The Rhythm Of Life: Living In Sync With Creator And Creation

Introduction

In November of 2010, I taught a four-week seminar under the title which now names this article. This means, readers may expect, that the present piece will draw on some of the material developed there and will make it available for a wider audience. I hope that the twenty or so members of that Tuesday evening seminar, who patiently endured those sessions in their initial development, will not be disappointed to find some repetition here, even as I hope they will discern in this presentation some signs of further maturation and reflection–benefits of another year of ruminating on this important topic, including many conversations and an expanding bibliography.

It was my objective then, and it is my objective now, to focus on what I consider to be crystal clear in the Creation story concerning one of its narrative and theological functions. I will get to this in just a moment. Rather more elusive, it seems to me, are the ways in which Genesis means to answer scientific questions about origins. This is not to deny that it does that in some (fortuitous?) sense, but it is to express doubt that doing so is its primary, or even its intended, function. To put this sharply, showing how the “facts of science” and the “answers in Genesis”¹ can be harmonized, or contrarily, how the scientific data and the Genesis account fail to square–neither of these, in my judgment, represents much more than a modern extracurricular activity to the main course of doing either science or biblical interpretation. And neither actually proves what its respective adherents wish to prove since they share a common misreading error that confuses the scriptural text and its per se meaning and message with interests that derive from elsewhere.² It’s what happens when biblical interpretation gets all tangled up in questions and issues which almost certainly never entered the biblical authors’ minds, including (I would venture) God’s (which is not a statement about divine omniscience, but about scriptural intent), or the minds of early Christian readers.³ It is not that I think Genesis errs in any point at all in what it says about Creation; it is rather that I do not believe its contribution to Scripture or to Christian faith lies where the popular discussion would locate it. And the reason it is important for us to think clearly about this is because, when we bind the text to what it does not mean to say, we invariably deprive the text of getting its actual say.

To clarify, Genesis does not cast its account of Creation in a manner that reads anything at all like a text aimed at modern scientific, historiographical, apologetic, or polemical ends. (Even the tired, form-critical proposal of a previous generation, which construed Genesis 1 as an intentional debunking of ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies, now seems less persuasive than it once did, before its shaky premises were examined.) To construe the Creation story that way, as if its real function consisted in telling us the truth about origins (what really happened), is to risk missing a crucial point: While it does purport to tell us the truth and not a lie, it does so in certain ways and for certain purposes which are essential to its true meaning.⁴ And to press the point, unless we are reading the Genesis account of Creation on its own wavelength, hearing its message in its own idiom and in concert with how the rest of Scripture “hears” it–with the accent on the theological implications of Creation–it may be pretentious and presumptuous for us to call ourselves creationists, at least in any way that rings true with the scriptural conception of Creation. In other words, those who can lay legitimate claim to being subscribers to the Genesis account of Creation are not simply those who side with the biblical “truth” about how everything really got here over against all those evolutionary “lies.”⁵ Biblical creationists are those who accept the Creation narrative on its own terms, who respect its given function within Genesis and the rest of the scriptural revelation, and who (factoring the perlocutionary force of the text, or the mission it exists to fulfill) seek to align themselves with what it says. They are less concerned with defending the truth-claim of Genesis than with listening to it and living in its light; or, we could say, they are more focused on the meaning and message of Genesis 1 than on its reliability, historically and scientifically conceived.⁶ They do not approach Genesis as a problem to be solved or a set of data to be reconciled with “what science proves,” but as a revelatory word from and about the God of Scripture. To remove every possible ambiguity, I firmly believe that the Genesis account is factual rather than fictional. I also believe that, even if we were able to verify every detail of that account as historically authentic and scientifically accurate, we would not thereby have grasped what Genesis is saying, or the identity of the One who is saying it. We would not, in other words, have arrived at the biblical meaning of Creation. For that, we need a set of reading tools appropriate to the subject matter.

