s voice say to him tolle, lege (take up and read), I too picked up the Bible and read it from cover to cover. When we were young the girls used to play skipping rope in the streets. They would sing songs to the rhythm of the rope as they swung it. Sweet memories! Maybe you too dear reader in your innermost mind can hear the soft strains children outside rhythmically singing, “Pick it up and read it, pick it up and read it.” Warning! Many an atheist has been converted just by picking up and the Bible and reading it!

Creation began when God spoke it into existence. This made much more sense to me than “In the beginning there was nothing. This nothing exploded into something.” It reminds me of when, as a child, trying to get my head around the fact that nothing plus nothing still equals nothing. No matter how many zeros you add together it’s still zero!

Only God has no beginning (or end). You may argue with Ussher and his 4004 BC date for the beginning of creation, but you may not argue with the beginning of His new creation which began by His raising Jesus from the dead some 2,000 years ago. Have you begun your new beginning yet? “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (1 Cor. 5:17).