Self-Identity # 4 Six days of Creation

Essay #4 on Self-Identity

God Introduced to His Universe:

The Genesis Six Day Creation Account

Written by Dan McDonald

 

          In this series of essays, we have come to the Bible because it describes itself as a book written from a different vantage point.  Most of us write from the vantage point that we share insights drawn from our observations, thoughts, beliefs and conclusions.  That is true for every human being.  But the Bible is set forth as a book written from a different vantage point.  The Bible's self-professed vantage point is summed up nicely by a book title in a book written on the message of Judaism by twentieth century Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Philosopher, who entitled his book “God in search of man.”  We are drawn to the Bible for the possibility that as we seek meaning in life, a sliver of hope begins to wonder if at the same time as we seek meaning there is a God in the heavens seeking us.  That is why we turn to the Bible. 
          The moment we open up the Bible to the first verse of the Bible we read, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1)  Then in the following verses, the Bible describes what is commonly called the six day account of creation.  Then in the second chapter, some would argue that a different creation account is set forth not wholly in agreement with the first chapter.  I will speak mostly about the first chapter, but will say that I see no reason why the two chapters may not be seen telling the same story.  Chapter two definitely seems to move from the first chapter’s expression of how God created everything in the six day creation, to chapter two’s beginning of exploring man’s place in the creation.  If we recognize that man never existed in the first five days of creation spoken of in Genesis 1, then we can understand that for man he entered the whole of the creation on just one of the creation days.  We were not created until the sixth day, which was for humankind the one day of creation.  So from the perspective of the human experience of creation there was but one day and the whole finished work of the previous five days were brought forth into the human experience also on that one day of creation.  The sixth day is for humanity the one day on which all of creation is brought forth as we are created within the created universe, and as the whole of creation is at first brought into our view and experience.  This seems to me to remain a plausible explanation of the differing perspectives of the first two chapters of Genesis.  No human existed in the first five days of creation, but the scope of the whole six day creation was brought into our human view on the one day in which we were present during the six day creation.

          I will not pretend to be able to present answers to every aspect of the creation account.  I will not even try to do so.  I am writing this essay not so much to explain the whole of the creation account, but to express how I believe the creation account does have something to say to mankind in our modern search for self-identity.  For I believe that the chief purpose of the Bible’s inclusion of the creation account is not so much to answer all our questions about how the universe was created, as much as this creation account was meant to be our first glimpse and introduction to the God who created the universe.  The primary purpose of the creation account is not necessarily to tell us how God created the universe as it is to introduce us to the one who did create the universe.  I will go so far as to say I believe I have a Biblical basis for making that assertion.

          That is not to say that God does not tell us anything about how he created heaven and earth in the six days of creation.  Clearly the Bible is setting forth that God is telling us some things.  But the purpose for which God tells us these things is not so much that we might have a comprehensive understanding of the mechanics and scientific principles regarding the creation event, but rather that we might understand as created beings within a universe that has been created how we relate to the God who created the heavens and the earth, and all things visible and invisible.  I am quite comfortable with asserting that the purpose of the Genesis creation account is more to introduce us to God than to lead us to any sort of scientific summarization of how God created the universe.

          The reason that I am comfortable with such an assertion is because this perspective seems agreeable with other Biblical texts dealing with creation.  In Job 38 God asks Job and his friends, who all seem to be trying to explain God to one another, for them to describe how God created the universe.  He asks them to explain how God laid the foundations or how he kept the waters in their place - - an even more remarkable question for those of us who understand the shape of our globe.  How does the water on the bottom side of the earth stay put?  Yes gravity - - of course, but is that an answer or a term to define the fact that it does stay in place?  So why gravity and when you have answered that, like a little boy I will ask once more “why” to that and then to the next thing, and eventually you will run out of answers for the “why” before I run out or reasons to wonder why.  The child, who has asked to learn why, always has one more legitimate question of why than any of us can ever answer about anything.  Perhaps this comes under that scope of human understanding St. Paul described when he said that “we know in part.”  Perhaps this is an essential truth to be understood when we try to understand the whole of creation.  Perhaps the creation account was never meant to enable us to understand everything.  Perhaps it was meant to be given to those who were meant to live knowing “in part.”  But perhaps it was given to introduce us to a creator who loves us.  For the mystic who has come most to know God always comes down from that mountain where he encountered the high and holy one, having learned not that we ever fully know God, but that we may take comfort for He who is God fully knows us.  Perhaps almost as dramatically the mystic report that we know in part, including that part of the creation that is summed up as “ourselves.”  We know who we are, like all other things only in part.  We live life not only to explore the universe but to discover ourselves.  We are not fully cognizant with complete and perfect knowledge even of ourselves.  But our comfort, at least the Christian comfort is that God does know us in such a manner.  So we read about the creation account not to understand everything there is to know about the creation, but rather to be introduced to the God who knows everything about us for he has created us and placed us in our lives within creation.

