Forming A World into Existence

Part 2: Origins of Joy

What if the world isn’t supposed to be spiraling towards death? What if all living things aren’t bound by survival of the fittest but the thriving of all creatures big and small? What if, instead of hospice care, life is intended for joy?

Standing in contrast to our modern story is the text of the Bible which says and has said since the ancient days of a freed slave people in the desert: The world was formed with intention and it was good. You may disagree with claim, but you ought to understand it.

The origin story of the cosmos, in the Bible, is filled with joy. It starts this way:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hoveringover the waters.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

In the beginning God created. The language is most similar to an artist putting their hands to clay to mold and shape. The Hebrew word “bara” means to give form. In the beginning God gave form the heavens and the earth.

What was he forming? The void, the formless, the wilderness.¹ The Hebrew words is “tohu va-vohu” which means the absence of form. The void of meaning. He was forming the formless. Essentially, “this happened when everything and everyplace was the middle of nowhere.”

Then it says the Spirit of God hovered over the darkness of the deep and he spoke and suddenly the wilderness was a world of light.

Words Form the World

God speaks. He is the first character. God has the first lines. God initiates. It’s not just true in the beginning. He doesn’t just get things rolling, God continually speaks.

The Scriptures start with a duality of activity: the words of God and the making of things. God speaks, light. God speaks, plants. God speaks, animals. God speaks, water and land. This is the dialogue of the creation: “Let us make” and, at its making, “This is good.”

Later, God first goes to a sheepherding couple, Abraham and Sarah, saying: “Go to the land I’ll show you and I will make you into a blessed family that blesses all the people of the world.” The covenant was simple: “follow me and I will make you into a blessing family.”

God led them, we’re told in Genesis, around the Middle East. They were a barren urban couple living out a life on the fertile rivers of modern day Iran. God spoke, God led them to a new land and they arrived to give birth to an unlikely child. God spoke and God made. God made Abraham and Sarah’s descendants into a family that blessed the known world amidst a global famine, through the stewardship of dreams.

The Israelites became bound in slavery to the Pharaohs of Egypt. Egypt crushed the psyche and God-family identity out of God’s family. They bore the pains of infanticide, rape, slave labor, and racism. The phrase the Bible crafted to summarize this pain was “making bricks without straw”. In other words, they carried the demands of life without the presence of the necessities to live.

God, in the clearest picture of his character, liberated the Israelites from centuries of oppression and led them out of Egypt and they followed through the Red Sea and into the desert. There, God spoke and made again. To the former slave laborers he spoke: “I have taken you out of Egypt and saved you. You will be my people and I will be your God. I will make you a holy nation, a kingdom of priests.” God spoke the promise of becoming a people that demonstrates the otherness of God, a protected people all on their own, and a people with a central role in God’s grand endeavor of kingdom. God promised to make them participants in the restoration of the world.

In the wilderness, God’s new kingdom was born in the lives of slaves-made-priests. Each day they awoke dependent on his bread, his water, and his presence. In a pillar of smoke and fire, they followed him. He led them. They became a holy nation belonging to God. God spoke, God promised, God made.

This is the operation and vocabulary of God in our world. He speaks and makes himself known to the dust, to the wanderer, to the captive, and to the burned out.

He speaks into the life that’s fallen short of the glory of human existence and he says: “Become alive!” He speaks into the emptiness that’s forsaken the knowledge of God for man-made things and says: “I will lead you and I will make you!” He enters the soul of the oppressed says: “Be free and be mine!” To the least resourced, like newly freed slaves in a desert, he says: “Become the centerpiece of my vision for the world!”

The Cadence of Name and Affirmation

The pattern of God is to not just to form inanimate objects, but to name them. The word and language forms identity. God also uses his words to evaluate what has been formed. To give judgement on the nature of his creation. The repeated rhythm of Genesis 1 is a cycle of declaring things good.

He speaks and something is formed.

He names what has been formed.

He affirms its goodness.

A Difference of Existence

This passage also confronts our notion of what the world is and even the nature of existence. Our Western minds imagine existence within the material, the property, the elements, the substance that simply is.

The cultures and people groups of the ancient world believed existence wasn’t rooted in material, but by virtue of having a function in an orderly system. For us, existence is material. Something exists when there’s something. The beginning is dated to matter.

However, this passage is built on a world view that existence is rooted in function, or purpose. Existence is ontological not material.

While this isn’t our gut reaction to existential curiosities, we can understand this concept. In fact, ontological existence is expressed in our world constantly. Imagine a building gets purchased in your city, those who purchase it put up a sign that says something hip like “The Boy and the Lamb”. Later you see ovens, stoves, plates, silverware, and all those sorts of things brought into that building. And then it sits there.

We wouldn’t walk by and say, “That’s a restaurant!” It could be one day. But it isn’t a restaurant. It’s a building with equipment. It has a sign. but it isn’t anything yet. The space doesn’t serve food, doesn’t have a chef, and doesn’t have a menu. Nothing is getting cooked and nothing is being eaten. It exists materially, but it doesn’t exist yet.

However, when the chef unlocks the door, prints the menus, and pours olive oil on the skillet and begins to chop, and the waiters seat guests and take their order and the food comes out…then you say: “This is a restaurant.” In fact, their social media will likely post something like, “Grand Opening”. Every future year it will be that date that the owners celebrate as the restaurant’s anniversary. It wont be the day they signed the lease or purchased the industrial oven. Existence is brought through enacted intentional function.

Meaning, we are more than flesh and blood. We are more than specks on a rock hurling through the world. Our existence and everything we see and touch is brought about through and for a purpose.²

The creation of the world isn’t a vanity project like the temples the Israelite slaves built for Pharaoh. The creation of the world wasn’t something for God to tinker with like a hobby or fashioned like a child randomly placing lego pieces on top of each other. God formed the world with intentional purpose.

