Thinking again about Genesis 1
After many years of defending the use of the word "day" in Genesis Chapter One, I finally saw it all very differently. You know how it goes. Sceptics say that we know that the universe was not created in a matter of days, nor was planet earth. Indeed we do know this. Science has, in my opinion, securely established some basic knowledge about the development of our universe and of planet earth. Arguing that the word "day" in Genesis One could be a metaphor for millions of years seemed increasingly to me to give the ground of the argument to the sceptics. It felt like I was on the run in my defence of the Bible.
Then one day I was reading Chapter one with a view to talking about it, and I noticed in a way that I hadn't before, the repetition of the word "good". I mean, I had noticed it but had kind of taken it for granted. It was like background noise to the text. So I started to think about it. I figured that at the supposed time of writing there were many gods in the running for stardom and celebrity status. Every tribe had its own deity or deities, and the bigger nations had big cults attached to the major players. In those times also, all things inexplicable, over which people felt they had no control, were ascribed to the gods. Belief in the gods gave people explanations for events which otherwise couldn't be understood or explained. So for instance, poor harvests, floods, droughts, thunder and lightning and so on, could be explained by reference to your god. It was natural therefore for people to think that the gods were fickle, prone to temper tantrums, unpredictable and prone to favouritism. So they had to be placated, appeased, worshipped, noticed. But here, in Genesis, we find a startling idea that runs completely against the accepted ideas of the time. Here is the proposition that God is good. More than this, we find the idea that all things come under the control of this one good God. This for these early times is fairly staggering stuff. We don't see this because these are ideas that we now take for granted. But if you understand these ideas in the context of an early developing faith, they are mind blowing.
As I thought about this I began to understand that I wasn't reading some early writer's attempt to give us a historical and scientific description of the beginning of the world, but I was reading a piece of theology. Once I had grasped this, the whole chapter came alive for me as an expression of a very new understanding of God emerging from the mists of time. Here was a description of a good God, the all powerful God in charge of all things, who created order and beauty and rhythm and life. Here was a God who seemed to live in relationship - the word "us" if it were not the royal "we", what else could it mean? This also led me to an understanding of how it was that love was at the heart of God, and why it would be that others be created who could also give and receive love. Against that revelation, the arguments about days and order of events seemed trivial, inconsequential.
This understanding of the purpose of the account in Genesis 1 also helped me understand the reason behind the writing of Chapter 3, where we are introduced to the first shadow which falls over this new creation. We meet something that is not good. It stands to reason that the writer knew there was now a theological problem that had to be resolved. If creation was the work of a good God, how come there was so much pain and suffering? So with absolute commitment to recognising the world as the writer and as all his readers would know it, the problem of evil is faced. The Biblical answer is couched in terms of the ebb and flow of love. The brothers fall out because of jealousy, and this leads to murder. The Bible sees human evil in terms of the rise and fall of love. Some philosophers have argued that an all powerful God could have ordained that there be love without its opposite, but this is not the Biblical view. Theologically at least, the existence of love brings about the possibility of pain. Should God be held responsible for this? This is a question which is eventually addressed in the Bible. But not right away.
Then one day I was reading Chapter one with a view to talking about it, and I noticed in a way that I hadn't before, the repetition of the word "good". I mean, I had noticed it but had kind of taken it for granted. It was like background noise to the text. So I started to think about it. I figured that at the supposed time of writing there were many gods in the running for stardom and celebrity status. Every tribe had its own deity or deities, and the bigger nations had big cults attached to the major players. In those times also, all things inexplicable, over which people felt they had no control, were ascribed to the gods. Belief in the gods gave people explanations for events which otherwise couldn't be understood or explained. So for instance, poor harvests, floods, droughts, thunder and lightning and so on, could be explained by reference to your god. It was natural therefore for people to think that the gods were fickle, prone to temper tantrums, unpredictable and prone to favouritism. So they had to be placated, appeased, worshipped, noticed. But here, in Genesis, we find a startling idea that runs completely against the accepted ideas of the time. Here is the proposition that God is good. More than this, we find the idea that all things come under the control of this one good God. This for these early times is fairly staggering stuff. We don't see this because these are ideas that we now take for granted. But if you understand these ideas in the context of an early developing faith, they are mind blowing.
As I thought about this I began to understand that I wasn't reading some early writer's attempt to give us a historical and scientific description of the beginning of the world, but I was reading a piece of theology. Once I had grasped this, the whole chapter came alive for me as an expression of a very new understanding of God emerging from the mists of time. Here was a description of a good God, the all powerful God in charge of all things, who created order and beauty and rhythm and life. Here was a God who seemed to live in relationship - the word "us" if it were not the royal "we", what else could it mean? This also led me to an understanding of how it was that love was at the heart of God, and why it would be that others be created who could also give and receive love. Against that revelation, the arguments about days and order of events seemed trivial, inconsequential.
This understanding of the purpose of the account in Genesis 1 also helped me understand the reason behind the writing of Chapter 3, where we are introduced to the first shadow which falls over this new creation. We meet something that is not good. It stands to reason that the writer knew there was now a theological problem that had to be resolved. If creation was the work of a good God, how come there was so much pain and suffering? So with absolute commitment to recognising the world as the writer and as all his readers would know it, the problem of evil is faced. The Biblical answer is couched in terms of the ebb and flow of love. The brothers fall out because of jealousy, and this leads to murder. The Bible sees human evil in terms of the rise and fall of love. Some philosophers have argued that an all powerful God could have ordained that there be love without its opposite, but this is not the Biblical view. Theologically at least, the existence of love brings about the possibility of pain. Should God be held responsible for this? This is a question which is eventually addressed in the Bible. But not right away.
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