Genesis 1:1-2

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 And the earth was a formless and desolate emptiness, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters."

Many believers can quote this verse, but the much of the original Hebrew gets lost in translation.

First of all, the Hebrew word for God, Elohim, is plural. Right off the bat, we are getting the Trinity. In fact John 1:1-3 describes the role that the Son plays in creation. It calls the Word God, and says that the Word was with God. Then this word became flesh. Before He became man, he existed as a unique person but shared in the nature and mind of God. He was God’s way of thinking. The whole world was created on the principle that life comes from God alone.

This Son became the conduit through which all things were created. It is a foreshadowing of how the Son becomes the conduit through which the Father brings eternal life. It is the three people with God's divine nature creating the world together.

In the Hebrew, after the word Elohim, there are two letters, Aleph and TAv. These letters appear across the Old Testament but remain untranslated. They are the first and last letters of the Hebrew Alphabet, and remain untranslated. Aleph Tav is actually Jesus. In Revelation, Jesus calls himself the Alpha and Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. The vision of Revelation probably happened in Aramaic, and John heard it as Aleph Tav. He wrote it in Greek and used the Greek equivelant.

Furthermore, in the original Phoenician script that Hebrew used, Aleph was actually a picture of an ox (A sacrificial ox was an Old Testament type and shadow of Jesus). Tav was a mere tally mark, but resembled a cross. It is a foreshadowing Jesus’ death on the cross.

Genesis 1:2 describes the Earth as “formless and void”. It means empty waste. It describes nothing. The verse also describes the God’s Spirit hovering over water. This language is used to mean that nothing was there, yet God saw something out. It’s similar to how a painter can see a picture on the canvas even when it’s not there. It goes with that verse that says that God calls things that aren’t as though they are.

Also, the water is playing off of Mesopotamian mythology. Mesopotamian mythology taught that their God's were created from the water. By saying that God's spirit hovered over the water, the author of Genesis is also saying that God is above all creation.

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