          Admittedly there are many Biblical scholars who believe that the book of Job was written before the Book of Genesis, and therefore Job and his friends weren’t privileged to understand the Book of Genesis when God addressed them about their understanding of creation.  But you and I both know that is a red herring.  If you and I were having a hot and heavy discussion about the nature of God and the why of suffering like Job and his friends were having and all of a sudden God spoke out of a whirlwind and said, “Hey boys, why don’t you explain to me how I laid the foundations of earth?”  Does either of us really believe we would want to stand up real straight and say, “God, I just read about that in the opening chapters of Genesis . . . This is how it says you laid the foundations of the earth?”  I think we would rather do what Job and his friends did.  We’d get real quiet real fast and think we had just – how shall we say it – “screwed up big time pretending to think we knew all the reasons and ways God did things.  This would be our religious equivalent of getting to take our place in the “time out” program.

          I doubt very much that the first purpose of the Genesis creation account is to tell us exactly how God created the universe.  It just doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the teaching of Holy Scriptures.  But what if the reason was to remind us who God was, to introduce us to who God is?  Would that be a Biblical reason that fit in with other passages of the Bible regarding creation?  For example, how about what St. Paul taught about the creation teaching man?  St. Paul said that because of the creation, every man is without excuse in his sinfulness.  He says that the invisible things of God, “from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”  (Romans 1:20)

          That is quite a statement regarding the knowledge of man regarding God.  The Apostle Paul seems to be saying a lot more than that philosophically you and I can and should be able to deduce from the creation that there must have been some sort of maker and prime-mover of this world in which we live.  He is saying that because of the creation we understand who God is.  We may seek to quiet this knowledge within ourselves, and he says we do this by refusing to be thankful, and by actually seeking alternative focal points for our worship rather than the God who freely created us in such a manner as to enable us to know instinctively who it was who created us.  Then our knowledge that we knew instinctively became obscured even, and perhaps especially to us.  St. Paul describes how as we became unthankful and unwilling to give God the praise and honor he deserved, God gave us over to fall into our own foolish ways and since we became unwilling to honor him or given him thanks as God, he allowed us to be darkened in our minds so that the knowledge we originally had; now became obscured to us.

          St. Paul has a Hebraic or Biblical perspective in this regard.  It is one that is clearly not liked in some quarters by modern man.  But we may explain something of it.  Hebrew language is not ordered in the same way as most modern European based languages.  Hebrew is a Semitic language, not a European language.  In most European languages, the first word in an ordinary sentence is a noun.  In Hebrew, the first word in an ordinary sentence is a verb.  Language experts, or philologists, might well be able to explain how this would affect the way people put together and relate their thoughts.  Language historians recognize that a language form affects a culture as well as a culture shaping a language.  In our ordinary usage of European languages we begin to think of creating sentences by first coming up with a subject for our sentence and then telling others of what the subject does.  But in Hebrew one began a sentence with a verb, and so the tendency by one speaking Hebrew would be to think in terms of verbs and then describe the subject of a sentence by connecting them to the relationship they had with the verb.  There is little doubt that these two different ways of thinking and creating sentences has led to emphases connected to the way we make our sentences.  Every student of New Testament Greek, for example, has to jump the hurdle of St. Paul’s use of participles, which are a combination of nouns and verbs.  St. Paul’s Greek is full of them.  He is writing in a Greek language the thoughts rooted in a Hebrew form.  He is not writing in a language that builds its sentences around a verb, but he is thinking Biblically in thoughts that are rooted to a Hebrew Old Testament worldview, where the verbal action is the beginning focus of a sentence.

