The Question of Origins

​“Where did I come from?” is a bigger question than it may seem. The easy answer might seem to be on that’s purely physical....ovulation, fertilization, gestation, etc. In some sense this answer would make us sound “like any other mammal” which is what many of us are taught in our Life Sciences class. However, is that ALL that we are? Are we simply physical? What about the part of us that is spiritual/eternal? Where did that come from? Just as the physical part of us is made “in the image of” our parents, are we somehow made “in the image” of someone/something with these eternal, spiritual attributes as well? We speak of body (physical), soul (spiritual), mind (mental), and heart (emotional). Which of these (if any) are unique to humans, or do all creatures share some or all of these with us? What makes something living vs non-living? Do non-living things still share a common ancestry? If “life comes from life,” then is there any “first life” that all living things come from, and how is it that possible....could something living come from something non-living to become the first living thing, or must there be something both living and eternal which could be the source of all life?
Let’s look at the book of Genesis for some biblical answers about the origins of everything. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1). This verse says a lot in just few words, but that’s not all that the Bible tells us about origins. It is true that Bible is not a Biology textbook, but we can learn a lot about where we come from within its pages. This first book of the Bible, Genesis, is literally “The Book of Beginnings/Origins.” It answers questions like:

• The pre-existence of God
• The creation of of the heavens and the earth and all that is in them and how everything was spoken into existence “out of nothing”
• The account of how man was “formed” from the dust and God breathed His breath/spirit into us and put eternity into man’s heart, and how God said “It is not good for man to be alone” and made woman to be man’s “helpmate” to come alongside and be similar, but different from each other.
• The origins of sin and sin nature
• The origin of the nations and the languages
• The origins of the Abrahamic peoples and specifically the nation of Israel
• ...and much more.

Genesis is not the only place in the Bible that discusses origins though. For instance, there are many questions about the “origins” of Jesus. If He is 100% God and 100% man, did He begin to exist at His birth or has He existed through all of eternity as part of “The Trinity” (I know that word is not specifically used in the Bible, but that doesn’t mean that the concept isn’t there when there are many verses that discuss The Father, Son, and Spirit)?
It is important to answer where we come from because this directly leads into the questions of Meaning, Morality and Destiny. If we were a “random accident” then we are without purpose, without destiny and without any reason to live by any moral code. We have no way no fixed reference for right/wrong, good/evil, etc. Yes, our belief about our origins is vital to the formation of the rest of our world view. Were we designed with a purpose beyond the physical act of conception or is meaning something we have to strive and make for ourselves and morality something we define for ourselves?
We’ll talk about these things and more as we continue, but for now, I encourage all of you to read the Book of Genesis. It’s 50 chapters that is historical narrative, meaning that it should be ready like a biography....real stories about real people in real places. Also, let me stop here and say even though I used the word “stories” that is not to imply anything such as “fable” or “fiction” or “fantasy.” No, this is a true, historical account, so I encourage you to read it that way.
That doesn’t mean that the book of Genesis won’t challenge you as you come across supernatural elements (even through somewhat natural means sometimes) where God intervenes in ways that cannot possibly be explained apart from His intervention (such as Abraham and Sarah having Isaac in their old age). We begin to see that all of this is His story that He works all things together for His plan...even the things that we meant for evil (see the story of the life of Joseph for that one).
This note is not meant to give answers to all of your questions or even to give evidences or proofs for the statements that I made here, but instead to show that what we believe about Origins determines a lot about what we believe. I think I’ve made it clear that I believe in the account six-day account of “special creation” told in the book of Genesis. That may lead some of you to ask me several questions and while I may not have all answers, I don’t need to understand everything to know from what I see around me that the universe shows design and order that to me can only be explained by a designer and law giver. Nor can I explain man’s soul by purely physical means...there must be something else...someone else that gives us that life and puts eternity in our hearts and give us the desire to even think about the existence of God, to try and know Him, and even to worship Him. Such things do not make sense at all from a Naturalistic perspective...even life itself cannot truly be explained by that model as living things are clearly more than the some of their physical parts.
The information in our DNA is a code much like a computer program or even a language....we’d never look at a computer program and say “Isn’t it amazing how those commands just happened to come together in a meaningful way where the computer could understand them and so that it would perform this function.” We’d never say that even for the simplest of programs because we that design and information have to come from a designer and intelligence. This is much the same argument that can be used on a much larger scale (see Romans 1) on how all of creation tells us of God and His invisible attributes and those who reject the account of creation do so because they desire to reject Him and His authority over their lives, not because of a lack of evidence or proof. This is the story of man that we see in Genesis that he wished to be God and know good and evil and make his own destiny, and so little has changed since then...we’ve just found new ways to be evil, but thank God for His plan of redemption and salvation and His giving of Jesus Christ so that we who were dead and without hope could find the answers to life, meaning, morality and destiny in Him.