Creation

Jesus himself treats the creation narrative as settled history, not myth, grounding his teaching on marriage in "the beginning of the creation" (Mark 10:6) — a detail that matters because Paul's Adam-Christ argument (Rom 5; 1 Cor 15) depends on a real, historical first Adam, not a literary figure.

The epistles extend creation language into present experience and future hope. Paul tells the Romans that "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together" (Rom 8:22), waiting on the same resurrection that will renew believers' bodies — creation's fate is tied to redemption's, not separate from it.

The same vocabulary describes conversion: to be "in Christ" is to be "a new creature" (2 Cor 5:17), the old order already breaking in. Revelation closes the canon where Isaiah pointed: "a new heaven and a new earth" (Rev 21:1), with the redeemed worshiping the Creator directly — "thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they were, and were created" (Rev 4:11, ASV; KJV "for thy pleasure they are and were created").

Genesis 1:1's "heavens and earth" and Revelation 21:1's "new heaven and new earth" bookend the whole Bible.

The honest tension sits mainly on one word: how long is a "day" (Hebrew yom) in Genesis 1? The widely held reading is six ordinary, sequential days and a young earth, reading Exodus 20:11's Sabbath parallel and the unbroken Genesis 5/11 genealogies as decisive; conservative scholars who hold the same authority of Scripture have argued instead for a day-age reading (Hugh Ross), a literary framework (Meredith Kline), or a functional "cosmic temple" reading (John Walton) — real, named positions within the wider church.

A second, narrower question is whether Genesis 1:1 describes creation from true nothing or God's ordering of already-present unformed matter (Gen 1:2's "waste and void," KJV "without form, and void"); the traditional and majority reading takes verse 1 as the absolute beginning, which is also the reading this theme's verse list assumes throughout.