With this in mind, the present discussion attempts to engage the Genesis account by way of one of those reading tools–careful attention to its narrative shape and function, according to which the Bible’s opening emphasis on creational orderliness and harmony is unmistakable. There is no implication here that orderliness and harmony exhaust the meaning and message of Genesis 1–2, only that these dominate this self-evidently theological narrative text. That my interest is more than “merely academic” will become apparent, as our theme opens transparently onto the whole of biblical revelation and onto the whole of life lived within the framework of the Bible’s grand Creation-to-New Creation story.⁷

Creation Synced Up: The Creator Establishes A Rhythm

In order to center on the peculiar focus of this discussion it will be necessary to limit our attention to how especially Gen 1:1–2:3 reveals an orderly Creation–all synced up, we might say–the work of the Creator establishing a rhythm or creational cadence in that which he makes. We cannot, in other words, engage in a full-blown exposition of the Creation narrative. Still, it is amazing what insights come to the fore when we observe just one of its dominant features and themes.

Our inquiry will build on two theses. Thesis #1: The placement of the Creation account is narratively strategic and theologically informing. The Bible begins with the story of Creation not merely for chronological or sequential reasons–this happened first–but for reasons much more profound. The Creation narrative exists in its present location to function as the lens through which we are to read, and so to perceive the reality of, everything that follows. For example, it is theologically significant that the scriptural God is introduced to us not as the Savior of Israel but as the Creator of the world. It is not just that Creation came first. It is important to remember that Moses is writing thousands of years after the events, with the saving experience of the exodus already in his rearview and a glossary rich with terms like ‘save’, ‘redeem’, ‘ransom’, ‘atone’, and ‘forgive’ ready to hand. He might have begun the biblical story there. So why begin here, with the Creator and Creation, not the Savior and Salvation? Terence Fretheim’s response to that question is surely correct: “That the Bible begins with Genesis, not Exodus, with creation, not redemption, is of immeasurable importance for understanding all that follows.”⁸

When the implications of this observation are factored, at least three points become apparent. First, the biblical story is first and centrally about the Creator and Creation, with the Creator’s saving/delivering activity construed as an aspect of a larger and grander purpose-plan–i.e., salvation not as goal, but as means, or perhaps better, salvation configured in terms of Creation. Second, and related, when salvation does come into focus, it is all-creational in scope–salvation as the restoration of the cosmos, “far as the curse is found,” not merely of lost humans. So it is that the end of the story features the new heavens and the new earth, not merely the redeemed saints enjoying eternity in blissful isolation (cf. Rom 8:18-25; Col 1:15-20; Rev 21–22). Third, inasmuch as humans are concerned, that same salvation extends to the whole of our created being–physical and spiritual, familial and ecclesial, social-political and economic-vocational–in the interest of redeeming and restoring and transforming the totality of human existence for the glory of the Creator, not merely salvaging disembodied souls for life in an immaterial heaven. Many further implications follow on from here, which we cannot engage now.

Thesis #2: The Creation narrative highlights orderliness–a design or rhythm–Creation “synced up.” If the first chapter of Genesis gives us a theological lens through which to view the whole scriptural world, one of its highlighted features will be its accent on order/rhythm; as if to say, the Creator is an orderly God who works according to plan, with signals of the same built into Creation itself for the subsequent ordering of all that exists. But rather than merely assuming this thesis, in what follows I intend to identify some of the indicators that this is so, as a foundation on which to construct a transformative theology of life, home, Church, mission, and everything.

To reinforce the significance of what we are about, we have only to recall that part of the story about humanity’s rejecting God’s perfectly ordered plan for life in God’s good creation, choosing autonomy instead, thereby casting the entire cosmos into disarray. Christians, it seems, have read their Bible sufficiently to recognize the results of ’adam’s choice in terms of our personal sins and social ills and the need for redemption from death-as-consequence. But rarely, it appears, do we reflect on the impact of humanity’s fracturing Creation’s order, rhythm, or design, or on redemption as the renewal and restoration and glorious transformation of what God had in mind at the beginning.⁹

My intent in what follows is to identify six indicators of the second thesis above, beginning with some of the more-or-less obvious ones and graduating to the more profound. I fully appreciate that my way of dividing and labeling this material may seem somewhat arbitrary, with considerable overlap; but I am hopeful that these will offer a useful way of organizing the data.

1. Creation in sync structurally

There is widespread recognition that the opening chapter of Genesis depicts the material or physical Creation in terms of a highly structured pattern or form. This is highlighted in especially two ways: symmetry and separations.

First, however we are to understand the relationship between vv. 1 and 2, it is clear that v. 2 describes the situation at the beginning of day 1 before the first creative command–the condition of the land before God prepared it for blessing and pronounced it “good”–and that vv. 3ff. respond to this state of affairs. In other words, vv. 3ff. describe what the Creator does to order the situation of v. 2 into a state of readiness for the habitation of humans and the fulfillment of his blessing-plan. And this seven-day creative work of preparing and populating a place for God’s existence with humanity is depicted in amazing and transparent symmetry (Table 1):

                                                                                            Table 1

Days 1-3 God forms the earth for habitation	Days 4-6 God fills the earth with habitation
1  separated brightness (light) and darkness	4  luminaries to govern day and night
2  separated waters–sea and sky	5  fish and fowl to fill sea and sky
3  separated fertile earth from seas	6  land creatures and humans to occupy earth

Day 7–Finished!

Second, among the ways God is introduced in the Creation narrative, one of the most pronounced is that the Creator “keeps things in order” by making separations or differentiations as a central feature of his Creative activity, with obvious relevance to the ensuing story and to how life is meant to be lived in the Creator’s world. Within the Creation narrative, at least the following separations or divisions are highlighted: light and darkness, waters above and waters below, land and sea, seeding plants and other seeding plants (each after its kind), animals and other animals (each after its kind), animals and image-bearing humans, male and female, good and evil, and trees permitted and a tree prohibited. Of course, this initial dividing activity will soon extend to the acceptance of one offerer and his offering and the rejection of another (Abel and Cain), a particular “seed” line through Abram for the universal blessing of the world, the consequent election of Israel vis-à-vis the nations, and the various laws governing Israel’s distinct life in covenant, including differentiations between the holy and the profane (cf. badal, “to separate,” in Gen 1:4, 6, 7, 14, 18; and Lev 20:24-26), the clean and the unclean, the leaders and the laity, and many more.

It appears then that knowing the Creator and living properly within the Creation will involve respecting certain boundaries the Creator has established and maintains; or to put it differently, it will require a “keeping rhythm” with how God has ordered his world. As John Goldingay puts it, “the principle of making distinctions is one that creation and Israel’s life have in common.” Again, “Mixing things implies a return to tohu wabohu [‘formless and void’, 1:2]. A hallmark of the holiness of the people of God is a reverence for and a participation in the order of the cosmos.”¹⁰ We should not be surprised that a world in rebellion will find this aspect of living in sync with the Creator’s Creation particularly problematic and offensive. It might even insist on its own criteria for determining what is good and not good (the test in the Garden), or make its own judgments about acceptable worship (Cain and Abel), or seek to unite through its own ingenuity what God has reasons to separate (the Tower of Babel), or attempt to obliterate differentiations of any kind that imply right and wrong or that might be perceived as restricting human autonomy or unbridled liberty (the need for laws). But the main point here is that Creation is an orderly and artistic, a harmonious and beautiful, achievement. In Creation we could say, God has a perfect week! No wonder God called it seven-times “good”–a reflection of God’s own infinite goodness.

2. Creation in sync literarily

Since the entire narrative is given to us literarily, according to the conventions of written communication, this might be regarded as a catch-all category. But in two particular ways the Creation story highlights order, rhythm, or cadence simply in the poetics or style of its telling: in the narrative pattern and in the multiples of ‘seven’.

Most studies in Genesis 1:1–2:3 observe that, with minor variations, the text is structured in a consistent pattern that includes the following elements for each of the seven creative days: the announcement (“And God said”), the commandment (“Let there be”), the report or fulfillment formula (“And there was/it was so”), the naming (“And God called”), the evaluation (“And God saw that it was good”), and the temporal framework (“And there was evening and there was morning, the [n] day”). We will return to the significance of this observation in just a moment.

Related and equally remarkable are the multiples of seven which adorn the page. Some of these are retained in translation; others are apparent only in Hebrew. For example, the creative week consists in 7 days. The execution formula or description of God’s creative act (e.g., “And God made”) occurs 7 times (vv. 4, 7, 12, 16, 21, 25, 27), as does the fulfillment formula “and it was so” (vv. 3, 7, 9, 11, 15, 24, 30), the evaluation formula “and God saw... good” (vv. 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31), and a divine word of naming or blessing (vv. 5 [2x], 8, 10 [2x], 22, 28). The verb ‘create’ occurs 7 times (including the transitional 2:4), the title ‘God’ 35 times, and ‘land’ or ‘earth’ 21 times. Genesis 1:1 contains 7 Hebrew words comprising 28 letters; v. 2 contains 14 Hebrew words; the seventh-day description (2:1-3) contains 35 Hebrew words; and in vv. 2-3 ‘seventh’ occurs in three clauses of 7 Hebrew words each. This heavy working of seven, which continues into the subsequent chapters (esp. chs. 4; 5; 10), is echoed at the far end of the canon, where the same number dominates both the structure and the language of the Apocalypse.¹¹

