Creation Story Bible Quotes

The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.

Pablito, the Bible was meant to be a bridge, not a wedge. It's the greatest love story ever told, about God's enduring and unconditional love for his creation--love beyond all reason. To understand it, you have to read it with love as the standard. Love God. Love your neighbor. Love yourself. Always remember that.

The gospel is unintelligible to most people today, especially in the West, because their own particular stories are remote from the story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation that is narrated in the Bible. Our focus is introspective and narrow, confided to our own immediate knowledge, experience, and intuition. Trying desperately to get others, including God, to make us happy, we cannot seem to catch a glimpse of the real story that gives us a meaningful role.

Contrary to what many of us are told, Israel’s origin stories weren’t designed to answer scientific, twenty-first-century questions about the beginning of the universe or the biological evolution of human beings, but rather were meant to answer then-pressing, ancient questions about the nature of God and God’s relationship to creation.

the whole Bible is itself a missional phenomenon. The writings that now comprise our Bible are themselves the product of and witness to the ultimate mission of God. The Bible renders to us the story of God's mission through God's people in their engagement with God's world for the sake of the whole of God's creation. The Bible is the drama of this God of purpose engaged in the mission of achieving that purpose universally, embracing past, present and future, Israel and the nations, "life, the universe and everything," and with its centre, focus, climax, and completion in Jesus Christ. Mission is not just one of a list of things that the Bible happens to talk about, only a bit more urgently than some. Mission is, in that much-abused phrase, "what it's all about.

Every book is an alchemical creation, and I'm thinking back to 1857 when Herman Melville arrived in Greece and saw the Parthenon for the first time sitting there like a great beached whale, its big white bones exposed to the winds. But how can this happen? How can a whale turn into a building? Or into a book? In what way can words be alive?

God first appeared on the scene of human history in the role of a matchmaker. What a profound and exciting revelation! Is it too much to suggest that Eve came to Adam on the arm of the Lord Himself in the same way that a bride today walks down the aisle of the church on her father’s arm? What human mind can fathom the depth of love and joy that filled the heart of the great Creator as He united the man and woman in this first marriage ceremony? Surely this account is one among countless indications that the Bible is not a work of merely human authorship. Moses is generally accepted as the author of the creation record. But apart from supernatural inspiration, he would never have dared to open human history with a scene of such amazing intimacy—first between God and man, and then between man and woman.

Oftentimes, a truth is so big, so far beyond our understanding, that the only way we can grasp it is through a story. The creation of the whole universe is like that. How can our puny brains contain it?

The biblical account of Noah's Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend. Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine?

How convinced are you that man was created in the image of God when you can't see the image of God?

readers. The story of the Bible is creation, fall, and then covenant community—page after page of community—as the context in which our wonderful redemption takes place.

As we read the Bible, we see that God's role is not that of a scientist managing robots. Neither is God a frustrated artist who left an incomplete work and chose to start an altogether different one. Throughout the biblical testimonies, God is an involved character who loves relentlessly, judges fairly, and joins wholly in ongoing relationship with creation. The Bible itself has a "to be continued" ending, and God is to be understood as continuing in the action of the drama. God still partners with people today in an ongoing story of renewal.

But the [Eden] story takes a dramatically different turn: it tells of the couple succumbing to fear, blame, and the will to power, which from Cain and Lamech to today continues to engulf the world.

Louie dug out the Bible that had been issued to him by the air corps and mailed home to his mother when he was believed dead. He walked to Barnsdall Park, where he and Cynthia had gone in better days, and where Cynthia had gone, alone, when he’d been on his benders. He found a spot under a tree, sat down, and began reading. Resting in the shade and the stillness, Louie felt profound peace. When he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save him. He was not the worthless, broken, forsaken man that the Bird had striven to make of him. In a single, silent moment, his rage, his fear, his humiliation and helplessness, had fallen away. That morning, he believed, he was a new creation. Softly, he wept.

For in that perfect garden when one day entered sin, An animal was murdered for garments made of skin. When figs of human effort produced religious strife, The Father tailored clothing for Adam and his wife.

