Sky and Sea and Soil

I can still remember one of the happiest, most contented moments of my life. It was years ago now. A friend of mine and I were spending a weekend on Mykonos, a 33-square-mile Greek island. It was early morning, shops were barely opening, I was restless. So I ventured out on my own, bought a gyro for breakfast, walked a little further on to a small stretch of beach (or what pebbly shore passed there for a beach). There I stood to eat, firm on the dry land, gazing out over the face of the Aegean Sea. Everything seemed at peace. The sky above was heavily choked with a ceiling of cloud, but the morning light was breaking through in layers of defined rays just above the stark and rugged form of an opposing island, another one of the Cyclades. The orange beams after the dawn glittered across the choppy waters. Looking up to heaven overhead, down at the dry land underfoot, out over the sea ahead, marveling at the sheer artistry of their arrangement, with a thankful heart I saw that what God had made was as really as good, as beautiful, as fearfully and wonderfully made, as Genesis promises.

In our exploration of this Genesis and its good God so far, we've ventured to the doorstep of eternity, trying to sneak a quick peak of God at home alone: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one Eternal Love. We've witnessed the grand outpouring of his love, wooing a universe into existence out of nothing by the authority and allure of his all-gracious Word. All things exist as expressions of the love of God, and to be loved by God as he shares the goodness of existence with them, and so displays the glories of his love. And yet, verse 2 shows us the face of an early universe which isn't ready yet to grasp and proclaim that glory. A raw world has a triple imperfection: it's dark, it's inhospitable, it's void of life. But all the same, the Spirit of God is hovering over the waters, over the matter of creation, nurturing and readying it for what God's about to do.

Last Sunday, we watched as God remedied the first problem, the darkness. “Let there be light!” Light is the basic medium of recognition and interaction, which makes beauty and form shine forth and helps us begin to understand the mystery of the God who saves us. And so, with the alternation of day and night, a framework is set up for the rest of God's works. Now, in today's passages ascribed to a second and then a third day, we'll find God at work addressing the second incompleteness of the raw world: the formlessness, the inhospitability.

So on the second day, we read about God wanting to divide up the waters, the same waters his Spirit has been hovering over (Genesis 1:6). He's going to divide them vertically, hoist some of them up and away from the rest that will be left behind below. And to make this separation happen, he makes what your Bible might call an 'expanse' or, if it's an older translation, a 'firmament' (Genesis 1:7). The Hebrew word refers to something that's stamped or hammered thin, like gold leaf (cf. Exodus 30:9; Isaiah 40:19). After it does its job, being lifted up to separate the waters above it from the waters below it, then he gives it the name 'Heaven' or 'Sky.' And that's the work of the second day (Genesis 1:8). Elsewhere in the Bible, this work is summed up as God “stretching out the heavens like a curtain, and spreading them like a tent to dwell in” (Isaiah 40:22).

On the third day, we read about God turning his attention to those waters left below. So far, they've covered the whole earth, but God wants to gather them together into one place, just a portion of the earth, so that dryness can appear above its surface (Genesis 1:9). That's what God does. And after he does, he gives the dry the name 'Earth' or 'Land,' while the gathered and confined waters gets the name 'Sea' – which, in Hebrew, is always plural (Genesis 1:10). Elsewhere in the Bible, this work is summed up in that, though “the waters stood above the mountains” until then, yet “at God's rebuke they fled.... The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that God appointed for them. God set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth” (Psalm 104:6-9). He “shut in the sea..., prescribed limits for it, and set bars and doors” (Job 38:8-10). So God “spread out the earth above the waters” (Psalm 136:6). From here, the third day marches on, but this is where God sees things as 'good' for the first time since day and night began (Genesis 1:10).

If we go back and listen to past generations of Christians reading these days, we can of course find plenty of wisdom. But we'll also find that, as they read their Bible, they were trying their best to use its language to work out the universe around them in a way matching the science of their time, which shaped their questions and their answers. The trouble was, the science of the fourth century wasn't the science of the thirteenth or the seventeenth or the twenty-first. In theirs, the earth was the sink drain of the universe nestled in concentric spheres for each planet, the basic elements were fire, earth, air, and water, and bugs born straight from decaying matter. In our science, none of that's true, so when we read Genesis, we naturally read it differently.

It'd be possible for us to read Genesis and use it to come up with our own vision of the natural world, which we would then pit against what today's scientific knowledge holds. It'd also be possible for us to read Genesis by correlating its details with today's scientific stories, too.¹ But if history's any teacher, Christians have usually gotten into trouble whenever we've tried to either build science out of the Bible's language or to marry it too closely to whatever the latest science teaches. When scientific discovery moves on, the Christians who look silliest in retrospect aren't the ones who most cherish Scripture but the ones who stayed too loyal to yesterday's science as if it were what Scripture taught. God has better things to do in Genesis than explain for us the stuff we're supposed to go figure out for ourselves. And so, in the way he inspired people to write the Bible, he doesn't override some of the assumptions they and their audience shared about the world.

All Israel's neighbors had a common way of picturing the world around them, where “the earth is the bottom of that flat gap in the primeval waters, and over the earth arches the firmament, on which the celestial bodies move along.”² And so Israel also pictured the earth as a flat disk “spread out” wide (Isaiah 42:5). There's “water under the earth” (Exodus 20:4), as God “has founded it upon the seas” (Psalm 24:2), even as he “hangs the earth on nothing” (Job 26:7) and “on the pillars of the earth... he has set the world” (1 Samuel 2:8). Standing on the earth, there are “heavens over your head” (Deuteronomy 28:23), stretched out like a tent curtain (Psalm 104:2) or else “spread out... hard as a cast-metal mirror” (Job 37:18) and comparable to a “pavement of sapphire stone” (Exodus 24:10), held up by “the pillars of heaven” (Job 26:11). Above this heavenly pavement is God's throne (Ezekiel 1:26) and a “sea of glass like crystal” (Revelation 4:6).³

God, in his wisdom, chooses not to meddle with that, not to give them a medical text or a blueprint for space exploration, not to replace their world picture with a medieval or modern or future world picture, because that wouldn't have been nearly as useful to them as using their natural vision to convey his supernatural message.⁴ So, when Abraham's hometown neighbors believed that creation really kicked off “when heaven had been separated from the earth, when the earth had been demarcated from heaven,”⁵ God doesn't waste time in Genesis arguing with it. So in the first three days of Genesis, nearly every work God does is to separate things: day from night, waters from waters, sea from land. And yet day interacts with night, sea and sky interact with land: “for every separation established..., an integral connection is forged,” because only after clear separations can God selectively bring things into contact in constructive ways.⁶