These observations invite two clarifications. First, that the narrative pattern and multiples of seven are merely coincidental seems unlikely, or at least that would not be the conclusion one would draw from observing how literary conventions operate generally in the Hebrew Scriptures. More probable, these artistic designs are a deliberate means of signaling a certain rhythm built into Creation by the Creator, in order to highlight the Creator’s wisdom,¹² to accent the seventh day (2:1-3) as the goal of Creation (see further below), and to evoke praise for the Creator and his word, as readers behold the artistry and bow down in wonder before the One whose works are so magnificently depicted.¹³ In this connection, Orthodox theologian Vigen Guroian suggests that “The first chapter of Genesis introduces the awe-inspiring mystery that Creation springs from a divine litany of which God is both celebrant and respondent, so the liturgy of Creation is truly a divine liturgy in which we may participate and sing ‘Amen’.”¹⁴

Second, contrary to some proposals, these fine features in the literary artistry do not demand a genre classification of “mere poetry.” True, this text is a rich goldmine of poetics,¹⁵ but it is straightforward narrative just the same–narrative of a highly crafted and structured nature. Such features as repetitive patterns or recurring multiples of seven are no more defining of formal poetry than they are of narrative.¹⁶ The breathtaking attributes of this text function in the interest of literary mimesis or representation, as a means of foregrounding that which is true of its ostensive referent–a Creation all “ordered up.” There is no indication here that we are in the literary world of poetic imagery.

3. Creation in sync temporally

Among the several indicators that Creation is set in rhythm temporally, three stand out as most obvious.

First, there is the “evening and morning” cycle, with an identical clause framing the narrative in such a way as to give it an unmistakable temporal cadence: “And there was evening and there was morning the [n] day” (1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31). The Creator’s activity and the resultant Creation have a rhythm about them that will not be captured in a simple, bland report: “In the beginning God made all the following: light, land, . . .” Creation follows a pattern that must be marked temporally, with evening and morning and with days designated by numbers.

Second, the luminaries (sun, moon, stars) and their designated “rule” (1:14-19) signals a functional assignment that is manifestly temporal. Beginning on the fourth day, the luminaries are delegated the duties of regulating and illuminating days and seasons and years–of maintaining the creational rhythm, we could say, thereby assuming a task God did without their assistance on the first three days.¹⁷

Third, “having ordered all things well” (Goldingay, 640), the Creator brings to an end (puts an end to or completes) his creative activity and stops on the seventh day, blessing and designating it as holy, not because there was no more work to be done, but in order to build a work-rest rhythm into the order of Creation (2:1-3). The 7th day stands apart from the other six days of the creative week,¹⁸ but it does not stand outside the creative week. It is not that God’s producing things is a part of Creation and God’s ceasing from producing things a part of something else that comes after Creation. Creation is not actually finished until the 7th day, until a day of ceasing/stopping/resting is built into its temporal framework.¹⁹ Both speaking and making the Creation into existence on the one hand (days 1-6) and finishing and ceasing from that activity on the other (day 7) comprise the work-rest rhythm built into the created order of things. Creation thus has to do not simply with the ordering of space and matter but with the ordering of time as well. “God sanctified” the 7th day, designating it ‘holy’ or ‘set apart from’ the other six. Indeed, the first thing described as holy in the Bible pertains to a temporal rhythm.

From these observations flow many implications. Surely living in sync with Creator and Creation will entail a certain “doing as God does” when it comes to the use and management of both the cosmos and the clock. Among other things, living in tune with Creator and Creation precludes the secularization of time.²⁰ Again, that God could have done more but chose to cease or rest instead underscores that immediate or measurable productivity is not the only, or even the highest, value in the world. Respecting a creative rhythm matters more.²¹ And not to be missed, the Hexaemeron (“six-day” Creation, as St. Basil the Great called it) crescendos to its climax in the 7th day, indicating that “Creation was fashioned with a view to the sabbath and therefore for the worship and adoration of God. Worship is inscribed in the order of creation.”²²

4. Creation in sync theologically

Some of the less obvious indicators of rhythm in Creation happen also to be among the most profound. Here I highlight two indications of a uniquely theological or ontological nature: Creation as the project of a “triune” Creator and Creation as the product of the creative word.