About 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off Noah’s ark. According to the United Nations Population Growth Statistics, the world’s population grows at about .47% per year. That is the growth rate for all civilizations who kept records. Suppose you put $8.00 in the bank 4,400 years ago and received .47% a year. How much money would you have? What a coincidence! It would be about $7,000,000,000. That’s kind of odd, because 4,400 years ago 8 people stepped off the ark and now we have about 7,000,000,000 people on planet earth. God’s math works! Compound interest is something we teach to seventh-graders. You don’t have to be a professor to figure this out. A twelve-year-old can do the calculation. Ask any seventh-grader, the algebraic equation looks like this: A=P (1+r/n)t . . . where "A " is the ending amount (about 7,000,000,000 in this case), "P " is the beginning amount (8 in this case), "r " is the interest rate (.47% in this case), "n " is the number of compoundings a year (1 in this case), and "t " is the total number of years (4,400 in this case).

One of the reasons there are so many bitter, disenfranchised people who are angry at the church is because of bad theology. It’s really, really important to separate your theology of the kingdom from the church. These are two separate, autonomous entities. Yes, there is overlap and the lines blur and bleed, but they are two different ideas. Jesus’ ultimate goal for the universe is the kingdom, not the church. The kingdom is where the renewal of all things takes place. Where Eden is restored. Where the entire creation is made new.[1] The story of the Bible ends with heaven crashing into earth. The kingdom is a huge, elephantic theology with layers and texture and depth and dimensions. The problem is that most people erase or ignore the theology of the kingdom. In doing so, they pin all their hopes and dreams on the church. These unrealistic expectations are way too much to bear for the frail shoulders of God’s bride. She was never designed to bear the weight of changing the world, much less perfection. I hear people say things like, “The church is God’s plan to save the world.” No, it’s not. Jesus is God’s plan to save the world. He is bringing his kingdom crashing into this present age, and he is saving the world. Yes, the church is part of God’s plan to save the world. That is very true. We are the body of the Messiah. Meaning, we are the arms and legs, the appendages, the extensions of Jesus to the world. We join and partner and work with him for the kingdom; but he is the one saving the universe, not us.

Certainly the rise of the Christian fundamentalist movement was not a recovery of the Christianity of earlier centuries or of the apostolic church. It was a thoroughly modern phenomenon, a strange and somewhat poignantly pathetic attempt on the part of culturally deracinated Christians, raised without the intellectual or imaginative resources of a living religious civilization, to imitate the evidentiary methods of modern empirical science by taking the Bible as some sort of objective and impeccably consistent digest of historical data. It is of course absurd to treat the Bible in that way—though, frankly, no more absurd than thinking that “science shows that God does not exist”—but it is also most definitely not the way the Bible was read in the ancient or mediaeval church. The greatest Church Fathers, for instance, took it for granted that the creation narratives of Genesis could not be treated literally, at least not in the sense we give to that word today, but must be read allegorically—which, incidentally, does not mean read as stories with codes to be decrypted but simply read as stories whose value lies in the spiritual truths to which they can be seen as pointing.

We can begin to focus on the eternal if we live to love God and others (the Jesus Creed), if we pursue justice as the way we are called to love others as God’s creations, if we live out a life that drives for peace as how loving people treat one another, and if we strive for wisdom instead of just knowledge or bounty.

The number 6 was the first perfect number, and the number of creation. The adjective "perfect" was attached that are precisely equal to the sum of all the smaller numbers that divide into them, as 6=1+2+3. The next such number, incidentally, is 28=1+2+4+7+14, followed by 496=1+2+4+8+16+31+62+124+248; by the time we reach the ninth perfect number, it contains thirty-seven digits. Six is also the product of the first female number, 2, and the first masculine number, 3. The Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus of Alexandria (ca. 20 B.C.-c.a. A.D. 40), whose work brought together Greek philosophy and Hebrew scriptures, suggested that God created the world in six days because six was a perfect number. The same idea was elaborated upon by St. Augustine (354-430) in The City of God: "Six is a number perfect in itself, and not because God created the world in six days; rather the contrary is true: God created the world in six days because this number is perfect, and it would remain perfect, even if the work of the six days did not exist." Some commentators of the Bible regarded 28 also as a basic number of the Supreme Architect, pointing to the 28 days of the lunar cycle. The fascination with perfect numbers penetrated even into Judaism, and their study was advocated in the twelfth century by Rabbi Yosef ben Yehudah Ankin in his book, Healing of the Souls.