To ancient people, the sky overhead, the firmament, was like a roof, and the earth below was like a floor. The world was a great big house, a palace protected, a habitat which provides shelter, keeping chaos and danger at bay so that life could be capable of thriving within.⁷ People in the ancient world were terrified of the thought of it all crashing down – the firmament could crack and crumble, the sea overtake the land.⁸ If these separations ended, it'd be the end of the world. But Israel lived with an abiding faith that God's love for creatures is too great to let it all collapse without a purpose. And so he's built the house well, and made it a well-ordered place with systems set up to provide diverse environments ready for different kinds of life.⁹

The Babylonians credited the separation to Marduk: they thought that after he killed the ocean goddess Tiamat, he stretched out her skin to make a firmament that held back the half of her waters above it, and he built her head and lower half into the earth, and then used her tail to make a pulley, and handed this rope to his dad Ea, who lived in the waters under the earth and, holding this rope, would keep the universe from crashing in on itself.¹⁰ The Egyptians believed in a god named Shu who held up the sky goddess Nut to keep her away from the earth god Geb, and so held them, his children, apart by his power.¹¹ The Greeks, imagined the Titan Atlas, whom Zeus compelled to “hold the broad sky in his hands..., and on his tireless shoulders and his head he props up heaven.”¹² But Genesis says forget Marduk and Ea, forget Shu, forget Atlas – the one true God issues a simple command, and that's enough to make sky and sea and soil and keep them all in their places. Heaven and earth and sea aren't gods, but there is a God in control of all things who holds them where they belong.

And so we hear of God as “the One who by his strength established the mountains, being girded with might,” who equally “stills the roaring of the waves” (Psalm 65:6-7). We're assured that “when the earth totters,” God is the One who “keeps steady its pillars” (Psalm 75:3), and that God “placed the sand as a perpetual boundary for the sea,” so that “though its waves toss, they cannot prevail” (Jeremiah 5:22). “When he utters his voice, there is a tumult of waters in the heavens,” says Jeremiah, “and he makes the mist rise from the ends of the earth; he makes lightning for the rain, and he brings forth the wind from his storehouses” (Jeremiah 10:13). We may now say yes to his question to Job, “Do you know the balancings of the clouds?” (Job 37:16), but does that make the experience of a great storm any less incredible? As exploration expands our knowledge of how this great habitat and all its features works, Genesis reminds us that it's God's power at work through nature.

So “stop and consider the wondrous works of God!” (Job 37:14). He made the mountains. He carved the valleys. He shaped the beaches and the islands. He stirs and calms the seas. His are the storm clouds, the lightnings, the winds. Every framing of scenery – that's his artwork. Isn't it awesome? Look at the Grand Canyon, gaze across the Atlantic at sunset. Survey his work “from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam.”¹³ Doesn't it inspire your wonder? God made all this for our habitation!

And in his work of creation, he prophesied what was to come. If he made our habitat by dividing sky and sea and soil, how else could Israel emerge as a nation? He divided the waters again and revealed dry land in the sea for the Hebrews' escape from Egypt. Much as our nation was born out of a “separation,”¹⁴ so Israel was thereby 'separated' from the other peoples of the world (1 Kings 8:53). Foods clean to eat were 'separated' from those unclean to eat (Leviticus 11:47). In fact, the LORD said it was precisely because he'd 'separated' Israel from the peoples that they had to 'separate' their food (Leviticus 20:24-25). Then God 'separated' the Levites from the congregation of Israel (Numbers 8:14), and the priests were especially “separated to sanctify the most-holy things” (1 Chronicles 23:13). And a major job of Israel's priesthood was to guide them in 'separating' things, drawing right distinctions and boundaries in their lives: “You are to separate between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean, and you are to teach the people of Israel all the statutes that the LORD has spoken to them by Moses” (Leviticus 10:10-11). “You shall be holy to me, for I the LORD am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine” (Leviticus 20:26). Holiness was all about separations, just like the separations that made the world.¹⁵

But Ezekiel saw that in the end, the priests “have made no separation between the holy and the common, neither have they made known between the unclean and the clean” (Ezekiel 22:26). And so, where Israel was supposed to be separated from sin for God, Isaiah charged that “your iniquities have made a separation between you and God” (Isaiah 59:2). In the end, not even Ezra and Nehemiah's words could fix it. More was needed.

And so God sent his Word into the world. Just as the earth was buried in the beginning under the deep but then emerged on day three, so that was a picture of Jesus, the True Earth, resurfacing triumphantly from Death's Deep on the third day.¹⁶ This One “who fixed the first boundary, who hung the earth, who tamed the abyss, who stretched out the firmament” now became “our high priest, holy..., separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens” (Hebrews 7:26). As our High Priest, he undoes the bad separation between souls and God, and redoes the true one between souls and sin; he unwinds the former separations of diet and of race, and forges a new separation between the new humanity and the old (Mark 7:19; Ephesians 2:14). As he separates us from sin and death, we're “brought together into one congregation of faith,” one Church built on Christ the Rock; and he is the mountain whom we climb to pierce the very skies above in him.¹⁷ “Therefore... be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you” (2 Corinthians 6:17).

For “Christ has welcomed you” (Romans 15:7), and “your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). He is our sky, our sea, our soil, our hospitable environment. With him as “a shelter from the storm and rain” (Isaiah 4:6), “we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling” (Psalm 46:2-3). Better than the beauties of the landscape and seascape around us, better than the glories of the firmament above, is “to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD,” of the Lord Jesus Christ, “the Holy One” who has also “made you beautiful” (Psalm 27:4; Isaiah 60:19) “with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit” (1 Peter 3:4). For if the gathering of the sea and the land is good, then (as one old saint said) “surely the gathering of such a church as this is more beautiful, from where there is sent out in our prayers to God the mingled voice of men and women and children, as of some wave beating upon the shore.”¹⁸

As the gathered church, we look back and read that “the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God” (2 Peter 3:5). But equally we know that “by the same word, the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly” (2 Peter 3:7), after “the angels... come out and separate the evil from the righteous” (Matthew 13:49). When “the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more” (Revelation 21:1), then we're promised “a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). And this habitat made new by Christ will be no less protected, hospitable, or beautiful than the first. Just the opposite, it's the promise latent in the sky and sea and soil we do now see. And “he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence” (Revelation 7:15), as they're separated from all former things.

This week, go boldly into the habitat God made for you. Rejoice in faith that he holds everything separate and connected, balancing all things and keeping so many complex systems running so that you can thrive within. And as he separated sky and sea and soil, understand that he separated your soul, set it apart from unclean things like sin and death, and for himself in Christ, to be the abiding habitation of his Spirit. He welcomes you, not just into his world that he so wondrously made, but into his life which is unmade, and into the new creation he's making even now. So be separate. Don't be fueled by unclean habits, but dine only on a clean diet of faith and hope and love, on “all that is good and right and true” (Ephesians 5:9). Draw right distinctions and boundaries in your life, as the Wisdom of God teaches us. “As he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct” (1 Peter 1:15), following your High Priest from sea to soil to sky to new creation. And may “God shed his grace on thee, / till souls wax fair as earth and air / and music-hearted sea.”¹⁹ Amen.

The Light Shines in the Darkness

Scripture assures us that “God is Light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). He's “the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning” (James 1:17). The Psalmist says God is “clothed with splendor and majesty, covering [himself] with light as with a garment” (Psalm 104:2), while Paul adds that God “dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Timothy 6:16). In his very eternity and essence, God is Light. But in his eternity and essence, we also meet one whom the Church describes as “Light from Light, true God from true God.”¹ We hear of “the eternal generation of uncreated Light from unbegotten Light.”² And this is God's eternal Word, his only-begotten Son, “the True Light” with whom God dwells in that unapproachable light (John 1:9). So eternally, as the Father looks on the Son in the Spirit, and as the Son looks back in the Spirit on the Father, eternally they see each other as the True Light  and see that they are Perfectly Good! “Light is beautiful in itself,” and of no light is that truer than the Eternal Light which is God, the inspiration for all light.³

Before anything else, then, when we read “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3), we think of “God's own light,” the “pre-existent light,” “a primordial divine brilliance” that's now “made perceptible in the created world.”⁴ Here, now, by and through and with his Word which is Light from Light, God reveals his Eternal Light to his creation in time, from the beginning, for “light is the beginning of creation.”⁵ God is Light, because God is Truth and Goodness and Beauty; God is Light, because God is in himself perfectly clear, perfectly simple, perfectly pure; and God, as Light, manifests himself to his creation. It's the first act of revelation.

And in his light, creation discovers light. Jewish tradition had it that “on the first day, he created... all of the spirits which minister before him.”⁶ Christians throughout the ages debated exactly when angels were invented, but nobody seems to think the angels showed up after God said 'Let there be light' and there was light. After all, angels could be defined as “secondary spiritual lights that possess their illumination from the First Light that has no beginning.”⁷ So God “made for himself hosts of glorious beings in the high place..., a chamber of light with children of light who delighted within..., and there was light, and the hosts were moved to shout out.”⁸

But no sooner were they created in the light than, the very next instant, they were given a choice: either they could turn themselves fully to God and receive a fulfillment beyond themselves by grace, or they could try to dig up a fulfillment for themselves out of their own nature, as if they were lights in themselves.⁹ Would they thrive best supernaturally or naturally? Choosing the first option would be an act of love – love for God, love that takes them out beyond the limits of themselves. And most did that. They were “light that had turned back to [God],” and so God gave them “a confirmation of their blessedness,” instantly granting them eternal life in the light of God – they came to see God as God really is, and with that beatific vision, they could never fall.¹⁰ “Thus the angels, illumined by the Light that created them, themselves became light.”¹¹

On the other hand, the angels – in that first instant after their creation – could have chosen to react by turning to themselves to seek their fulfillment. That would not have been love for God. It would have been pride. And some of these spiritual creatures took that path. One instigating angel, followed by a vast number of others, freely and pridefully chose not to abide in God's Light, but to try to light their own way naturally instead.¹² And when an angel chooses anything, there's no reverse course, only full-speed-ahead. Confirmed in their rebellion, they instantly turned from the First Light which is God, and so became darkness. “Then the separation of the holy and the unclean angels took place where Scripture says: 'And God separated the light from the darkness' [Genesis 1:4].”¹³ For, as Paul asked, “what fellowship has light with darkness?” (2 Corinthians 6:14).

Speaking of darkness, when it comes to the material creation that popped into being at God's command, we last Sunday discovered that there were three problems that needed to be ironed out with this raw world as it initially existed: the darkness, the inhospitability (tohu, 'formless'), and the vacancy (bohu, 'void'). And the whole story of creation Genesis 1 tells is, from here on out, all about how God goes about remedying those characteristics of the raw world.

So to begin, “the Creator of all things by his word instantly put the gracious gift of light in the world.”¹⁴ God just willed that the initial darkness be fixed. So suddenly, with God's wish being his command, there was light, just as he wanted. Now, to be honest, we even today don't totally get what light is. On the one hand, light is an electromagnetic wave, a propagating disturbance that oscillates the fields it passes through. So each wave of light has a wavelength, a distance over which it repeats, the inverse of which is its frequency. What we see as light is electromagnetic waves with wavelengths between 380 and 750 nanometers. Radio waves are the same kind of thing as the light we see, the only difference being they've got much longer wavelengths and hence lower frequencies. And X-rays are the same thing, too, just on the other side – shorter wavelengths, higher frequencies. On the other hand, electromagnetic interactions are carried by particles called photons. These are some of the most basic particles there are. A photon isn't built of anything, doesn't weigh anything. Nothing's faster. And any time a particle drops to a lower energy level, it rids itself of that excess energy by throwing off a photon or two.

In the standard scientific model of the early universe, a whole lot happened before the universe's first second had wrapped up. The first tiny particles of matter and antimatter kept wiping each other out, with surviving matter barely a billionth of what could've been, what had been. Everything else went kaboom, releasing photons each time they did. Before that first second was up, scientists think, it was literally a trillion degrees out there everywhere; and not only that, but the entire universe was “aglow with an unimaginable brilliance.”¹⁵ After all, for every proton or neutron that managed to form, there were about ten billion photons.¹⁶ So in every direction you'd have “seen only a glowing fog... bright as the surface of the sun.”¹⁷ And that stayed the case, scientists say, for hundreds of thousands of years, until finally energy levels dropped enough to let actual atoms survive. They cleared the way to let the light pass through, dispersing it and bringing about a 'cosmic dark age' until the first stars.¹⁸ Or, to put all that more simply: “There was evening, and there was morning: one day” (Genesis 1:5). But even so, the stretched-out remainder of the original light of creation's dawn is still out there, faintly soaking the entire universe, even right here. Scientists found it in '64 and called it cosmic microwave background radiation – the light of creation running wild forever.¹⁹

As much as we know, or think we know, “light is simultaneously familiar and mysterious.”²⁰ Which, when you think about it, is pretty fitting, if the light all around us points us to the God who is also always simultaneously familiar and mysterious. We struggle to wrap our minds around how light is both particle and wave, without there being a contradiction; we struggle to wrap our minds around how Eternal Light is three persons in one God, without a contradiction. But he engages us, shines on us, becomes intimately familiar with us.  And “it is this God alone who made light from darkness, who brought light out of his treasuries,”²¹ who “uncovers the deeps out of darkness and brings deep darkness to light” (Job 12:22).