Therefore our curiosities with these opening lines are not well suited for knowing when and how matter came about but for what kind of purpose is God bringing into existence. “Why does everything exist?” is a better question than when.

What is God Making?

He’s forming a cosmic sanctuary of praise.

The creation narrative is the image of God forming, shaping, and molding a world into the function of endless worship. And so, all things — day and night, stars, water, trees, animals, birds, and fish—are brought into functional existence and purpose to declare the marvelous riches, goodness, and love of God.

This is an architect narrative of appointing, ordering, and carefully places colors, shapes, and light for maximum joy and adoration. In fact, it' follows multiple temple and dedication ceremonies throughout the Old Testament. Notably the instructions to build the tabernacle and then the temple which are filled with detailed instructions and descriptions of artisans, carpenters, and masons molding and fashioning raw material into visual displays of God’s character and actions. Things like, take this wood, and make it into poles that hold up a canopy. Fashion out of gold these things. Chisel these stones into that platform. In each temple narrative and inauguration there are three consistent elements.

1. The careful ordering of things by the king or ruler. There’s detailed vision for maximum impact for worship.

2. There is delegation and inspection. The king uses his words to make and form and then he inspects to see if the results are “good.”

3. Roles or purpose given to people, families, artists, and even objects. "This plate will hold the bread, or these stones will form the alter.

In Genesis 1, The written words are declaring, God formed the heavens and the earth as a temple. He calls each thing, forms into an order, inspects it and names it good, and puts it in place for praise. He’s inaugurating the universe as a theater of worship.

The entire Hebrew Bible speaks to this. The default assumption of each writer is that the world and all that is in it is a temple to God’s marvelous character, ability, and work. For example, Psalm 148:

Praise the Lord from the heavens;
praise him in the heights above.
Praise him, all his angels;
praise him, all his heavenly hosts.
Praise him, sun and moon;
praise him, all you shining stars.
Praise him, you highest heavens
and you waters above the skies.

Let them praise the name of the Lord,
for at his command they were created,
and he established them for ever and ever—
he issued a decree that will never pass away.

Praise the Lord from the earth,
you great sea creatures and all ocean depths,
lightning and hail, snow and clouds,
stormy winds that do his bidding,
you mountains and all hills,
fruit trees and all cedars,
wild animals and all cattle,
small creatures and flying birds…

Creation Sings

Everything is intended to declare his constant worth to be adored for his glory and his goodness.

There isn’t a single atom, a single inch of earth, and single drop of water within the ocean that doesn’t declare “God is good.”

Not only that, but every mountain, crashing wave, furry animal—truly every molecule in the universe—was placed there so you and I and all humanity might declare generation after generation the goodness and glory of God.

All things were created so that all people might declare for all of time the goodness and glory of God.

The Webb Telescope causes us to consider incredible truths through each image we see of the cosmos beyond the reach of any human eye into the curvature of the universe itself.³ Images like the one below stun us.

Everything we’re seeing and everything that fills us with wonder, was created by God with utmost confidence it would forever declare his glory. And God was right.

It’s more miraculous than we imagine. Each of these stars was placed there by God millions of years ago with his sovereign knowledge that one day in 2025 humanity would build something that they might see deep into the heavens and in seeing it, you and I might notice the living God and rejoice.

This is what is the Psalmist is amazed by when they wrote Psalm 19:1-4:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.

They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

In the creation of the universe, God has made a temple of rejoicing so intricate the call to worship is under a microscope and so majestic its benediction is through the telescope.

Here’s what was crucial to the first listeners in the desert and for us, too: There isn’t amount of chaos, darkness that God has disregarded as unusable…on the contrary, it’s be brought into existence as praise to him.

Here’s what else is crucial for our understanding: God’s first words to the people in the desert is to orient them on the things of God and God’s first words to us, in this broken and disoriented world are about God and what he can do.

Not a chat about what God will do for you. Not a description of how awesome you are. No he begins: When the world was wild and waste, before you were worried about anything, before anything had hurt your feelings, before any trauma ever occurred in your life: I was there and I made everything you see and brought it into existence because I’m glorious and worthy of all praise and honor. I’m the author of goodness.

The origins of joy is coming into contact with that God.

God of Delight

Some of us have the image of an angry, petty, and self-absorbed God. Others, have the image of an insecure God who simply wants to be appreciated, and liked and exists to make us happy and comfortable as long as we tell God we like him.

The first image of God in the Bible is that of an artist who has completed their masterpiece. It’s a contented garden sitting beside his newly tilled and planted vegetable bed. It’s the image of a musician who has just strung the final chord on the performance of a lifetime. God is delighted in what he’s made.

Again, the Hebrew poetry builds on this, when Psalm 104:31“May the glory of the LORD continue forever! The LORD takes pleasure in all he has made!”

God is filled with joy—taking pleasure in all he has made.

This isn’t survival of the fittest. Life isn’t a chaotic clump of cells. It isn’t us trying to create meaning. Existence isn’t about putting your head down and hoping it will get better. No, the story is: God formed all things into the purpose of endless praise and he is happy with it.

1. This is the same word to describe the wanderings of the people of Israel in the desert after being redeemed out of Egypt. They were in the “Tohu Va-Vohu”.

2. Oxford mathematician rightly states that the conflict is not between science and faith, but between fundamentalist materialism and faith. Christians believe in the material, we just don’t believe everything is only material. In fact atheism, or naturalism, takes the first and greater leap of “faith” that materialism is an assumed “a priori” fact. But how?

3. See all the images from Webb from NASA.