Suddenly There is God

The Story of Our Lives in Sacred Scripture

Veronica Mary Rolf

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532674495
  9781532674501
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532674518
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Suddenly There is God plunges us into the key stories of biblical characters who find themselves caught up in the divine-human drama. With unique insight, it relates these stories directly to the distinct stages of our own lives: being created, falling from grace, leaving the childhood ark, hearing God's call, gaining freedom, embracing covenant, praying the psalms, learning forgiveness, choosing love, and expecting resurrection. The scenes unfold before our eyes like a riveting play or film, as we discover with astonishment how closely the progression of Old and New Testament stories reflects our own spiritual journey. Packed with historical content and written with dramatic intensity, Suddenly There is God suggests contemplative ways for us to nurture an ardent expectation of encountering God. By identifying with the biblical characters--their conflicts, difficult choices, and realizations--we recognize how divine presence continually breaks into our own life story. This book is a valuable resource for clergy, students, and spiritual seekers who long to experience the drama of sacred Scripture as deeply personal revelation.

1

OUT OF THE DEPTHS

Our Creation Story in Genesis

What does it mean to be created? To be birthed from nonbeing into existence? To not be and then, in an instant, to be, thus becoming capable of movement and growth, change and choice? Too often, we take life for granted, that it will always function for us. Yet does any one of us have control over our next heartbeat? Can we be certain of our next breath? In each and every moment of existence, we might ask: Where does our life come from? Is it by chance or design? What power initiates, sustains, and determines our length of days? Most importantly, why do we exist? For what purpose? These mysteries have long fascinated philosophers and theologians, poets and scientists. They are mysteries that must be plumbed again and again if we are to discover who we are and what our true destination might be, even to evaluate the meaning of our lives each day. Moreover, it is not merely a question of the origin and destiny of a single person or of a nation, but of an entire cosmos.

These are some of the questions that must have prompted the writer of Genesis 1 to attempt a description of the creation of the universe and everything in it. Let us venture with the ancient author back into empty nonbeing, to be present before anything appeared, so that we might experience the sheer wonder that there came to be anything at all. Let us imagine the first instant of time (if that is even conceivable), the dawn of light, the emergence of the cosmos, seas, land, animals, birds, fish, and the awakening of human awareness. This is what the creation poet sought to do: envision how everything in the known world came to exist, long before modern science could propose its own hypotheses. For our part, we will attend carefully to how and why the ancient Israelites believed the world was created, so that we may begin to fathom from our own perspectives how and why we ourselves might have been created. Moreover, we will engage the Genesis creation story as a poetic drama (as well as a profession of faith), so that we may better appreciate the creation story at the beginning of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word . . .” (John 1:1). Then we will link it directly to the story of our own personal coming-to-be in the womb of our mother. Indeed, the story of our lives actually commences with the creation of the entire cosmos. In a most wondrous way, we may discover that Genesis 1 is all about the miracle of our own creation.

The Bible begins at the very beginning with the story of creation, actually two stories of creation from separate sources. Scholars have identified the first version (Gen 1–2:4) as having probably been added on as an introduction to the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) by a priestly author during or after the Babylonian exile, c. 550–450 BCE. This would have been some four or five hundred years after the more ancient story of the creation of Adam and Eve in paradise (Gen 2:4–3:24) was set to writing. (It should be noted that the various books of the Hebrew canon were not arranged in the chronological order in which they were written.) We will encounter the second version of creation in chapter 2.

The Canticle of Creation

The first creation account is structured primarily as a poetic hymn. It may have been sung or recited at a covenant renewal ceremony or perhaps during the Israelite New Year’s festival in the autumn. This was a sacred time when the people gathered to celebrate nature’s fresh beginning, as on the first day of creation when everything was pristine, before evil and suffering entered the world. A priest or cantor might have chanted each verse of the hymn and a chorus of singers or cantors responded with the refrain: “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gen 1:31). The entire account is a dramatic depiction of the perfect world God called forth out of the abyss of chaos. It could be set to the music of the harp or psalter (a triangular stringed instrument akin to a zither), or danced to rhythmic drumbeats. The language is solemn, imagistic, evocative, deliberately repetitive to provide lyrical balance, and theologically astute, all at once.