And so God “has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness” (Job 26:10). To this day, the alternation of light and dark keeps going, and for the kind of existence we live, both times of light and times of dark are essential. Up in the Arctic Circle, they deal with conditions called midnight sun, where during the summer the sun never quite sets below the horizon, and polar night, where during winter the sun never quite rises above the horizon. The midnight sun's constant light can provoke anxiety, restlessness, inability to sleep, to the point where the most violent suicides in Greenland happen in summer.²² Similarly, people who've lived in total darkness for extended periods risk messing with mood and metabolism, dealing with hallucinations, even strokes.²³ As one early Christian summed it up, the light of day “assists humans with work and industry, brings visible things to their attention, and prompts them to sing the praises of their Maker,” while the dark of night “gives rest and renewal, and relieves the weariness caused by labor.”²⁴

Early readers of Genesis commented especially on how light is a prerequisite for recognizing beauty.²⁵ If you doubt it, tour an art museum with a blindfold on, and see how impressed you are. We might add that without the gift of light, none of the forms of life we're familiar with can grow. Extinguish all light, and soon you won't have plants; and when you don't have plants, you won't have animals, and you won't have me and you. In all these things we take in to survive, we're eating the fruit of light, and that light becomes our life.

In a similar way, down through the ages, the Eternal Word of God continued to be, like John says, “the True Light who gives light to everyone” (John 1:9). In all human culture, wherever there's ever been anything true and good, any beauty or life anywhere, that light comes from the True Light. That's why, even in the most depraved societies and most disturbed religions, there are always traces of light – and some early evangelists appealed to these lights to remind pagans of the True Light, and held that those who'd lived and died reasonably in the light they had were thereby following the True Light, and hence Christians without knowing it.²⁶

But in a very special way, though giving light to everyone, the True Light called himself “the Light of Israel” (Isaiah 10:17). For they, as the chosen people to whom he revealed himself personally, could profess him by name as “my light and my salvation” (Psalm 27:1), and say: “With you is the fountain of life: in your light do we see light” (Psalm 36:9). They could find no higher blessing than to wish the LORD's face to graciously shine on you (Numbers 6:25). Theirs was a spirituality of striving to “walk before God in the light of life” (Psalm 56:13), and that meant living by his lawful word, “for the commandment is a lamp and the teaching a light” (Proverbs 6:23), “a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105). And “the path of the righteous” who follow it is “like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day” (Proverbs 4:18).

Israel was chosen for a purpose: to be “a light to the nations” (Isaiah 42:6). And they were promised that “if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness” (Isaiah 58:10), “and nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising” (Isaiah 60:3). But although they postured as “a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness” (Romans 2:19), the recurring scandal of their sins meant that they failed to be much light to the nations. Yet the righteous among them never stopped praying to God, “Send forth your Light and your Truth!” (Psalm 43:3).

Then, nine months after the Spirit of God hovered over Mary's womb (Luke 1:35; cf. Genesis 1:2), “those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone..., for to us a child is born, to us a son is given” (Isaiah 9:2,6). That was when “the True Light which gives light to everyone was coming into the world” (John 1:9). The True Light had become flesh. “I have come into this world as Light, so that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness” (John 12:46). “As long as I am in the world, I am the Light of the World” (John 9:5). “While you have the Light, believe in the Light, that you may become sons of light” (John 12:36). But “this is the judgment: the Light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light, because their works were evil” (John 3:19). “We must work the works of the One who sent me while it is day,” Jesus said, because soon “night is coming, when no one can work” (John 9:4).

For when Christ was crucified, “there was darkness over all the land” (Mark 15:33). Yet even from the cross or tomb, Jesus could've prayed the words of Micah: “When I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD will be a light to me.... He will bring me out to the light” (Micah 7:8-9). And so, just as light was born on day one, so “the first day of the week” found Jesus no longer in death's darkness (Luke 24:1). On Easter morning, it became clear just how “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5)! And “by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light” to the whole world (Acts 26:23).

After the Light had risen to heaven, a persecutor of the Light was on the road to Damascus, when he “saw on the way a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, that shone around me and those who journeyed with me,” he said (Acts 26:13), and in that moment, “God, who said 'Let light shine out of darkness,' shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). The voice from this glorious face tasked Paul's with a mission: to go “turn [people] from darkness to light” (Acts 26:18), much as the other apostles were doing. But until Paul was at the brink of baptism, “darkness fell on him” (Acts 13:11), illustrating his spiritual condition until that light from above would make him new (Acts 9:18).

And what came to Paul on the Damascus Road comes to you, too. “At one time you were darkness,” he says, “but now you are light in the Lord” (Ephesians 5:8), when “God supplied the Spirit to the water as... a baptismal font, and immediately thereafter commanded, 'Let there be the light of illumination,'”²⁷ because the Spirit there infuses a gift of a supernatural faith, and “faith is the first light of the soul.”²⁸ “Delivered from the domain of darkness” (Colossians 1:13), now “you shine as lights in the world” (Philippians 2:15), “for you are all sons of light, sons of the day..., not of the night or of darkness” (1 Thessalonians 5:5). And so the Church is now “the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14), “chosen... that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). So “take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them..., for anything that becomes visible is light” (Ephesians 5:11,14). “If we say we have fellowship with [God] while we walk in darkness, we lie” (1 John 1:6). Instead, “walk as children of light, for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true” (Ephesians 5:8-9), and “if we walk in the light as [God] is in the light..., the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). “Let your light shine before others,” then, “that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).

And now “the night is far gone, the day is at hand” (Romans 13:12) – “the darkness is passing away, and the True Light is already shining” (1 John 2:8) – for “when the Lord comes” again, he “will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness” (1 Corinthians 4:5). Then, as in bright heaven above, you'll be welcomed to “share the inheritance of the saints in light” (Colossians 1:12). “You who have experienced pain: Fear not! For there shall be a healing medicine for you: a bright light shall enlighten you, and a voice of rest you shall hear from heaven.”²⁹ To the children of light will then come true the ancient promise that “the LORD will be your everlasting light, and your God will be your glory” (Isaiah 60:19). At last “night will be no more,” having hit the end of its usefulness, “for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever” (Revelation 22:5). That's how the Bible ends, much as it began: with the Eternal Light being all in all, shining as one eternal day – only, this time, with us basking in it in perfect bliss, made brilliant to gaze forever on the True Light and radiate his own glory!

See, that's what this has promised from the beginning. Who knew such familiar verses held so much revelation, so much guidance, so much unsurpassed hope?  In hearing “Let there be light,” the whole mystery of salvation has been set in motion!

We'll end today with this blessing from St. Basil: “May the Father of the True Light, who has decked the day with the heavenly light..., who has made ready the peace of the future age with a spiritual and never-ending light, illumine your hearts in a knowledge of the truth, and preserve your life without offense, allowing you to walk becomingly as in the day, in order that you may shine forth... in the splendor of the saints for my exultation in the Day of Christ – to whom be glory and power forever! Amen.”³⁰

Prayer
Bright Father of All Lights, you who are Eternal Light begetting Light, you who have created lights spiritual and physical: Send forth your Spirit of light and truth in us today!  Task your angels of light, we beg, with our guidance and protection, and brighten and intensify them in their holy endeavors in your service.  Shine your own great light onto our hearts from above, and fill our whole selves, soul and body, with your light.  Make us children of light, entirely light in you, as your angels above are light in your light.  Let us see all light in this world around us by your light from above.  Let us walk in the light as you are in the light; and as we walk with you in light, lead us to your full light eternal.  We ask this only in the name of the True Light who came into the world for us and for our salvation, who is truly Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the brilliant unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever.  Amen.