In the first place, the popular Christian claim that Genesis already reveals a trinitarian God may in fact be a little overzealous, but it is not going too far to suggest that the Creation narrative does introduce the Creator as a mysteriously plural-yet-singular Being. It will take the rest of Scripture and the Church’s theological formulations to unveil the details, to unpack in what sense this is so. But Genesis 1 gives at least three important directional hints. (a) The title ‘God’ throughout ch. 1 in fact translates a grammatical plural noun (’elohim), which occurs regularly with a grammatical singular verb (e.g., ‘God’ in v. 1 is a plural noun, but ‘created’ is a singular verb; obviously these details are apparent only in Hebrew). The linguistic issues here are complex, as is the resultant interpretive discussion. Various proposals have been offered for the numerical discord, which we cannot engage here, but the most satisfactory and tenable ones will at the very least factor the next two points. (b) The ruah ’elohim, ‘Spirit of God’, in v. 2 hints at a differentiated divine Being who hovers or broods over the uninhabitable earth, as if in complete control and with implicit intention. (c) The thrice plural pronoun “Let us make ’adam in our image, according to our likeness” in v. 26 draws our interested attention, even as does the switch to singular ‘his’ in the narrative report of v. 27, “Then God created ha’adam in his image.” Moreover, the phrases “in our image” and “according to our likeness” at least hint that one already exists who is the image, who constitutes the likeness.

Of course, none of this is lost on later writers of Scripture or on the Church’s early interpreters. And so, “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host” (Pss 33:6)–is ‘the word of the LORD’ a what, or is it a who as some of the Church Fathers read it? Is Wisdom in Proverbs 8:22-36 a quality built into Creation, or is it a character active in Creation–an actual person who both preexists and participates in Creation, as the details seem to suggest? Again, who are the father and the son in Agur’s question, posed in a creational context: “What is his name, and what is his son’s name?” (Prov 30:4). Or in the oft-quoted Ecclesiastes 12:1, “Remember also your creator in the days of your youth,” why is the term ‘creator’ in fact a Hebrew plural participle? The New Testament, of course, makes the point with explicit force (esp. Jn 1:3; 1 Cor 8:4-6; Col 1:15-16; Heb 1:1-2). Of these last-mentioned, none is more breathtaking than the Prologue to John’s Gospel, on which we will say a little more momentarily. In light of all these considerations, we are not entirely surprised that the Aramaic Targum Neofiti renders Genesis 1:1 as it does: “In the beginning, with wisdom, the son of YHWH created the heavens and the earth.” If it reflects a retroversion or reading back of later texts into Genesis 1, at least the reading is not without basis in the immediate context of the Creation story. All of this, of course, the Church has confessed almost from its very beginning, as, for example, in Articles 1 and 2 of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed: “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. And in one Lord, Jesus Christ,... Through him all things were made.”²³ And as for the significance of this discussion for our purposes, Creation takes on the character of the Creator, as a reflection of his very being, of his own internal plural-unity. We might say that Creation is orderly and in sync precisely as an expression of God who is orderly and in sync within his own ontology.

In the second place, as Creation is the project of a triune Creator, so is it the product of the divine creative word. I have not heard or read a more succinct summary of this fact than the one offered recently by my seven-year-old granddaughter on one of her CCD homework papers.

Grandpa: Why did God create the heavens and the earth?

Piper: Because he wanted a place.

Grandpa: How did God create things?

Piper: With his mouth.

In fact, the obvious highlighting of the striking centrality of the spoken word may be one of the most standout features of the Creation narrative. The Creator speaks or commands the world into existence, which is to say, the world exists in obedience to the word of God and is defined by that word. No fewer than 11 times in chapter 1 we are reminded that “God said” (vv. 3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 29). God did not just plan or decide or do; God spoke creation into existence (cf. Isa 40:26; 44:24-28; 48:13; 55:10-11; Ezek 37:4; Pss 33:6-9; 104:5-7; 147:4, 15-18; 148:1-6!; 2 Pet 3:5).

