1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
I can think of no better place to start this blog than with this five sentences. The Hebrew word that means in the beginning is Rosh. The word means "head". Rosh Hashanah actually means the head (beginning) of the year. I find it interesting that head is the beginning. Everything starts and comes from the mind of God.
The bible says that God created the heavens and the earth; but, that they were without form and void and that all was dark. So my question is what was God's existence like prior to creating the heavens and earth. Was alone in the darkness? At what point in time did he create angels?
After creating the heavens and earth he created light and separated it from the darkness. It was not until he created light that there was a single day. The question then is how long was God in existence prior to creating light? The answer is that he was. The great I Am.
So how did he create the universe? He thought it into being and he spoke it into being. We can imagine worlds, we do it when we sleep. We can imagine other beings, we dream about others when we sleep also. The difference is that the beings we imagine do not exist while we are awake; but, is that really different? God is always aware; but, he does rest. What does rest look like for God?
These may seem like silly questions that we can never know for sure; but, I think they can help us to understand the nature of our existence and God's attitude. God, like us, is a self aware being. He is an independent consciousness from which we all come. Everything created is of God, an aspect of him. The difference is that God is complete while we are incomplete, we are not everything and everything is not us; but, we are all from the same place, the mind of God.
God called the change from light to dark a day. A time of light and a time of dark combined equal one day. The length of a day depends on how long the period is between light and darkness. The passage of a day on Saturn is not the same as the number of hours that the earth sees light and day. My question is, how long is a day for God. There is a passage that says that the length of a day for God is like a thousand years for us. His days are slightly longer than ours and we don't know how long that is.
What if a day for God lasted a billion years? Might make you understand that the age of the earth cannot be measured using the bible. We have to be careful when we read the bible to understand that it is always written from a particular person's understanding and context. I believe the bible to be inspired; but, it is a book of stories about individuals with free will and their experiences come through it.
It is believed that the first five books of the bible were written by Moses. It is assumed that he was given the history by God. God did not get into the method of creation or how everything worked, it wouldn't make sense for God to explain what he did using advanced math to Moses nor would it make sense for him to explain it in terns of quantum physics. Moses would not have understood it in those terms nor would he have been able to explain it to others. The bible is not a science text book; but, God clearly works with nature.
There are many things that are not discussed in the bible. They are not discussed because the bible was written for us, the Old Testament was written primarily for the Jewish nation and people. It is both a history and an instruction manual of a sort. When we look at the progression of the book we begin to see a plan unfold. The plan was to take us from being self absorbed, selfish children to become loving and forgiving adults.
The bible chronicles our development as a society. We are not told much of what occurred prior to Noah because that was a different society and the book was not written for them. In reading the bible we should always take into consideration who the particular book is primarily aimed at.
The creation story is a very simplified story of what occurred. The details are all left out. The purpose of the story is merely to let us know that God created everything, that he did it in a particular order and that he was pleased with how things came out. It was not meant to answer all of our questions about creation and doesn't attempt to do so. We are left to investigate the details and better understand how things work.
We now turn to science for a moment. We turn to the big bang, there was one you know. We can see the stars and see that they were all created from a central point. We live in a closed universe without boundaries. It seems sort of contradictory; but, it is how things look. Our sun lies towards the edge of the universe and not towards the center.
The universe is considered the totality of all that exists, it appears to have a center from which all radiated from. That is kind of funny, In all of history we are not aware of, nor do we see, that another creation of this type has ever existed. Everything from nothing seems to have only ever happened once just like the bible described. And what did this creation look like when it occurred, it was a blast of light. Hey, I think we read that he created matter that was without form and void, a thought if you will that became light. Prior to the light there was only darkness.
For all we observe about the universe we cannot come up with an explanation of why it exists. We have developed very good models of how it works; but, we cannot come up with an explanation for why it started. Science and philosophy both are at a lost for why.
The one thing they forget is self awareness. We attempt to explain the universe and minimize the importance of people. We are part of the self awareness of the universe. Without us, without people to observe and experience this creation, the creation would be meaningless. Without us to observe it, it would not matter if it didn't exist at all. The universe only has meaning because we exist, without life there is no need for the universe. God created it for us because he knew in advance that he was going to create us. It is his gift to us and we should cherish it and seek to understand it. He created it so that we would have everything we need; but, some of it we cannot use until we are ready.
What we are aware of in this universe is light, matter and awareness. We can assume that these three things always existed or that one of them created the others. The bible teaches us that a great awareness created the universe. Many attempt to use science to prove that matter and light created awareness, that our awareness is merely a mechanical thing. Science does not like the Near Death Experience because it presumes that awareness can exist when the physical has ceased.
To attempt to explain the universe without understanding free will, creativity and self awareness is arrogant and an avoidance of the inevitable questions of why are we here.
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