Abyss and Inspiration

Over the past two weeks, as we've begun to sink into this book of beginnings called Genesis, we've gotten our dawning glimpse into eternity, at a God who is eternally Love shared by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – one God in three distinct persons, each and all the same pure Existence, the same pure Goodness, the same pure Knowledge and Power and Life and Happiness and Glory. And this God would still have been Happiness and Glory, Goodness and Love, had he chosen not to create anything, had remained home alone in the eternity which he himself is. But that's not how things played out. Instead, he freely loved the universe into existence out of nothing. He simply willed to share the goodness of being with things. And so, out of nothing, “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).

But now, as we inch forward, we find that this world as it first exists at God's command is not anything at all remotely like the world we know. It's incomplete, it's unready, it's raw. And we find three main words that describe it, or at least the part we're talking about: the earth, the waters, the deep. In fact, this picture is all so foreign that it's a bit hard to know what to make of it, isn't it? Some in the early church pictured this as though the earth is basically the earth we know, but “concealed by the water,”¹ “inundated by a deep flood,”² like the ocean floor.³ But at the same time, other Christians pictured it as though the earth and the waters and the deep were the same thing, blended together in a big muddy ocean of sediment: all that “mixed-up material” not yet “sorted out and formed,”⁴ “all the elements jumbled up together.”⁵

In more modern times, trying to picture how we can envision Genesis in our day, some Christians have drawn parallels with the stories scientists tell us of the history of our world. Some have compared this original 'deep' to the molten or gaseous early earth, “a poorly defined mixture of solidified compounds, molten liquid, and gases swirling” through space.⁶ Some look back further, to the theorized first fraction of a second after the Big Bang, when matter only formed what scientists describe as a “free-flowing quark-gluon plasma,”⁷ a “quark soup,”⁸ a dense fluid state throughout the whole universe in which the most basic building blocks of matter were unconfined, flowing all jumbled together in a universal deep. And still others look all the way back, to the scientists' tale of an infinitely dense beginning point, a singularity awash in possibility on the quantum vacuum.⁹

Whatever else we might compare the 'deep' or 'earth' to, listen to how the Scripture first introduces what God has just made: “Now the earth was formless and void” (Genesis 1:2). Those words make a cute little rhyme in Hebrew: the earth was tohu-and-bohu. Now, the word tohu shows up plenty in Scripture. It can describe a city reduced to rubble, like when Isaiah says that “the city of tohu is broken down; every house is shut up so that none can enter..., the gates are battered into ruins” (Isaiah 24:10, 12). It can describe the desert, like when Job says that God's judgment takes great people and “makes them wander in a trackless tohu” (Job 12:24), or when Moses sings that God found Israel “in a desert land and in a tohu, a howling wilderness” (Deuteronomy 32:10). In other words, the tohu is a place that's dangerous to set up shop.¹⁰ Isaiah loves this word as an insult, describing idols and their lovers as tohu (Isaiah 40:17; 41:29). Tohu is a desolate place, an inhospitable environment, something broken and unproductive, serving no purpose or value.¹¹ And one scientist writes that the early universe was “devoid of structure, nor was it obvious that there would ever be any structure.”¹²

Bohu is a trickier word, since it only shows up in the Bible as an addendum to tohu. Isaiah threatens Edom that God would “stretch the line of tohu over it, and the plumb line of bohu” (Isaiah 34:11) – making it a haunted wasteland, devoid of human life, but given over to creatures of the night. Jeremiah, previewing the destruction of Jerusalem, laments: “I looked to the earth, and behold, it was tohu and bohu; and to the heavens, and they had no light” (Jeremiah 4:23). He's pointing back at this verse, saying that the loss of Jerusalem will be like rewinding to when things barely existed at all. The basic idea of bohu is probably something empty and bare, unfinished and unfurnished, like a house after you've moved out. The earth was a desolate wasteland, a vacant house, “formless matter” (Wisdom 11:17) in a “gaping, empty, and void space.”¹³

But as if that weren't rough enough, Genesis adds one more fact: “and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). There was no light anywhere. Nothing could be seen. It was all impenetrable and invisible, mysterious, empty of any beauty yet. Everything was darkness, desolation, devoid of any real features at all, any clear indications of its goodness. It clearly wasn't anywhere a loving God would put us and tell us to live. This was a world that couldn't be lived in, that wasn't alive. As one Jewish writer put it in the first century, back then “darkness and silence embraced everything.”¹⁴ Lifeless as a tomb. One early reader got the impression of “something murky, always in twilight, deep, depressed, misty, and bearing darkness everywhere.”¹⁵ Others have called it simply “a sterile nothingness,” shrouded in unremitting darkness.¹⁶

And sometimes that feels familiar. Because, as the prophets feared, these things – tohu, bohu, and darkness – can come back and impinge on our lives today. The psalmist cried that the brokenness in his relationships had made his companions “darkness” (Psalm 88:18). Jeremiah lamented that suffering and confusion can make us “dwell in darkness” (Lamentations 3:6). Darkness descends into our lives in our obscurity and our uncertainty. Think of all the times you've been unsure what to do, who to trust, where to turn. Think of all the times you've been screened off from the truth, kept in the dark. Think of the times in your life when a gray fog has seemed to settle on your heart, clouding your vision, sinking you down to the depths beneath your soul.

And then there's the bohu in our lives. Our lives can be depopulated as what we love moves away from us. It might be a grievous loss, perhaps the death of a loved one – a parent, a spouse, a child, a friend has died, they're not in your life any more in the same way, and that crushing void you feel, that's bohu. Or there's a relationship you've gotten cut off from by distance or disfavor, and it feels so strange and so lonely at times. That felt absence, that vacancy – there's the bohu. Or it could be a privilege or position you've lost. You've moved and been uprooted, you've been fired from your job, you've had your license revoked. That choking inability, that invasive insecurity, that phantom pain you feel in what's not there any more – bohu.

But there's tohu in our lives, too. Isaiah says that God “makes the rulers of the earth tohu” (Isaiah 40:23), that he strips them of their status as counting for anything at all. And so too, we might have stripped from us not just a thing, a place or position, but our sense of identity and meaning and purpose. You used to feel a vocation, a calling to do this or that, but you can't do it any more. You used to have bearings on who you are, what you're here for, what you're doing in life, but now that's damaged or destroyed, and you're adrift in the deep, unsure which way is up. Your landscape of meaning, the world you navigated your way in, has crumbled. It's become a more dangerous place inside your head, less fit for your soul's habitation among those thoughts of the night. And suddenly all those anchoring truths you used to tell yourself feel more like fairy-tales from a future that may never come. Whether you hurt or whether it's just numb, you wonder what it all matters. There's the tohu. And whether you're dealing with the darkness, with the bohu, with the tohu, or all three, you might find yourself in an “unbearable feedback loop of exhaustion.”¹⁷ You can tell it's no way to live. Have you ever been there?