          An example, of how this impacts our thinking, might be drawn from what Jesus says about the disciples love for one another.  Jesus said to his disciples “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love, one for another.”  That sentence seems to take on even more impact we imagine a person looking at a group of Christian disciples and noticing their love for one another.  There is a verbal picture that is conjured up of “loving” taking place.  Men and women are looking at a certain kind of love in action, and this kind of love stands out as unique.  They see the participants of this "love in action" taking place.  They then learn that Jesus taught them, and that what Jesus taught them is being set forth in how they love one another.  If this were expressed in Hebrew we would perhaps be reading a sentence that was saying; “Loving you one another, others will see this and understand that you are my disciples.”

          Now if we understand the Hebrew roots of Genesis, we can begin to see what the Bible is doing in telling us the story of the creation.  The creation account in Hebrew reads something like this, “created God the heaven and earth in the beginning.”  That is not the most proper or preferred way to structure the same sentence expressed in Greek by the translators of the Septuagint, or in Latin by the translators of the Vulgate, or by the various translators of our English written versions of the Scriptures.  But if we understand that background then perhaps we can see more of what was taking place in the giving of the creation account.  Just as Jesus was describing the deduction about what men would see when they saw loving between the disciples, as they traced that loving one another back to Jesus’ teaching; so we look at the story of creation found in Genesis and understand who the God is who created the universe.  Both of these statements are most fully understood when we understand the principle of “by their fruits you shall know them.”  The Bible’s creation account is a story of creation as the fruits of God.  By the fruits of God you shall know him.  By his creation you shall know him.  This is essentially, Biblically speaking, the main purpose of the creation account.  I firmly believe this is essential to understanding God’s purpose in telling us of the creation.

          This makes this creation account very essential to our human quest for understanding the meaning of our lives.  The creation account tells us about the God who created us so that we might understand who he is.  This should resonate with the general goal of a Christian understanding of eternal life, for Jesus taught us that this is eternal life, “that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.”  (John 17:3)  We know God partly at least, by knowing his fruits and his works, and one of the venues by which we understand the fruit or work of God, is through his work of creation.

          I sometimes wonder if some of these lessons have not been forgotten in the debates between creationists and evolutionists; which often are set forth in relationship to the opening chapters of Genesis.  It should be understood by both sides that if God did speak to us from the whirlwind and ask us to tell him how exactly he laid the foundations of the earth, we would neither side; whether the creationist or the evolutionist, be ready to speak to God.  I suspect that whatever view we favored, we would become silent real fast the moment God asked us to instruct him.  There are so many assumptions used by both sides in this debate.  The evolutionist assumes that everything that looks like it took millions of years must have taken millions of years.  But who is to say that God could not have compressed what looks like millions of years for those of us looking at the creation from our perspective in a finished creation into a single day of his creative work?  Imagine a big boom taking place and then the pieces of the universe are strewn across galaxies.  How quickly would the natural laws now in place have themselves been organized into natural laws, and do we have such a full knowledge of such laws as to assert that we have a flawless understanding of creation that could not be seriously modified given the right information to discredit or enlighten our understanding of the history of the universe?

