Genesis Diaries (1:1a)

Before I get into the meat of this article I want to explain that I am by no means a biblical scholar, at least in the traditional sense.  I am a guy who reads the Bible, pays attention, makes connections, believes the God behind this book is real, and does his best to understand it.  My grasp on hermeneutics, apologetics, ancient biblical languages, and deep technical theology is almost non-existent.  Heck, I still have a hard time separating the meaning of “apology” and “apologetics” in my head.  And I have no idea what “hermeneutics” means.  I keep seeing Herman Munster from “The Munsters” in my head when I read that word.  

What I do have is a passion for what this book says and means.  I get a deep joy out of reading the Bible.  It is such a great and worthy treasure.  It deserves and begs to be read.  The Bible is the primary way God reaches out to His people and I find that we all tend to treat it like it’s a normal book and let it sit on our shelves alongside “The Works of Shakespeare” (that nice leatherbound one you found and decided you should have because everyone should probably have it, but rarely open) or as an app on our phone or tablet alongside “Candy Crush Saga” and “Fruit Ninja”.  

I believe the Bible is a never-ending well, especially the first four chapters.  The longer I look at this book, the more layers I find and each one adds an odd mix of simplicity and complexity to all the perception and understanding of existence.  There is truth here; a Deep Magic, C. S. Lewis would call it.  

I’ve recently labeled my technique for analysis of the Bible as that I am a “Roving Explorer”.  I move from one place to another, taking in the sights, writing down thoughts and connections, and little tales I’ve heard, compare it to other places I’ve been and basically say, “Well, isn’t that interesting.”  I’ve been paying attention to storytelling, and dabbled in a fair bit of it myself, for nearly thirty years.  That will come up all the time.  I can’t help but delve into the things the Bible does say and doesn’t say.  What I mean by this will be evident when we eventually get to what life may have been like for Adam and Eve after the fall.  The little hints lend themselves to a lot that isn’t openly said.  And, as if I planned it this way (I assure you I did not) we will begin with a reference to storytelling.

“In the beginning…”

At the beginning of the Bible, these three words stand at what we can know.  They are three huge monuments that set the stage.  They are the Holy Scriptures’ version of “Once upon a time…”.  It is the signal for the children to be quiet around the fire because something they will not understand initially will become clear, and, while they are certainly going to be entertained, by the end a great truth will be revealed and an important lesson related.  

Interestingly the end of the Bible doesn’t say, “The End”, or “And they all lived happily ever after.”  Its books are not a single moment in time.  It has much more in common with “Moby Dick” which ends with the line, “And I only am escaped alone to tell ye.”  The White Whale is still lurking out there.  The story continues, it goes on into eternity.  Yes, the Bible declares all will be made right in the end, but what has come before, what is actually in the beginning, affects the middle, affects the end.  

And you, dear reader, are in the middle.  You are walking somewhere in time between the end of the book of Acts of the Apostles and the beginning of The Revelation to John.  This fact is not inconsequential.  

Genesis is a book of what its name means: “origin”.  In geometry, my least favorite subject in school ever (oh, how I disliked chemistry, but I straight up loathe geometry) the origin point of a ray is important.  How and where it begins affects everything about where it ends up.  Yes, I know, a ray theoretically goes on forever.  But, so shall we.

“In the beginning, God…”

When a story begins, “Once upon a time, there was a princess…” it is telling us who the story is actually about.  The storyteller is specifically saying, “Watch, the princess.  Pay attention to the princess.  The princess and what happens to her is actually the point.”  We don’t even question this.  If it stops awkwardly and is revealed to be about the princess’ cat halfway through we wonder, quite rationally, “Then what was the bit about the princess even there for?”  Sometimes we do get confused.  Take the parable of the Prodigal Son, for instance.  Who is that parable about?  

It begins with the words, “There once was a father who had two sons…”  

Because we have spent our whole lives hearing that parable and being told that it’s about the youngest son and clearly we can relate with the youngest son’s circumstance most easily, and the heading in our Bible even says “the Parable of the Prodigal Son”, we assume that’s who it is about.  But no.  

It is about the father.  Yes, we absolutely go on the younger son’s journey.  We watch him partying, cavorting with the wicked, ending up face-first in a pig trough, and making the long walk of shame back to the father he treated so horribly.  We understand that feeling of, “Look, I don’t deserve to be called a son.  Just please let me work for you.”  All of that is understandable.  Every one of us gets that feeling.  We don’t need a parable to tell us what that is like.  What we need to pay attention to, what is the absolutely unusual part, is what the parable tells us the father is like and, therefore, what the Father is like.

If an earthly father was in that situation, half his money gone, his son coming back with pig slop and dung hardened in the rags he calls clothes, would he be likely to have the parable father’s reaction?  Or more likely to say something along the order of, “Oh, you think you can just come back and everything is going to be ok?  You take my money, waste it on booze and prostitutes, and then you come back and all is just expected to be forgiven?  Dang right, you’re going to sleep in the bunkhouse with the hired hands.  I told you that this was a bad idea.  You didn’t listen.  You’ve made this bed, now you sleep in it.”

It isn’t so with God.  The entire point is how God the Father reacts toward us and our repentance.  It probably should be re-titled “The Father Who Had Two Sons Who Didn’t Realize How Absolutely Loving He Was”.

“In the beginning, God…”

It is not the beginning of God.  It is the beginning of all creation that is in view here.  

God already existed and has, presumably, always existed which tweaks our human pea-brains something so fierce that to fully accept that and conceptualize it might make us go crazy.  It’s like trying to think of eternity.  At some point, your brain shuts down, rejects it, or minimizes it into a form you can handle.  

The Bible begins by telling us that everything from here on out is about God and what He did, has done, and is doing.  There is not a book in the entirety of the Bible that doesn’t tell who God is.  Every book, every chapter, every line has some key to who God is.  The book is Him telling us exactly who He is, who we are in relation to Him, and how He relates to us.

I used to believe that the Bible was a one-dimensional thing.  It was there to tell us our “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth”.  It was a checklist, a series of rules on how to measure up, just what God expected and you needed to meet this level or it sucks to be you; you get the hell behind door number three.  It was a simple way to teach a simple child simple truths.  It was A+B=C.  It took quite a few years to move on from that and to see the second and third dimensions of the Scriptures.  And they are there.

The desire to be known is at the heart of God.  This book, the Bible, exists so we can deeply, intimately, unerringly know Him and, only by extension, know ourselves.  The first four chapters of Genesis affects everything in the rest of the book.  The lyrics change, but the song remains the same.  God is that song, repeating endlessly His love and desire to bring all who would come back to Him into union with Him.  That’s His vast, incomprehensible, prodigal (look it up), passionate, translogical desire.  

His vast love caused him to do something that changed everything.

“In the beginning, God created…”