Creation or Chaos? | Genesis 1:1-2:3 | From Creation to Covenant

In this opening message from Genesis, we begin with the Bible’s first words: “In the beginning, God…”

One of the most common questions people ask is, “If God made everything, then who made God?” That question leads us to something deeper—we must believe that something is eternal. The real question is: do we believe in creation or chaos?

In Genesis 1:1–2:3, we see three foundational truths:

• God is

• God is powerful

• God is a God of order

These truths shape how we understand the world, our lives, and our need for redemption through Jesus Christ.

Watch the message above and consider how the truth of God as Creator brings clarity, purpose, and hope to a world that often feels chaotic.

📖 Click to Show the Transcript of this Sermon

Over the years that I had doing youth ministry and continuing now teaching catechism, I've had several times where, after the lesson, I opened up the floor for any question that the students might have about the Bible or about God in general. And there's one question that has come up more than all of the others. This question is so common, and yet I can still see the faces of some of the students over the years who've asked me this question. Some of these students are now over 30 years old with children of their own, and they have families.

I still have a clear image in my mind of them raising their hand and asking me this question. I'm not sure why it's so clear to me and why it stuck out, but this question has been a regular over the last 19 years. You may have already guessed what the question is, but here it is for you. If God made everything, then who made God?

It's a good question. As created beings, it's a question that we're gonna want answered. We can't fathom the idea of something that has the power of being as an inherent part of who they are. We know that there was a day when we weren't around.

And we also know that there'll be a day where our family and our friends will grieve our death. In and of ourselves, you and I do not have the power to be. And so we ask this question because we can't wrap our minds around an infinite being who is without beginning and without end. We are so bound by time that we can't comprehend this God who's outside of time.

And I've answered this important question in many ways over the years. I try to make it thought-provoking, I try to make it fun, but it all comes down to the same basic answer at the end. God by nature is an uncreated being without beginning and without end. And as you can imagine, no matter how well I explain it, There are still those who struggle with this idea, and so I always make sure to make a very important point at the end.

No matter how you slice it, you have to believe in something that has always just been. Either God is uncreated and has always been, or matter is uncreated and has always been. Something has to be eternal. No matter how you slice it, you have to have faith that something is without beginning and without end and comes from nothing.

Your options then are either that that something is God and he loves you and he created all things with order and purpose or that eternal thing you believe in is matter. and has randomly come together to cause you to ask this question today. Now, we struggle with this because modern scientific thought does its best to push this off to where we won't ask this anymore, right? We put ridiculous amounts of time out there to make us forget that we have to believe in something eternal.

Or we put it out there across a giant astronomical distance, way out there in space that we can't even begin to fathom and we hope we don't ask this question or come to this realization that either God is eternal or matter is. Because we want to avoid the truth that God is. We wanna get away from this God, and so we push these difficult questions that keep us up at night out into distant past and into distant space, hoping it'll go away. You know, the whole idea still doesn't make sense, though, because even in this theorized Big Bang event, in the way distant past, in way distant space, we're told that all of this matter that we see around us came out of a big volatile egg that exploded.

And the point here is, regardless, we have to believe in something that is eternal. We have to have faith. And so what we are presented with is a choice. Do we believe in creation?

Or do we believe in chaos? And this is an important question because it shapes not only what we believe, but it shapes how we view the world. And we're beginning a series on the first 11 chapters of Genesis. We're going to work our way through the book of Genesis eventually over time, but we're gonna do it in bite-sized chunks, starting off with Genesis one through 11.

I'm referring to it as season one, like a TV show. We operate in that mindset in our day. So this first part of Genesis, we're calling it foundations. Because what we see in these first 11 chapters of this first book of the Bible is that it lays our foundation for how we understand Scripture as a whole, and how we view reality.

It tells us where we came from. It tells us that we were created in the image of God. And we see God establishing the covenant of marriage as the design for human flourishing and families. And in the story of the fall, we find out why we die.

We find out why there's death, bloodshed, and disease in the world. In the flood, we not only understand that God judges the world, but we also understand why the world looks the way it does, because these floodwaters that have changed the way the earth looks. And at the Tower of Babel, also in Genesis 1 through 11, we get an understanding of why there are different languages, why there are different people groups, And maybe you've never thought about it before, but the first 11 chapters of this book are foundational to our faith, but they're also foundational to how we understand and view the world.

And so today, as we begin to think about this foundation, we are taking in a substantial chunk of text. All of Genesis 1 into verse two, verse three, took us a while to read. And we're not going to be digging into every day of creation and looking at the nuances, but instead we are going to be thinking big picture about this creation week. And from the text we see that there are ordinary days, there's evening, there's morning.

