This seems like a good place to start a blog. (I’m finding my way.) Every year I read it, as the New Year begins—the first sentence of the Bible:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

It’s a simple sentence, short—seven words in the original text—but it’s important! Whether we believe it or not has an enormous impact on our view of the world.

When believed, this sentence gives everything meaning. God is the Creator, Lord, Owner of all. The world is here because God willed it. I am here because God created me. The Creator is the One who determines the order of creation (“the laws of nature”) and all moral law. And (we are later told), he created man and woman in his image—so our role in life is to know God, to reverence and love him. Under God, life is filled with meaning and direction; all of history is going somewhere under his sovereign guidance.

Many reject this first sentence of the Bible. In a college philosophy class, we read Ludwig Feuerbach’s book, The Essence of Christianity. Feuerbach argues that God is a psychological projection. People value love, truth, justice, goodness, etc., and they project it out to infinity—infinite love, infinite truth, infinite justice, infinite goodness and call it “God.” Thus God did not create man; man created God.

Bertrand Russell gave the naturalistic worldview unforgettable expression:

“That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation be safely built.” (Why I Am Not a Christian, 107).

Despair! Debris, death, extinction! Tragically, we see such desperation filling our world today. Many find little meaning in life, no purpose, no goal. Why do we go to work, eat, sleep and go to work the next day? What’s is all for?

The Bible does not ask us to build our lives on “the firm foundation of unyielding despair.” (A striking oxymoron!) God is. God is our Maker. God is our heavenly Father; he cares for what he has made—and provides for us. That’s why we give thanks.

All good theology begins with creation theology. Either God is Creator, or he is not. If not, and the naturalists are right, life has no meaning. We die and we rot.

I cannot walk out my door without being confronted with the Creator. He is everywhere, his wisdom and power and love of beauty on display.

So, as 2018 begins, I look forward to the New Year. God made the world. Life has meaning; history is going forward to God’s appointed purpose. “And though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the Ruler yet.” So, the first sentence of the Bible brings joy.