In the beginning

This is not a ‘Bible study’ in the strict sense – there are no lessons to be learned for application to our own lives, for instance – and I think it will be very short!  Also, when I told someone that I wanted to do a session on the creation story, she said that people aren’t interested, that she tried with Junior Church and it did not work; but I re-read the chapter and felt the excitement and decided that I would have a go anyway! We’re not going to read the passage yet, that will come a bit later: and I am going to ask you not to follow it in your bibles because I want you to listen and don’t want you confused by variations in translations

I was telling someone that I was getting a bit nervous about doing this today, about creation, and she said, yes, it’s difficult, isn’t it, with all the different theories? And I thought, but I’m not doing theories.  However, it made me think that I should just touch on the theories a little bit: so here goes.  I actually don’t think it matters a huge amount whether we choose to take Genesis 1 as a literal account using 24-hour days as we know them: or whether we say that each of God’s days was a million of our years: or even if we say, it’s all down to the Big Bang.  As I said in my baptismal testimony, somebody had to make the things that went bang – and who was that but God?  I think science has proved that the order given in Genesis 1 is the order that big bang theorists agree with: and since the main argument that I am going to present is that of God’s choices, nothing that science shows proves to me that God did not oversee every aspect of the building of this world. Presumably at every stage, if circumstances had been a little bit different, the results would have been different: if God had wanted rainbows to be upside down, leaves to be blue and people to walk on their hands or curl up and roll along the ground, he would have adjusted the so-called laws of nature and laws of physics to bring this about. If God was overseeing the circumstances, as I believe, then each result was exactly what he had planned.

So – are you sitting comfortably?  Then I’ll begin!

‘In the beginning’ – this is the beginning, not of God who has no beginning (In Exodus he says, ‘Tell them I AM sent you’: Jesus says, ‘Before Abraham was, I am’.) but of our story: it is the equivalent of ‘once upon a time’, Moses is saying, now settle down and listen, I’m going to tell you a story, something that has been handed down for generations, the story of our family. Some people turn the quotation into ‘In the beginning God’: yes, but only for us. So the story to unfold is our story, or rather the story of us and God, but from our point of view.  We only ever think of God in relation to ourselves – many of the epithets we use about him can only be true in relation to us: God of himself has no need to be compassionate, merciful, just and so on, he needs these attributes to deal with mankind.

(Just a side-thought: the Rabbinic commentaries note that the first letter of the bible is the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and conclude that this is because there are two creations – that of Genesis 1 and that of the nation of Israel.  It occurred to me that it could mean that we, here on earth, are God’s second creation!  How do we know what goes on in the rest of God’s existence?  As I said just now, we only really look at God from our own point of view. But God is eternal and infinite: how can this tiny little planet use up all of God’s eternity and infinity?  What else does he do?) But if we follow the Rabbis for a moment, the first creation is this one in the Garden of Eden and the second, the creation of the nation of Israel.  A point that struck me on my recent reading was that in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham takes responsibility in a new way, pleading for the people of the towns which face destruction. He has relatives there but does not plead only for them but for the people as a whole.  Is this also a new beginning, of people accepting responsibility for strangers – Noah did not plead with God not to wipe mankind out in the Flood.  I don’t know, I haven’t re-read the early chapters since this occurred to me, but it is how I remember it.

Back to the book.  So:  God has created the ‘shell’ – without form and void. The Spirit of God hovered over the waters in darkness. There is a great sense of expectation: God can do anything at all. Then the first Word was spoken – ‘Let there be light’.  God is light so the first thing that was brought into our world was the essence of God himself.  We have the Trinity in place – Spirit, Word and God, all in a few lines and all in at the birth of our world. However, the light did not displace the darkness but was as-well-as., side by side with.

I am interested, too, in the fact that for some things – light, the gathering of the waters, vegetation, the stars – God simply spoke them into being.  Other things – the heavens and the earth, the firmament, sea and land creatures, birds, man himself – we are told that God ‘made’ or ‘created’.  So apart from the basic structure and the firmament, it is the things that have breath that he created, the other things he just spoke.  I don’t know what difference that makes, but I found it interesting!

Sometimes we seem to read Genesis 1 as if it were a shopping list – God did this and that and this and that and there we are! As though it were all planned out and inevitable, rather boring.  It’s rather like setting the stage for the appearance of the star – Man.  I mentioned the Big Bang earlier, and sometimes it is made to sound as if all the ingredients were in place in the primordial soup for our world as we know it, and there was only one possible outcome: some people read this passage almost in that way, as though God were calling out each potential from its inevitable place.  But I think it was much more exciting than that.  God is emotional – he loves, he is jealous, he gets angry: so why should he not get excited?  God is not boring or bored, we know from the psalms particularly that he did the things it pleased him to do, why should God not get excited about his projects and plans?  Why is the creation story usually told as if God went about it in a somewhat mechanised and unemotional way?