And then the day of the creation week is expressed, so we know it's the first day, the second day. A lot happened when God spoke, and he showed his power. He could have spoken everything into existence at once, he has that power, but he did not. He chose to create in six ordinary days and rest on the seventh day.

And in this, we see that he made things with order, and it's an order that impacts our lives. And so as we look at this question, creation or chaos, I want us to focus on three important truths that come out of the text for us today. The first thing that we're gonna see in this passage is that God is. The very first words of Holy Scripture do not attempt to convince us of the existence and nature of God, but instead they state the truth.

of who he is and what he does. And secondly, we will see that God is powerful. We see that he speaks and he creates from nothing. He speaks and where there was nothing, there is now everything.

And many of us struggle to put together a prefabbed piece of furniture, right? That has clear instructions. And some of us can create a nice piece of woodworking from the stuff we get from the lumber yard. You can envision it in your mind and then you can build it.

But none of us, not one of us can simply speak and have something come from nothing. You can't even get the voice assistant in your home to make you some coffee just by your voice. You have to take the material in before you say, Alexa, turn on the coffee pot. We can't create from nothing.

So to have the power to create at the power of your word alone is something that is reserved for Almighty God. Only He can do this. And lastly, we see from the events of the Creation Week that God is a God of order. He didn't leave His creation without form and in void.

He spoke into His creation, and He created order. He created the sun, the moon, the stars. He created plants, fish, birds, and land animals. He created humans in His own image as the crowning achievement of this creation.

And the world we live in is designed. It is well-ordered. It is not chaos and disorder. And so as we jump into the first two verses of the creation account, we see that God is.

Like I said, he alone and in and of himself has the power to be. He doesn't need to be argued for. He doesn't need to be explained right here in Genesis 1.1. He is.

God is. What God does here is he lets us know that he's there. and He will be there. To be God, by definition, He would have to be an uncreated being without beginning and without end.

And the Bible tells us here that that's what He is. He is God. And we see also this truth reflected in other parts of the Bible. And specifically, I think of Romans 1 that tells us that we know God.

We know He's there. We sense that we need Him. We see Him in creation. We know deep within us that God is.

And when we deny it, Romans 1 tells us that we're actually suppressing the truth that we already know. We see the nature of God and it tells us that he is necessary. His invisible attributes we read here in Romans 1 are clear to us and easy for us to perceive. And even though the idea of there being order is our third point today, I want to allude to it here because the idea of design in the universe is something that we cannot miss.

We see order in the universe, not chaos. Because things work in extraordinary ways around us, don't they? We digest our food, and our bodies use what it can, and then the waste is eliminated. A giraffe just so happens to be able to bend over, and drink out of a stream without its brain exploding or it passing out.

It has a sponge-like mechanism in its brain to absorb the blood, just by random chance and chaos, right? No, we see design all around us, and we all can probably think of something in creation that amazes us. We see it and we go, yeah, God did a good in there. We know this.

We know that this does not come from random chaos We know it's by design. And it isn't just as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ who acknowledge this. Not too long ago, there was a scientific panel at some sort of conference, and they discussed there whether or not the world that we experience here is just a simulation. Okay?

So Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's an astrophysicist who isn't known for publishing peer-reviewed articles or anything like that, or he's basically a personality on Twitter speaking out against Christianity and the creation account, but he's the one who hosted this discussion. And his input to this discussion, wait for it, was he thinks the likelihood of the universe being a simulation is very high. He said that if we were to find out if we were in fact living in a simulation, he would be one of the only people in the room who wasn't surprised. He thinks that our lives may be nothing more than for the entertainment of some intelligent, more powerful being.

Now, I hope you're as baffled as I am here. This man claims to be an atheist, or at best an agnostic, He refuses to believe in creation by God, a being that has the power to be within himself, but yet he's willing to entertain that the entire universe, the entire cosmos, is a simulation by a higher species that's bored and needs something to do. But from scripture, we know something.

This shows that he knows that God exists. But instead, he'd rather choose absurdity. He'd rather choose absurdity. He suppresses the truth in unrighteousness.

He's willing to go to absurdity instead of trusting in this God who is. And he's not the only one. Many scientists look at the world and they see order and they can't believe it came about by chance. So what do they do?

Do they repent and believe? No. There's many high-level scientists who subscribe to a theory called panspermia. And this suggests that the necessary complexity of life was delivered to our planet by aliens, and then everything sort of came out from that.

Yeah, that's right. Instead of believing in creation by a divine being, they send the problem that they struggle with out into the distant past, out into distant space, and they hope that E.T. can solve their problems. Or Chewbacca, pick your favorite alien.

That's their choice. Absurdity. Instead of trusting God, they suppress the truth in unrighteousness. God is.

