One Chapter to Rule Them All: Genesis 1

 

Q. If I were permitted only one chapter from the Bible and only one to base my faith on, what would it be?

A. Genesis 1

Everything in the remainder of the Hebrew and Christian texts is pretty much the explainer and outcropping we see of this great cosmology. 

Q. But wait, isn't Genesis 1 just a retelling of earlier pagan cosmologies? 

A. Yes, and a big NO. It certainly piggy-backs on Egyptian, Sumerian, and Babylonian cosmologies, which all shared a common near-east matrix of thought. But Genesis 1 is not a haphazard mash-up or borrowing from these other creation stories, it is purposefully a challenge to them. 

The Hebrews knew full well of these other creation claims and even shared some of the structural beliefs, but unlike these other stories, where the creator deities are "created" from nothing into the shapers of creation, the Hebrew God stands alone as being distinct from creation (he wasn't created), but at the same time is similar to these other deities in shaping matter into something ordered. In fact, Genesis 1:26 says, "Let us make man in our image..."While this could be referential to a potential godhead, like the Trinity, it seems likely that it refers to a Divine Council of God that appears throughout Scripture. Ultimately, the Creator determines how to fashion creation, and here, humanity is made with something shared with God and his council -- the ability to fashion, create, and act (i.e. agency). 

We know from Scripture and extra-biblical literature that the Divine Council is the heavenly host or army -- the angelic classes who do God's bidding. They have been assigned the role of stewards or regents of a part of God's creation, like sharecroppers are as tenant farmers to a landlord's whole property. Only, a third of the angels fell into corruption and waged a war against God and humanity. God's faithful in humanity will assume the duties of the Divine Council in eternity as the fallen angels are cast out. 

We also know that the fallen members of the council were created and worked in fashioning/governing creation. These were assignments. For example, when the goddess Tiamat in Sumerian/Babylonian myth functions, it is in relation to her assigned regency -- the deep abyss or chaotic oceans. The Church Fathers affirm that the fallen council members or fallen angels (demons) became the gods of the nations. What Scripture is doing then is not simply retelling cosmologies that include pagan deities, but is presenting those deities in rightful subservient (created) roles.

There are plenty of differences. For example, humans are created with agency to serve as God's agents on earth, whereas the pagan creation stories (Sumeria/Babylon) place humans in the role of slaves made by lower class angels because they were tired of serving higher ranking angels. But humans, in God's economy, are not slaves, but co-workers alongside God in his creation. 

Ultimately, God is about order. While the pagan deities reportedly brought order (they did as God's agents), they fell into corruption and later sewed disorder in the world and humanity. Genesis 1 is replete with God's ordering of creation, which brings us to human nature, a natural disposition for disorder, and the need for God to have continual order.   

Tiamat was the Sumerian goddess of the chaotic ocean. In a Judeo-Christian understanding, she would be a member of the Divine Council assigned to order the oceans on behalf of God. Instead, the fallen angel in Tiamat became deity for Sumeria and Babylon, and so becomes chaos in possession of the ocean. In Genesis 1:2, God's Spirit hovers over the darkness of the deep, which is the abyss of chaotic ocean or Tiamat. The Hebrew word here is a cognate of Tiamat -- tehom. In near-east cosmologies, darkness of the seas and barrenness of deserts were the primordial states the pre-existed creation, from which the deities themselves emerged. Deities brought land and plants and animals, or order and the sustenance of life. The Bible shares this mode of thought as God orders a garden (Eden) to sustain life. With regard to Tiamet or the waters, God separates them in and order.

Eden is situated as a place where the great rivers (waters) converge, only some of the rivers listed in Scripture do not converge (Genesis 2:10-15). This suggests a watershed, which means a mountain whereby waters traverse and become the various rivers. A mountain is where God meets people throughout Scripture. So Eden is essentially a mountain garden that sustains life, because it is where God meets and keeps his creation. The tower of Babel, pyramids, ziggurats, and temples in pagan worship were human devised mountains in an attempt of people to control their own destinies. But these were attempts in the wilderness, in the deserts, which was the exile from Eden into essentially chaos or nothingness. This parallels the chaos and nothingness of the sea. Both barren land and choppy sea represent disorder, so when Adam and Eve are booted from the garden, or Cain was made to wander, these were examples of exile into nothingness or disorder -- the primitive state of non-being. To be or to exist meant to be on the mountain garden with God, where waters that were under the earth (still in chaos) were drawn up as springs and became mighty rivers to the chaotic lands to bring life everywhere. 