The relevance of this observation to our interests consists in the fact that by the agency of his word the Creator effects order out of disorder. It is God’s word that defines and mediates the order/rhythm. The world is ordered by God’s working through his word, and “out of order” will always indicate a departure from that word. So, for example, in a context richly creational and trinitarian, Ephesians 1:9-10 informs us that “the cosmic, redemptive purpose of God, predestined from eternity and executed through... Christ, is to overcome hostility and divisions in the universe by bringing all things together under the headship of Christ,”²⁴ with many and profound creational implications for how the Church perceives its identity and mission (cf. Col 1:15-20). Of course, all of this foreshadow the supreme fulfillment and embodiment of that creative word in the Word who became flesh. The threads connecting Genesis 1 and John 1are too many and profound²⁵ to miss the point: In him and through him will the vision of Creation finally be realized in the New Creation put to order under his lordship. And that brings us to...

5. Creation in sync eschatologically

By ‘eschatological’ in this context I do not mean merely that which pertains to the end times or the last days, but the program of God that moves ever and determinedly forward in that direction.²⁶ Included here are what we might call typological or figural indications of rhythm, each of which deserves an article (or a book) in itself.

First, the word/phrase bere’shît, ‘In the beginning’ (1:1). Mark Twain’s famous quip, “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning,” certainly applies here. Bere’shît is the right word, not simply for saying “This happened first,” as in a series of things (which would be a different Hebrew word), but for signaling “the beginning” of the story which the rest of Scripture will unfold and bring to its rightful goal “in the end” (be’aharît). Gary Schnittjer captures this point when he says, “A beginning does not mean that it is the first thing in that nothing comes before it. It is the beginning in reference to whatever comes after it. It is the beginning of something.”²⁷ In other words, bere’shît introduces the start of something to which its rhyming antonym, be’aharît, is the end. It is the beginning of something that has an end goal. From its first word, then, the story of Creation is eschatological or goal-oriented. It is not intended merely to inform us about the origin of the universe, much less to evoke heated debates, but to introduce readers to the Creator whose story has a purpose. Behind the world and all that is in it stands a divine plan with a created beginning and a future goal. On further exploration, it would turn out that Genesis 1 is the “Once upon a time” of a story fulfilled in “The End,” where ‘End’ refers to the messianic seed/offspring of Abraham at “the end of days.”²⁸ In other words, Genesis 1 is all part of an eschatologically oriented strategy. Creation is ordered, in sync, with an end-time goal that centers ultimately in the Messiah. We will return here momentarily.

Second, en route to the end-time goal for which Creation is the beginning, we are reminded that the dwelling presence of God will be its central feature. Jewish and Christian interpretation has long recognized the studied correspondence between Genesis 1–2 and Exodus 25–40, in which the former is echoed in the latter (Table 2). The Tabernacle, it turns out, is depicted as a new Creation, a return to the Garden of Eden, a restoring of God’s first Creation. Jon Levenson draws out the point: “The function of these correspondences is to underscore the depiction of the sanctuary as a world, that is, an ordered, supportive, and obedient environment, and the depiction of the world as a sanctuary, that is, a place in which the reign of God is visible and unchallenged, and his holiness is palpable, unthreatened, and pervasive.”²⁹ And Fretheim adds: “Just as the creation through the word of God meant that the creation was completed precisely according to the will of God, so also the completion of the tabernacle according to a heavenly ‘pattern’ (25:9, 40) meant that it corresponded exactly to the divine will.  This is one spot in the midst of a world of disorder where God’s creative, ordering work is completed according to the divine intention just as it was in the beginning.”³⁰ We could dwell here a long, long time, literally and figuratively; but the point I wish to underscore is that Creation is ordered, and the Tabernacle after it (hence the tedious detail in Exod 25–40!), as part of a grand eschatological theme that centers finally in the blessed presence of God with his people in a place all synced up for such a purpose!