God is, and we either believe in this one who is, or we end up being reduced to absurdity. And we see this in the design of creation, and it's evidence for us. We know that God is, and we know that he's necessary, and we have seen this God. And we see that he not only has the necessary intelligence, he has the power needed to create from nothing by the entire power of his word.

And we see this power of God right here in verses three through five. There was no light and he spoke and it was. And so far, we have seen that he created the heavens and the earth. He's now created light.

It's all by the power of his word. And as I've alluded to, this is real power. We need material, but God, the eternal Lord of heaven and earth, by his word, he creates all that is seen and unseen by merely speaking it into existence. And it's important that we think about how this story of creation is being told.

This is the true story of the universe and it's how God created. But imagine being an ancient pagan with your understanding of multiple gods competing and then coming about from the material around them. And while the idea of evolution is credited to Darwin in the 19th century, the basic idea behind it has always been floating around there in paganism. As we saw when we read our way through the book of Ecclesiastes, there's nothing new under the sun.

What we hear now is nothing new. Back then, when people have been reading the book of Genesis through history, they thought that life sprung up from the stuff around them, not nearly as refined or scientific as Darwin's theory, but the same general idea. And what does the creation story here in Genesis have instead of that? There is a God so powerful that He creates from nothing.

Even the material that they believe has the stuff they see around them coming forth from it, was made by God. It wasn't there, but He was, and He created it. This truth would have been a shock to their culture, just as it's a shock to our culture now. Because God's power is unbelievable.

It's unfathomable. Think of the power of our Son. then think that God spoke it into being. And then think of the rest of the stars and the planets.

Then think that while we struggle to fathom the power of the large and distant, we need to remember that we struggle to also fathom the creative power of God in the things that are near to us too, right? Just think of the complexity of the cells that are coursing through our body now. Scientists stick their eyes up to the lenses of a microscope and could tell us about a complexity that is amazing. And then we go down even further to the atomic level, and there's even more complexity.

We think about the power of God on the massive scale and suns and stars, but we often forget the power of God is even on display in the microscopic. And this is just what we see in the first day of creation, but right there, with only one day, we see that the creation of the world stands in contrast in the face of the chaos that we're told to believe from the ancient ideas of where the world come from, and the modern ideas of where the world came from. This story stands in contrast to that chaos.

and we see that our God is a God of order. Right there in Genesis 1 verse five, he creates day and night. There's a passing of time. This isn't random chaos, this is order.

And then in verse six, we see that he separates the water above the water below. There's more order. There's more passing of a defined amount of time. This isn't chaos.

This isn't assorted pagan gods doing things because they're angry. This is a God of order putting his stamp on his creation. And in verse 10, we see the same thing. We have dry land and seas, and God says that it's good.

Again, not random chaos. This is a good creation. This is order, and he designs it in a particular way. It's good.

And now I gotta run through every creation day because you're already latching on to my bigger point. This is an orderly work of God and it stands in contrast to the idea of random chance and time being able to explain how the world and all the creatures came to be. This is not chaos. This is a loving God putting a stamp on what he's making.

And we see this most visibly on the sixth day when we get to verse 27. He does something else. He makes humanity in his own image. And there's something unique about them.

They're inherently different from the rest of creation. They bear the image of their maker. Now there's been debate over the years about what exactly it means to be made in God's image. And often we can get hung up in the details.

And we don't have the time today to explain all these different theories. But I think that's actually really good for us because we're thinking about the big picture. What we wanna see here with this image language is there's something different about us. We are bearers of the image of God.

And so we need to value human life in a unique way. We protect it, we care for it, we use the intellect that God has given us over the animals for his glory, and we do not abuse it. And we see in here something else about the order that God created. You'll notice here that this creation is vegetarian.

Now some of you just, that wasn't good for you right there, was it? You've probably gotten really worried, because you have a nice hunk of meat sitting in the crock pot at home. But you know, you know that the Bible doesn't teach us. Later on, the Bible tells us that we can consume meat, so you don't need to worry.

Enjoy your roast, that's wonderful. Because later on, we receive permission to eat those tasty animals, because something has happened. Death had entered the world, but when God gave this command for them to be vegetarian, there was no death. You can't eat meat without killing something.

And so God shows the order here once again. He tells them what to eat because his creation is good. In fact, he says it's very good. There's gonna be no death.

There's no bloodshed, there's no disease. There's no survival of the fittest here. The creation is ordered in such a way that it's very good. It's very good.

And we see one last thing as we get to chapter two, verse one. that we see order again, because it all concludes with the order that we have for our week. On the seventh day, God rests, and as his image bearers, we're also called to rest from our labor. Even the order of how we structure our lives and set aside the time to worship God established here in the first part of Genesis, it's foundational.

