In my last entry I established that the entirety of the Bible is a revelation of who God, the eternal one, is to us and who we are to Him. All of His actions are an expression of Himself so that we may know Him. He began everything and did so out of His indescribable love. And out of that love, He was motivated to create.
“In the beginning God created…”
Does it strike anyone else as strange that the sentence doesn’t actually stop there, or that the next word isn’t just “everything”. Why make it so specific as to point out two things that He created? And those two things stunningly encapsulate all the things. So, why not just say that God created all the things? Why be specific?
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.”
If you take “everything” and you break it up into specific things then you are doing so to serve a function. Any storyteller knows the value of words in certain constructions. When the story is long then you can flesh it out and add little flourishes. Homer is famous for this by naming a character and then adding a repetitive descriptor to them like “Hector, of the bronze helm,”. After the first time, we get it. But Genesis is a tightly packed story in an amazingly small amount of words. Every word has a purpose. Every word is carefully selected. Every phrase has a purpose.
People can and do argue about the meaning of all things Biblical. I don’t expect you’ve come to this blog to find out what others are saying about it. If such is your bent then, “Go forth and search thy Google, and compare.” When I, as a storyteller and a writer, see this grouping of words it isn’t the “kosmos” of the Greek so that tells me, firstly, that the heavens were not enough to satisfy God’s purpose in creation. It was never just to make “stuff” that looked pretty. I presume that when Genesis speaks of “the heavens” it refers to both the rest of the vast universe with its swirling galaxies and planets that rain ammonia or diamonds or molten lead (these are legitimate wonders we or only just beginning to catch glimpses of, precious jewels He created for our amazement), and God’s living place. Now, I grant you, that with stars and sun and moon coming later in the subsequent verses but they stand like actors in the wings. Waiting for their parts. Dimmed and out of sight.
All of this is surrounding the only little planet that God focuses on. The Earth. It alone is set aside.
“And the Earth was without form and void…”
This little lump of a planet with only potential and nothing particularly attractive about it stands apart from the rest of the heavens. Only the will of the Creator, the attention of the Eternal One, makes it special at all. Its surface was irregular. Its ability to support life was nill. One of the words used here can be translated “vacuum”. Nothing lived on this space rock and nothing was going to. It wasn’t just empty. It was a void.
The word for “void” here is only used two more times in the whole of the Bible, most notably when Jeremiah sees the final judgement and the earth reverts back into this particular state of void presumably before God makes “all things new” leading to the New Heaven and the New Earth.
“The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.”
Here we discover that the Earth isn’t just a lumpy rock. It’s covered by water; deep and dark. The whole of creation is surrounded by darkness at this point. While I understand what is coming, the creation of Light, the sun and the stars, this part has always bothered me. It touches a place of my nightmares and I’ve only recently understood why.
It’s meant to unsettle.
My current understanding of ancient history is that while there were many seafaring peoples, the Jews were not known as one of them. They feared the ocean. There was something forever unsettling about that massive of a body of water. In prophetic literature of the Bible many of the creatures of chaos lived in water or rose from out of the ocean. It’s a place where the weather can change in an instant, tsunami’s rose and obliterated whole coastlines, and the worst storms came inland from there destroying crops and homes. They seemed to have a nominal relationship with the Sea of Galilee and had sketchy feelings about the Dead Sea. The image of darkness, which terrified ancient people to a degree we can’t fully appreciate in our always lit world, and water would have deeply bothered the early readers. It was an open, foreboding, terrifying question mark. Things could not stay as they were. God had to do something. He had to take action.
“And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”
There is something here in the word usage that fascinates me. In two sentences we have a darkness covering the face of the deep which is replaced by the Spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters. So, what gives? Those are two similar but distinctly different phrasings. I just got back from a two hour deep dive into the original Hebrew and here is what I can tell you. There are two potential readings.
Reading number 1: It was dark. There was water. It was deep. God hovered over the face of it.
It’s a very linear and logical thing to say.
Reading number 2: …and darkness/despair/misery was upon the face of the chaos/abyss/grave. And the emotional aspect/breath/wind of God was moved emotionally to a brooding tremble over the face of the water.
Each reading would be more palatable to different kind of people. For me the second is far more interesting. The Holy Spirit, the feminine aspect of God (it’s a feminine word) was so moved by the sight of the darkness and chaos that God then did something in response.
“And God said…”
This is so amazingly in keeping with the rest of the scriptures. Every story is God acting, God reacting to a horrible situation, chaos, disorder, suffering, sickness, death, confusion, destruction of bodies and souls. And how many times does that begin with some version of, “And God said…” Whether it to be to the first sinning couple, the first murderer, an old old man who wants a child more than anything, an Israelite who was once an Egyptian prince, the prophets, the judges, a strong man brought low by his enemies looking for a shot at redemption, a scared man hiding in a wine press who would become a warrior and lead people to freedom, a nation who abandoned Him and embraced toxicity, the birth of His Son, the Death of His Son, the persecution of many, all the way up to today. It all begins, every good and perfect shift and change in history has always begun with, “And God said…”.
He is not just a creative God. He is a speaking God. He speaks into each of our lives. He sends others to speak into our lives. He uses the scriptures to speak into our lives. He has not left us as ignorant nor as orphans. We live in a wearying, noisy world and so many are screaming above the din, “Where is God?! Why doesn’t He speak to this or that in my life/nation?!” When the truth is that He is speaking all the time. He began with words. He has used words throughout. And if we get quiet. If we truly want to hear. If we silence the distractions, we, like Elijah, can hear that tiny voice barely above a whisper.
He is moved. We have this crazy notion of an unaffected God, an angry to the exclusion of all else God, or a loving all permissive God. All of those are a very low-resolution perspective of who He is. He is emotional. He is moved to trembling by the circumstances of His people. But most often…I wonder if we don’t “hear” Him because He has already spoken and what He has said is not what we want to hear. He has spoken into the darkness and chaos, to form something He calls “good” in our lives. Something we run and hide and shield our eyes from.
“And God said, ‘Let there be…Light.’”
Finding Narnia 
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