Creation 2: From Nothing

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

If there’s one thing we might say about we human beings it is that we are extraordinarily creative beings.

I was reminded of this recently when I watched on YouTube the video of Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone at the 2007 Macworld conference. The iPhone is simply a piece of technology from the pages of science-fiction. I remember when the idea of a hand-held multi-function communication device was something that might belong to Batman.

But here, in our lifetimes, dreams have become reality; fiction has become fact. And how is it done? Well of course, as Steve Jobs brilliantly explains, the device hasn’t appeared out of thin air. It has evolved from the technology that came before it. The brilliance of the iPhone as a human invention is the way in which it brings together its different elements and combines them. It is a consummate human creation – bringing together the raw material of the earth and the ideas that have gone before it – the work of Faraday, and Bell, and Babbage, and Jack Kilby the inventor of the silicon chip - and yoking it all together to create a new vision and new possibilities.

But still: the humanity of this creation is that it is created from stuff that already exists. It is created by creatures who themselves are anchored in the material world. We are composed of stuff ourselves.

This is not the testimony of the Christian faith about the way God creates. From the earliest times, Christians have understood that God creates ‘ex nihilo’ – from nothing. It is a doctrine more inferred from a number of texts than taught explicitly in any of them. A number of passages affirm the comprehensiveness of God’s creative act – he created all things: Romans 11: 36 – from him and through him and to him are all things; 1 Corinthians 8:6 – there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things; Ephesians 3:9 God who created all things; Colossians 1:16 for in him all things heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible. ‘All things’ is the refrain: God created all things, and there is nothing created that he did not create.

And so, when we turn to the first 2 verses of Genesis and we come across the strange words...the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters… we must not understand this as a kind of pre-existent eternal matter that exists alongside God, though the NRSV tried to make it sound as it was. If we are to read this text theologically and biblically, we must understand this void, the formlessness, this shapeless darkness, as a way of speaking of nothing at all.

Nothing. And it’s nothing that we have a problem with really. No human analogy exists for creating something from nothing. As Shakespeare’s King Lear said to his daughter Cordelia: ‘Nothing? Nothing will come of nothing!’ This was actually taken straight from the old Greek philosopher Aristotle, being one of his fixed laws of the universe. And that’s right: something must be composed of something else which is composed in its turn of something else. Whenever we find this ‘nothing’ we want to make it a something. It’s an old habit.

One terrible mistake we may then make is to depict this ‘nothing’ as a chaotic darkness, a force of negation something like the creeping darkness of Mordor that needs to be rolled back, tamed and even overthrown for there to be order and peace. In the ancient mythologies of Babylon, the earth was depicted as formed from the slain body of the sea monster Tiamat who was killed by Marduk.

Now, we do hear Scripture using this language sometimes to speak about Yahweh’s creative prowess – for example, in Psalm 74:

You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters.

You crushed the heads of Leviathan; you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.

Or in Job 26:

By his power he stilled the Sea; by his understanding he struck down Rahab.

By his wind the heavens were made fair; his hand pierced the fleeing serpent.

But we need to read these passages in the light of the basic theological truth of the absoluteness of the creative activity of the Triune God. My colleague in Old Testament George Athas said to me: The use of the sea-monsters is merely a mythological motif that's aiming to depict Yahweh as the supreme, powerful deity who is worth believing in. ‘If we begin to extract more than that from these texts, we're treating them as something other than mythological, and that would be an error of genre. We would need to start proposing that there are real fanged monsters 'out there'. That's an illegitimate move. If there are no real fanged monsters out there, then we can't conclude evil/chaos is eternal.’

God’s act of creation is not an act of taming the unruly and menacing force of nothingness. To think of it this way would be to give evil too much permanence – to give Satan a toehold in eternity which he does not deserve. As unthinkable as it is, nothing is, in theological terms, simply nothing.

What that ‘nothing’ means is that creation is not caused by anything except for the will of God. As the creatures around the throne say in Revelation 4:11: For you created all things and by your will all things were created and have their being. Creation therefore has no necessity as far as existence goes. It didn’t have to be here. Nothing in it compelled God or moved God to make it, because there was literally nothing in it. Nothing twisted his arm, or made the appearance of things inevitable. There was no pure logic that drove him to create. He just might not have done it. The only necessary thing that exists is God himself.

