Beginning Again (14 years later)
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1 NASB
In the Beginning – This was written on January 1st, 2009. Recently a reader questioned something about it, and when I looked at what I wrote 14 years ago, I had to agree. It needed some changes. So, for those of you who have been around a long time, here’s the revised version:
Let’s begin by doing some mental stretching. You’ve had a nice vacation. You’ve had some rest. You have the day off. Now put your mind to work.
Something deep is happening here . . something very deep. James Gleick talks about these kinds of problems in his book Chaos. “For the hardest problems, the problems that would not give way without long looks into the universe’s bowels, physicists reserved words like deep.”[1] In Gleick’s book, chaos is one of the deep issues. In the Bible, the deepest of all issues is God. Without His revealed insights, there is no hope at all of uncovering His character. Fortunately, He decided to give us a peek.
As I write this woefully brief first entry to the seventh year of Today’s Word, azure blue scales of the flat-backed Caribbean Leviathan slough off against the bleached loofah beach. Timeless, we might say, but we wouldn’t mean that the heavens and the earth were once not temporal. We would only mean that their temporal duration extended into the past in ways we find difficult to measure. So it is with the deep things of physics. Since temporality appears to be a concomitant of change, time is thoroughly entwined in the warp and woof of the universe. But how time is really connected to change is a deep issue. It’s deep because it takes us back to God.
That brings up this strikingly unusual opening to God’s Word. Bere’shiyt (pronounced with long e sound: be re sheet) is the Hebrew word for this phrase. It’s a red letter word. It says something no other ancient cosmology is able to conceive; something, in fact, that no human being can conceive. It posits a beginning. It says that there was a “time” when there was nothing at all and that was the “time” when God began to create. But maybe it’s not quite that simple (as if this really is simple).
The soft scales of the sea rub against the grist of the shore, but the scales are not polished. Instead, the liquid Leviathan grinds its boundary to powder. The sea remains the same. Maybe time is like that. It just continues on its way, unhurried and unperturbed by the events it rubs against. But if we think of time as an ocean or a river, we could make a tragic mistake. We might find ourselves with an intractable problem, worshipping a God who is wholly other, beyond any of the interactions we so desperately need. Why? Because the popular mythology of conceiving time as a function of change leads us to imagine that where there is nothing to change (for example, where there is no heaven and earth because they have not yet been created), then there cannot be any time. But there is God. So, God must be “outside” of time. Right?
If this is right, then how can God be the intimate, involved redeemer of my soul? If all of my existence, and all the existence of every azure sea and every bleached shore is “within” the temporal realm, but God is not, then how am I to find solace in the Redeemer I need? He isn’t here where I am. He is “beyond” me. And how can a God who is “outside” time become intimately involved within the temporal world? (I told you this was deep.) It doesn’t do any good to simply assert that both are true, but I just don’t know how. Saying that God is outside of time has a lot of other implications that are very uncomfortable – like impassibility (you can look that up) and the loss of free will. All the great theologians see this. They just don’t preach about it. And for good reason. Who would listen to a sermon about a God who doesn’t feel?
Does bere’shiyt force us into this frightening dilemma? Well, many Christian theologians think it does. Most of the fundamental doctrines we hold so dear are formulated on the basis of this “deep” Greek metaphysics. We just don’t talk about it very much. But if you look, you will find it buried in those systematic theologies on your shelf.
Perhaps we need to begin again. Nahum Sarna, a Jewish commentator, says that bere’shiyt never appears with the definite article and is “unlikely in a temporal sense.” He supports this with other examples in the Hebrew text. While the details are issues for Hebrew grammarians, the insight is very important. Bere’shiyt comes from the word ro’sh. It has three categories of meanings: beginning, best, and first fruits. Ro’sh, of course, is the word for “head.” You will find it used metaphorically in Rosh Hashanah, the “head” of the year, the first day of the Jewish calendar.
Hebrew does not require the same degree of rigorous certainty implicit in the Greek worldview. Hebrew is a language capable of a certain inner tension; a tension that is comfortably uncomfortable with a God who is transcendent over all creation and yet immanently involved in it. YHWH is independent of any created entity, yet He is intimately involved in all creation. As Paul often says, “This is a great mystery.” Maybe bere’shiyt really doesn’t imply a line between time and eternity. Maybe it only says that God created everything some time in the past.
Rattray (TDOT) points out that the use of bere’shiyt for “beginning” always implies an end (‘aharit – another very important word). So, if we read this verse as “in the beginning,” then it implies that there will be an end to the heavens and the earth. That is a problem. In addition, normal Hebrew for “in the beginning” would use ber’shiyt, not bere’shiyt. Rattray concludes that re’shiyt “does not allude to an absolute beginning of time or of the universe.” Now we really have a problem. We just might have an answer too. The preoccupation of claiming that God is “outside” of time doesn’t come from a Hebrew point of view. It is tied to a Greek metaphysics of perfection. Once we unhook ourselves from this Greek idea, all kinds of things begin to change.
Of course, there is one additional insight that we need here. All of the language about time used to express this Greek-based metaphysics is spatial. In other words, when we talk about “beyond” or “outside,” we are really treating time as though it were a spatial relationship. This is a “deep” and abiding fallacy, but it permeates our vocabulary about time. It’s part of the way we see the world – from a Greek point of view.
Something mysterious is happening here, and it just may be a bit “beyond” us. Perhaps we don’t need to be quite so Greek in our demand for the “correct” and “certain” answer. Perhaps knowing God, experiencing His grace, finding His comfort and enjoying His presence, is really what “knowing” theology is all about. And maybe that’s enough – for the time being.
The sea is very deep, but when you stand on the shore, you only see the flat-back scales of the azure Leviathan. How much we see of the “surface” of our God might be just the top of what He reveals. Bere’shiyt says we are really just beginning.
Topical Index: time, theology, beginning, know, bere’shiyt, Genesis 1:1
[1] James Gleick, Chaos (don’t have the page number, sorry)