So much for the abyss. We could use the inspiration now, couldn't we? Because this verse is not done. Yes, the earth in the beginning was tohu and bohu. Yes, the face of the deep was covered in darkness. “But the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2). When the deep was in darkness, when the earth was tohu and bohu, that didn't mean God's Spirit was far away, that God had removed himself from the situation the raw world was in, that God wasn't involved and had no plan. God wasn't absent from this dark desolation in the slightest. No, God was there, presenting himself face-to-face with the matter of creation, even in the dark. The darkness is no proof of God's failure. The vacancy of the house is no vacuum and void to God. The most desolate and inhospitable places are as open to God as any garden.

God has not left the matter of the world alone, has not deserted the deep, hasn't let the desolate earth go its own way. He's engaging with it. The question is, how? The Egyptians might have said that God owed something to the deep. The Egyptians looked back on “the uniform darkness, ocean of the gods,” a “place void of sky and void of land,”¹⁸ and declared that “the Waters... evolved” so that the first god rose out of them,¹⁹ “evolved out of the flood, out of the waters, out of darkness, out of lostness.”²⁰ But that's not the picture in Genesis. The Spirit doesn't emerge from the deep, doesn't evolve from the waters. The Spirit comes to face lostness, not to flee it.

The Babylonians looked back on the deep as a vicious monster, a universe-sized threat that the gods needed to shatter before hope could begin. To them, before heaven and earth, there were “mingled waters” which gave rise to the gods, but which then “organized battle against the gods,” so that the gods ultimately had to kill them with a mighty “evil wind.”²¹ Only the destruction of the deep and its darkness, only the violent shattering of the original reality, could allow a new world to triumph – or so said the Babylonians. But that's not the picture in Genesis either. The deep may be dark, but it's not aggressive. It's “still, motionless, receptive, waiting quietly in the darkness for the Creator's next step.”²²

How does God's Spirit behave with this receptive matter of creation? God's Spirit – a holy wind, not the evil wind of Babylon – behaves like a soaring, gliding, circling bird. The verb here might sound predatory, because to the Canaanites, it was their word for the circling of a hawk or a vulture.²³ But in the Bible, it's much more likely to picture how a mama eagle finds her nest and tends it devotedly, raising her eaglets with lots of love. It's the word Moses uses when singing about how, when God had found Israel in the tohu, “he encircled him, he cared for him... Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on its pinions, the LORD alone guided him” (Deuteronomy 32:10-12). This is not a story of violent intervention to fight the deep and its dangers.²⁴ This is a story of God's Spirit gently rousing and pushing, supporting and shepherding. This is peaceful nurture of the deep and desolate earth toward hope. The dark world is shown to be putty in the hands of God. Much as the Scriptures took their origin when “men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21), so the very depths of all creation were being carried along by the Holy Spirit, waiting to hear God's voice. Nature is nurtured, nature is inspired.

And so God's Spirit looks down on this creation, stares the desolate and dark deep right in the face, and watches over it, shapes it, stirs it to growth. It's the Spirit of God that imparts dynamism, motion, on what would otherwise be a very dreary and dull abyss.²⁵ It was God's Spirit who drove the inflation and expansion of the universe behind its austere face, God's Spirit who coalesced interstellar dust to form the earth, God's Spirit who alights upon the face of the deep, “preparing the nature of the waters for the generation of living beings.”²⁶

And when we read here of the Spirit brooding like a bird over the waters, we should remember that story told often in the Gospels, where “when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold..., he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him” (Matthew 3:16). Jesus, in submitting to John's baptism, showed the Spirit hovering on the waters again – and he was the place where it happened. In his ministry, he'd go on to describe baptism as being “born of water and the Spirit,” without which a person “cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). So naturally, when Jesus' followers read Genesis, this verse stuck out to them, that “already at that time, baptism was being foreshadowed”²⁷ – that “the Holy Spirit... represented beforehand the grace of holy baptism” by sanctifying the first waters.²⁸ The entire world we know began, then, as not just any waters, but as a cosmic baptism, superintended and sanctified by the Spirit's energy: “The nature of the waters, having received holiness from the Holy, itself conceived power to make holy.”²⁹

And so, when we were “born of water and the Spirit” (John 3:5), we returned to the very dawn of creation, to the root of the universe. We were buried in that original abyss of dark waters, the deep on which the Spirit of God stirred the prospect of order out of chaos, motion out of sterility, life out of the void. Our beginning in the life of Christ is nothing less than the birth of the universe itself. And if the Spirit's energy is what caused, as the scientists describe it, the universe to multiply its reach by a billion billion billions in the tiniest fraction of a second, then what growth in grace is the Spirit's energy not enough to supply in you, if you're as receptive as the deep? For the Spirit of God hovered over the waters where our Christian life was born. Jesus promised no less.

Out there in the world, there are lives that have fallen under the dark shadow of sin and death, draining them of vitality, bringing destruction and ruin, making them formless and void. And yet, wherever sin has introduced a moral darkness and desolation, the Spirit is circling, fluttering, having been sent into the world to “convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment,” like Jesus said (John 16:8). Even while darkness rules, even while unbelieving souls are yet sterile and empty, even when the world seems most graceless, the Spirit of God is already there, working undercover by brooding over each sin-soaked heart. There's hope for the darkest!

And we, too, even as Christians, even when we're living right, may meet in this life with a darkness, with the tohu and bohu, with chaos in our minds and hearts and circumstances. But there, too, the Spirit of God is circling, hovering, fluttering, nurturing, brooding. So when your mind is confused and all your thoughts and anxieties are mixed up, the Spirit of God is circling over your confusion, offering to be your order. When your heart feels like rubble and your emotions seem empty as the vacuum of space, the Spirit of God is hovering over your heart, breathing forth compassion from above. When you can't see past the cold obscurity and the gloomy grief, the Spirit of God is brooding warmth and possibility and life. When circumstances seem at their most chaotic, the Spirit of God is nurturing, gently prodding. When the apparent absence of God chokes all things in the stifling silence that shrieks louder than words, then and there is the Spirit stirring, setting plans in motion until the all-swallowing abyss is swallowed up by an even more bottomless hope. Tohu and bohu were never God's ultimate plan for the world; neither will he abandon you in fruitlessness forever (cf. Isaiah 45:18). And so, in the most desolate night when all is confusion and chaos, still even then, “to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace” (Romans 8:6). Therefore, “praise the LORD from the earth..., all deeps!” (Psalm 148:7).

So “may the God of Hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,” even when things seem perilous and pointless, fruitless and formless, vacuum and void, “so that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, you may abound in hope” (Romans 15:13). Yes, even then, may you abound in joy and peace, in faith and hope, as the Spirit of Love hovers ever-near – for in your darkest and most desolate, no less than at your brightest and most fruitful, you will never be alone. Thanks be to God! For from him and to him and through him are all things. Amen.

