The eternally working Creator (part 1)

To create, or not to create ...
"By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day .... he rested from all his work of creating that he had done" (Gen 2.2-3). A lot later on, however, "Jesus said to them [who questioned what he was doing], 'My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working'" (Jn 5.17) ... which, incidentally, took place on the seventh day of that week, which is why he was being questioned here.

It's often supposed, by people who hold to a very literalistic view of parts of Scripture, that this passage in Genesis implies that God got completely done with his creative work at that point; that's certainly what the plain reading of it would seem to mean. But all through Scripture, Yahweh is portrayed as still in his creative workshop, both making and maintaining creation:

Let this be written for a future generation,
that a people not yet created may
praise Yahweh. (Ps 102.18)

When you send your Spirit,
they [all living things] are created,
and you renew the face of the earth. (Ps 104.30)

... you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my
mother's womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully
and wonderfully made .... (Ps 139.13-14)

I will make rivers flow on barren heights,
and springs within the valleys ....
I will set pines in the wasteland,
the fir and the cypress together,
so that people may see and know ...
that the Holy One of Israel has
created it. (Isa 41.18-20)

... this is what Yahweh says—
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel ....
I will bring your children ...,
everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made. (Isa 43.1, 5, 7)

I am Yahweh, and there is no other;
I form the light and create darkness .... (Isa 45.6-7)

"Before I formed you in the womb
I knew you ...." (Jer 1.5)

"This is what the Lord Yahweh says about the Ammonites ...:
In the place where you were created,
in the land of your ancestry ...." (Ezk 21.28, 30)

He who forms the mountains,
creates the wind ...,
he who turns dawn to darkness ...
Yahweh God Almighty is his name. (Am 4.13)

... in him [Christ] all things hold together. (Col 1.17)

So did he get done with creating, or not? The clear and simple answer seems to be, again, that Genesis depicts God's initial creation of everything, while other passages describe various ways that he has ongoing interaction with what he's already made; that is, this view attempts to say that God sort of keeps creating, but isn't really doing anything new in terms of the created universe. On closer inspection, though, that's a little awkward as an explanation ... not least because the same Hebrew verbs for creating, making, forming, and so on, are used throughout the rest of the Old Testament as are used in Genesis. So how is there supposed to be any difference in what he's doing?

On the other hand, Genesis does say that God gets done with his work of creating, and rests from that. How could that be, when he keeps creating people and things through the rest of Scripture?

... for different folks
One drastically important thing to keep in mind, when trying to understand any written text (whether the Bible or anything else), is to recognize differences in how various peoples, in various cultures and at various times in history, expressed themselves. We (Christians) take Scripture as God's own Word; but of course he composed it through a wide variety of human agencies, over a great spread of time, and representing multiple cultures.

Here, some 1,900 years after the Bible was completed, we as heirs of the traditions of Western (mostly Greek- and Roman-influenced) civilization have our own complex ways in how we express ourselves in speech or writing, just as any other culture would; but, since our European-American cultures have mostly dominated this entire half of the world, it's been easy for us to forget that there are plenty of other ways that cultures can express themselves, and easy to assume that "our" ways are somehow the "best" or "right" ways. Who could be as logical as we are! Right?

But the writers of the Old Testament didn't even give us the time of day, as far as caring how we do things. How rude! They went about, expressing themselves however their own cultures of the day were used to doing it; and since they were writing for their own peoples, naturally it wouldn't even have occurred to them to attempt that any other cultures would understand what they meant. One classic example of a style that would have been clear to its contemporaries, but is pretty obscure to us, is the book of Ezra, whose narrative jumps back and forth between events happening about eighty years apart ... which his readers would have been completely familiar with, but which we have to scramble to check footnotes and other references to make sense of.

Tragedy as poetry
Another example, this one very much of literary style, is the book of Job: ostensibly, it records the literal words of a dialog (arguments and counter-accusations, really) among Job and his friends, attempting to make sense of the series of tragedies that had just befallen Job. However, the Hebrew text is mostly in carefully and beautifully crafted poetic form. I have never heard of even the most gifted poet being able to speak extemporaneously in perfectly crafted, complex poetic form; let alone a group of them speaking in live-action response and counterpoint to each other, in the same expert caliber of poetry; let alone managing (or even wanting) to maintain that creative, collaborative focus in the immediate aftermath of horrific tragedies that have befallen one of them (and the agonizing, complex emotions that would have erupted from that, and which of course we see in everything those men said to each other).

