In the Beginning, There Was a Plan

Genesis 1–2; Moses 2–3; Abraham 4–5: What Creation Actually Teaches

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Before it says anything about light or water or land, the Bible opens with a word that deserves more attention than it usually gets: beginning.

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1).

We read this so fast. Beginning feels like a timestamp, a footnote before the real content. But the Hebrew word bereshit—"in the beginning"—carries something larger. It's not just when. It's the announcement that this story has an arc, that it's going somewhere, that chaos isn't the natural state of things.

Creation is the argument that order is real.

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Three Accounts, One Vision

We have three overlapping accounts of the creation this week: Genesis 1–2, Moses 2–3, and Abraham 4–5. This is unusual, and it's worth sitting with before you flatten them into one tidy version.

Each account has a slightly different character. Genesis speaks in the spare, formal register of ancient Hebrew liturgy—it moves like a hymn. Moses 2–3, revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith, adds God's voice and Abraham's eyewitness perspective. Abraham 4–5 shifts to plural language: "And they said, Let there be light" (Abraham 4:3).

That "they" has drawn serious discussion. Multiple Latter-day Saint thinkers, including BYU scholars and Elder Bruce R. McConkie, have connected it to the council of the Gods, to the premortal assembly described in Abraham 3. Creation wasn't a solo act. It was the project of beings who already existed—including, in some sense, us.

President Russell M. Nelson has taught that understanding the doctrine of the Creation changes your relationship to the natural world: "[God] has given us this beautiful world to live in." But understanding the how behind that world—three texts, a council, a plan—changes your relationship to the Planner.

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The Image Problem

Genesis 1:26–27 is one of the most consequential passages in all of scripture: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness."

Our image. Not a metaphor. The Latter-day Saint reading of this passage is distinctive and important: God is an embodied being. When Moses saw God (Moses 1:2), Moses had a body. God had a body. The word image meant something physical.

The early Christians largely agreed on this point before centuries of Greek philosophy reshaped the Christian understanding of God into the formless, immaterial deity of classical theism. Joseph Smith's First Vision recovered the original testimony: God has a face. He has a voice. He stood close enough that Moses saw Him clearly.

The creation of Adam and Eve "in the image of God" is therefore not an idiomatic expression for spiritual similarity. It is a statement about physical nature—that human bodies are a form of holiness, that embodiment is a gift, not a limitation.

This reframes everything about our bodies. Your body is not your soul's problem. It is your soul's companion and your soul's estate.

See the Gospel Topics Essay on the nature of God.

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The Seventh Day

After six days of creation, God rests. Moses 3:2–3 gives us this: "And on the seventh day I, God, ended my work... and I, God, sanctified the seventh day."

In Hebrew, Sabbath comes from shabbat—to cease, to rest. But there's a subtlety here worth catching. Jewish scholarship notes that God didn't finish His work on the sixth day. He finished it on the seventh—by resting. Rest isn't the absence of work. It's the completion of it. The seventh day is the crown of creation, not the aftermath.

President Nelson has spoken of the Sabbath as a "delight" (see Isaiah 58:13), reframing it from restriction to gift. "It is a day for spiritual renewal," he taught in April 2015 General Conference. The creation week tells us why: rest is what makes the work mean something. It's the moment you look at what you've built and say, it is very good (Genesis 1:31).

When did you last stop long enough to say that?

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What Adam and Eve Mean

Moses 3 introduces Adam and Eve in the garden. Two things are worth noting that often get overlooked.

First: Eve is created because "it was not good that the man should be alone" (Moses 3:18). This is the first time God declares something not good in the creation narrative. Not the darkness. Not the unformed earth. Isolation. God's correction to loneliness is human companionship. That's not a small theological claim. It's God saying that even in a perfect garden, solitary existence is incomplete.

Second: both Adam and Eve are given stewardship before there's any mention of transgression. They're put in the garden "to dress it and to keep it" (Moses 3:15). They have a calling before the fall. Their lives have purpose inside paradise, not just after the exile.

We often read their story through the Fall lens, as if the garden were just the prelude to the real story. But the creation account is also saying something about human dignity, human purpose, and the sacred nature of work—before any mistake is made.

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Open Your Come Follow Me Manual

The manual this week offers rich context on the relationship between the Genesis account and the revealed versions in Moses and Abraham. Don't skip it. Let the Spirit point you to the verse that's specifically for you this week.

Come Follow Me Manual – Week 3