Although he is omniscient, there is a difference between knowing how something will be and actually seeing it in being and I hope this is true even of God: he could imagine the universe but imagining it and seeing it are different things.  I don’t think he necessarily started off with an exact plan, I think he made choices as he went along and that he was excited as the reality unfurled before him. God didn’t need a whole day to separate the firmament, to draw the waters into one place, but like the artist he is, he stood back at each stage and considered it: he had no need to rush the creation, he didn’t have a deadline to meet.  If we were making something as grand as this, we might be in too much of a hurry to get it finished, but God had all eternity, he could stand back and look at each stage and think about what to do next.  At each stage when the word had been spoken and the reality appeared, perhaps the father and the son looked at each other across the heavens and smiled, as Joseph and Jesus may have looked and smiled across the carpenters’ shop when they had made something together, and said, ‘This is good’. He even thought to create scavengers like maggots and hyenas and crows to get rid of dead animals in a positive and ‘creative’ way.  From nothing he creates an interdependent world, getting more and more complicated and exciting – does God get more and more excited as the scenario develops?  And at last he decides that it is ready for just one final touch – ‘human beings’ in his own image.  And that image has to include being able to make choices, as God has been doing: and the choices must be real, with real consequences, as God’s are real – not simply following a plan laid down in advance or it would not be in ‘God’s image’. So mankind has to be able to choose not-God or at least, not-God’s-way.  This I think is the greatest argument against the doctrine of universal salvation – man has to be able to choose to separate himself from God, and if God brings all to himself in the end anyway, then man’s choices are illusory. As T S Eliot said, ‘I had far rather walk, as I do, in daily terror of eternity, than feel that this was only a children’s game in which all the contestants would get equally worthless prizes in the end’.

And only then God can look around and say yes, that’s very good.

Now read Genesis 1-2:7.

The choices God made resonate through this passage.  He made two major choices from which, presumably, many of the others led - one choice was that this would be a universe of Time – from the very beginning we have light and darkness taking it in turns to rule: day and night.  The created light did not wipe out the darkness, did not banish it: but they existed side by side, turn by turn.  We have counting – first day, second day….Time has to include change – if we come across somewhere or something that hasn’t changed in a long time we talk about ‘timelessness’ or say, ‘time has passed it by’.  Time is also implicit in the creation of fruits and trees with their seed ‘according to their various kinds’ – you only need seed for renewal, rebirth, continuation, decay and replacement.  The stars are there to ‘serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years’. The rhythm of evening and morning, evening and morning, is like a heartbeat throughout the passage: or the ticking of a clock.  Time is there from the first moment.  However, even in our time universe, there may be an image of non-time: St Augustine argued that part of the plural heavens created was the intellectual, non-physical heaven, where intelligence’s knowing is a matter of simultaneity, we know what we know, not moment after moment but all at once, like God knows everything.

Just as a complete red herring: is there time on the moon?  Not the moon with men walking around on it, but the moon in itself?  It is part of our time in that it orbits and affects our gravity, tides and so on: but one side of the moon is always dark and one side is always light: there is no wind: the astronauts’ footsteps will stay forever: there is no wind to raise the dust or cause erosion of the rocks, no water running from one spot to another, no sound waves in the air: until a creature with a beating heart arrives, or even a wind rises, it seems to me that the concept of time is meaningless on the moon!  Just a thought.

The other major choice that God made was that we would exist in Space: I am not enough of a scientist to know if time and space are Siamese twins or if you can have one without the other.  (How often in sci-fi stories we do we hear that there is a flaw in the space-time continuum!) However, the point I am trying to make is that God had myriad choices – he had infinite possibilities, more than we can possibly even imagine with our finite minds that are ruled now by space and time – but with each choice he made, he narrowed his own field of possibilities, so one choice leads on to the next.  Having settled for space and time, he decided on sea and land, and different life forms for each habitat: he decided on carbon-based life forms, and a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere.  He had to create trees and fruits that could reproduce, animals, birds and insects that could live off the vegetation and each other – the food chain.  There had to be death or the planet would very soon become unliveable: but death is the wages of sin, so again we see that God knew the end from the beginning!