It's no wonder that humans are often described as clay -- a mixture of water and dust. God has taken the disorder of the elements (seas and desert nothingness) and fashioned them into an ordered whole, infilled by his breath/Spirit (ruach) and given life (existence). It is the absence of breath that means death and death does not mean non-existent in this motif. When Adam, Eve, and Cain are cast out, they become exiles. So, when the serpent told Eve in Genesis 3 that she wouldn't die if she ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (an act of taking what she wasn't ready for being a novice in creation), she did die, though not physically. Death is more that physical cessation, but is removal from the life sustaining presence of God in an ordered garden where disordered desert and waters become ordered paradise. She did die. Humans are now born into the disordered world -- death. Our image of God's nature remains in that we are still assigned the role of assuring order to the world, but without the Spirit governing us. Our likeness of God is marred and we suffer beneath the sickness of sin, which is an embrace of disorder as we attempt to self-serve and make our own paths toward life and eternity. 

So, in this light, what we need is a renewal of life giving spring water, whom we see is Christ in Scripture. He is the living waters. His incarnation as a human restored waters from chaos to life, as was epitomized in his baptism in the Jordan, where we see the Father speak and send the Holy Spirit to hover over the waters (like in Genesis 1:2). Jesus restores order and brings water to our dry bones (desert dust). We are once again made into clay to be fashioned by God toward our ultimate purpose to co-labor with him. Because of Jesus' incarnation, the breath of God -- the sustenance of life -- returns and the spirit infills the faithful. We have new life. We are healed. In Greek, healing (sozo) is salvation.

So, let's look at sin then not as a personal attack on God's character deserving of pain and death, as some in certain camps of Christianity do. Instead, sin is yielding to the disease of disorder. It is a usurpation of God's design for order on our own terms and it simply unravels order. It is the selfish attempt to cure a disease without the doctor... Web MD instead of getting a physical. It ends up aggrandizing the self and loses sight that there is or ever was a garden of wholeness. It is choosing to live in disorder, so that when the body dies, the consequences are continual disorder, not cessation. At that point, sin solidifies... Repentance is a component of flesh (ordered dust and water) and spirit in unity or order. Without flesh, there is nothing to order, so without repentance of the whole, the dead in their sins can ever only live in partiality. Yet, in a fallen state, they would be utterly ruined in the fullness of God's glory and so as a grace they exist in eternity within chaos. It is no wonder hell is often described as darkness and an abyss.

Hell is the turbulent ocean and desert... It is permanent exile. And like the temporal exiles of Adam and Eve and Cain, it was caused by human choice, not God's arbitrariness. While hell is punitive in its assignment by God, it is not restorative -- that comes through repentance in Christ. Rather it is God's judgement of a person as an acknowledgement of their disposition and God then gives people over to what they have become. In short, God says, "I have had your medicine all this time and made it available, but you have chosen not to come to me and take it." God does not want his creations to exist in non-existence or exile, but if he forced those in such advanced illness into heavenly eternity, that would be more cruel than allowing them to embrace the exile they've decided upon. Hell is simply God allowing the people that he desired to heal or make ordered remain in disorder and exile. Exile is death; not cessation. Non-existence is dispositional.

In Physics the 2nd law of thermodynamics or entropy says that all things decay by nature. There is no permanency. This is the state of exile, of disorder. It is the natural state of things apart from order to decay or die. In God there is order. He is where the chaos of nothingness, made figurative in barren deserts and stormy seas, is ordered into clay -- a malleable composite of creation infilled by the life giving Spirit. Without God is entropy. This is natural for creation, because creation is not God. It is why the angels rebelled and became the gods of paganism, who were full of hubris and violence. They were so because they were in spiritual entropy. It is why we humans rationalize every element of sickness in our characters. We write of the effects of the fall and sin as natural, because for creation it really is. Only in God is real wholeness, where we can maintain our composite parts of dust, water, and breath, which interestingly is what we are composed of mostly: water, carbon, and spirit/breath. 

What does this mean for us when we claim ownership of our fleshly dispositions, especially marked by the most intense and emotive aspects of existence -- sexuality. Anymore, we write it all off as natural, in whatever form we find expedient or applicable or desired. Or we write off our other appetites and passions. We claim these things as natural and they are. Yet an appeal to nature does not mean it's how things ought to be. This is a logical fallacy. These things we yield to as drivers in life are indeed natural, because entropy and disorder is natural. God is ordered. He did not order things into disordered states. This is why we reason like no other creature, so that we might seek order.

Genesis 1 is the linchpin of all Scripture. It is like the great ring in Lord of the Rings: one ring [chapter] to rule them all. Genesis 1 tells us that God made everything and then brought it to order because of his presence in it. Salvation is a return to order or healing. It is not about getting to heaven per se, but rather finding wholeness. So, let's stop living partially. We are a society of materialists. The material needs the spiritual, and if we claim that we have our own spiritual path, we are merely cycling it through the medium of disordered material... It is still lacking. We need wholeness and that comes only on the mountain top garden. God bless.