From “Let There Be” to “I Am”: The Journey of Unity, Division, and Return

In the opening lines of Genesis, we are introduced to creation through a powerful, undivided word. The Creator speaks:

“Let there be light.”
“Let there be a firmament…”
“Let the waters under the heaven be gathered…”

Each act unfolds with divine authority and simplicity. The phrase “Let there be…” runs like a creative pulse through the beginning of the chapter. Light, land, seas, vegetation, sun and stars—all are summoned by command. These are declarations of a unified force acting without internal contradiction. There is no dialogue. No deliberation. No identity but God.

But then, a dramatic shift:

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…” (Genesis 1:26)

This is the first moment in Scripture where the singular voice of God becomes plural. “Let us make…” suggests complexity, relationship, and interiority. While many theological interpretations point to the Trinity or a heavenly council, symbolically, this marks the turning point: the moment where undivided Being imagines itself into division.

Man is not simply spoken into existence, as light or earth were. He is made—formed in the image of the One, and yet expressed through the plurality of “us.” This moment is the origin of identity, of self-awareness, and thus the birth of the human story as we know it. From here, the entire Bible begins to unfold as a symbolic record of this fragmentation: the One consciousness dividing itself into names, nations, brothers, kings, prophets, and inner wars.

The Division Into Characters

Every biblical figure that follows—Adam, Cain, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David—is not merely a historical person, but a state of consciousness. As Neville Goddard teaches, the Bible is not a secular history but a spiritual revelation. It is the psychological drama of the soul. Each “person” is a projection of some aspect of that original “I Am” as it journeys through experience, belief, fear, persistence, and eventually, awakening.

The moment in Genesis 1:26 symbolises the beginning of this symbolic fragmentation. The One becomes Many—not as a fall, but as a necessary unfolding. Consciousness descends into form and multiplicity so that it may rediscover itself within the drama.

The Return Through “I Am”

Enter Jesus. In the Gospels, he speaks with a startling authority:

• “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

• “I am the light of the world.”

• “Before Abraham was, I am.”

These are not poetic flourishes. They are calls to remembrance—to the identity that existed before all the characters, before all the states, before all the stories. “I Am” is not a claim to superiority; it is the voice of undivided Being, awake within form.

The significance of the phrase “I Am” reaches back to Exodus 3:14, when Moses asks for God’s name and receives the answer:

“I Am That I Am.”

Here, too, we are not given a name but an identity—unfixed, absolute, self-sustaining. It is the only place from which true creation, liberation, and transformation can occur. Jesus draws on this same identification, not to repeat it, but to embody it.

The “I Am” sayings are not introductions. They are closures—not endings, but closures of the gap between self and source. They gather the scattered fragments of identity—Adam, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David—back into the stillness of being.

Jesus doesn’t give us another character to follow. He draws the curtain back. He speaks from the place before division, yet within it—reminding us that the “I Am” at the centre of all things was never lost, only veiled in name and narrative.

And So

• “Let there be” initiates impersonal creation.

• “Let us make” begins the conscious division.

• “I Am” gathers all that has scattered back into itself.

The journey was never about leaving God, but about Knowing—the kind of knowing that only comes from forgetting and remembering. The “I Am” that once imagined worlds now stands inside them, awake.