Today's Devotional

The sentence does not argue; it announces. “In the beginning, God created” — no defense offered, no proof laid out, no case built. Scripture simply opens with God already there, already at work, before there was a universe to notice him. Slow down on those first four words. Everything that exists hangs on them, and they ask you to start where the Bible starts: not with you, but with him. James put the choice plainly on Sunday. Either God is eternal, or matter is eternal — and everyone believes something they did not watch happen. None of us were there at the beginning, so all of us are people of faith about where it all came from. He said he simply does not have enough faith to believe that order, meaning, and love assembled themselves out of nothing at all. Hear what this verse does not ask of you. It is not handing you an argument to win at the dinner table, and it is not pitting faith against science — James noted that science itself leans on the ordered world a rational God made. Genesis 1:1 is not a court case for God's existence. It is the opening line of a cathedral built for his glory. So let the day start where the chapter starts. Before your inbox, before the thing you are anxious about, before you have proven anything to anyone — God already is. You do not have to hold the world together or explain it into place. You get to live inside a story he began and still authors. Begin there, and the rest of the day finds its right size.