The Spiritual Content of Genesis 1 Creation – Seeing God’s Signature First impressions last. The first time we meet someone there may be a look, a phrase, a feeling we get which can colour our thinking, arguably unfairly so, in how we appraise that person thereafter. Similarly, opening lines often stick in the memory: • “Call me Ishmael.” • “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” • “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” It’s the way humans function and, to state the obvious, the One who designed them knows this. Thus, we can expect God has penned the opening of His Word with truly profound writing. It will be our first impression of Him. What do we find? An account of the creation of the heavens and the Earth, in six discrete and surprisingly explicit sections. Yet this account is almost universally rejected by the secular world as an outrageously false allegation and, surely worse, is increasingly interpreted by the Christian world as a metaphor so diffuse that it bears no factual connection to the actual development of life on Earth. (Is it likely that God crafted the opening of His Word around a story so abstruse as to be totally disconnected from reality? For my part, I say not.) But I defer critical analysis of scientific observations compared to Genesis 1 to other articles, if only for one reason: I don’t believe it’s the most important, or the most beautiful, teaching that Genesis 1 presents. I believe God’s opening treatise presents a synopsis of the Creator’s most fundamental work: the pattern through which God builds a disciple: a being with free will who comes to reflect Him. I believe Genesis 1 outlines not only the physical creation of the world but, on the higher spiritual plane, the thumbprint you and I are called to develop in our discipleship’s path. As a consequence it must also describe the development of the Lord Jesus, too, since he developed perfectly according to the Father’s signature. With that assertion in place, we’re ready to test it by considering the six creative acts themselves. But first, let’s be clear about what these six divisions of creation are *not.* They are not divided according to how much energy God, or His angels, could expend on a given ‘day.’ We can be sure of this, because the entire universe is created on Day 4, with the exception of planet Earth which, in percentage terms of matter, amounts to almost literally 0% of the universe (10e24 kg of 10e53 kg). So the divisions are not for any physical reason, which implies two things. First, since ~100% of the universe can be created in one ‘day,’ evidently the entire universe could be created instantaneously should God Almighty so dictate – and if we recognize God as omnipotent this is already evident. Secondly, if the divisions of the six creative acts are not dictated by physical restrictions, this already implies they are imbued instead with spiritual instruction. God separated His creation this way to teach us something. Six Days: Structure within Structure A careless reading of Genesis 1 might suggest each day contains the creation of a random assemblage of living or inert things. Not so: the six days are highly ordered. There are three arenas: Heaven, Sea and Earth; and God works in these three arenas twice each, in turn. First Cycle Day 1: Heaven: Light is created and separated from darkness Day 2: Sea: Fresh water is drawn out of, and separated from, the salt water below Day 3: Earth: Land is separated from the seas, and made plentiful in plant life Second Cycle Day 4: Heaven: Heaven is populated with sun, moon and stars Day 5: Sea: Seas are populated with the ‘great creatures’ and fish; birds also populate the firmament (sky) between the two waters Day 6: Earth: Earth is populated with animals, with man designated as principal Already, powerful patterns emerge. The first cycle is dominated by division: light from darkness; fresh waters above from salt waters below; land from sea. The second cycle, contrastingly but not contradictorily, is dominated by the action of multiplication: all arenas of Heaven, Sea and Earth are populated. If this contains spiritual instruction, we must conclude that first we are called divide in all areas of our existence, but then we are called to equally universally populate. Additionally, the first cycle’s divisions suggest God has preferences. Day 1: Light is preferred over darkness. Day 2: The fresh waters drawn up towards heaven, are preferred to the sea waters which languish below, unresponsive to God’s upward calling. Likewise Day 3: the seas, an environment hostile to human life, are swept aside to ‘create’ land, drawn out of those waters, on which humans can and must live. There’s a lot to observe here.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 22:43:30 +0000
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