Over the next several months, I want to encourage you to memorize with me 100 verses that every Christian should know by heart. Even if you choose not to memorize these verses at least mediate on them so that you might have the Word of God in your heart.
This week’s memory verse is the first verse in the Bible:
Genesis 1:1 (NASB)
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
These ten words are full of doctrinal truths. This is a fundamental idea of the Christian worldview—that God is the Creator and we are His creatures. This verse is a summary of creation. The verses that follow give us more specifics. The expression “the heavens and the earth” indicates the totality of the universe. Even time itself did not exist before the Creator acted to bring something out of nothing. Moses speaks of a “beginning” in Genesis 1:1 because of God’s intervention to get things started. Prior to His work of creation, the Lord alone was, and He was from all eternity. As Hebrews 11:3 tells us, “The universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”
Since we have a creator, we are answerable to Him for our actions. As dependent creatures, we rely on the Lord for our standards of right and wrong, our knowledge, and much more. We know our place in the universe only when we remember that He is our Creator and we are His creatures.
The biblical basis for God’s aseity (the quality or state of being self-derived or self-originated; specifically: the absolute self-sufficiency, independence, and autonomy of God) is found in the facts that (1) He existed prior to and independent of creation and that (2) He brought into and sustains in existence everything else that is. Many of the verses that support God’s aseity have already been utilized to demonstrate His pure actuality.