          The same must likewise be spoken to the creationist regarding his assumptions.  The Bible itself does not require us to state or not state the length of the days of creation.  Could the days be figurative days or must they be literal days?  If the days were literal days, what logical necessity would there be that the days of creation would be the same length during the forming of the creation as in the finished creation?  Why would twenty-four hour days be essential in a process of creation in which the universe as we know it progressed from disorder and chaos to the order of a finished creation?  Why ought we to imagine that somewhere in the middle or late period of those six days of creation did the twenty-four hour creation day come into existence?  From a philosophical perspective, one might ask, "Is God the creator and Lord of time, or is God himself subject to time so that time and not God is God?"  We have no actual basis for asserting that the days of creation were the same length as our days, or even the same length from one day to the next day in the creation.  It is a reasonable assumption that even in the framework of time the universal order was emerging and not something already fully brought into existence so that we could assert that from day one the days spoken of in creation were twenty-four hour days.  One of the philosophical necessities for believing in creation is that we assume that the era of God's work of creation was different from the outworkings of his finished work of creation.  The idea that creation's days were exactly like ours is a principle that a creationist might consider to be a uniformitarian imposition on the very work of creation.  The creationist that would not allow the natural historian to build a theory on uniformitarian principles argues for such a principle in declaring that we must believe that these were literal days just like we have today. To force the days of creation to be literal days such as are the case in the finished creation seems to deny that our framework of time governing the creation today was being instituted in the very six days of creation that took place according to the Scriptures.  Who truly knows when the twenty-four days became the established day of God here upon the earth?  Was it with the separating of light and darkness, with the creation or appearance in the earthly skies of the sun, moon, and all the planets and stars, or was it perhaps at a time unidisclosed by the creation account?  To hold otherwise is merely an assumption and not an expressly revealed truth.

          I am not sure it is even good Biblical exegesis to demand that every portion of a truth-telling statement be literal.  Could we have basically a literal account of creation with a figurative use of days?  Would there be any Biblical reasons that this could not be done by Moses, who according to a Scriptural introduction to the ninetieth Psalm wrote of how to God a thousand years was as if a day.  If it is not possible for Scripture to mix figurative speech with a literal record, then can we scripturally make use of what the writer of Hebrews says when he describes “today” in various references pointing to the idea that today is the day of salvation.  Does that mean that no one can believe the gospel in our days because our days are not literally the same day in which the writer of Hebrews presented his epistle?  Actually the emphasis he placed on "today" was a timeless emphasis to be placed on the preaching, receiving, and faithfully obeying the word of God for as long as the Gospel was to be proclaimed in the world.  A figurative use of day was essential to understanding the message of the literal words of the writer of Hebrews.  What would we think if someone reading one of the writer's exhortations for acting faithfully today in response to the Gospel, upon finishing that reading said, "I'm sorry but we are literalists here and for the book of Hebrews to be literally true there can be no figurative relativistic truths, so we believe that the today of salvation was a twenty-four day in the time of the writing of the Book of Hebrews, so that blue light special on the proclamation of the Gospel is over.  You can all go home, church is dismissed, but the literal truth of the Bible is preserved.  What sort of exegesis is that and how different would that be from demanding literal twenty-four hour days to be necessarily imposed on the Genesis creation account?  Most of us by nature read about the work of God and wonder are these days the same as our days, or do the days of the creation refer more to God's days in his work of creation in a figurative sense than the literal days we experience each time the earth makes one full rotation on its axis.  It is true that such questions became more necessarily asked only after the rise of evolutionary thought, but the reality that the question was asked mostly after the rise of Darwinian thought does not necessarily mean the question is illegitimate.

          Am I thus dismissing the Biblical account of creation?  I believe that there is something very real and concrete and supported by other statements in the Scriptures that is presented within the creation account.  There is a phenomenon highlighted in each and every day of the six day creation account.  This phenomenon is essential to the Bible’s message to men and women about their relationship to God, to the rest of creation, and even to themselves.  This one phenomenon is related, I suggest to presenting us with the something, the hole that has been left out of the story of who we are as modern men and women looking for our way in the wilderness of creation and society.

          There is a pattern in the days of creation.  At first God creates the heaven and earth and according to Genesis 1:2 “the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”  Here is the earth in its initial condition when the earth was without form.  It had no order.  It was void.  There was no meaning to it, no shape, and no beauty.  Darkness was upon it.  There was no light.  There was no light, no order, no beauty, and no life except the life of the creator who had created this existence.

          But then God began to act for six days to bring this shapeless void of darkness into existence as a place of order, light, beauty, and life.  He acted by speaking.  He spoke “Let there be light and there was light.”  Each time God spoke, something took place in creation and then God addressed what had happened and God called it “good.”