Prayer
Gracious God, you who created all things from the beginning, you breathed forth your Spirit on what you had made when it was still imperfect, unfinished, unready, raw, and dark.  And in what would have been hopeless and helpless, you stirred and hovered and baptized all things into love.  Your Spirit is the life of all that exists, and certainly the life of our souls.  So take not your Holy Spirit from us!  As we were baptized in the deep your Spirit sanctified, so let the same living waters now well up in our hearts to life.  When the darkness deepens, Lord, with us abide.  Abide with us in chaos and confusion, in trivial tohu and bereaving bohu.  Breathe forth your Spirit, hover over us, make us new.  Stir us beneath the surface by your love, evangelize and energize us for your holy purpose, and make us not a sterile nothingness but a fruitful new creation.  Catch and carry us along until all is very good, all is very best, in and for and from us, as we become at last, finally, fully in Christ.  Amen.

Deus Creator Omnium

Here's one for you: Why did the scientist say to his readers, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”?¹ Well, the answer goes back almost a century, when a Belgian physicist named Georges Lemaitre put forward his brand-new theory. He'd already published a report showing that the universe was not some static system like they used to think; it was getting stretched further apart. Now, in 1931, he drew out the implications in just four paragraphs: if you rewind the clock enough, the whole universe begins at one initial point, “a single quantum” which marks “the beginning of the world.” Lemaitre imagined it as “a unique atom, the atomic weight of which is the total mass of the universe.” And so “the whole matter of the world” was “present at the beginning..., a little before the beginning of space and time.”² The whole universe – all matter, energy, space, time – can be drawn no further back than that original beginning from which it grows.

When Lemaitre said it, it was such a crazy idea, an unsavory suggestion, one that skeptics thought “smacks of divine intervention,” smuggling religion into the halls of science.³ It sounded way too much like Genesis – and it didn't help that Lemaitre was not just a devout believer, but an ordained priest! Years later, a persistent skeptic scoffed at Lemaitre's theory for being “based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past.”⁴ He kept repeating the remark, and his mockery of Fr. Lemaitre's theory as “the big bang” stuck. But, to the scoffers' dismay, it's become part of the standard scientific account, so that even Stephen Hawking confessed that “almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang.”⁵

And so, back to that remark from earlier. To make an apple pie, you need things like wheat and apples. But to make wheat and apples from scratch, you'll need molecules you've got to build up from atoms like carbon and oxygen. To cook those atoms from scratch, you'll need some stars. To make the stars from scratch, you'll need hydrogen and helium. And how do you get those from scratch? The scientist, Carl Sagan, explained that they were “made in the Big Bang, the explosion that began the Cosmos.” So that's why, “if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”⁶ Now, Sagan himself – out of his philosophical poverty – tried his floundering best to backtrack from the notion that the universe really had an Inventor; he hoped, somehow, maybe, “the universe has always existed,” so there wasn't really that pesky absolute beginning after all.⁷ Plenty of people, even among scientists, remain desperate to escape these facts, because, no matter how you slice it, if all things trace back no further than that infinitely dense beginning state, then that cries out for an explanation which can't be found within universal space and time, or at nature's furthest boundaries, at all.

And when we're dumbfounded by what can't even in principle have a natural explanation, Genesis steps up to the plate, shouting in our dumb ear: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1)! Last Sunday, we traced all manner of things upward and backward to this unique God who is pure Existence, Goodness, Life, Knowledge, Happiness, Power, and Love. And from the revealed truth that “God is Love” (1 John 2:16), we realized God must be a Trinity – he exists eternally as a Lover called Father, a Beloved called Son, and a Love-Between-Them called Holy Spirit. This eternal life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as one God in three distinct persons is the eternal prelude playing 'before' Genesis opens. There's no one else but God.

And then, suddenly, there are “the heavens and the earth.” The ancient Israelites didn't have a single word in their language that meant the whole universe. They had to get around that with a way of speaking where you can sum something up by referring to its opposite extremes.⁸ So, to the Hebrews, one extreme of the world they lived in was the earth, and the other extreme was the sky above. So to talk about 'the heavens and the earth' means “the whole of creation,”⁹ “the totality of cosmic phenomena,”¹⁰ “everything that exists,”¹¹ “all things apart from God.”¹² That covers “all things visible and invisible.”¹³ The spiritual realm is included, and so is the physical world. When Genesis says “the heavens and the earth,” nothing isn't included in that except for God.

And in the beginning, God “created” all these things. The word Genesis uses is a verb that never takes anyone but God as its subject. And the Bible uses this word for 'create' sparingly, only for steps that are truly “novel, extraordinary, and effortless.”¹⁴ And that's not something you and I can do. In the biblical sense, we aren't creative. We can make things, build things, devise things, dream things, but “only God can create.”¹⁵ And it applies especially here at the beginning because God is inventing the universe. And he's doing it truly from scratch. There are no ready-made ingredients lying around to cook up the universe from. “He himself invented the matter of his work,”¹⁶ this “basic material... out of which all the things would be made,”¹⁷ since previously it did not exist.”¹⁸ He made all of it from nothing, not out of anything – no material cause at all.

That was an explosive idea. Some of Israel's neighbors had stories where their gods built the universe on the back of a terrible war: violence, conquest, dismemberment – that's where heaven and earth came from. Others told stories where the universe flowed forth in sensual and graphic ways: fluids, fertilization, pangs of labor. But in Genesis, heaven and earth are brought into being not with war but in peace, not in sensuality but in purity.¹⁹ How'd he do it, then? “By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible” (Hebrews 11:3). God simply “calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17). “For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm” (Psalm 33:9). With the will of God does absence yield to presence, eternity embrace time, space and substance surrender their unreality. God calls, “Let there be!” – and say no more, bang! there it be!

But to say that “the world was created by the word of God” is to say more than we thought. Because the Word was in the beginning with God, and was God, and then the Word took on flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth (John 1:1, 14). And his name is Jesus Christ. The New Testament very plainly unveils that Jesus is the One “through whom [God] created the world” (Hebrews 1:2). “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). “For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible... – all things were created through him and for him, and he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17). That's a wild thought! When Jesus was being born in Bethlehem, and growing up in Nazareth, and walking the fields of Galilee, and being nailed to the cross outside Jerusalem – that was the uncreated Creator of everything, the One whose idea it was to have angels and atoms and apple pies.

And so we know that, whenever we hear that “God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10), it's because God only makes good things. Paul writes that “everything created by God is good” (1 Timothy 4:4). And how could it be any other way, if the Word that calls each thing into being is the same Jesus we know and love? There is no thing in all God's creation that isn't good so far as it exists. A far-off galaxy? It's good that that exists! The land under your feet? It's good that that exists! Your body? It's good that that exists, too! All these things are good, even if something about them no longer works right or has some unpleasant features. God makes all things good, and nothing that's not good.

