Call of the Wild (3)
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1 NASB
God – Have we mined this verse yet? It’s certainly familiar, but it might be too familiar to actually understand what it says. Today I want to leave you with just a few remarks that might cause you to think once more about this important opening statement.
First, from the great Christian philosopher/sociologist Jacques Ellul, commenting on the impact of generating systematic theology from texts like this:
Finally, the mysterious powers of the world are definitively exorcized, eliminated, and vanquished. This is an essential theme. . . . In this world, then, there is no longer anything supernatural. There is no longer anything mysterious, no longer any world beyond. . . . The Christian world is wholly secular. There are in it no particularly sacred times or places, precisely because God is absolutely Wholly Other and nothing in the world comes close to him or can be the bearer of value, meaning, energy or even order. The only new energy that Christianity recognizes is the potential presence of God by the Holy Spirit. But the Spirit, too, is incomprehensible, inaccessible and unexploitable.[1]
Now at the same time and in a corresponding manner, reflection upon God, being led by Greek and Roman thought, radically transformed what the Bible said about God. On the one side it analyzed the attributes of God – a God, of course, very different from the gods of polytheism, but still a God constructed by philosophy. Thus the idea of creation underwent a radical change the moment omnipotence came to the fore. The relation between God and the world now had nothing whatever to do with what the first Christian generations believed. God was tied to his creation, and ultimately the world contained God. On this basis one could find the sacred everywhere. This path led to the reappearance of persons typically connected with the sacred, such as mediators or priests.[2]
Ellul’s insights remind us that the audience of Genesis 1:1 is not the Christian theologican, or even the Christian believer, for that matter. The audience is a people recently released from captivity in the hands of a polytheistic oppressor, a people whose national pysche is deeply affected by physical, emotional and spiritual trauma. These are not analyists. These are ordinary human beings in search of a living relationship with their God. So Heschel notes, “Ultimately religion is not based on our awareness of God but on God’s interest in us.”[3] If the Bible is a book about God’s interest in us, perhaps it’s time to read it as a love letter, not a study text.
Topical Index: Ellul, Heschel, Bible, Genesis 1:1
[1] Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, p. 60.
[2] Ibid., p. 68.
[3]Abraham Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity., p. xxii.
If you want to start reading the Bible as a love letter, I suggest Larry Crabb’s book “66 Love Letters: A Conversation With God that Invites You Into His Story”.
(Link removed) Please don’t use links. Just describe the where to, how to the link, page, video, etc. Thanks, Mark
Hi Paul. No offense intended here, please, but I just thought maybe you could have a little chuckle with me. I know there’s value in reading other people’s books. I have and do (including Skip’s), and I hope you read the Bible quite often yourself. But I just wanted to reply and express my sense of humor that I found your reply commonly ironic. In other words, “If you want to start reading the Bible as God’s love letter to YOU, I suggest you read someone else’s book.”
While it might seem ironic, I agree with Paul. Often we don’t know HOW to read YHVH’s love letters because we have been so conditioned by our culture and religious dogma. Crabb wrote a beautiful book to help those who are trying to break away from those dogmatic man-made theories of what the “Bible” IS and help the reader engage in the Word in a way they, perhaps, never had before.
Kind of like if I had a friend who said “I’m struggling with how to understand Jesus” and I replied, “Go read some of Skip Moen’s stuff. Understanding Hebraic thought is step one”.
I agree with Paul too. And also with you.
Come back to me… marry me… be one with me… same message from the beginning to the end…
When did we start talking about God instead of to Him? I suspect about the time we started putting Him in boxes; limiting Him by God Rules that said He COULD do this and COULDN’T do that. God boxes not only allow us to set Him off to the side when we talk about Him, it allows us to set ourselves off to the side, too, so we don’t have to factor Him in when we talk about Him, think about Him, etc. That way we don’t have to answer to Him all the time, every minute about Himself. When He is in His box He isn’t in the middle of the moment.
On the Road to Emmaus, Yeshua explained ABOUT Himself in the prophecies all afternoon til He was blue in the face, and the disciples spent that time able to ignore the fact that their hearts recognized the Master; at least that is, until they realized that He was present. Conversation ABOUT Him over.
I mean, do we pray every time the subject (see, we can classify Him as a subject now; how enlightened of us) of God comes up, inviting Him to make His Presence known and tell US Who He is? Or do we instead spend the time arguing about what boxes He fits or doesn’t fit into?
If everybody who has ever gone to war (or debate) ABOUT God had spent that time talking to Him and asking HIM Who He was instead, surely the planet would be a different place.
I love you sister always hitting the nail squarely on the head “when did we start talking about God rather than too him”.. To segue-way into the general topic of God the lover of man it was i believe He- God rather than we who first suggested he would get in to a box so the Israelite’s could carry Him around. He is so gracious to humble Himself that we might apprehend Him…We the conceited self important ones that we are tending to define, confine and limit Him with our Ideas about him.
The Bible is about “God’s interest in us” . Thanks for letting me sit and ponder that thought; maybe the whole morning, maybe the day, maybe a lifetime. Perhaps if my I ponder it enough, I will behave differently to those around me.
Now that you mention it, when I read this verse and think about it that way, I am aware that I’m actually able to have some good feelings about it. Feelings of awe, wonder, humility, love, security, being cared for, inclusion, belonging, as well as a sense of accountability, to name a few.
It’s like being a child and realizing, “Before you awakened this morning (In the beginning), your Dad was getting ready to go to work to provide for you and your family, and your Mom was up and in the kitchen getting breakfast ready for you and your siblings before you all start your own day at school (God created the heavens and the earth).”
Maybe the natural reply should not be one of dismissal, mere intellectual curiosity and investigation, just matter-of-fact acceptance, or a remote, impersonal appreciation, but instead, “Thank You, YHWH ABBA, for being interested that much in me, your child, your son. I really appreciate it. You’re so amazingly AWESOME! How can I show you my love in return?”