God Makes Everything, and Makes People in His Image

Read the passage first

Open your Bible to Genesis chapters 1 and 2. Read slowly. You do not need to understand every word. Just notice two things: what God does, and what God says.

What happens in this passage

The Bible opens with a short sentence: in the beginning, the very start of everything, God made the heavens and the earth. Before that there was nothing at all, except God.

All through chapter 1 you will see the same pattern. God speaks, and the thing happens. Light, sky, sea, land, plants, stars, animals. Everything comes into being because God says so. No struggle, no effort. This tells us God has power over everything.

And after each thing is made, the Bible says God saw that it was good. The world God made did not start out broken. It did not start out as suffering. It was good from the beginning.

The high point of the chapter is people (verses 26 and 27). God makes human beings different from every animal: made "in the image of God." That means people reflect something of what God is like. We can think, love, choose, and create, and we were made for a relationship with God. Man and woman have equal worth before him.

Chapter 2 zooms in close. God forms the first man, Adam, puts him in a garden called Eden, gives him work to do, gives him a single rule (do not eat from one particular tree), and makes a woman, Eve, to be his partner.

Chapter 2 ends with a sentence that matters enormously for the next lesson (verse 25): the two of them were naked, and felt no shame at all. Nothing to hide, nothing to cover up, from each other or from God. Hold on to that picture.

How this points to Jesus

This may not seem to be about Jesus yet, but it is the foundation of everything.

• Without a Creator God who is good, we have no way to understand why the world later goes wrong, or what God is coming to repair.
• The New Testament says Jesus was there at creation (John 1:1–3 and Colossians 1:16). The one who spoke the world into being is the same one who would later be born as a human being.
• "Naked and unashamed" is a picture of a relationship with nothing standing between people and God. The rest of the whole book is the story of God bringing us back to that kind of relationship, through Jesus.

Words to know

The Thai words ตรัส and ทรง are royal register. The Thai Standard Version uses them for God to show the highest respect. "ตรัส" simply means "said." "ทรงสร้าง" simply means "made." When you meet a word with "ทรง" in front of it, drop the "ทรง" in your mind and read what is left. The meaning becomes clear.

The name พระยาห์เวห์ (Yahweh, printed as "the LORD" in English Bibles), which first appears in chapter 2, is God's personal name. It is the same God as in chapter 1, not a second one.

Tap any underlined word in a lesson to see a short explanation at any time.

Reflect

1. If God made everything "good," how do you think God saw you when he made you?
2. Is there anything in your life you feel you have to "hide"? Think about the picture in Genesis 2:25, where there was nothing to hide at all.
3. How does the faith you grew up with say the world began? Where does it differ from this account?

Pray

If you are not used to praying, try simply talking to God as you would to someone standing in front of you:

"God, if you really are the one who made everything, let me come to know you. Help me understand what I am reading. Amen."