And so, that’s what we see in the opening chapter of Genesis: that God creates simply by his command. What’s the significance of him using his words to create? It’s that his words do not come from somewhere else, or have an existence other than God. They come from within him, representing and signifying his intentions for the world. They have no other source of existence than him.

We need to draw three important points from this thought about nothing. The first is that because creation is not necessary, it has the force of a gift. The American theologian David Bentley Hart puts it this way: The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo speaks of a God who gives of his bounty, not a God at war with darkness. From the very beginning, in the very beginning, the creative act of God is marked by grace and generosity. It needn’t be so. But it is: and so, being is a blessing. It’s an excessively generous gift, a plentiful, delightful gift. It sure exceeds nothing.

Have you considered how blessed you are in your very existence? There was nothing inevitable about you other than in the plans of God. You yourself are entirely the handiwork of the divine creator. He needn’t have made you – he was under no compulsion to do so. But he did. He involved the bodies of your parents in your conception, of course, and their affections for one another, and their plans for a family such as they were. But the way he has made the creation to run reminds us just who is doing the creating. Mum and Dad had so little control over what you became, didn’t they – your eye colour, your gender, your personality. They had to create from the raw material they had. But not God: God knitted you together in your mother’s womb, as the expression in flesh of an idea that came from nowhere. And here you are, a possibility made actual, in possession of the precious and gracious gift of existence.

The main alternative to this is the lottery of chance and genes that is materialistic evolution – luck, in other words. If luck is the only force bringing us into being, you cannot say anything much about you existence other than it is what it is. But the verdict of God on his creation is that it is good.

The second thing that creation from nothing teaches us is that, if creation has an absolute beginning, in also must have an end. It has time, in other words, because there was not, and then there was. It has an Alpha, and so it must have an Omega. We are right, therefore, to seek a purpose in things. Things look like they have a purpose – and so they do. The world of things is not going around in endless circles. Nor is it on an endless bungy of expansion and contraction.

But the third important point that God’s creation from nothing teaches us is spelt out for us in Scripture, and it is this: the only cause for God’s creation is the Son of God. Nothing less than God gives creation its purpose. It is love for the Son that brings the Father to create. Hear Colossians 1:16: all things have been created through him and for him. And John 1:3: All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. In Heb 1:2, we hear of God’s Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. The Son of God was the agent, instrument, plan and purpose of creation, and him alone.

Now this sounds like a very abstract thought. But what it does is very concrete. As we seek for purpose and cause and meaning in the unbelievably complex world we inhabit, we are turned by Scripture to focus on the events of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Instead of speculating about what God may or may not be doing in the world, we have before us the life and death of the incarnate Son of God, which gives us a great clarity about what God is doing. What these statements about the pre-existent Son of God are telling us is that if we want to grasp the essence of all things we need to study the Jesus of history. And what God was doing there? Colossians 1:20 puts it this way:

…through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

The death of Jesus Christ was at the heart of God’s plan for all things – all the things that were created through and for the Son. The Son’s mission of reconciliation, which led to the cross, brings to pass the Creator’s plan for his creation.

That God creates ex nihilo, from nothing, is a help to us in two specific ways. First, it helps us to see the human limitations of our own creative activity. It helps us feel unembarrassed by our need to build on the work of those who have gone before, since we are not God. Our culture prizes originality – but originality is an enormous pressure for human creators to bear. Only this week, I was talking to someone in fourth year about their project and we together observed that it is necessary as human beings to build on the work of others. Human creativity will always involve the bringing to together of things that already exist, since only God delivers pure ideas without origin. This is tremendously liberating for us in many of the things we seek to do; but also a rebuke to the vanity that has us sometimes imagining we are creative geniuses.

But second, the creation from nothing gives us great hope in the face of our slide into non-existence. If God can create worlds from nothing, then he is powerful to make good on his promises. If he is the God of his Word – that powerfully creative Word – than we need not fear that his promises will not come to pass. Sin and evil have no permanence. Only the God of Jesus Christ brackets human existence The connection is made for us almost in passing, in a single part-verse – Romans 4:17. Paul is rehearsing the story of Abraham and his faith which was credited to him as righteousness - a faith in God’s promises which meant denying the evidence of his body ‘which was as good as dead’ and not much use for the business of human reproduction by this stage. But Abraham believed, because the God in whom he believed was the one who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. That the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ is the one who in his free act of grace and by his Word alone calls things into being and raises the crucified Messiah from the dead shows him to be master of all reality, worthy of all glory and honour and praise, and one in whom we might find genuine, remarkable hope.

Creation 1: Where were you?

This morning I begin a series of three sermons on the Christian doctrine of creation. This morning: Where were you? Next week From nothing. And lastly, The delight of God.

The universe is big.

I don’t know how often, if at all, you have occasion to reflect on the sheer scale of the universe we inhabit – although when I say ‘inhabit’ it is only true in the sense that we sit in one crowded into one tiny corner of it. We can only travel in our minds’ eyes across the beams of light that reach us from the distant suns hovering some 14 billion light years away – meaning that what we are seeing is somehow the light from events that occurred some 14 billion years ago. We cannot see beyond this, simply because there has been enough time for light to travel that far. Even the light from our own local sun takes 8.3 minutes to reach us, 149.6 million km away. The sun is gradually increasing in temperature, such that another billion years will see it evaporate all the water on earth, and life will cease, if we haven’t managed to do that ourselves already.

The sun is itself of course only one of between 200 and 400 billion stars in the galaxy we rather cutely call the Milky Way. The diameter of the Milky Way is some 100,000 light years across. Earth sits about two-thirds away from the centre of the galaxy on a spiral shaped collection of dust and stars called the Orian-Cygnus arm. The possibility is that there are at least 10 billion planets that are, like earth, in a habitable zone, or as it is sometimes called, the ‘Goldilocks’ zone where things are ‘just right’. So far we have discovered just one.

In the 1920s, the great astronomer and telescopist Edwin Hubble demonstrated that the Milky Way was only one of approximately 200 billion such galaxies in the universe that we can see.

How did it get so big? The current thinking is that the power unleashed by the Big Bang, some 13 or 14 billion years ago was sufficient to expand a concentration of matter as tiny as an atom into the scale of a galaxy in an instant, and has been driving an expansion ever since.

As the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the late Douglas Adams put it:

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

How are we to exegete this vast text? At the very least, we ought to be awestruck. We are awed by the dimensions and age of medieval Cathedral, just a few hundred metres long and a few hundred years old. We are awed by the feeling of size and permanence that a landscape can give us. And yet these are as nothing in comparison to the universe itself. And against the immensity of the universe, all the concerns and anxieties of human life seem quite trivial. Our fretting about where to park our cars seems no more significant than our worry about how to treat our cancers. Our perspective is so limited, our time so brief, our bodies so puny: what do they matter?

That was how The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opened: with the pathetic Arthur Dent trying to protect his suburban home against being demolished to make way for a motorway all the while unaware that the whole earth itself was minutes from destruction at the hands of the Vogons. The same perspective comes through in Monty Python’s film The Meaning of Life, in ‘the Galaxy Song’:

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,

And things seem hard or tough,

And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,

And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough,

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving

And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour.

That's orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it's reckoned,

A sun that is the source of all our power.

The sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,

Are moving at a million miles a day,

In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,

Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Though it is done with the comic’s touch, it is a deeply disturbing and discomforting view of the way things are for men and women. The universe, even though it is extraordinarily beautiful, is actually a remorseless, unforgiving, unyielding place. Its greatest confidence trick, its biggest lie, is that it convinces you and me that it was made with us in mind. A moment’s contemplation of the depths of space and the forbidding span of time must surely rid us of the egotistical notion that we human beings are at the centre of things, and that what happens to me is of any consequence whatsoever. You might as well laugh: as James Taylor says, … since we're only here for a while/ Might as well show some style.

Something similar is going on in the book of Job - similar, but crucially, not at all the same. We are familiar with the story of Job: brought to the brink of death by loss of his family and possessions, he is urged to consider what the causes of his personal disaster are. The impeccable theological logic of his so-called friends is woefully inadequate. Job’s only resolve is to not accuse God – and so it goes. At the height of the story, after chapter upon chapter of silence, God speaks to Job ‘out of the whirlwind’. And what does God say to Job? Does he give him a solution? Does he explain what is going on?

No –if anything, it can be said that he taunts Job. His speech is the delivery of word which designed to silence. It is the playing of the ultimate trump card: where were you, Job, when I laid the foundations of the earth?

Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?

Gird up your loins like a man,

I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

Tell me, if you have understanding.

Who determined its measurements – surely you know!

Or who stretched the line upon it?

On what were its bases sunk,

Or who laid its cornerstone

When the morning stars sang together

And all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?

Is this not the same move that Douglas Adams and Monty Python make – and with a little sarcasm to boot? A ruthless blow to the human ego? Well, yes: yes it is. We haven’t got the capacity to answer these profound questions – we simply haven’t earned the right to challenge the creator. Did we pop off down to IKEA and assemble the earth from a flat pack with an Allen key? Did we knit together the canopy of the sky? Did we turn on the taps and create the mighty sea?

The questions come from God one after the other like a rain of blows on a fallen boxer. Only one of them would be enough to prove the point.

Have you commanded the morning since your days begane,

And caused the dawn to know its place

So that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth

And the wicked be shaken out of it?

Answer: no, no, no and again no. There can be no answer to the creator. If we are dwarfed by the creation then how much more are we dwarfed by him? It is, by the way, one of the great blessings of modern science that it has shown us the true scale of the picture. That the universe is far, far larger and far, far older than we ever imagined can only increase the awe with which regard the one who made it. His eternal qualities and his divine nature shine forth from every star. The heavens declare the glory of God – and we moderns have the privilege of seeing just how extraordinary that glory is and how far it reaches.

But what are we?

It does seem as if Job is being completely flattened by this speech – crushed underfoot like an ant. But then as it unfolds, we realize something more is going on than we see in Douglas Adams or Monty Python. For a start: instead of the terrifying and lonely quiet of the vast universe, Job hears, and we hear, a voice breaking the silence. We hear the voice of reality itself; the voice of the creator himself – the words of the creator of the rolling spheres, the potentate of time.

And though, in fact, the voice of God puts Job and the rest of us very much in our place, the very fact that there is a voice at all is extraordinary. That the creature is addressed; that the puny, suffering, vulnerable, short-lived creature is addressed by the eternal being who made all things is the moment at which we gain a flicker of hope. Even as this word is delivered as a judgement upon human arrogance, it is a word of tender grace and mercy towards our kind.

And the speech, as we take a closer look at it – there is no more beautiful passage in all of scripture – is not nearly as threatening as it first seems. It is actually playful and tender, as God lovingly and even humorously describes the animals in all their wildness: the mountain goats giving birth who knows where, the wild ass who won’t be tamed, the ostrich who foolishly lays her eggs on the ground where someone may step on them but who runs like the wind, the snorting warhorse, the flight of the eagle and the hawk, the Behemoth, or hippopotamus, with bones like tubes of bronze, the Leviathan – can you give it to your kids to play with like some fluffy dog? It is as if he is teasing us about our supposed dominion over the animals. Has the tiger recognized your dominion yet? Or the crocodile?

These words are humbling, but they are not crushing. They give us a perspective of scale, a bit of necessary self-understanding; but they are not designed to make us despair. They do not leave us with no alternative but to laugh bitterly to cover up our despair at our insignificance. On the contrary: we learn here that the Creator of all things, who made all things according to his Wisdom, does come towards us human beings and speak to them. He does not remain concealed somewhere in the darkness of space, standing behind some supernova or lurking in some black hole. He is not playing some game of hide and seek with us, as if we could simply deduce his existence from the way things are. Not at all. God is speaking to us. He is addressing himself to us – revealing himself. And that word at once rightly de-centres us but immediately elevates us: for we are the creatures to whom God the creator in his wisdom speaks. We aren’t who we think we are, for sure: we are not anything in the scheme of things, taken on our own. But the voice of the creator is spoken to us, for our benefit, in our hearing.

Why us? Even the Psalmist doesn’t really know: what is man that you are mindful of him, the Son of Man that you care for him? Yet you made him a little lower than the angels… It’s mysterious – a hidden counsel of God. But we are addressed by him, even to the extent that God himself becomes one of us, and not any other sort of creature. Let us not try to explain why should be so. But let us believe it to be so. In Christ, the wisdom of God from before the world began, the word that made worlds, is graciously and mercifully spoken to us. The only question is: will we hear it?

