Creation, pt 4

This section of my paper contains basically the last bit of "how" God created and the first bit of "what" God created.

Based on the Bible’s testimony, then, the personal God intentionally created all things by the orderly process of speaking creation into existence without the use of preformed materials. Does Scripture offer any more details about the procedure by which God created? Indeed, Proverbs 8:22ff suggests that the personification of wisdom had some role in the creation of the world. Namely, wisdom says she was present before creation began, that she rejoiced over it as it occurred, and delighted in the formation of man.

Many Christian scholars have taken Proverbs 8 as an allusion to the person of Jesus, largely in comparison with the prologue in John 1 and Paul’s Christological hymn in Colossians 1:15ff. In the latter New Testament reference, Paul describes Jesus as the firstborn of creation, the agent of creation, the one for whom all was created, and the one who holds creation together. John 1:2-3 says, “He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” The redundancy of this statement simply adds emphasis to the fact that Jesus is the source of all created beings.

The problem for early Jewish Christians was that the Old Testament did not seem to allow for the work of Christ in creation. Thus, “By identifying Jesus with Wisdom [in Proverbs 8], early Christians were able to express his divine origin, preexistence, role in creation and salvation, and still maintain the uniqueness of Israel’s one God.” However, from an exegetical standpoint, the roles of wisdom as described in Proverbs 8 do not correspond with the roles of Christ in John and Colossians. In fact, woman wisdom is not presented as a deity or creative agent but as someone who observes and delights in what God does. Therefore, it may be best to simply take the New Testament witness for its word, and assume the artistic presence of each person of the Trinity in the creative acts of Genesis 1-2.

The fact, then, that God created all things is clearly established in the Bible and in subsequent millennia of Christian theology. Therefore, this paper will now examine the nature of creation including its orderliness, goodness, substance, and its distinction. In regards to order, the Genesis account is often compared to other ancient cosmogonies. Whereas the other nations begin with a realm of utter chaos, the Biblical account of God’s initial creation describes it as formless, meaning “unproductive and uninhabited.” God begins to separate and create organized boundaries for his creation.

At this point, the act of creation becomes “an engagement with and victory over forces of chaos.” In a typical Hebrew poetic style, the author of Psalm 74:13 writes, “You divided the sea by Your strength; You broke the heads of the sea monsters in the waters.” Most interpreters believe that the sea monsters in this passage personify the forces of chaos that God subdued as he created. Order, then, becomes a gift of God, discernible in nature, leading Qohelet to conclude in Ecclesiastes 3:11 that everything is beautiful in its time. In other words, all attitudes and events are meaningful when they fit within the created order of God.

In the next post, I'll address a couple more aspects of the nature of creation, including the goodness of both the physical and spiritual realms.

-Matt