This past week, I was privileged to attend the fiftieth National Prayer Breakfast in Ottawa. It is hard to believe that for fifty years people of faith have been gathering in our national capital to pray – politicians, leaders of parties, the Governor General, the leader of the Defence Force, members of the Cabinet, members of the Senate, members of the Administration, lay people, clergy – seven hundred in total were there to pray. It was marvelous! Even though it was the day of the budget and a lot of people were locked away and couldn’t make it, it was, I thought, a fitting day to bow our heads and recognized that there is something greater than ourselves at work in the world.
In the midst of this, the Speaker, Ravi Zacharias, a rabbi who is well known as being a wonderful apologist and writer, a defender of the Christian faith, somebody who speaks cogently all over the world at universities and colleges and seminaries and at seminars about the existence of God. He began his presentation with a simple affirmation that everything that we are and that we do is dependent on the Creator God, and that the central declaration that we make as people of faith is that God created, and not only that, but that God created us, and that we are made in the image of God: we are the imago dei. He suggests that our whole notion of selfhood, of purpose, of existence finds its origins in that very simple affirmation that God created, and we are his creatures.
He even suggested that our very moral foundation of the preservation of life is predicated on God being the Creator and that is why the great prohibition in early Jewish writings – you shall not kill, you shall not murder – was precisely because human beings are made imago dei, in the image of God. Therefore, to take a human life is to take the life of a human made in the image of God. It was a powerful statement! He did maintain that in and of itself while a great declaration of faith is still a mystery. There is a lot that we just don’t understand about that affirmation that God is the Creator and that we should be humble in the way that we approach such a declaration.
I think it is fitting, because there seems to be a trend away from the notion that we have a creator, that there was a first mind, a first mover that made this world. Just a few years ago, Salman Rushdie was here in Toronto and was interviewed by The Toronto Star, and said that what we need is a new atheism where we simply see the world as a work of art, and that there is nothing more than a work of art, and that we need to move away from any sense of a divine being. Now, Rushdie is responding, I know, to the excesses of religion. I understand that. Nevertheless, he wants to throw out the baby with the bathwater. He did so by saying, “We need a new atheism, a new sense that this world has just been created.” It was fascinating that a few days later, a Muslim writer, Osama Ghadin, wrote this in response: “Rushdie surely lacks the humility that many experience in their consciousness and perception of this marvelous, awesome universe of ours, and in this humility that is vital to the necessary thing: to know God.”
He is right! Our belief in the creative power of God creates not just objects, but subjects, not just some sort of passionless, mechanical by-product of chance, but some living, purposeful beings.
We are much more than just a sum of our materialistic path. We are creatures that are made that have and are in our being a soul, and the notion of the soul and the notion of the person having purpose cannot find its roots in something mechanical or accidental. It must find it in something deeper. I love a joke that I read about what would happen if you took out any notion of the divine, any sense of creation, any sense of purpose for what we have been made, and that we are just simply beings, material beings, that the eulogy for something like that would read something like what follows:
Here lies George. Unfortunately, he experienced a breakdown in his DNA. It is sad to say there was too much sugar in his system and not enough insulin, which has affected his organs, and very sad to see that ultra-violet rays have done terrible things to George’s complexion over the years, and here today we remember and desecrate a psychologically broken-down creature. Amen.
Can you imagine if that was a eulogy for somebody? Well, if you didn’t see them as having something more than that or being something more than that or arising for something more than that, then that kind of mechanistic view of the human creature would be absolutely accurate, and probably describes why George died. It doesn’t explain why George existed, or why George lived.
I want to look at the source of why there is the conviction that there is a God who made us. For that we have to turn to this morning’s passage from the Book of Genesis. I took a very cut and paste approach to Genesis, but I would really like you to go home and to read Chapter 1 and the earliest part of Chapter 2 at the beginning of the Bible. These are snippets that I have taken, but they are important snippets that were read this morning. The Book of Genesis was probably written sometime around 1,500 BC, and likely based on the writings and the ideas of Moses. A lot of Genesis arises from Moses as its source. Other parts of the Scriptures suggest that as well. But, the Book of Genesis isn’t a whole; it is a compilation of different paths and what is known as the pre-history, in other words, the creation and life before Adam and Eve and right after Adam and Eve, was probably written much later.
Most scholars, like Walter Brueggemann, believe that it was probably written during the Exile, when the people of Israel lived in Babylon. They had lost their connection to their Temple; to the Sabbath and to God. It seemed that the world was pernicious and nasty and dangerous. They were starting to question whether there was – get this – a purpose for their existence. When you suffer, when anyone suffers, they ask that question: is there a purpose in my existence and why am I going through this? The people of Israel were asking themselves why they were going through this. This incredible poetic passage from the Book of Genesis is an explanation as to why we are here, an explanation that there is a God who creates, that there is a God who made us, that we are not here by accident, and therefore the future is not accidental either. There is a reason and a purpose for why we are here – and then arose this incredible passage from Genesis!
It was never intended to be a text book on geophysics or cosmology or astronomy. It was never designed to be a scientific text book on how the world was created blow-by blow; it was given in order that we might know the purpose and the reason for its existence in the first place. If you look at it carefully, what is remarkable about it is that there is a sense of dynamism to the story of the creation. We read that God created, God made – the word in Hebrew is bara, and bara means that God not only creates, but is creating. The whole narrative of the Creation is God creating three things in three days, and then creating some space and some openness. Then God fills that openness with animals: with fish in the sea and the glories that we see in creation and the reason why we had the Blessing of the Pets this morning. There was nothing frivolous by the way about the Blessing of the Pets. It is the recognition that where better to be than with all God’s creatures in God’s house on God’s day? It is an affirmation of everything that we believe to be true and that we hold dear, because God filled this void, filled this creation with this incredibly unique and magnificent sense of being.