The most sensitive period of their developmental age, when the kids are supposed to be taught to question everything and nourish their reasoning skills, they are taught that God created the world in seven days – that the human race did not evolve from apes through millions of years, rather it came from the amorous congress between two God-made humans, named Adam and Eve. And if you ask why? The answers of the uneducated primordial teachers would be that the scriptures say so. And now if you ask, can’t the scriptures be wrong – do I have to take these stories literally? They would lash out with rage and shout at you – how dare you question the scriptures! Every single word in it is true. There is no greater truth than the truth of these sacred texts.

For Christians, the Trinity is the primary symbol of a community that holds together by containing diversity within itself. Another symbol of a unity that is not uniform might be the Bible itself, with its two creation accounts in the Book of Genesis, and four gospels, each with a strikingly different approach to telling the story of Jesus and his ministry. Church historians such as Margaret Miles point out that “Christianity is, and historically has been, pluralistic in beliefs, creeds, and liturgical and devotional practices in different geographical settings as well as over the 2,000 years of its existence.” The wonder is that this flexibility and diversity has often been considered more of an embarrassment than celebrated as one of the religion’s strengths.

God created the cosmos and everything in it. He created the earth so that he could be with the people he created. Unfortunately, the first two people — Adam and Eve — rejected God’s vision for his creation, causing sin to enter into their nature and thereby making them unfit for community with a holy God. The greatest pandemic ever experienced by humanity is the transference of this sin “DNA” to every generation.

According to a 2012 Gallup survey, only 15 per cent of Americans think that Homo sapiens evolved through natural selection alone, free of all divine intervention; 32 per cent maintain that humans may have evolved from earlier life forms in a process lasting millions of years, but God orchestrated this entire show; 46 per cent believe that God created humans in their current form sometime during the last 10,000 years, just as the Bible says. Spending three years in college has absolutely no impact on these views. The same survey found that among BA graduates, 46 per cent believe in the biblical creation story, whereas only 14 per cent think that humans evolved without any divine supervision. Even among holders of MA and PhD degrees, 25 per cent believe the Bible, whereas only 29 per cent credit natural selection alone with the creation of our species.1

I think of Christians who, having been raised to read the Genesis creation story as literal science and history, leave for college, watch the History Channel, or log onto the internet, and find out that fossils and radiometric dating are in fact not hoaxes. That’s how nice Christian college freshmen become atheists by Christmas break. If your faith can unravel that quickly, it’s enough to make you question whether your faith is worth the effort at all.

Which got Thomas thinking. What religious book was any better? The Holy Bible, full of power and poetry, was also filled with tall tales. Thomas had found them enthralling, but in the end they were all just stories, less important than the Sky Woman story, the manidoog at creation, the Nanabozho stories. To them all, especially the humorless book Elnath and Vernon had left, Thomas preferred their supernatural figure Nanabozho, who fooled ducks, got angry at his own butt and burnt it off, created a shit mountain to climb down when stuck high in a tree, had a wolf for his nephew, and no conscience at any time, who painted the kingfisher lovely colors and by trickery fed his children when they starved, who threw his penis over his shoulder and his balls to the west, who changed himself to a stump and made his penis look like a branch where the kingfisher perched, who killed a god by shooting its shadow, and created everything useful and much that was essential, like laughter.

There are two different stories of the creation of the world. There are two stories of the covenant between God and the patriarch Abraham, two stories of the naming of Abraham’s son Isaac, two stories of Abraham’s claiming to a foreign king that his wife Sarah is his sister, two stories of Isaac’s son Jacob making a journey to Mesopotamia, two stories of a revelation to Jacob at Beth-El, two stories of God’s changing Jacob’s name to Israel, two stories of Moses’ getting water from a rock at a place called Meribah, and more.

This means that a biblical attitude to this world can neither be one of simple affirmation nor of straightforward condemnation. Wherever Christians look in the cultural world, they will find Hart’s palimpsests: no social movement, no artefact, no text, no church, no performance, and no academic discipline is free from the violence, selfishness, delusion, and rebellion of sin, however “Christian” they might appear, and similarly nothing in culture is so full of these things that it can fully erase the goodness of the original creation.

