She awakes
looking into a mirror.
Strength, goodness, and valor are there.
His first, and have become hers—
two halves of a split picture, the Imago Dei.
The One who breaks apart darkness and light,
water and ground,
God’s space and human’s space is now become
the One who knits together whole new beings from inside Himself.
And he who breaks apart the creatures by kind,
who himself is broken in two,
incomplete,
not good,
cannot be knit whole outside of her.
Now the earth was formless and void, darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” There was an evening, and there was a morning: one day.
- Genesis 1:2-5
“Let there be light.”
Let the voice of God, His Holy Breath, command darkness and chaos to retreat to their proper places. The uncreation state is not empty nothingness into which matter must be injected; it is a chaotic wasteland, from which order and abundance must be made. The chaos-taming, desert-farming, order-making God is the same One present with the disciples thousands of years into the earth’s future, sleeping serenely in the midst of the storm until they wake Him—and the תהו ובהו, the tohu va vohu, the formless void remembers His voice.
“Peace, be still.”
There is light before there are stars to produce it. There are days before there is a sun to dictate them. There is quietude before the storm should reasonably have been able to pass, because this world is under the authority of the King whose throne is on high, who “wraps Himself in light as with a garment”—not its own star-paths or weather patterns.
Elohim—the God-without-origin from Genesis 1:1—is also a God without fear. Chaos is no threat to Him. Darkness is no threat to Him. The best of Creation’s terrors and the worst of Uncreation’s desolation are just a breath away from being silenced and undone by His word; how much less can the evil deeds of a few rebellious men scare Him? How much less can the Enemy hope to prevail against Him?
Fearlessly He commands the darkness. Fearlessly He guides His people through the wilderness. Fearlessly He sleeps in the storm. Fearlessly He submits to His own execution.
He merely looks on the earth, and it trembles.
And it is good.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
- Genesis 1:1
The story starts with One who is, for now, simply called “Elohim.”
It’s the plural of a very ordinary Hebrew noun for an ordinary god, a divine ruler or judge. But the writer makes an extraordinary statement about this “ordinary” supernatural being: In the beginning, Elohim created the skies and the land.
Of course, such a claim would be far less extraordinary to its contemporaries than it is to us. Every ancient culture had an explanation for the origins of the world they inhabited, and all of them were linked to the activities of the supernatural. But unlike the stories told by the ancient Egyptians, Elohim didn’t Himself evolve from the preexisting chaos state of the uncreated space, nor did He achieve creation by reproducing Himself into an order of multiple other gods. And in contrast with the cosmology of the ancient Babylonians, who believed the world had come into form as the byproduct of cosmic wars between supernatural rivals, the Biblical creation narrative begins simple, peaceful, and authoritative.
There is no rival to Elohim.
There is no origin of Elohim.
From the first words of the Scriptures, He is set apart and supreme, eternal and ever-present. And He creates.
Heavens, or skies: The space belonging to the divine.
Earth, or land: The space governed by His human representatives, the ones He makes in His likeness.
In the beginning of human history, Elohim formed divine space and human space, and married them into one indivisible unit of sky and land, atmosphere and earth. From the outset of time, He intended to dwell within His creation and among His creatures, sharing all His goodness, His glory, and, yes, even His power with His image-bearers.
The God who has neither origin nor rival has no cause to be stingy with His abundance.
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a Pacific Northwest-native writer, photographer, and Bible nerd with a lot of big ideas and a never-ending sense of homesick. Here, in words and in images, I process my inmost thoughts and invite you along on my lifelong pursuit of truth + beauty - ever inspired and sustained by the changeless nature of my beautiful God, and by the hope He offers in His Story.
