It only takes a word

Christians have the privilege of believing that our world is created by God. Our Christian Bible begins with an account of him creating everything we know as our universe. It begins, ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’

This faith is now popularly discounted as a superstition. But in doing so, we’ve left ourselves without answers to many questions. We seem to be here simply to exist. There’s no common expectation, purpose or future.  All these, we are told, we must make for ourselves. And, of course, we can’t agree on what they should be.

To our modern ears, this ancient creation story sounds quaint. That’s not surprising given it’s over 3000 years old! Naturally, it’s not a scientific treatise, or a construction manual. Its first readers weren’t preoccupied with ‘how’ questions like we are. But it does tell us things we need to know. Even things we are even hungry to know. Things that science doesn’t address.

It’s arranged as a week of days—not to tell us how long it takes God to get things done. A week doesn’t exist until he makes it! And, as we shall see later, the pattern of a week is more about demonstrating the orderliness of what God does. It also reveals a pattern of work and rest that is appropriate in a world God creates and cares for.

One of the things that stands out in this account of creation is that every day begins with God speaking. This is how he works.

A second thing that recurs is that each of his ‘busy’ days ends by noting that his work is good—a fitting part of all that he is making. And, in particular, when he makes us in his own image and appoints us as his curators, he calls it very good. We are an essential part of his creation, necessary to the functioning of everything else.

We need to know that we’re living in this God-spoken and God shaped environment. And we need this affirmation—this sense of rightness and the appropriateness of our own place in it—in order to live in it well.

So, this little series of articles is about God’s good world and what makes it so. And, in this first article, the first good thing is that our world and the universe around us is brought into being by God speaking—effectively, telling something to happen.

If God creates by speaking, that means that there’s a person behind all that we know as our universe—not nothingness. There’s a reason for things being as they are—not chance. And there’s communication, a desire for relationship.

This latter point becomes clear when we see how God speaks on each of these days. On six days, he says, let this or that happen, and it happens. But when he creates us, he confers with himself—’Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ And then he speaks to us. He tells us to fill the earth, and look after it. And he tells us what to use for food.

He could have left us to work things out for ourselves. And in fact, he does leave plenty for us to discover and to make. It starts with taxonomy—the study of naming, describing and classifying organisms. It’s not finished until we’ve inhabited the whole earth and made it a place that befits what its Creator began.

But it’s reasonable to suppose that if our world is made by God speaking, it will also run properly when its curators are listening to God speaking. That’s certainly what God expects because he keeps on speaking. But much of the human race doesn’t listen.

We all know that the world hasn’t remained as the idyllic place this story portrays (or in the second story about creation in the next chapter). And the Bible spells this out for us in the chapters that follow this creation story.

Things get twisted—quickly. The first couple God creates decide to trust their own judgement on something God has said about eating from a particular tree. To their dismay, they find they now have a different view of everything and things begin to go wrong.

There’s a murderer in this first family. That’s Cain. There’s anger and grasping by those who reject the idea of God being in charge of his world. It focusses on Lamech. And then, there’s violence so vicious and corrupt, and widespread, that God floods the earth. And then, he begins again —with one family who respond to his kindness. That’s Noah.

And after this drastic intervention, mankind still wants to be in charge of what is essentially God’s territory. A regime seeks to unite all peoples against the idea of spreading out across the earth as God’s curators. They build an edifice to establish themselves as self-reliant. That’s the tower of Babel.

However, despite this series of tragedies, God remains in charge. He confuses the language of the tower builders so they can’t understand each other. They become frustrated, and then, do what God told them to do at the beginning—spread through the whole earth.

We’ve only looked at eleven chapters of the Bible! But God is showing that he never gives up on his world being good! He never stops speaking. His charter is still in place. It will work out according to his plan. And he cares for it—for us.

The same thing goes on all the time. If we think the world is just stuff for us to use and enjoy, and if we think we can run it all without listening to its Maker, things go wrong. God lets it go wrong. It’s not meant to work without him!

But God goes on speaking. And now, he speaks to us through his own Son—Jesus Christ. The Gospel of John begins by telling us that the Word became flesh.[i] Everything we’ve read about God speaking our world into existence was through Jesus Christ. There’s nothing made that wasn’t made through him.[ii]  We could say that God’s Son is God’s way of speaking.                                                                                                                               

But now, this Word of God comes to begin a new work of creation. The human race has had a terminal disease. We haven’t been able to hear our Creator’s word. We need a restart.

As God’s Word, Jesus lives in this world. He does this in the way we were all meant to live—listening to our Father God. But then, Jesus takes upon himself the disfunction of humanity, and the accountability for it that we should bear. And he dies the death we deserve. And when God raises him to life again, the Word made flesh speaks to us again and says, ‘Peace be with you’.[iii]

We’ve needed to be reconciled with the God we left out of our lives. And this is what he does. He enlivens our very being with the knowledge of God. We can hear God speaking again.

This astonishingly good news is what God is saying to us all. And it is this word that will create something that wasn’t there before—a reborn creature who loves their Creator.

This is what keeps Christians going, and what gives the church its message. The God who said, ‘let light shine out of darkness’ when the world was being made, now shines in our hearts.[iv] We begin to know our Creator. That’s very personal. And very powerful. Through this, we come to recognise this world as God’s gift. And we love to be about his project.

Next time, I’d like us to see more of what makes God’s world good.

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[i] John 1:14

[ii] John 1:3

[iii] John 20:19

[iv] 2 Cor. 4:6