          The Bible, the ancient Jewish religion, all the earliest Christian forms of worship drew near to God in a liturgical manner of expressing the faith.  God spoke, man replied, and God responded favorably to man’s faithful reply.  This is what we see in the Genesis account of creation.  The Genesis account of creation is less than four pages in length.  It doesn’t tell us everything about creation.  I work in the oil industry.  A refinery has lots of engineers, technicians, that is, people with expertise.  A refinery might have what is called an event.  An event might be the building of a new unit or the accidental blowing up of an old one.  Invariably, refineries will release a news story telling about an event, whether good or bad.  The press release gives general information, hopefully in a truthful manner.  But if there is an explosion in a refinery and the company asks a team of engineers to assess what exactly happened they will give a much more full account of the event with much greater detail than initially expressed through the press release.  The press release could not be used to arrive at the conclusions made by the engineers upon a full investigation.  The engineers are trying to arrive at a detailed understanding of the event, whereas the initial press report was simply an honest attempt to make the public aware of what took place.

          So as we look at the six days of creation we have a lot of unanswered questions.  But there is this pattern.  God speaks, something happens, and God gives his approval of what takes place.  It will not be until man disobeys a command of God that God does not express his pleasure with what took place following his speaking and something taking place in creation.  If God gave to us a press release form of his creation of the universe, then this matter of his repeated speaking to creation, something taking place, and his subsequent approval of what took place must be something very important indeed.  The Book of Genesis would suggest to us that the universe was created through a dynamic liturgical relationship between God and the universe.

          We can see this perhaps especially in Genesis 1:11-12.  Here is what it says: “And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth and it was so.  And the earth brought forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”  Genesis 1:11-12)

          It seems like we are let in on how God related to the creation during the work of creation.  He spoke to the creation, and then the creation responded and God responded to the creation’s response.  This is a creation activated within a liturgical relationship.  We might picture such a relationship in Christian worship.  The priest gives a call to prayer, saying “Let us pray.”  He then begins to recite: “Our Father who . . . and then the congregation responds by responding to the invitation to pray by joining in to the praying of the “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name”, etc.  It is understood that as God, through the minister, issues the call to pray that the instructed congregation will respond in expressing the replying prayer, and then ultimately God will likewise respond favorably to the faithfully prayed liturgical prayer.

          The creation is thus described as a work done cooperatively between God who speaks, the creation which faithfully responds and this brings forth in its conclusion a God who gives his approval to that which has been rendered in faithful reply to the call of God.  In Genesis 1:11-12 what first looks like in verse 11 as a completely wrought out work of God is shown in verse 12 to also have a dynamic of creation’s entrance into the work of God as governed by God’s call.  The earth cannot be said to evolving completely on its own, but neither is the earth a passive element being acted upon without any activity on its own part.  The earth is said to bring forth grass, herb yielding seed, and the tree yielding fruit.  Earth evidently does this in an active manner in an active response to the word of God.  If this is the case, then what does this have to say about the debate between creation and evolution?  What does this have to say about the relationship between theology and science?  Could the natural scientist be seeing the evidence that nature has indeed responded to the call of God in creation as nature itself progressed from a world empty, void and covered in darkness; without shape, order, light, or life until we look about ourselves today and see a creation that has order, light, beauty, and life?

          It would seem to me that the shape of the relationship between God as creator and the creation itself is similar in pattern to that of God as Redeemer and man as responder to the call of redemption in the present “day” of salvation.  God speaks, instructs, calls upon us to believe, to trust, to obey, to repent, etc.  We then act in response to the call.  Our actions are not independent of the grace of the word which commands and calls.  Our way is instructed, encouraged, stimulated, initiated and brought to completion all in this relationship between God as the one who calls, and us who believe and respond.  That our salvation is entirely by grace does not conflict with the reality that our salvation is active in our expression of faith, in our obedience, in our hearing the word of God with fear and trembling, and in our actively seeking to work out our salvation in fear and trembling.  God speaks and calls us to redemption and we reply by and through faith.  There is finally the promise of the final word spoken in regards to the story of this present day of salvation.  We read of Christ’s words to the faithful servant on the final day of judgment, wherein our Lord will say, “Well done thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of the Lord.”  (Matthew 25: 21, 23)

          As we have been addressing, in this series of essays, the concern of discovering our own human self-identities nothing from a Biblical perspective can be any more essential to our discovery of our own self-identities than to understand that within the creation and within Christ’s redemption we were created for and need a relationship in redemption that is worked out between the God who calls and we who respond to his call.  If we have been created to answer and make reply to the call of God who created the heavens and the earth, and all things visible and invisible; and we haven't even a clue that such a call is being addressed to us then there is something dramatically essential to the understanding of our lives that has been left out of the story being told to modern men and women.