That would be about comparable to friends gathering around a relative of one of the victims of 9/11, only a few days after it happened, and all of them somehow improvising beautifully worked poetry as they tried to express their agonies and outrage over the tragedies of that day. Obviously, that would be unlikely in the extreme ... and even if that is exactly what happened in the case of Job, that event in itself would have been so remarkable that it would certainly have been noted in the text at some point ("... and one of the most amazing things about all this was that Job and his friends ALL spoke in perfect poetic form, nonstop, through their whole dialog. Amazing! Such a thing has never been heard of before!").

At any rate, it's obvious that Job himself did not write the story as we have it, since it not only refers to him always in the third person, but records his death; someone after his time took the available records (existing probably at least in part as his own family or clan lore, by that point; probably also having passed into legend throughout the wider geographic region, since the author refers to Job's homeland as somewhere evidently distant from where his reading audience lived) and crafted them into the poetic masterpiece that conveys God's wisdom through those traumatic events.

The gist of the matter
So if Job and his friends didn't speak in perfect, improvised poetry, how do we know which (if any) of their words were accurately recorded? Where did historical fact leave off and artistic license begin? It isn't known that anyone in ancient Israel was worried about any question like this. Nobody lost any sleep over it, because they were well aware that something could be recorded in a highly artistic form while still remaining true to the intent of the author and the gist of what was recorded.

This is terribly difficult for us to accept or understand most of the time, however. Modern, Western culture (especially in America) has developed a strong instinct, in some cases you might say almost an obsession, with technical and factual accuracy. In many cases, obviously this is not only helpful, but can be vital. (Think, for example, of finances or accounting; you wouldn't want your bank keeping track of only the "gist" of what was in your accounts, or taking "poetic license" with their balance sheets! Likewise, criminal investigation depends on explicit accuracy, in order to ensure that, ideally, only the actual guilty party is found and charged with only the relevant crime. Electronics, auto maintenance, medical science ... accuracy is vital in almost every area of modern society, for it to work the way we want it to.)

And of course accuracy is nothing new, nor confined only to the West; some of the earliest written records found (from ancient Mesopotamia, modern Iraq) appear to be inventories of commercial goods. It's easy to see why accuracy would have been important to merchants; their livelihood depended directly on it! There was a direct cause-and-effect relationship there. But in other areas for which we have records, such as historical chronicles and, of course, poetic-style literature, the definition of "accurate" can get a good deal fuzzier, at least from our point of view.

Complexities in figuring out, for example, the chronology of the Old Testament stem in great part from the variety of ways that its writers recorded the number of years (sometimes a part of a year was figured as a whole year, resulting in what looks like overlapping reigns of kings, for instance); this is why about a half dozen early, and very sincere, attempts to work out biblical chronology to find the date of creation resulted in no two agreeing on the same date. (It was only their rough average that has been handed down as the traditional "6,000 years ago" beginning of the world.)

And "accuracy" in events can be defined differently, depending on what the writer was intending to record. Again, in our society today, that statement wouldn't even make sense: for us, accuracy in recording events means just that ... "just the facts". But in other cultures through history, events have been considered accurate if they accurately reflected a people's understanding of themselves and their place in the universe; or of how their society came into being; or of their perceived relationship to the Divine. Native American cultures of many kinds, for example (and of course "Indians" aren't a sort of single, monolithic culture from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego: in North America alone, at least 500 peoples and cultures are represented, still speaking up to 200 distinct languages, some of which are more unrelated to each other than German is to Chinese), often recorded their own history in what, to us, seems part fact, part legend (which may be based on fact), part absolute myth.

That's only one of the reasons why the study of biblical history has generated so much interest, and has stirred up so much controversy. The Bible's records are true! No, they're not true! No, they're partly true! No, they're true, they just mean something else than what we thought! Debates over that are likely to rage for a long time ... which, whether we like it or not, is a good thing: God's Word tells us explicitly to "test everything; hold on to the good" (1 Thes 5.21). Being reluctant to put anything in that crucible, no matter how dearly held, only highlights our own fears about what we might find out. Putting everything in the crucible, to find out what it really is, helps us to be genuinely sure of what we (think we) know, and it enables us to grow as persons in our maturity of critical thinking ... and in recognition of how much we do not know.

So the art of understanding God and his creation amounts, in great deal, to our learning to understand what he is doing and what he means by it, not what we think he's doing. How frustrating that he doesn't do everything the way we think he should do things!

©2008 Roger S. Smith

Part 2: growing in wisdom and understanding