"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." That's how it all begins, and so that's where I'm starting. Every Wednesday, I am going to take a look at a portion of this crazy book called the Bible, starting with the very first of the creation stories it contains. I am no Biblical expert, nor do I think I have some kind of special (divine) knowledge everyone else is lacking. I don't even know Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic. I present only one opinion on what may be the world's most controversial book and share my own journey. As we go, I'll be using the Revised Standard Version and cross-referencing other versions as well. With all that said, let's begin.
Genesis 1. Right here, on page one, we get the very first story of creation, the most famous of all creation stories. Now, I love creation stories, and I've read all kinds of different ones, but this is one of my favourite. Every time God makes something, God looks at it—God sees it!—and finds it to be good. God is an artist, and an artist who actually likes their work! When I read this, I see a mystical forming of the world like a vague picture slowly becoming clearer and clearer. I get to watch God's brush strokes.
I hear a lot of arguments about the creation story, and I've never understood them. Those who argue that it is a literal, factual story which disproves evolution seem to have missed the poetry, and those who argue that its factually erroneous account of things that happened long before humanity even existed disprove the Bible's usefulness also seemed to have missed something crucial.
"And God saw that it was good." I read this very first (in the Bible) creation story, and what I read is a story about an artist, a creator, which loves its work. As an artist, I find it hard to like, let alone love, most everything I make. I get annoyed, emotional, moody, upset because what I made is imperfect. And then here's this artist, this creator, who looks at all of creation and says, "Hey, I like that!" I read this story, and I want to be like God.
I also see here something profoundly human: the desire to understand the hows and whys of existence. Cultures from every corner of the world had their own creation stories, all attempts at understanding the world in which they lived, and the Israelite people were no different. The Bible, from the very first page, recounts for me one culture's journey toward greater knowledge and understanding of the world. There is a hunger to understand and make sense of the unknowable here, and it is a universal hunger, a hunger to which I can relate, to which we all can relate.
Maybe I'm supposed to think the Bible is the perfect, infallible Word of God and to treat it like a book of law and scientific and historical fact, but why would I even want to read that? The Bible is an invitation to think and consider, an invitation to engage, and that's what compels me to read it. It connects me to people who lived in a far away land a very long time ago, and it connects me to people who are alive today in my very own hometown. And, somewhere along the line, the Bible connects me to "God," whoever and whatever God is. I am no Biblical expert, but neither were the writers of the Bible.
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