God is here to change human history, to change our history—individually and corporately. How did all of this start? Let’s go back to the beginning. How did we get here?
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
Exactly what did God create? According to the Genesis story, God created everything. We call it the universe. But the word universe is not in the Bible. The earliest known use of the noun, universe, is in the Middle English period (1150—1500) by Chaucer.
The Bible says that God created the heavens and the earth—stars and dirt. And then proceeds to tell a story about how it all happened. It’s a long, convoluted story that isn’t finished yet. So, bear with me as I suggest that the most important thing that God created in the beginning was a story, an explanation about everything.
We are word creatures. Our lives, our histories, our futures—everything that we know—are stories made of words. In the beginning God created the universe, a unified story about the earth. So what exactly is a universe? The word universe is composed of a prefix and a root. The prefix is uni and the root is verse. The meaning of uni is one, and a verse is a noun and a verb, or a sentence, a subject and an action. A sentence is a very short story. So essentially universe means one story. In the beginning God created one story, a single story that explains God’s activity on earth, where He created life and critters and creatures and people.
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