(Today we begin a series of posts about the “whole story” of the Bible. I plan to run one every week, on Tuesdays, with a printable PDF. The printable includes a brief 2-3 paragraph introduction, Bible passages to read, a key verse, 5-7 thought/discussion questions, and 2-3 activities for the kids.)
Every story has certain elements in order to be a story. We often think of characters first–somebody has to act in the story, and there’s usually a hero, or protagonist. Usually, though not always, there’s also an adversary, or antagonist. And then, of course, something has to happen. Some kind of problem develops, or a conflict arises, that the hero has to solve or resolve. The plot develops around this conflict and resolution, working its way to a climax.
But there’s another story element that we often overlook, and that’s the setting. In some contemporary stories, the setting is not especially consequential: it could be any modern city, or Midwestern small town. But in historical fiction, or science fiction, or regional fiction, the setting leans in, shaping a plot that couldn’t take place anywhere else, or in any other time. (I wrote about the importance of setting in great westerns on my other website.)
The Bible story also starts with setting: the heavens and the earth. We often pass over it in order to get to characters and plot, but for this week, let’s linger and think about what the setting means for this particular story. What meaning is packed into the very first sentence of the world’s greatest story?
The popular term, which began as a joke but lingered as a classic understatement, is THE BIG BANG. It all began, they tell us, from a point infinitesimally small and dense. That point experienced an unimaginable burst of energy, and here we are!
With some explaining to do.
Here’s another way to say it: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
The first ten words of the Bible are infinitely small compared to the universe, but also infinitely dense, like the first instant of the Big Bang. Its meaning spirals out like the arms of a galaxy. Is it a summary statement of the rest of the chapter? Or is it one side of the “gap”?* Or does this verse establish the setting and protagonist of the story, in a manner similar to
Marshall Kane squinted as he stepped into the dusty sunshine of Dodge City’s main street.
There’s a character, an action, and a place. But the first three words of Genesis establish something else: something vital, something we take so much for granted we don’t think about it. In the beginning sets out the phenomenon of forward motion. In other words, Time steps out and makes History.
In the beginning, God created the beginning.
What happens when I try to imagine timelessness.
There was no time before this, because there was no “before” and no “this.” We can’t understand it; we must accept it, as children answer their catechism question: God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable.** Some atheists pose the question, Who made God? as though it were unanswerable. We laugh: No one! A being who is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable doesn’t have to be “made.” But when we try to think through what that means, we stop laughing.
We can’t go there, to the place where God existed infinitely. We can’t let go of time. We have no way to even think about timelessness; those categories don’t exist in our imagination. Genesis 1:1 establishes that we can only go forward. We can’t go back, because there is no “back.”***
Neither science nor philosophy can say what happened before time—the words what and happened and before are meaningless outside a time matrix. If there was a great explosion of matter from energy, we are part of it, and our minds still ring, however faintly, with the echoes. Strangely enough, the human mind seems to hold within it an idea of something—actually, Someone—who is responsible for all we see. All cultures at all times have passed on their notions relating to what sort of being this might be, and how he/she/it might have existed before everything. After thousands of years of speculation, the possibilities boil down to three. Which are
God existed as that incredibly dense point, and now inhabits the universe in every particle.
God existed as an unimaginably powerful Force, which arose somehow from eternal matter with which he (she/it) shaped the universe.
God existed as a relationship of three “persons,” co-equal, co-eternal, none before the other, whose mutual love is so dynamic and powerful it must find expression. As a painter uses vision and craft to create an image, an author uses action and character to produce a story, a musician uses mood and tone to write a sonata–so God, using the relational dynamic of himself, tossed out the heavens and planted the earth.
NOTE: Since this is an investigation rather than a mystery story, I plainly state my preference for Theory 3. Not only does the Bible report it, but all creation supports it, as we shall see. Also, most intriguingly to me, it’s the theory we could not have made up. Of all religions and philosophies, only one proposes a Trinitarian deity. In only one does this odd, difficult, troublesome doctrine appear—which, once accepted, explains so much.
We still want to know a few things, such as, do “the heavens” include Heaven, or does it just mean “space”?
In the Genesis context, probably the latter. With the creation of space (the heavens), there must of necessity be something not-space, and that’s Heaven. How do we picture it? Not accurately, for these are truly things too wonderful for us. Still, for reasons yet to be explored, our minds are tirelessly forming pictures of things we can’t understand.
Suppose, rather than an ever-expanding sphere, the universe is hollow. We can never see the end of it because like a ring it does not “end.” It’s like a balloon that expands as we blow it up, with solar systems and constellations and galaxies strung along its surface, spreading apart as the universe grows. The air in the balloon is not, strictly speaking, the balloon, but it defines its shape and keeps it whole. That’s Heaven.
Or the balloon exists in an atmosphere, a negative space that hosts it without being it. That’s Heaven.
Or, as ancient sailors believed about the earth, the universe is a flat plate you’ll fall off if you sail too far. Beyond the edge is Heaven—a mystery, but also our destiny.
All we know is that it’s eternal, beyond time and space, and the angels are there. I don’t make a fetish of angels, but they are persons of interest—the only extra-terrestrials we know of, whose story touches ours at several telling points.
But more of angels later. For now, as the Bible directs us, we should turn our attention to our own homey, comfortable, mysterious, terrible, and beautiful planet. What happened on the first day of creation?
Have you ever heard the expression, “land before time”? Can time exist without space, or vice versa? Why or why not?
Do you believe in God? No, seriously: do you find yourself sometimes not believing, even though you call yourself a Christian (or other “faith tradition”?) Can belief exist alongside unbelief? Is your faith mostly intellectual, or mostly emotional, or both?
“There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passing through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant” (Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, p. 25). What does “now” mean to you? Does it seem as elusive as Kundera describes? Do you find that “sad”?
Next week, we’ll think about “Let there be light.” But if God is light, where did the darkness come from?
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* The “gap” theory of biblical creationism proposes that Gen. 1:1 takes place during an indefinite, but very long, period of time, after which the earth takes shape during a series of six twenty-four hour days.
**Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q&A 4
***Time travel is theoretically possible (though unlikely), but only if we go forward—there is no credible mechanism for traveling backwards, wormholes and time tunnels notwithstanding.