          There seems to be one reason for the creation to have the strange inclusion of Genesis 1:2 where after God has created the initial heaven and earth, earth is described as: without form, void and covered in darkness.  That is the picture of a creation separated from the dynamics of the liturgical relationship between God and the creation.  Then God began to speak and the universe began to respond and the creation began moving towards order, light, life and beauty.  But with man came the possibility of a creature which would choose to say “no” to the voice of God. What are the consequences of saying no to the dialogue between God and man?  What sort of world would we inherit if we were to say “no” to the dialogue between God and man?  That world is, I believe, illustrated for us in the second verse of Genesis.  It is a world that is without form, void, and covered in darkness.  This is the Bible’s frightening presentation of a hellish existence.  Hell is a place where the human being will be deconstructed, broken down as a worm that does not die, and as a fire that is not quenched to take place in the outer darkness.  We see this frightening scene and think of it as an evil created by some evil God.  But the reality presented in the Scriptures is that there is in man’s sinful rebellion some sort of desire to not give thanks to God, nor to honor God, and to wish for a universe where we existed apart from the call of God; but that universe is one separated from the dynamics of the liturgy of creation.  So there is this frightening view in the Scriptures that if we get to separate ourselves from the call of God like we sometimes imagine to be freedom, then everything created in the world through God’s relationship to the creation is something from which we must be separated until we are left with our own little island in the outer darkness where the earth is without form, void, and covered in darkness.  Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the ancient Christian creed spoke of Jesus descending into hell.  For on the cross, for three hours on Good Friday as mankind put to death the Son of God, “darkness covered the earth.”  Was this the darkness of Genesis 1:2, of existence separated from the voice of God set forth in the call of God to which creation replied and took on order, light, beauty, and life?  If that is at least partially the intended understanding of the Apostolic account of Good Friday's darkness, then let us take encouragement that it did not triumph, for on the third day the Son of God, the Light of the world, arose from the tomb and busted loose from the bands of sin and death and claimed triumph for all who would follow him from that day forward.

          If this story of creation, is the story of a liturgy, or dialogue between God and his creation then it sheds light on the true nature of man's need to be in relationship to God for even a partial knowing of God's will for our lives, or even for an understanding of who we are as men and women created by God.  For if we understand the creation, then we will begin to understand that there is also a word of redemption, a call of salvation being issued by God in the call of redemption to sinners who have stumbled, fallen short, and are in need of being called into a liturgical creation of a new heavens and earth wherein dwells righteousness.  If this is all true, then surely this is an essential part of our understanding who we are, and what role and place we are meant to play in our lives within society, within creation, even how we are to understand ourselves.  If this understanding of the creation is basically correct, then to not understand that we are being called to life, faith, and repentance by our God means that we truly have not been told an important story when we were being told as modern men and women the story of our lives.

          Thus Psalm 19 begins:  “The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament shows his handiwork.  Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night shows knowledge.  There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.  Their line is gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.”  (Psalm 19:1-4)  This Psalm describes for us how God’s word has gone out into the world first in creation, secondly in the word of the law of the Scriptures capable of leading to our redemption, and ultimately in the Lord our strength and redeemer.  How can we understand ourselves apart from the liturgy of creation and redemption?  This is an essential part of the story not only of creation, but it is an essential element in understanding each of us our own individual life story.  If Jeanne, in "Don't Look Back" had discovered this story of Genesis she might well have said of her teachers in modernity, "You left out this part when you told me the story of my life."  The Bible however is written from a different vantage point, from the vantage point of God in search of man.