And we see these truths. God is, and he has power beyond description. He uses that power to create order. You and I are not the results of random chance processes coming about in a pool of chemicals and chaos.

We are created in the image of God, and because of that we worship Almighty God. And we take these three truths that we've seen today And I believe that there's two primary ways in which we can apply this as we step out of this place today into this beautiful, created world of order that God has given us.

And the first challenge that we see here is that we need to relish in who God is. We don't need to see a mountain or a sunset over the ocean to appreciate the creative goodness of God. We see his power and majesty and order in everything that is around us.

We don't even need to leave this room to appreciate what God created. Look around you. We see not only the wonderful smiles of each other, But we see the fact that a loving God, a God of order, has placed us together, not just as biological families, but as His family.

Together, the family of God. And it can be so easy in our lives that are chaotic. To see things as only chaotic and random. But just looking around at God's creation, it reminds us that that's not the case.

A God of order has placed you where he has for his glory. And so live into this goodness shown to you in the created order. Take note of the blessings that God has put in front of you each day and remember this God who is, who loves you and cares for you.

And the second thing that we need to remember today, is that we need to remember the order that God has placed in our lives. As I just said, life is not random. God has used his creative power for your good.

It's visible not only in the things I just mentioned. It's visible in us, in what he's done for us in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

because we just saw at the end of Genesis 1 that there was no death, there was no bloodshed, there was no disease, but that's not the world we live in now. God said that the creation was very good, but much of what we see in our world on a daily basis can't be categorized as very good because we see suffering.

Some of us have recently experienced the death of a loved one. It doesn't seem very good out there.

And this is because it wasn't God who introduced this chaos. It was us. It was us, it was our first parents. Adam and Eve fell into sin and with it came this disorder, the reality of death.

But he brought order to us. He brought order from that chaos to us through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus for us. Our lives find meaning and order in the salvation that has been given to us in Jesus Christ.

And God used his creative power to bring that into being.

Don't miss this. Even though our sin and rebellion brought death into the world, God reversed this curse in us through faith. He created it in us, not by anything that we did, but by the power of His word.

And that's why we focus on the Word as we gather here to worship because we understand that it's through the Word of God and by the power of the Spirit that God creates.

Not just in the beginning, but as we hear the Word and we're brought from death to life through faith in Jesus Christ. We have order in our lives because God comes to us with this new creation.

this new creation that saves us from our sin. And as we live into this created order that God has given us in our life, we're gonna see something.

And that's a call to evangelism. The belief that chaos rules the cosmos is probably greater than it has ever been. Instead of faith in an eternal, loving God, there are those who claim to have no faith, but they actually have a deep and devoted faith to an eternal cosmos, to nothingness.

They may not even realize it. In fact, I would guess they don't.

And so we are called not to convince them. We're not called to twist their arms into believing. Instead, We proclaim the word, and we trust that God can do what he's always done.

By the creative power of his word, with the spirit, God can create order where that chaos reigns. Where unbelief reigns, the word of God can create order, just as it has done for us.

And so I challenge you to be on the lookout. This topic This topic may be one of the best methods we have to speak the truth of Christ to those who have hard hearts.

And you don't have to win a debate, you don't have to have all the details. You don't have to convince anybody. Instead, speak the truth of who God is, this God who is eternal, the God who not only brought into being a universe of order, but who brought you to life in Christ by the power of the word.

And so we do what God did. We speak the word into the chaos and we trust that God will create new life from it, just as he always has.

And so go from here, trusting in that word, sharing that word, knowing that God will work and he will create faith. Amen.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who made God?

God was not made by anything or anyone. By definition, God is eternal—without beginning and without end. While everything in creation has a starting point, God alone has the power to simply be.

Do we have to believe in something eternal?

Yes. No matter how you approach it, something must be eternal. Either God has always existed, or matter has always existed. The question is not whether something is eternal, but what that eternal reality is.

Does Genesis 1 teach creation or chaos?

Genesis 1 clearly presents creation as intentional and ordered, not random or chaotic. God speaks, and creation responds in a structured and purposeful way. The repeated pattern of days shows design, not disorder.

What does it mean that God created by His word?

God did not need materials or tools to create. He spoke, and everything came into existence from nothing. This shows His absolute power and authority over all things.

What does it mean that humans are made in God’s image?

Being made in God’s image means that human life has unique value and purpose. We are distinct from the rest of creation and are called to reflect God in how we live. This truth shapes how we view ourselves and how we treat others.

Continue in Genesis

Explore more from our study through Genesis and grow in your understanding of God’s Word:

• Genesis Sermon Series - Browse all messages from the book of Genesis.

• Genesis 1:11: Foundations - Study the opening chapters that shape how we understand Scripture and the world.