Meditating on the scale and grandeur and beauty of the created universe is something Christians ought to seek to do regularly as a spiritual discipline – and I’d like to challenge you to think of it in this way. Scripture does it often enough, after all! Urban living is designed to screen out nature and give us the appearance of human omnipotence and significance. Having heard the God who speaks, we need the reminder of our place in the order of things. The God of Jesus Christ is the God of all reality. When we contemplate that reality in light of Jesus Christ we begin to understand something of the privilege we have received in being spoken to by God. We are given a true sense of perspective: that human beings are by size or power anything much in the context of the universe; but that we are incredibly blessed by the God who stoops to speak to us.

Martin Luther's devil (part iii)

This is Martin Luther’s great difficulty, then: where can I find a gracious God? It seemed to him that the Devil and God were in cahoots. They were allies against him in his destruction. The Devil took the holiness and righteousness of God and used it to prove to Luther his due to his woeful performance as a human being, he had no hope of right-standing with God. Even as a monk, Luther could not but perennially doubt how it could be that the face of God was set firmly against him. The way he had been taught about the Christian life was that if human beings were to do whatever it was in them to do, then God would supply the remainder necessary to ensure salvation. And yet it was precisely the precondition of ‘doing what was in him’ that the meticulous Luther did not think he could meet.

What then?

Luther had impossible difficulties with the concept of iustitia Dei, the ‘righteousness of God’. As he understood it initially, it was a divine attribute – God’s impartial judgement of individuals on the basis of their merit. This was very much the Roman lawyer Cicero’s definition of righteousness as ‘rendering to each person his due’. God in his righteousness gives each individual exactly what they deserve….

…which is fine if you think human beings are capable of meriting justification. But Luther thought this was simply naïve. He understood human beings as incapable of meeting the preconditions of salvation. They are shot through with sin, bound only for death. They couldn’t even get to the start line. And so – how could ‘the righteousness of God’ be anything but bad news for the sinner? God stood frowning and tut-tutting at the end of every corridor.

Was this then the Devil’s victory? Was there no other side to the God that Luther pleaded with in the darkness and loneliness of his room?

We can chart Luther’s transformation through the written evidence of his meditations on the Bible. His lecture notes from the period stretching from 1513-1519 are available for our perusal. Whether this happened at one sudden, dramatic moment – on the toilet perhaps, who cares? – or over period of some years is debated by scholars, but it scarcely matters. What Luther came to understand was that the ‘righteousness of God’ included the mercy of God that he shows to sinners despite their sin. And where can this mercy be found? It had been under Luther’s nose all along. It in the cross of Jesus Christ. And that is the heart of the concept of ‘justification’. The individual finds himself under the judgement of God, with nowhere to turn, exposed terribly to his wrath. The only place to flee for safety from God’s wrath – is to God! And there he finds the great mercy that lies hidden under the terrible wrath. Christ the crucified one, who suffered on our behalf, became sin for us in order that his righteousness might become our righteousness. The cross symbolises (though it is also in actuality) God’s vehement hostility towards sin. If the death of the Son of God shows the extent of the wrath of God against sin, then it comes as a great surprise to realise that it also shows the extent of God’s mercy – since it is the Son of God himself who is crucified in such a way.

This insight takes faith to see it for what it is. Or, rather, to hear it for what it is. Luther wrote once, ‘the ears are the organ of the Christian’. What he meant was this: faith is simply hearing and believing the message that not only that God is good, but that God is good to me. God is good, yes; but that goodness does not spell my destruction but rather my preservation. The Devil’s testimony against us is true at a surface level, as the Devil’s words often are; but it turns out to have the reality of a lie, since it tempts us to doubt the goodness of God for us, and so despair.

The whispered lies of the Devil do not cease once one has begun to have faith. As Luther sees it, the Christian life is lived in the middle of a tension between faith and experience. Our experience very often serves to contradict our faith. Feelings of guilt, for example, do not leave us automatically, however much we might believe in our own forgiveness. This tension between faith and experience was something Luther expounded somewhat later in his career when he thought that he might be martyred by the authorities who were chasing him down. Where was God in this? Has God abandoned me? Luther used the word Anfechtung – ‘temptation’, or ‘assault’ – to describe this experience. The Devil, the world and death are allied in a war against human beings. But surprisingly, this agonising assault is a work of God too, to reduce the individual to utter reliance on him and him alone. The Devil it turns out, does God’s work without meaning to, because he increases the utter dependence and humility of the believer in the work of God. The absurd, even blasphemous idea, that human beings might help God along a bit is completely thwarted.