How do we think of God?  Shut your eyes and tell me what expression he has on his face.  OK?  It should be joy.  God is light and spirit and love – his essence must be joy. It is sometimes said that the creative impulse in humans springs from pain – some great dramatists and artists, poets and sculptors will say that their art flows out of their torment and agony and in a way this is true, that war and pain can act as the catalyst for great art.  But then if you turn your mind another way and think of a woman’s embroidery, say an altar cloth or those wonderful national costumes in Eastern Europe, this are made out of love and celebration; or you think of a monk labouring over an illuminated manuscript, then I think you will agree that beauty and creation can also rise out of joy and peace.  If we were made in God’s image, and God’s essence is joy and peace, then Mankind was born to joy and peace.  The fact that we don’t always have it is down to Sin, it is what we have made of creation and the fact that beauty can spring out of even our pain is surely a testament to the goodness of God.  It is another of his blessings, that nothing is wasted.

Do you know why God made the world?  (I think it was because it was so wonderful being God that he wanted to share it.) Sometimes I wake up in the morning or ‘come to’ during the day: standing in a sunbeam on a cloudy day or splashing through a rainstorm in wellies and mac and umbrella, or just feeling at one with this amazing world. and think, ‘isn’t it wonderful to be me?’ I know my faults, I know how far from perfect I am, that I am not an important person changing the world, but sometimes it is just wonderful being me.  There are many debatable points about IVF, but the common argument of selfishness is a non-starter: there is no unselfish reason for having children – you have them for you, not for their own sakes – but part of the reason I wanted children was to share with them the things I love – books and poems, sunsets and raindrops, all the cliché things: they were too good to keep for myself.  And if I in my limited little way here thought being me was wonderful enough to want to share it, to pass it on, how much more must God have felt that?  Being God must be inexpressibly amazingly wonderful: and perhaps he wanted to pass that on; but he couldn’t create other divinities, they would be creatures not I AMs, so he knew he needed also to create a universe where they could live and enjoy being themselves.  So he created the very best world he could within the parameters he set for himself and then he made humankind in his own image to enjoy it as he enjoyed being himself.  A picture that came to me is this: if you were quite rich and had a beloved daughter getting married, you might decide to buy her a house, have it decorated, choose furniture and paintings, and arrange everything as beautifully as you could, as a setting for her, as your gift.  Isn’t that what God did for us?  He created a wonderful setting for us, as his gift to us. And then he and his son looked at each other across the heavens, across the stars which they had thrown into the sky, and said, ‘this is very good.’

I would also like to share with you something you may already know but which I learned some time ago when reading about the bible code made up of skipping letters.  I checked this with Larry and Peter Gray-Read in case I was simply being a credulous woman, but they said yes, there was truth in this way of knowing the bible, so..  Apparently in the Hebrew text, in the passage about the Garden of Eden, there is hidden by the code the name of every one of the 25 trees and plants native to Israel at that time.  Isn’t that amazing?  I find it so frustrating that I do not know enough Hebrew to check these things for myself, I have to take someone else’s word for it, but even if it is not proof of a code as such, if those words are hidden in the text there, it makes it just

perfect!

Quotation: this appealed to me when I read it because it is the nearest anyone has come, in anything I have read, to my feeling about creation:

Imagine God in heaven surrounded by the choirs of adoring angels singing hosannas unendingly….”If I create a perfect world, I know how it will turn out.  In its absolute perfection, it will revolve like a perfect machine, never deviating from My absolute will.”

Since God’s imagination is perfect, there is no need for Him to create such a universe: it is enough for Him to imagine it to see it in all its details.  Such a universe would not be very interesting to man or God, so we can assume that the Divinity continued His meditations.  “But what if I create a universe that is free, free even of me?  What if I veil My Divinity so that the creatures are free to pursue their individual lives without being overwhelmed by My overpowering Presence?   Will the creatures love Me?  Can I be loved by creatures whom I have not programmed to adore Me for ever? Can love arise out of freedom?  My angels adore me unceasingly, but they can see Me at all times.  What if I create beings in My own image as a Creator, beings who are free?  But if I introduce freedom into this universe, I take the risk of introducing Evil into it as well, for if they are free, then they are free to deviate from My will.  Hmmm.  But what if I continue to interact with this dynamic universe, what if I and the creatures become the creators together of a great cosmic play?  What if out of every occasion of evil, I respond with an unimaginable good, a good that overwhelms evil by springing out of the very attempts of evil to deny the Good?  Will these new creatures of freedom then love Me, will they join with Me in creating Good out of Evil, novelty out of freedom?  What if I join with them in the world of limitation and form, the world of suffering and evil?  Ah, in a truly free universe, even I do not know how it will turn out.  Do even I dare to take that risk for love?”

The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light:  William I Thompson

And God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.