Most of us grew up believing that God created the world ex nihilo-- from nothing. He began with nothing and He made something -- a beautiful, balanced, harmonious world that He saw was "very good" when it was finished. Then man messed up the "very good" world, and it became "not good" anymore, beginning with thorns and thistles in the earth and ending with the flood.
What does it mean to believe that this is the pattern from the beginning of the Bible? If this is the repeated pattern, it means that man keeps messing up what God has created. It means that we are eternally guilty, despite forgiveness, and that we will continue to create chaos until the end of time, until the final day.
A careful reading of Genesis, however, reveals that what God started with was not "nothing," but rather, "the earth was formless and empty, darkness....over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God hovering over the waters" (New International Version). In the Shocken translation by Everett Fox, which attempts to closely translate the sound of the Hebrew into English, we get this reading: At the beginning of the God's creating of the heavens andthe earth, when the earth was wild and waste (tohu-vavohu), darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering* over the face of the waters----
*The word translated "hovering" in English conveys in Hebrew the image of an eagle protecting its young.
Words create images, and the images contain meaning for us. If our imagination gives us a God making a perfect world to begin with, and man messing it up, we have one kind of meaning. If, however, we grasp the image of a world "wild and waste,"( kind of what we experienced after Katrina, with no trees in New Orleans that could support birds of the air, with no ground that could support life, with everything grey...), we have a different meaning.
The Bible begins with chaos, with a "watery deep," with an abyss that has no form or shape or meaning --- and what we see there is the Spirit of God hovering over the water, anxious to begin the work of separating the confusion, of creating a distinction between light and dark, between heaven and earth, and between earth and dry land. We see a Divine Corps of Engineers saying to Ocean, "This far you shall come and no more; here is where you stop!"
For anyone who has ever experienced chaos in their lives, this image gives immense hope. We are always moving out of the darkness toward the light. In the Gospel of John, Nicodemus comes to Jesus (the Light of the World) "at night." He is coming out of the darkness toward the light-- and the first thing he hears is about being "born again of water and of Spirit." Being born again means moving out of chaos into light, from the watery deep onto dry land, from drowning into rejoicing.
This is the Biblical pattern of creation -- from chaos to cosmos, from being lost to being saved, from "uncreation" to a new world, from the old to the new. God says, "See, I am doing something new; do you not perceive it?" "I am creating a new heavens and a new earth." "The convenant I will give at that time is not like the Old Covenant, written on tablets of stone, but will be written on men's hearts." Jesus says, "See, I make all things new again."
The images we have, what we believe, make a difference. If we can learn to see the Bible the way it was written, not the way "we think" it was written, we will see new meaning in it. And then Psalm 18 will be the way we think about God:
The cords of death entangled me;
the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
The cords of the grave coiled around me;
the snares of death confronted me....
He reached down from on high and took hold of me;
he drew me out of deep waters.
He rescued me from my powerful enemy,
from my foes, who were too strong for me.
They confronted me in the day of my disaster,
but the Lord was my support.
He brought me out into a spacious place;
he rescued me because He delighted in me.
Understanding this pattern as the basic human condition, with the Spirit of God "hovering" over the chaos which is always threatening to overwhelm us also helps us to understand -- or give meaning to---Christ's crucifixion. He did not shun the human condition, but took it on for us, in us, and with us, willingly submitting to the forces of death, destruction, and chaos, that He might bring us out of them into a "spacious place," because He delights in us.
This "meaning" revealed by Scripture is much different from that of "guilty man," who needs to be punished for messing up the world and the work of the Almighty God. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote about a world "bleared, smeared with trade," and "over it all, The Holy Ghost broods....with-- ah --- bright wings" (God's Grandeur).
This is the image and the meaning we need when threatened by deep waters closing over our heads. We need to look up and see the Spirit of God hovering over us to draw us out of the cords of death; we need to hear the Voice of God sending the LIght of the World into our hearts, the Light that has come into the world to see men free from the darkness of death! Alleluia! This is the Good News that all men need to hear!
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