The hymn of creation extols the harmony and interweaving functionality of everything in the cosmos as well as the Creator’s eternal peace and rest, symbolized by the evocation of the Sabbath on the seventh day. The style and images bear a strong resemblance to the ancient Babylonian account of creation, Enuma Elish, including its structure, with seven days of creation, as well as an act of self-praise by the deity, a familiar theme in Sumerian literature.1 The deity derives glory not only from the material creation, but from the way the cosmos functions. Everything works. Nothing is out of order. And to the ancient Near Eastern peoples, cosmic functionality, signified by the Egyptian concept of Ma’at (truth, order, justice, law, morality, and harmony of all the elements), was of paramount importance.2

However, the greatest achievement of the canticle of creation is the theological clarity with which the poet borrowed elements of polytheistic creation myths, demythologized them, and then reshaped them into a vibrant monotheistic doctrine. In this account, God alone, not a congress of many gods, is the sole Creator of all that exists. God speaks with absolute authority, not after consultation with other deities. God needs no other gods to help in creating, naming, separating, and assigning functions to everything in the universe. Furthermore, God creates out of perfect goodness, not as the result of a primeval war between personified powers of good and evil. All that is created issues from eternal wisdom, the divine plan for perfect order, not through sorcery, magic, or trickery. Thus, all matter is good and has prescribed functions.

According to biblical theology, human beings are created in God’s own image and given the highest place of honor, with direct responsibility for the preservation of creation. They are also blessed, like the animals, with the power of procreation. They are not made to be mere slaves of the greedy gods of the ancient world, performing the hard labor of maintaining the earth, all the while keeping the temple idols clothed, fed, and pacified. In fact, human beings are so highly valued in this creation account that they are given the divine gift of the Sabbath, to join in the perfect rest of their Creator.3 With consummate skill, the canticle writer composed a song of adoration, praise, and gratitude to the one and only God of Israel, with a subtext of longing for the earth and its people to be made perfect once again, as they were originally created.

Out of Chaos

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. (Gen 1:1–2)

“In the beginning” suggests that the concept of time had to be conceived before anything else, in order that there might be a beginning to time, while the transcendent deity exists before time and without time, eternally. The first phrase, translated from the Hebrew as “in the beginning,” usually implies a continuing period of time rather than a specific point in time. In this case, it refers to the beginning of the seven-day period of creation, not to a specific “moment” beforehand.4 It is also important to realize that in this translation of the original Hebrew, verse 1 is not merely an introductory temporal clause leading into verse 2, but an independent declarative sentence, establishing God’s supreme act as the foundation of all theological principles: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”5 Everything that is, was, or ever could be proceeds from the life of God.

The creation drama begins in chaos and emptiness. The “formless and empty” void (Hebrew, tohu vavohu) waits expectantly in complete darkness. Tohu and vohu were understood, in ancient Semitic terms, as “disordered chaos,” a problematic state of uncertainty and dysfunctionality that was usually juxtaposed in direct opposition to creation. All Near Eastern creation myths considered “chaos” or the “desert, wilderness, void” to be a true representation of the earth as it existed before creation. Thus the rhyming duo tohu and vohu (frequently used together in the Old Testament) might indicate that “chaos” preexisted divine creation or was created first, before anything else. However, the notion of a preexistent “created chaos” is itself illogical and therefore may be discounted. Alternately, tohu and vohu might suggest that God created everything from the material of this preexisting chaos, rather than “out of nothing” (Latin, creatio ex nihilo), as a more developed theological interpretation will later hold (2 Macc 7:28).6 But such a reading also presents a problem. “Chaos” only refers to...

Table of contents

• TITLE PAGE
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: OUT OF THE DEPTHS
• CHAPTER 2: BROKEN TRUST
• CHAPTER 3: FLOOD OF FEELINGS
• CHAPTER 4: CALLED BY NAME
• CHAPTER 5: STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM
• CHAPTER 6: DARING TO COMMIT
• CHAPTER 7: CRIES OF THE HEART
• CHAPTER 8: WOUNDED AND HEALED
• CHAPTER 9: COURAGE TO LOVE
• CHAPTER 10: EXPECTING RESURRECTION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY