In the Beginning God... | Genesis 1:1

Scripture: Genesis 1:1

Key Takeaways:

Psalm 33:6

Nehemiah 9:6

Revelation 4:11

+ God Exists as the Eternal and Transcendent God

            Aseity

Hebrews 11:6

+ God Exists as the Good and Personal God

“There is a philosophical fissure between fundamental impersonalism or fundamental personalism. First of all, there is the difficulty of deriving ethical values from a nonpersonal source. If the universe is most fundamentally matter, time, and chance, then it becomes very hard to argue that one combination of those three is necessarily and of itself better than another combination  - for example, that life is better than death or kindness better than selfishness - in any way that gets deeper than a feeling or an unjustifiable decision… the impersonal cannot create obligation. From looking at the natural world, we can tell what is but not what should be. We can tell that hot is different from cold, drought from moisture, lightness from heaviness, and good from ill, but we cannot tell in any of those cases that one is better than the other in any way more profound than we happen to prefer it. Philosophers try very hard, sometimes very hard indeed, to derive something resembling commonly accepted human ethical principles from a radically impersonal universe, but such valiant and well-meaning attempts tend to be unconvincing or rely on the goodwill of the reader in granting contestable assumptions.” – Christopher Watkin, Thinking Through Creation.

+ God Exists as the Triune God

John 1:1

John 1:18

John 17:5

John 17:24

1 Peter 1:18-20

“For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.” – Aristotle, 384–322 BC

“Plato thought that in order to be worth rearing, children must be “malleable, disposed to virtue and physically fit”. If they did not prove themselves worthy, parents would “properly dispose of [them] in secret, so that no one will know what has become of them.” Aristotle thought defective children should be exposed—that is, discarded at rubbish tips, abandoned on hillsides, thrown down wells or drowned in rivers. “As to exposing or rearing the children born, let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared.… Around the world and down through history the vast majority of cultures have considered that we are all better off without the weak.” – Glenn Scrivener, The Air We Breathe