My pastor in Accra always used to say: if you can believe Genesis 1:1, you can believe the rest of the Bible. The more I think about it, the more I think he is right. This single verse makes the most radical claim in all of Scripture - that a personal God existed before time and matter and brought the entire universe into existence by an act of will and speech. If that is true, then everything else in the Bible - the miracles, the resurrection, the promises - is not only possible but expected. The hardest act of faith is here, at the beginning. Once you have believed that God created everything from nothing, you have already accepted the possibility of every other miracle. I come back to this verse when my faith is thin. It is the load-bearing wall of everything I believe.
This is so encouraging. Thank you for taking the time to write it out.
My small group discussed this exact point last week. We came to a similar conclusion.
This is the kind of study content that makes this platform special.
What a rich passage. Your notes helped me understand it more deeply.