The Genesis Project

CHAPTER SIX
IN THE BEGINNING
The Universe and everything we see is made up of matter. Matter did not exist before the beginning of time. It was created “in the beginning.”
If you are a frequent traveller like I am, you may have noticed different packing habits at the airport. The airlines mandate that you carry no more than a specified number of suitcases, depending on your travel class, upper or economy. It all depends on how much you pay. The more you pay, the more you can carry.
The challenge for most people, especially women, is how to squeeze so much into those suitcases. They remove presents from boxes just to gain extra space. Boxes occupy space. They remove clothes from packages. That creates more space. They press materials down, and squeeze and squeeze so the suitcase can take more. No one packs like a woman, especially the Nigerian woman! Airlines the world over understand the packing habits of Nigerian women.
But all this squeezing is incomparable to the squeeze I am about to describe.
Take all the matter in the Universe - all the houses, all the bridges, all the water, the landmasses, our bodies (all 6.9 billion worth), the planets, galaxies… take everything. Squeeze them all together until you arrive at the size of the Earth. Keep compacting. Squeeze and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until everything looks like a compacted metal cube at a scrap metal yard. You can't imagine that, can you? That cube will be unimaginably heavy and dense. You don't have the energy to perform this squeezing feat but let’s assume you do. Let's assume you're some superhuman species with extraordinary squeezing powers. Now compress, and squeeze, and squeeze again until everything is now the size of a small cube of sugar. But we are not done yet. Don't get tired. Now squeeze and squeeze again until everything is the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence. Remember we're assuming that you are superhuman and that you have the power to compress all of creation into a full stop. I know you can't even squeeze a small piece of paper into a full stop but let's indulge ourselves in foolery.
That full stop, the dot, was the size of the Universe when it all began. When the Bible says, “In the beginning…” it was referring to that dot. Scientists call it a singularity. The Universe began essentially as…nothing. Both science and the Bible agree on this. “The Earth was without form,” the Bible says (Genesis 1:2). It had no dimensions. The Universe was a singularity.
The Hebrew word translated “Without form” is “tohu”. Among other words it means a worthless thing. The Universe was nothing, worthless!
Indeed the Book of Genesis uses an interesting word to describe creation in the opening verse of Genesis. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth” (Genesis 1:1). The word “create” in that verse is the Hebrew word “Asa”. It literally means to create something out of nothing. In other words, the world was created ex nihilo or out of nothing. (Science and the Bible agree).
But the man Adam was not created ex nihilo. The Bible interchanged the word “Asa” with another Hebrew word, “Bara” when it came to the creation of Man (Genesis 1:27, 2:7). It means to create out of something. Man was made from already existing material.
And so at “the beginning” there was nothing, zilch, zero… No universe, no landmasses, no water, no continents…not even time!
What was before “the beginning”? No one knows! The Bible doesn't say and even science is stomped. In truth, we cannot talk of a time before the beginning because there was no time before the beginning. “Timelessness” is hard to imagine, and not a few might have considered St. Augustine wankers when he stated that time did not exist before the creation of the Universe. That statement might have been considered the output of an over-contemplative mind. We imagine that time has always been, but it is not so! Time was created alongside everything else at the beginning. The word “beginning” in the phrase “In the beginning…” is the Hebrew word “Reshith”. It is not so much a reference to “time” but the initiation of a series of historical events. Please note that. You need that understanding to configure creation in the Book of Genesis. Some modernistic translators in fact render that verse, “When God began to create…” It is a very apt interpretation because it uses an event-based turn of phrase to describe “In the beginning…”
The implications of “timelessness” are immense. For one, it means that God exists in a “dimension” outside of time. There must be another type of dimension outside our dimension. If God created our dimension He must be extra-dimensional. If He created time He could not have existed within time. He is not subject to it. He would later subject himself to time at his incarnation but that was eons later.