The first day ends with the phrase: there was evening, and there was morning — the first day. In the Jewish reckoning of time, the day begins at sundown, not sunrise. God's rhythm starts with rest and darkness before the light and the work. I have been sitting with how countercultural this is. Our culture starts the day with productivity — get up, achieve, perform. But God's creative pattern... Read more
The language of dominion given to humanity in verse 26 is explicitly royal language in the ancient world. Kings exercised dominion. To be given dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every living creature on earth is to be commissioned as a royal steward — a vice-regent placed by the Creator King to represent His rule over His creation. This is an enormous dignity. Every... Read more
I grew up hearing the creation story in a very different frame — more mediated by art and tradition, more symbolic and layered through centuries of interpretation. The Sistine Chapel ceiling, the great cathedrals, the liturgical calendar — all of these surrounded the text with a richness that sometimes made the text itself harder to see. Coming to Genesis 1 through evangelical Bible study, where... Read more
Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over every living creature — this is one of the most misread verses in Genesis, and it matters enormously how we read it. Subdue and dominion are strong words, and they have been used to justify environmental destruction and exploitation. But the context corrects this. A king who subdues a territory is responsible for its... Read more
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. This means God was before the beginning. The beginning is itself something He created — time, space, matter all originate with His creative act. He is not within time the way we are, carried along by its current. He holds all of time simultaneously, from every first moment to every last one, in the same eternal present. When I pray, I am not... Read more
And God said, let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear. And it was so. What strikes me in this verse is the word "let" — as though the dry land was waiting beneath the waters to be revealed rather than being built from scratch. Creation responds to God's voice not with reluctance or delay but immediately and completely. The seas obey. The land appears. The... Read more
Sofia Andrade·Église Protestante Évangélique de Paris·Mar 18, 2026
Deus criou
Growing up in Brazil, this was the first Bible verse I ever memorised, and my grandmother taught it to me in Portuguese: no princípio, Deus criou os céus e a terra. No matter how much theology I have studied since then, no matter how many commentaries I have read or lectures I have attended, I always return here. This is the foundation on which everything else stands. Before the law, before the... Read more
God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. He doesn't eliminate the darkness in this verse — He orders it. He creates a boundary between them, names them, gives them their times. There is something here that has been speaking to me about how God works in our lives. We often pray for the darkness to be removed — for the difficulty, the confusion, the grief to... Read more
Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness. The plural — our image, our likeness — has drawn reflection from every generation of theologians. The Christian tradition reads this as the first echo of the Trinity in Scripture: Father, Son, and Spirit in conversation before the creation of humanity. If that reading is right, then humanity is made in the image of a community — a community of... Read more
Sofia Andrade·Église Protestante Évangélique de Paris·Mar 18, 2026
Seed-bearing plants
Let the land produce vegetation — seed-bearing plants and trees that bear fruit with seed in it according to their various kinds. What strikes me here is the principle of generativity built into creation from day three. Everything that lives carries within it the capacity to reproduce, to extend itself, to produce more than itself. Life is designed for continuation and multiplication. I wonder if... Read more
The first blessing spoken in the entire Bible is not spoken to a human being. It is spoken to fish and birds on the fifth day of creation: be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth. Before the fall, before sin, before any covenant with Abraham or covenant at Sinai, the first recorded blessing God speaks is a word of abundance over... Read more
David Mensah·Cornerstone International Church·Mar 18, 2026
The foundation
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... Read more