The Orion Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope
God is the hero of every Bible story. Right from the beginning, it is not about us, it is about God and the purposes He is accomplishing. The creation account of Genesis was never written to be a scientific treatise on how God accomplished the creation of the world. It was not a plan to be checked by scientists and confirmed as authentic or even realistic. It was written in an ancient historical context in order to argue against the prevailing opinion of the day.
Depending on your scholarly persuasion (Liberal or Conservative) the book of Genesis was written a long time ago (15th century B.C. or 5th century B.C.) and departed from the accepted script of how the world began. The prevailing opinion among the nations on how the world was created was that it came out of the strife and struggle of the gods or governing powers. There was some sort of struggle and the world in it’s complexity emerged from the wreckage. Genesis 1 describes an entirely different story.
Genesis describes that God was the single and only cause of creation. He brought order to chaos, He separated what cannot be separated (light and darkness, water and sky, the land and the sea). He formed the skies, the seas and the land and then in turn filled each with a variety of objects and forms of life. The point is not how many days it took, how many years ago this happened, or the process through which God performed this feat. The point is that God did it. God was the primary actor in this story.
The story refutes the competing worldviews by placing all powers and authorities of the day under the subjection of the one true God. Notice that in Gen 1: 16 the sun and the moon are not named. The names of these objects were in turn, the names of the gods they represented. The Egyptians, the Canaanites, everyone had names for the Sun and Moon. The writer of Genesis did not want to authenticate pagan gods in any way so they are called objects of creation: greater light and lesser light and they are placed there under God’s direction to serve God’s purposes.
The point is that God did it, for His own purposes, to bring Himself glory. Period.
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