Then there is that line near the end, where God said, “And, it was good.” This talks about the quality of creation, not just its existence, but its quality. The fact that he used the term “Creation is good” implies that there is some standard on which goodness is based. The standard on which the goodness is based is the standard of the Creator. How can you say, “Creation is good” if there is no standard for goodness? No, the world is good, and God made it good, and God made it to sustain itself, and God filled those empty days with light and darkness, with beings and creatures, and with this purposeful, gracious overwhelming love.
To say God created, to say that God is the original source is not enough. Where do we find our purpose in all of this? It is very interesting that in the passage, God speaks of God’s self in the plural. There is an incredible line, and it is subject to debate, I know, that God said “let us make humanity in our image”. Implied in that is a sense of relationship within God’s self. Christians declare this quite clearly, as do I, that this is the Trinity. The loving relationship within God, the love, the purpose, is right there in the loving relationship within God. Even the term that is used to describe God in Genesis 1 is elohîm. This is the name for God. It is used about half the time in The Old Testament, Yahweh the other, and adonai another one, but elohîm is in there, and elohîm is used to describe a god who is a living god, an active god. The beautiful thing about elohîm is that it implies that God not only created and then left the scene, but made the world in order – and this is crucial – that the world might live in communion with him. God created the world in order that the world might live in communion with him.
God didn’t just create some sort of static thing, but something that continues to live. It should be no surprise to any Christian, Jew or Muslim for that matter that the universe is expanding. There should be absolutely no sense of shock that all manner of changes are taking place within the universe. This is exactly what the God elohîm is all about. God made and God created and God is creating; God is not static, God is not dead. The universe is not as closed as medieval thought had fixed it. Indeed, the world is dynamic! When God said, “Let’s make humanity in our image” (Imago dei), God gave us our purpose and reason for being. That is why there is this mysterious and miraculous part of our existence, that when we meet one another or when we have communion with one another, or even when we have communion with nature, when we love and are loved by our pets, when we see the beauty of the world, we are living in communion with it. Does it mean that it is absolutely perfect? By no means! The Scriptures make it abundantly clear that there is a crack in creation, that there is sin, and there is brokenness to it because of our own disobedience; not because it wasn’t made right, but because we as human beings haven’t always adored the one who made it and therefore haven’t lived right. Even so, it is still the world that God made, and God made us to have communion with it. We are not mechanistic. We are not just pro forma. We are living and loving, and we are in a relationship with the God who made us.
I have just finished reading a spectacular book by David Brooks of The New York Times called, The Road to Character. If you haven’t read it yet, it is a good read! In it, Brooks makes the point that in the “me” generation, in the “God-of-the-self-absorbed” generation, we are spending a lot of time developing our curriculum vitae, everyone is driven by what they have accomplished, and people want to build their lives as if it is a building block or points on their CV. He argues that rather than concentrating on the CV we should be concentrating on the eulogy. What is being said about us reflects our character, the things we believe, the way we relate to one another, the values we stand for, and the person we are. He says that it is all very well to go and build your CV, but in the end, when all comes to an end, that is extremely mechanistic, but is it our character. Although he is Jewish, he doesn’t talk in overt terms about the faith, but it is implied within a lot of what he says. He goes through different people’s lives to show that in people of character there is an implied sense in which that character shows that they have a purpose. The purpose isn’t just to fill up the CV but to be a full person, a full character, a full creature of the God who made us. He even describes it in biblical terms: the CV is Adam One, but character is Adam Two.
I would suggest that we have a purpose that is way beyond our ability to understand. I think it is a dangerous thing to simply see the world as a passionless and mechanistic by-product of some chaotic chance. I think it is dangerous because of the way that we look at the other. When we see meaning in the world, we also see it in our neighbour’s existence.
This passage ends with the seventh day, and the need for a Sabbath. Why was that Sabbath created? That Sabbath was created not only as a day of rest, which is emphasized a lot, but a day to commune with the God who made us. The Sabbath is not just about a day off from building the CV, but about living in a relationship with God and what God has made. The people of Israel, when they were living in exile had had their Sabbath taken away from them by the Babylonians, and they craved that day, not just as a day of identity, or a day to rest, but a day to commune with God who made them. That is why I think the Sabbath is important. It is not a hard, cold legislated religious thing that if you don’t adhere to the Sabbath you are a bad person. It is not about that at all! It is about having the joy and the time to commune with the One who made us.
I think one of the greatest poems that I have ever read on the Creation was by James Weldon Johnson. He wrote it in a Gospel way. I don’t often end with a poem, but this is so good! You will see what I mean:
Then God walked around,
And God looked around
On all that He had made.
He looked at His sun,
And He looked at His moon,
And He looked at His little stars;
He looked on His world
With all its living things,
And God said, "I'm lonely still."
Then God sat down
On the side of a hill where He could think;
By a deep, wide river He sat down;
With His head in His hands,
God thought and thought,
Till He thought, "I'll make me a man!"
Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled Him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;
Then into it He blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.
That is what we are – we are a living soul! In Creation and its creatures and the earth in its beauty and we in the image of God, are all made for the purpose of the living in communion with a living God. Amen.