And that brings us to the end of the story. Every reader will have anticipated where all of this is headed, and those familiar with the closing chapters of Revelation will need no convincing that the Creation account of Genesis 1–2 already has the end-time goal of “a new heaven and a new earth” in view, that the future is grounded in the past, that the last things will be like the first, that, as Derek Kidner puts it, “the beginning is pregnant with the end.”³¹ Indeed, as many as 50-60 verbal and conceptual links between the opening chapters of Genesis and the closing chapters of Revelation help make the point!³² According to Guroian, “The Old Testament envisions the whole of Creation, heaven and earth, as a vast temple in which the people gather in liturgy to give praise and honor to the Maker and thank him for the beauty and goodness of his Creation. God lays the foundations (Ps. 104:5), sets up the pillars (1 Sam. 2:8), stretches out the canopy (Isa. 40:22), and frames the windows (Mal. 3:10)” (2).³³ Of course, we should add here as well the end-time Sabbath as the eschatological goal of God’s creative and redemptive rhythm (cf. Heb 3:7–4:13).

6. Creation in sync provisionally

Creation, according to the biblical account, is an open-ended process, finished but not finalized or exhausted in the distant past–“a wonder,” as L. T. Johnson says, “that God performs every day” and as psalm 104 celebrates (esp. vv. 27-35). Johnson goes so far as to say, “This understanding of creation not simply as an event in the distant past but above all as a constant and present activity of God is the dominant testimony of Scripture.”³⁴ He is thinking, of course, of the resurrection and of God’s making things new, as in Isaiah and Revelation. God, we can say with the Catechism, leaves Creation “in a state of journeying (in statu viae) toward an ultimate perfection yet to be attained, to which God has destined it.”³⁵

Related, the Creator creates in a relational-cooperative manner with Creation itself. The earth is not immediately filled, but plants and animals and humans are enabled to fill it with the (pro)creative capacity given them by the Creator. They participate in the creative process. God creates and then says in effect, “Now go and complete it; go and get it done.” So God “calls” (1:5 [2x], 8, 10 [2x]) but assigns man to “call” (2:19 [2x], 20, 23). God enables plants and animals to reproduce “after their kind” (vv. 9-13, 20-23). God assigns to the light bodies on day 4 what he himself had done on days 1-3 (cf. vv. 3-5 and 14-19). God commissions animals and humans to reproduce and fill the earth, which he could have filled himself all at once (vv. 20-28). God delegates rulership to humans (vv. 26-28), although obviously he is the ultimate ruler. God entrusts to humans the task of working/serving and keeping/maintaining his good Creation (2:5, 15; 3:23), which he is certainly capable of doing on his own or of creating in such a way that no upkeep is necessary.

Many implications and questions for exploration flow on from here. For example: If how we serve and keep God’s good Creation, how we go about reproducing image-bearers, and how we “rule” are aspects of the Creator’s ongoing creative work, then obviously they must be in sync with the Creator’s own order or rhythm for such activities. This will have implications, for starters, on what we do with the land (including how we think about farming or about the environment³⁶), why we have children and how we ought raise them (including the inculcation of structure and boundaries), and whether human rulership over the animals is absolute and arbitrary or rather is something constrained and defined by the Creator’s way of managing and treating his creatures (which surely has bearing on “cruelty” issues or on recreational killing). Again, if the rhythm of Creation is provisional and open-ended, it leaves open the very real possibility that humans might not choose to live in sync with it (ch. 3!), that the Creator’s identification with Creation might entail his own suffering and his own need to invade Creation in order to bring it to its proper goal. Here we must leave time for a very long and meditative pause.³⁷

Conclusion

Earlier I suggested that the relevance of our theme will become apparent in the way it opens onto the whole of biblical revelation and onto the whole of life lived within the framework of the Bible’s Creation-to-New Creation narrative. In fact, my goal in the foregoing discussion has been to lay a foundation on which a transformative theology of life, home, Church, mission, and everything might be constructed. I have tried to illustrate this potential by way of selected examples and implications at various points along the way. It should be transparent that every meaningful discussion about reality has to begin here, in the story of Creator and Creation, whether expressed or unexpressed, explicit or implicit. Failing that, we are fated to “create” our own world in which to live and work and marry and raise children and do church and relate to others and manage time and set policies and treat animals and care for the land and consume resources and.... Even a brief reflection on the history of civilization or a look around at the present personal, familial, ecclesial, social-political, and cultural exigencies tells us that the world of our making remains desperately out of sync, out of tune, out of order–a far cry from “the mystery of [God’s] will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite [bring to order] all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph 1:9-10). Tuned to that purpose, the Church enjoys the unique calling and privilege of putting on display the rhythm of life–a microcosm of the new cosmos, Creation as it should be, restored to order under the peaceful and harmonious rule of Christ the Lord.³⁸