Genesis is the first book of the Torah (Pentateuch), authorship of which is attributed to Moses, who is believed to have been alive on earth approximately 2000 years before Christ. However, the events of Genesis (i.e. the flood) are believed to long antedate Moses, possibly 4000 years before Christ. The events and characters recounted in Genesis are of mythic proportions: larger than life-size, older than normal maturity, more dramatic than natural events and heroic and supernatural in ambition. Normal proportions are distorted in the Genesis account because this was the time when man walked very closely on the earth with God, and the promise of God’s likeness in man’s character was still fresh and untarnished by centuries of sin after the fall from grace. Genesis is therefore written as a prologue for the Torah (and is placed at the beginning of the Bible), setting the stage for the creation of Israel and then the salvation offered to all of mankind through Jesus Christ. At the far end of the Bible stands the opposite bookend in the Book of Revelation, which also is told in mythic proportions and represents the possibility of what man can become again in right union with God. Throughout Genesis, there are stories which illustrate the pathos of our loss of God’s likeness in our lives, resolved in conclusion by the hope that God’s likeness will be restored to us by God’s loving grace if our actions are in obedience to His will. The interplay of pathos/hope permeates Genesis along with the themes of creation, covenant, blessing, sibling rivalry, and divine mercy.
By definition, God is an omnipresent, omnitemporal and omnipotent being. His presence is therefore logically prior to all of the created world. We cannot say that God is temporally prior, since "before time" is definitionally absurd. Instead, we can say that God is the basis of and the reason for the created world. As the first and the final cause, God’s being logically precedes the being of His creation. God chose to create heaven and earth within time, while maintaining His infinite presence extra-temporally (proper translation is "In the beginning, when God created..." and this implies time already existing when God wills into existence the material universe). God is named in the original Hebrew as “Elohim,” a plural form which indicates the power and authority of many attributes, combined in one divine being where all these attributes are totally compatible with one another. Thus, in God, His judgment is His mercy, His transcendence is His immanence, etc. Elohim is the author of heaven and earth by exertion of His will, which is His self-revelation in creation.
God’s action on the dark, formless earth and waters imposes new and marvelous order on these formerly dreary voids, which saves them from the eternal darkness that is the endpoint of disorder without salvation. We see that creation in Genesis is not so much creatio ex nihilo, as it is bringing order to what is disordered. God's action is the outward expression of His will, and His will is in absolute harmony with His ordered, harmonious, loving nature.
As the Spirit of God moves over the face of the waters, He hovers in a loving, womblike embrace of the disordered precursors of life, protecting what is disordered so that it can later become stable, growing, ordered creation.
It is God's Word, distinct from the Spirit of God, that initiates the first stroke of order on complete disorder ("And God said, Let there be light..."). Imposing order on what had been disordered is salvation, so God's Word is creative and salvific. God's Word also reveals God's nature, and so it is also revelatory. So, the Incarnation of God's Word in Jesus Christ will be creative (we are made "new creatures" in Christ), salvific (we are saved in Christ), and revelatory (if you see me, you see the Father). Creation = Salvation = Revelation.