And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Genesis 1:2 (KJV)
Waters – Have you ever watched the movie HOME by The Goodplanet Foundation? It’s a movie full of beautiful cinematography, and vibrant colors, warning us of a disastrous future if man doesn’t change the way we live.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqxENMKaeCU
Notice that around the 2:22 marker, the movie says, “At the beginning, our planet was no more than a chaos of fire.”
Sounds a lot different than God story of creation, right? In God’s version, His spirit hovered over the face of the waters. The planet was a formless void of water… not fire.
And what’s more interesting is that everything God created was good and in perfect order. It wasn’t chaos as Greek philosophy, and this movie, might have us believe.
God’s story isn’t about frightening us into understanding how things came to be. It’s not about making the future of man’s affect on the earth dreadful. It’s about separating us from the rest of the world. Wait, what? You mean it’s not about creation? Exactly. It’s a story designed to be different from everything else. It’s a story told to help a people remove themselves from the wisdom of the world. It’s about sanctification, not creation.
You see, the common belief among Greek philosophers was that gods created from chaos, and mankind was a creation from mud wherein was breathed life. The Egyptians believed that one of their gods rose from waters of chaos to stand on dry land and then created another god called Atum. Our God, YHVH, on the other hand, created in order, not chaos. He named His first man, Adam, not Atum. But do you see the similarities too? Atum was the first god who stood on the first mound of land. He was lonely, and thought to have relations with his shadow to produce offspring. Wasn’t Adam lonely? And so God took from Adam’s own body and created Eve. Wasn’t life also breathed into Adam during creation like the Greeks philosophized?
My point is that God was telling a story that the Hebrews had already learned from their Egyptian masters. The gods of Egypt were not strangers to the Hebrews. But God sanctified the story. He made it about peace, and goodness, and order. He separated His people from the worldly, and He gave them a purpose. You see, in all other stories, man doesn’t really have a purpose. But our God is different. Our God is the one true living God.
And His story is different… His story is holy.
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