Theological Notes
1a. What is important about the days of creation in Genesis 1 is not so much when things happen, but rather how God creates. Beginning with the second day, each stage of creation is preceded by the formula “and God said,…” and concluded by the formula “and so it was.” What this pattern reveals is a picture of God’s voice as the sole instrument of creation. God simply speaks the universe into being, in an unmediated display of infinite power. Hence, the true theological insight of Genesis 1 comes from reading the creation process, not in a temporal or sequential sense, but rather in a substantive sense. It is God’s mode of creation that is to us of spiritual concern, not so much the literal sense in which to interpret the content of each creation day. In other words, what we lose from reading Genesis primarily as testimony is the deep, theological reward which comes from reading Genesis as praise[1].
1b. We may take the notion of creation by divine speech as an intimation of creatio ex nihilo, so far as it points to God as the unique and exclusive source of creation. God speaks (or wills), and so it is, without recourse to any pre-existent reality.
2. The creation of the world has, from “the beginning” [2], been ordained to its final end: the divine project of salvation, reconciliation, and renewal. And because we cannot understand the cause of an effect if not in terms of what the effect is for, the Bible encourages us to read forward, from Genesis to the New Testament, where the telos of creation is finally revealed to us in the fullness of creaturely expression: from one man — or rather God-man — to all mankind. What was once only implicit in the Old Testament — prefigured in Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, the sacrifice of the Passover lamb, Isaiah’s prophecy of the Suffering Servant (Is 52–53), the “house of God” depicted in Jacob’s vision (Gen 28:12–22), etc. — is made explicit in the New Testament, that is, in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Christ is the means, the vehicle, if you will, through which God will draw all things unto Himself, as was ordained from “the beginning.”
3. If disembodiment is the end of the Christian life, then there is no common destiny — namely, resurrection — which both man and cosmos share. But this is in effect to replace Christian eschatology, according to which disembodiment is merely transitory, with Gnostic eschatology, according to which the cosmos is presently indifferent to us, something to be escaped, and ultimately destined to become a ghost-town.
4. Matthew 6:21
19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and consuming insect destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor consuming insect destroy and where thieves do not break in or steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Love is in the thing loved — our ‘treasures’ — the way the thing known is in the knower. Put differently: we are what we love. Think of sentences like “I left my heart in San Francisco”, or Augustine’s famous line: “our hearts are restless until they come to rest in you”. The thing loved acts upon or changes our hearts, such that to love is both to be transformed by the good in the thing loved, and to be reflective of the good of the thing loved in our own lives.
________________________________________
1. Brevard Childs notes: “[Genesis 1] is not primarily a testimony to creation, but rather praise to God, the creator. Through the power of his word God brought forth the heavens and the earth in an act commensurate only to himself (bara’) according to his own will and purpose”
2. Genesis 1:1