Genesis: God’s account of how He created
Creation for kids: How did everything start?
Published in Creation 42(2):32–35, 2020
People have always wondered how the universe began. Some ancient people had stories about how the earth was formed from a war between false gods. Today, some scientists tell us that everything began with a ‘big bang’ billions of years ago. But how do we know how the universe really began? God tells us in the Bible how He created the world. Only the Creator can give us a true account of how He made everything.
Genesis—God’s account of how He created
The universe began before people were around to see it, so God gives us the only possible eyewitness account. Because He was there, and He created the universe, He can tell us how He did it. And God tells us in the very first book of the Bible that He created the universe in six days and rested on the seventh day.
A day is a day!
Some people want to make the Bible fit the ‘big bang’ idea, so they say that maybe ‘six days’ means ‘six long periods of time’. But we know that when the creation story says “day”, it means “day”! When God gave Israel the 10 Commandments in Exodus 20, He told the Israelites to work for six days and rest for one, because that’s how He created the world! God didn’t rest on the seventh day because He was tired, but so that we would have a good pattern to follow.
The ‘big bang’
Many scientists do not believe the Genesis creation story. Instead, they think that the universe began in the ‘big bang’. They think that the universe began as a tiny point that we couldn’t see—everything that would eventually make up all the stars, planets, and people was contained in this very small dot. Then somehow this small dot exploded and the universe grew out of this dot, faster even than the speed light travels. But no one knows how such a thing could happen.
Could everything come from nothing?
Scientists who believe the universe started this way believe that the big bang involved a lot of energy which made everything very hot. As the universe slowly cooled down, the elements that form stars came together. The stars were like big furnaces that created other, heavier elements that planets, and eventually people, are made out of.
But there is no way for the first elements to naturally come together to form stars by themselves. God had to create the stars and planets miraculously, which means that scientists can’t explain how it happened, though they try.
God created the universe!
The way God created tells us several things. First, God created over a period of time. He could have created everything in a moment, but He took six days and rested on the seventh to give us the one-week pattern for work and rest. Second, He created in a very orderly way, forming the heavens and earth before filling them.
Third, we know that God created the earth to be a good home for human beings. Humans were around from the beginning of creation, because God created Adam and Eve, the first people, on the sixth day of creation.
The earth as an observatory
An observatory is a building with a telescope that scientists use to look out into space. But did you know that God put the earth in a good place to look out at the rest of the universe? We can see that God didn’t put galaxies (large groups of stars) just anywhere, but they are organized as a series of shells in a sort of ‘onion’ pattern. And it looks like our galaxy, the Milky Way, is near the middle of this ‘onion’!
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