Daily Journey: January 1st

Genesis 1:1-3:24, Matthew 1:1-25

Thought from Today’s Old Testament Passage:

I. The “Creation Hymn,” Genesis 1:1 to 2:3

Who wrote the “Creation Hymn”? Used by Moses, but written, no doubt, long before. Writing was in common use long before the days of Moses. Furthermore, some of God’s “commands, decrees, and laws” were in existence in the days of Abraham, 600 years before Moses (Genesis 26:5).

How did the writer know what happened before man appeared? No doubt God revealed the remote past, as later the distant future was made known to the prophets.

Who knows, perhaps God Himself may have taught this hymn to Adam? And it may have been recited by word of mouth, around the family circle, or sung as a ritual in primitive worship (hymns constituted a large part of the very earliest forms of literature), generation after generation, until writing was invented; God Himself then guarded its transmission until finally it found its intended place as the opening statement in the divine Book of the Ages.

If the Bible is God’s Word, as we believe it is, and if God knew from the beginning that He was going to use the Bible as a main instrument in the redemption of humanity, why should it be difficult to believe that God Himself gave the germ and nucleus of that Word? (Halley’s Bible Handbook, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000), pp. 84-85)