And God “made things by his own counsel and free will.”²⁰ God created each and every thing he created – time and space, matter and energy, cherubim and cockroaches, galaxies and gingko trees and gophers – freely, not under any inner or outer compulsion.²¹ He decided freely in favor of all these things, when he could easily have not, easily have remained blissfully content in eternity with his Son and his Spirit. But freely God “created out of a superabundance of goodness,” willing there to be creatures who could “benefit from his goodness and share in it.”²² He did it to extend his love to a creation. A Jewish writer around the time of Jesus' earthly ministry prayed to God: “You love all things that are, and loathe nothing you have made, for you would not fashion what you hate” (Wisdom 11:24). Everything that exists? God loves it! God wouldn't have made it if he didn't. God didn't just speak you into being; he loved you into being. Love is what made you, love is what keeps you, the love of God is your very heartbeat. If you ever need proof God loves you, check if you exist – question answered. And so it is for all that exists: it's a manifestation of God's love. Space is the love of God stretching, time is the love of God counting. Every creature is simply, purely loved into being by God who is Love.

And because love is relational, God isn't merely a Creator 'from the outside.' He's a Creator who doesn't stand far off from what he's made. He can't: nothing could stand without his continued touch of love. God is, we said, Existence himself. And so for anything to exist is for God to be lending it existence at the core of its being – God loves each thing from the inside. He surrounds and suffuses each thing he has made. That's why Joshua can say that “he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath” (Joshua 2:11), why Paul can proclaim that “in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17), “and no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed” (Hebrews 4:13). Loaning existence to every span of space, every moment of time, every particle of matter, every wave of energy, “God must exist... intimately in everything.”²³ In this most fundamental sense, God may just be closer to you than you are to you. Like Paul says, God “is actually not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27-28).

Now, if God made all things out of love, and God is Love, then God made them for himself. Paul says that God the Father is not only the one “from whom are all things,” but also the one “for whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6). And of Jesus Christ, he adds: “All things were created... for him” (Colossians 1:16). God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – is the point of why you and I and anything else exists. What's a person for? For God. What's a peacock for? For God. What's a proton for? For God. There is no thing that was not created for God, that does not exist for God, that does not have God as its ultimate goal and good.

And if that's true, then God – as creator and goal of each and every thing – has absolute rights over all things, because they're his both in origin and in destiny. That's why Moses taught that “to the LORD your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it” (Deuteronomy 10:14), why King David prayed: “All that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours” (1 Chronicles 29:11), why Paul reasoned that “the God who made the world and everything in it” must therefore be “Lord of heaven and earth” (Acts 17:24). “If God made everything, then he owns it and is in charge of it.”²⁴ “Shall the potter be regarded as the clay, that the thing made should say of its maker, 'He did not make me,' or the thing formed say of him who formed it, 'He has no understanding'?” (Isaiah 29:16). “Has the potter no right over the clay?” (Romans 9:21). God made all things for his own purposes. No inch of space or moment of time isn't made by him and for him, and any other treatment of it would be illegitimate. Every use of your powers of body or mind – your actions, your will, your thought – is equally made by him and for him, in holy love. And so any use that deviates from holy love is both a violation of God's rights as its Creator and a betrayal of our very own selves, falling short of our own true purpose, resisting our best destiny. Off-label use of our faculties is no good for us, or for anything else.

For when any created thing behaves as though God weren't its maker and owner, when any created things veers away from the purpose for which he made it (which is for himself, for love), then it behaves against its creation. It acts as though some other thing – some fictitious thing or some created thing – is a god to rival God. But the prophets remind us, in their usual stark way, that “the gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens” (Jeremiah 10:11). God made all things for himself, which is to say, for Love. But false loves, distorted loves, misappropriate and arrogate God's purposes to themselves. So every love that isn't at the root of creation, or reflective of the love that is, is destined for a downfall.

Because God created freely as an act of love. And that makes creation a gift – a gift from God and to God, in the final scheme of things, but also a gift to itself and us. Creation is a gift to creation, “the gift of existence.”²⁵ Everything that exists is a gift! Not even the apple pie in your oven is anything other than a gift from God. After all, he first had to invent the universe so you could have it. And such gifts call for a fundamental attitude of gratitude.²⁶ Through our hearts, through our lives, the universe can be grateful to its “faithful Creator” for itself (cf. 1 Peter 4:19). I think Chesterton said it best, a century ago this year, when he wrote:

This sense of the great gratitude... was not a fancy but a fact. … That we all depend in every detail, at every instant..., is not an illusion of the imagination; on the contrary, it is the fundamental fact which we cover up, as with curtains, with the illusion of ordinary life. … He who has seen the whole world hanging on a hair of the mercy of God has seen the truth. … The great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All goods look better when they look like gifts. … It is the discovery of an infinite debt. It may seem a paradox to say that a man may be transported with joy to discover that he is in debt. … Debt and dependence do become pleasures in the presence of unspoilt love. … It is the highest and holiest of paradoxes that the man who really knows he cannot pay his debt... will be always throwing things away into a bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks.²⁷

Faced with the infinite debt of being a creature, a creature loved into existence by God, a creature loved into the good by a God who has only the good purpose of love for all things – what else should we do, what else is good to do, what else is beneficial to do, but to leap with our lives into that bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks? “Let us glorify the Master Craftsman for all that has been done wisely and skillfully,” wrote St. Basil, “and from the beauty of visible things, let us form an idea of him who is more than beautiful.”²⁸ Or, as the angels sing in Revelation: “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created!” (Revelation 4:11). God first invented the universe, and so he is worthy of praise, worthy of thanks, worthy of admiration and adoration. For “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Let us adore with thankful lives the Creator Love that loves us into being! Glory to God! Amen.

Prayer
Almighty and Eternal God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, as one God you willed all things to exist, and they were created.  None but you could have done this.  Out of your goodness, out of your love, you created all things out of nothing.  Time and space themselves, matter and form and energy, things in heaven and things on earth, things visible and things invisible - you spoke your word, and they came to be; you commanded, and there they were, established by the power of your love to be loved by you and to glorify you with their being.  You encompass all things, you exist intimately in all things, you share the goodness of existence with all things that are.  You are Lord of all creation, of heaven and earth, and your every work is the giving of a gift.  What can we do but thank you?  What should we do but praise you?  What is there for us but to worship you in adoration?  We believe in you, God, for the Creator can do all things.  We hope in you, God, for the Creator is faithful to all things.  We love you, God, for the Creator is the good of all things.  And you are more than wise, more than beautiful, more than true, more than good.  So we give you boundless glory and honor and power, to the extent we as feeble creatures can, for you are worthier than worthy!  Thank you, Most Holy Trinity, for the gift of existence.  Thank you, Creator, for all your creation!  We pray and praise you through Jesus Christ, your Creating Word, our Redeeming Lord.  Amen.