The First Word

The fascinating connection between John and Genesis

Every January 1st, the first thing I do is open Genesis in Hebrew and read the opening line.

Beresheet bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

I’ve done it for years, and it still impacts me. There’s something about starting a new year with those words — the same words through which God started everything — that puts everything else in perspective.

But how did God create the heavens and the earth?

Count how many times this phrase appears in Genesis 1: And God said. Verse 3. Verse 6. Verse 9. Verse 11. Verse 14. Verse 20. Verse 24. Verse 26. Verse 28. Verse 29. Ten times. And every single time, something new enters the world. Let there be light — and there was light. God speaks, and things exist.

The Gospel of John opens by pointing directly back to this.

In the beginning was the Word — ὁ Λόγος / ho Logos — and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through him all things were made.

John wants us to understand that the voice speaking in Genesis 1 is not just a voice. It is a person. The eternal Word, the Logos, the one who would later become flesh and dwell among us. When God speaks the world into being, we are watching the whole Trinity at work — the Father speaks, the Son is the Word through whom all things come into existence, and the Spirit is the ruach, the breath, hovering over the waters.

Logos was already a loaded word in the Greek world. The Stoic philosophers used it to describe the rational principle holding the cosmos together — the divine logic woven into the structure of reality. John takes that word, which his readers would have been very familiar with, and says: this is not an abstract principle. It’s a person. His name is Jesus. And everything that exists was made through him.

What I find so striking about this is what it implies about speech. If God creates by speaking… if the Logos, the eternal Word, is the means through which the universe comes into existence… then words are not just communication. They carry something of the creative nature of God himself.

Proverbs takes this with great seriousness.

The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit (18:21).

That’s a strong claim. The power to bring life or to bring death is found where? In our mouths. Our own speech has a derivative power. As God’s image bearers, we are granted the ability to impact through speech the world he made through speech.

And in Jesus’ own teaching, this connection between speech and creative power becomes explicit. In Mark 11:23, he says:

Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them.

The key word there is says. Not hopes, not thinks — says. Jesus is connecting our speech directly to the creative speech of Genesis 1. When we speak in faith, we’re doing something that reflects how reality is fundamentally structured — a universe made by a God who spoke it into existence.

I want to be careful here. Some Christians think we can just ‘name it and claim it’ as if life is only controlled by what comes from our mouths. It’s not. You can’t name and claim a healthy body or a healthy pay check and then proceed to eat junk food and never work.

But I do think many of us underestimate how much our words form us and the reality around us. The things we say about ourselves, about our children, about our circumstances... They’re either moving toward what God says about us, or away from it.

One thing I’ve done for years when I’m sick is read Psalm 91 aloud.

A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.

These words aren’t a magic formula, but there is something spiritually significant about taking what God says and speaking it into your own situation out loud. Like the Spirit hovering over the darkness and chaos, and then the word of God speaks light. We are image-bearers of the Logos, the speaking God, and our words do something in the world.

No other creature can do this, by the way. No animal can tell you what happened yesterday or speak hope into tomorrow. Language — real language, story-language, meaning-making language — is one of the most distinctive things about being human. It is part of what it means to be made in the image of a God who spoke and the universe came to be.

So what are you speaking? Over your life, over the people closest to you? It’s worth paying attention to. Because the Word made everything, and you follow in his footsteps.