“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things were created through him, and apart from him nothing was created that has been created. In him was life, and that light was the light of men.” (John 1:1-4)
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.” (Gen. 1:1-3)

When Christians talk about salvation, we often start with the cross: Jesus died for our sins so that we can have eternal life with God. We might quote John 3:16, the lynchpin of all good Protestant evangelism, or perhaps Romans 3:23 and 6:23 to drive home the well-known fact that all of humanity is depraved and stuck in their sin, therefore needing divine rescue through Jesus Christ.

While the Romans Road is not incorrect per se, it is incomplete in explaining salvation.

Preaching salvation beginning with the Gospel of John or the letter to the Romans is like popping into a conversation that has been going on for some time and building a doctrine based on half a sentence, disconnected from the rest of the conversation.

Instead, we must enter the story from its very beginning. After all, it’s difficult to understand a story without hearing its beginning, isn’t it?

Imagine hearing the story of Jack and the Beanstalk without knowing that Jack and his mother were very poor and that he foolishly traded their cow for magical beans instead of money with which they could buy food and provisions. Imagine entering the story at the point where Jack, carrying a magical golden-egg laying goose, is being chased down a magical beanstalk by an angry giant. How did Jack get there? Where did the beanstalk come from? Why is he being chased? Why does he want the goose?

The story doesn’t make sense without its beginning.

Likewise, the Gospel of John is not the beginning of the story. It does, however, allude to the beginning of the story and, to the original Jewish hearers who were well-versed in the beginning of the story, it would recall images of God’s Spirit hovering over the depths of a black sea and then breathing God’s breath of life into it to create light from darkness and life from nothingness.

To understand salvation, we must go back to the beginning.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Quite simply, there was a beginning. A beginning to the world as we know it, a beginning to life, light, and creation.

(This causes all kinds of consternation for science-minded folks. Let’s put a pause on all arguments of whether God truly created the world in literally seven days or whether this is symbolic for eras, epochs, or some other length of time. This is not the point of our discussion today, and I might add that this was not the point of Genesis for the people of the Ancient Near East, either. The point, rather, is that God was in the beginning, and he created all things.)

Suspend your logical mind for a moment. Let yourself imagine the tohu va-vohu, the ‘formless and empty’ or ‘wild and waste’ pre-creation state.(1) It’s dark. Empty. Chaotic. Wild. Watery.

God’s Spirit hovers over this wild nothingness. And then God speaks.

With God’s very breath, light breaks into the darkness.

Where there was wild wasteland, chaotic waters, and formless emptiness, creation happens—light, land, creatures, vegetation, and humans!

Wild wasteland no more.

First, God creates spaces of order within the formlessness—creating space for the sun, moon, and stars, and then space for the heavens apart from the earth, and land apart from the waters. Then, God fills these spaces with life—sun, moon, and stars, sea creatures and birds, and plants, insects, reptiles, and mammals.

Is this not the very definition of salvation? God takes what was dead, formless, and void, and brings it to life with God’s breath.

The act of creation is an act of grace. Did God need to create the universe? No, not really. God can do as God wants. This is what makes him God.

However, God did create. God formed a beautiful universe with all its wonderful variety and diversity. In this wonderful, vibrant garden, God placed an image of Godself—the human.

“Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.” So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.” (Gen. 1:26-28, NLT)

When we disconnect our story of salvation from the creation story, we also disconnect it from its place in history. We remove it from the people who first heard it, retold it, and eventually wrote it down so that generations after could know it, too.

The people of the Ancient Near East were not unfamiliar with creation stories. The Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh tells a violent tale of warring gods, infidelity, and death, which resulted in the birth of the world from the body of a dying god. Humans were then created to serve the remaining victorious gods as slaves. The Egyptian creation myths also begin with chaotic primordial waters by which Ra is self-created and then births earth and sky.

The biblical creation story is shockingly similar to the ancient myths.

The difference is that God already existed (there is no creation of God in the biblical story) and creation occurs not by violence but by the breath of life. Humans are created and placed in this creation with the responsibility to tend and keep the garden; they are not God’s slaves but rather, representatives of God who steward the creation.

Grace and life are present in the very first pages of the Bible. This is the birthplace of goodness, wisdom, justice, and order. It is the origin of good relationships with other humans, creation, and God because it originates with God’s own Spirit, his Breath.

Salvation literally means to “save, rescue, or heal.”(2) If you argue that there was nothing to ‘save’ creation from in the first pages of the Bible, you’d be correct. It’s only after the humans’ rebellion against God in the Fall that salvation becomes a necessary concept.

However, the Bible starts with a picture of a good, beautiful creation; every attempt at salvation after the Fall is an attempt to return to the Edenic state of reconciliation with God and creation. This is the vision to which we long to return. It is the hope of every act of redemption thereafter, culminated in Jesus Christ on the cross.

So you see, the cross is empty of its power if we don’t first consider creation. Without the story of creation, how can we understand the meaning of “salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone”?

For the next several months, we are going to walk through the biblical story to search out the meaning of salvation within the entire biblical context. Yes, it culminates with Christ. But we miss out on so much of the significance of the cross and resurrection when we fail to understand the broader biblical story.

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(1) Tim Mackie, BibleProject, “Genesis 1 Study Notes,” accessed Apr. 18, 2025, https://d1bsmz3sdihplr.cloudfront.net/media/Study%20Notes/VC_Genesis-1_Study%20Notes_final.pdf

(2) William D. Mounce, Mounce’s Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, 615.