In the beginning, God created…
Genesis 1:1
To my own amazement when I opened the Bible for the first time, it did not begin with, “God exists; He has these attributes; there is a trinity…” I expected creeds to believe, but was rather given a narrative that just began unfolding. As a new believer, having known absolutely nothing of the faith previously, I thought the Bible was supposed to tell me what to believe. I didn’t even know how to read this, because instead of allowing the story to unfold, I kept searching for the hidden meanings behind the words. There are no hidden meanings. The God of heaven and earth did not permit the Scriptures to give us a list of what to know. He instead gave us a narrative by which we can understand Him. He sent messengers and prophets to help explain His mind and heart. We have psalms, prayers, proverbs, and even letters that continue to expound and explain. There is no systematic theology in Scripture. The Bible seems entirely disinterested in giving us a nice, packaged theology.
The beginning has God as creator. Instead of an attribute, we have a verb.
Why?
In some legitimate sense, God creating would be the obvious opening of “the beginning.” Yet, a second consideration allows us to realize that it absolutely could have told us about “before the beginning,” and listed what God is, or what He is like…
Many have asked why God created. Many have given opinions and answers. I find the question to be a bit uninspiring. My interest, rather, is upon the question of what it is about God that would logically lead to the verb, “created.” It’s a subtle shift, but the question does vary. It removes the need for “reason” and replaces it with “necessarily.” From God’s own personhood does creation logically make sense; not from an abstract logical train of thought in the mind of God. It doesn’t say that God concluded that He should create. It says that He did. God is not the type of Being that seems to do things outside of that which flows from Himself. What He does reveals who/what He is.
Perhaps God isn’t revealed as Creator, but that creating is the first way that God’s ontology, or who He is as He is, becomes perceptible to creatures. Whatever the act of creating manifests must already be true of God before the creation, but that revelation of God was unknown to anything outside of Himself until there was another subject to relate to that revelation. The question of why God needed to reveal Himself to something takes the notion that God had some sort of a desired end in mind, and then creation was the goal of that desired end. I’m suggesting that maybe God’s creative work, and even the desired end if there is one, stems from God’s character, and not from some sort of need in Himself.
Later Scriptures give us some clues to what it might be that led to this phenomenon.
The Father has life in Himself
John 5:26
All things came into being through [the Word]… in Him was life, and the life was the light of men.
John 1:3-4
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into teh world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins…
1 John 4:7-10
The passage in 1 John 4 continues, and in the entirety of the thought we have a flow moving through being born of God, knowing God, Son, life, Spirit, abiding, love, God abiding in humanity, and humanity abiding in God. It intertwines love and life, that God sent His Son into the world so that we might live through Him. Perhaps love and life are not two different attributes of God, but two sides of the same coin… What relationship might exist between the God who has life in Himself and the fact that the first action Scripture attributes to Him is creation? Is there a correlation?
One conclusion that seems safe to make is that the life that God possesses in Himself appears in relation as love. Love is spoken of as “before the foundation of the world” in John 17, Jesus saying this of the Father toward Him. Therefore, the divine life that manifests itself within creation is already relational apart from creation.
The conclusion that I continue to get more and more convinced of is this:
Self communicating life.
The life that God possesses in Himself does not appear in Scripture as closed in upon itself. It communicates. It manifests. It gives. It relates. It communes. It abides. When that divine life is expressed relationally, Scripture seems to call that “love.” Creation may be the first outward manifestation of the self-communicating divine life, whose relational expression is love. Why did God create? Maybe it has less to do with His own lack, His needs, His desires, “for His glory,” or many of the other attempts at answering the question. Maybe self communicating life is enough. Because God has life in Himself, and the overflow of life is given descriptions of outward movement, the natural implication of that outward movement would be creation. The question of why God created what He created is a separate question from this. Attempting to combine the two seems to cloud the distinction and make it difficult to determine any responses to either.
Later in Genesis 1, the God who creates makes an image of Himself and commissions that image toward fruitfulness, multiplication, filling, and rule. This makes it reasonable to ask whether the vocation given to God’s image bearers have some analogical relationship to the activity of the God being imaged… We leave it with a question: Is a part of being “in God’s image” a reflection of the self communicating life and love that God has in Himself? Obviously the creature does not have this within themselves, but the sheer command and vocation should cause us a moment’s pause.
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