The Humble Place

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day. (Genesis 1:1-5 NKJV)

Hebrew assumptions about Creation are humble, that it would be impossible to know more than God tells. Leave it where God puts it; His boundaries are in our best interest. The Hebrews would have flatly refused to speculate out of reverence for the God who speaks. From that basis, we can begin to look around us to find meaning in what we can experience directly. Thus, the narrative assumes to know only a little about our own world, and that we can grasp the limits of what God wants us to know about it.

So there’s nothing in this text that we should assume talks about the rest of the universe. It’s confined to just human space. We know nothing about the sun except what we experience here on the earth. The same with any other luminary bodies in the sky. The Hebrews knew that God made all of those things, too, but they would never presume to stretch revelation beyond what God actually offered. Thus, in the Hebrew mind, this passage doesn’t suggest that God made those luminary bodies from scratch at the same moment, only that He brought light into human space.

Indeed, the symbolism of light as revelation is more important than the physical experience of light. Don’t try to nail down syntactic precision when it’s not there. The Hebrew language and Hebrew thinking doesn’t support it. So, the term “the heavens” isn’t meant to refer to whatever was or wasn’t out there in space; they had no such concept. It wasn’t excluded, just not mentioned. The Creation narrative of Genesis 1 refers to what little we can know about our own existence here on earth.

We have the instinct to read our Western mythology back into these things. On the one hand, the Medieval mind of superstition flatly excluded anything outside their world, until science proclaimed things otherwise. The prejudice died slowly, and the instinctive reaction remains. This is because of the barbaric sense of fear for the unknown in the roots of our Germanic ancestors. The cosmopolitan scientific outlook sleeps uneasily in the same mind with superstition, yet they both come from the paganism, so it’s a marriage made in Hell.

I’m not trying to justify the wild notions like the Gap Theory or the Age-Day Theory. Both of those are an attempt to bring revelation down to the level of reason. Nor do I exclude such speculation, but I simply assert that Scripture doesn’t address such things in the first place. Those ideas are asking the wrong questions. Perhaps it would clarify things if we characterized it thus: “Let there be light on the earth.” It’s not meant to address whether there was already a sun, moon and stars, only that they became manifest on the earth. The earth is the whole reference point here.

Nor was the text meant to speak to what may or may not have existed outside the earth at the time God began preparing it for our use, nor does it presume anything about what went before. That phrase, “in the beginning,” refers to the beginning of God’s dealing with humans, nothing more. Scripture is the revelation of how God deals with humans, not the rest of Creation. The idea is not to presume we are the center of Creation, but simply the center of revelation. This is revelation to us alone. We cannot possibly comprehend God’s other concerns. All we know about such things is that there most certainly is something else going on, and that it’s none of our business. We have more than we can do already in our own unique accountability before Him.

This is the humble position we are called to take.