In the Beginning...

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth,

The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep,

While a wind from God swept over the face of the the waters.

-Genesis 1: 1-2

Let's start at the beginning then, the beginning of everything, with God.  One of the most insidious ideas that confronts the modern person is that one has to make a choice between God and science. Oddly enough, it is not the secular sort of person who seems to press people into this choice, it is actually a certain sort of religious folk.  In the United States of America, in the beginning of the 21st century, in a world saturated with iPhones and internet, there is a group of people who actually built a huge replica of Noah's Ark, they strenuously, if misguidedly, argue that the accounts of Genesis are literal truth, the way that the Pythagorean Theorem or Einstein's theory of general relativity are the literal truth.  For people who hold on to what they think is a "literal" interpretation of Scripture, this is important work, worthy of much time, talent and treasure, but what it is quite simply, is idolatry.

In fact, the people who gave us the Book of Genesis, would have probably laughed at the people who use their work in such a literal way.  I mean, they went to such great lengths to make it poetic and beautiful, filled with rhymes and metaphors and written with pleasing meter so that it flowed like water.  Oh right, it does that in Hebrew... we forced it into English, and made it into prose, so that it's not obvious that this whole account practically sings.  And the good old King James version, that's the one the literal types usually want to have pried out of their cold dead hands, can be eloquent at times, but actually is not very good at being entirely accurate, because it was taken from the Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Bible that was the official text of the Holy Roman Empire, which had in turn been translated from a sort of dodgy Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures called the Septuagint.  I say dodgy because Greek and Hebrew, as it turns out, are somewhat different languages.  Hebrew is a Semitic language that has a lot more in common with Arabic than it does with Italian, and on top of that the Hebrews who wrote Genesis were a Middle Eastern people, with a definitely different worldview from the Europeans who decided that their book would be Holy Scripture to them as well. The translation from Hebrew to Greek is fraught with peril, not just linguistically, but philosophically and theologically.  I'm going to talk more in the future about the Scripture and the work of interpretation, but for now, let's just say that pretty much anyone who gets a glimpse of Genesis in all its splendor would ever want to force it back into a merely literal box.

The actual vision of the Creator is so much better and so much bigger than the one those Ark building folks have.  The God whose spirit hovered over the face of the deep, would not be at all threatened by Charles Darwin's theory of Evolution or the idea of natural selection.  God has actually been at this Creation thing a lot longer than the good folks who wrote Genesis could have possibly comprehended. Trilobites and Dinosaurs were nothing but fossils buried deep in the earth, puzzling marks in the rocks, but nothing more to those folks. They had more pressing concerns: the Hittites and the Assyrians, people who claimed other gods had made the world.  Those other gods were real terrors too, full of blood and wrath, burning with rage and demanding sacrifices. These people knew a different God though, a God who was all about Steadfast Love and Mercy, Justice and Truth.  This God didn't create the world by accident, by eating his children, or by murdering his consort, as some of the others had.  This God created the world with his breath and his words, this God didn't come from some primordial realm of myths and legends, this God was the only thing there was in the midst of a "formless void." They had a great way of saying formless void though, tovu wabohu, see I told you there were rhymes. This chaos, this nothing, was all there was and God was alone in it, and this God, as we will find out later, is not angry, vengeful or greedy, this God is not some competitor among a pantheon of other gods.  No, this God is One, this God is Love, this God creates others because of love.  Genesis doesn't exactly tell us that, but it shows us. It shows us God being pleased with the light and the darkness, and everything God makes.  God is pleased with everything, because God has made everything because of love.  It never says everything is perfect, it says that it was "good," up to and including human beings.

You know the story gets pretty complicated pretty quickly, but it is good sometimes to pause just at the end of the beginning and take that reality in, everything was good, and there is a time to rest.