One of My First-Ever Devotionals: “How Would You Introduce Yourself?”

I wrote this several years ago.  It isn’t the greatest, but I’ve always liked it.  I thought I’d lost but found it in some distant, neglected corner of the internet a couple years back.

If you had to introduce yourself—just on paper—to someone who doesn’t know you, how would you start? Oh, and you can’t give your name, or tell what you look like or how old you are, or what gender you are, or where you live, or….

In fact, let’s say the only introduction you have is to tell the reader about an accomplishment of yours—and not even one of your best ones. Lastly, try doing all of this using about 10 words!

Here, I’ll even help you:
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ .

How’d you do? Pretty tough assignment, huh? What’s amazing is that God introduces Himself to you and me in exactly that way. “Genesis” means “beginning”. Look at Genesis 1:1, the very beginning of the Bible (no, the Table of Contents doesn’t count and God didn’t write the Preface either!)

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Let’s look at this more closely.

“In the beginning God” God existed even before the beginning. God is real and has always existed. Just as you wouldn’t attempt to prove your existence to someone, neither does He.

What does the word “God” mean? The book of Genesis was written in the Hebrew language. The Hebrew word for “God” here signifies “supremacy” and “strength”. In four words we understand God to be ageless and ultimate strength; and not a god, but the Supreme Being. Hold on, He didn’t stop there.

“…created the heavens and the earth.” God is creative, detailed, structured, completely comfortable working in grand scale with nebula and galaxies and the invisible scale with molecular particles, and the elements–hydrogen, nitrogen, einsteinium and all the rest I never memorized in high school but was supposed to.

God tells us quite a bit about Himself in just 10 words. The more one reads the Bible, the more one learns about Him. In just the very first sentence we learn He is ageless, supreme, logical, orderly, creative and caring enough to make this world not just environmentally hospitable to human habitation, but downright beautiful, and all for us to enjoy.

Whether you’re a Christian reading the Bible for inspiration or a skeptic looking for holes, ask God to show Himself to you as you read it. You’ll undoubtedly discover that the first book of the Bible, Genesis, really is only the beginning!