When He wrote the Bible, God didn’t give us a ponderous theology book divided into sections labeled God, Creation, Man, Sin, and so forth. Instead, He gave us a story, a narrative that begins in eternity past and ends in eternity future. It’s a story about God and His dealings with all kinds of people and how they responded to His Word. As we read these narratives, we learn a great deal about God, ourselves, and our world, and we discover that our own personal story is found somewhere in the pages of Scripture. If you read long enough and honestly enough, you will meet yourself in the Bible.

Christ’s centrality in the plan of creation, and its restoration through redemption, is fundamental to understanding God’s plan and the end of the world. Angels and men received an intelligent and free nature. When I am told (by those who confuse predestination with God’s providence) that God already knows who will be saved and who will be damned, and therefore anything we do is useless, I usually answer with four truths that the Bible spells out for us: God wants that everyone be saved; no one is predestined to go to hell; Jesus died for everyone; and everyone is given sufficient graces for salvation.

I’ve concluded there are four chapters missing from the working Bibles of all too many Christians, and these missing chapters are not some obscure ceremonial texts or dusty corners of the royal chronicles. Instead, they are the very bookends of Scripture: the first two chapters of Genesis and the last two chapters of Revelation. And to miss these chapters—the first two about the creation, the second two about the new creation—is to miss the whole point of the biblical story. When these chapters drop out of our functional Bibles, our understanding of culture, power and salvation itself is badly weakened.

We have noted thatthe two creation stories contained no pointers toward male “headship” in the sense that men or husbands are supposed to exercise authority or leadership over women or wives. But the audience of Genesis knew that patriarchy was a reality of life. Genesis here tells them how this came to be. Male authority or domination was not God’s design but a consequence of a breakdown in relationship between humanity and God, between humanity and the animal world, and between human beings and one another. From now on, the Bible will assume the reality of patriarchy and of male headship, but it begins by noting that this came about only as a result of those various breakdowns of relationship.

There is no single text, perhaps, that is more consistently the object of humanist contempt than the book of Genesis. The creation of the cosmos in six days; Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Noah’s flood: here are stories that have long served as prime exhibits in the contention that religion is merely a farrago of childish nonsense. This is why Genesis can pretty much be guaranteed not to feature in round-ups of the ancient texts that humanists are prepared to acknowledge as influences. Yet humanists, no less than Jews or Christians, are indelibly stamped by it. In fact, if there is a single wellspring for the reverence they display towards their own species, it is the opening chapter of the Bible.

To add to the muddle, it seems that Americans are as ignorant and poorly educated about the particulars of religion as they are about science. A majority of adults, in what is supposedly the most religious nation in the developed world, cannot name the four Gospels or identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible.19 How can citizens understand what creationism means, or make an informed decision about whether it belongs in classrooms, if they cannot even locate the source of the creation story? And how can they be expected to understand any definition of evolution if they were once among millions of children attending classes in which the word “evolution” was taboo and in which teachers suggested that dinosaurs and humans roamed the earth together?

The Bible is in the end a single, great story that comes to a climax in Jesus Christ. God created the world and created us to serve and enjoy him and the world he had made. But human beings turned away from serving him; they sinned and marred themselves and the creation. Nevertheless, God promised to not abandon them (though it was his perfect right) but to rescue them, despite the guilt and condemnation they were under and despite their inveterately flawed hearts and character. To do this, first God called out one family in the world to know him and serve him. Then he grew that family into a nation; entered into a binding, personal covenant relationship with them; and gave them his law to guide their lives, the promise of blessing if they obeyed it, and a system of offerings and sacrifices to deal with their sins and failures. However, human nature is so disordered and sinful that, despite all these privileges and centuries of God’s patience, even his covenant people—who had received the law, promises, and sacrifices—turned away from him. It looked hopeless for the human race. But God became flesh and entered the world of time, space, and history. He lived a perfect life, but then he went to the cross to die. When he was raised from the dead, it was revealed that he had come to fulfill the law with his perfect life, to offer the final sacrifice, taking the curse that we deserved and thereby securing the promised blessings for us by free grace. Now those who believe in him are united with God despite our sin, and this changes the people of God from a single nation-state into a new international, multiethnic fellowship of believers in every nation and culture. We now serve him and our neighbor as we wait in hope for Jesus to return and renew all creation, sweeping away death and all suffering.

In the beginning, according to the Doctrine of Hermopolis, there was water, darkness, formlessness, and hidden powers. This is how the ancients understood the primeval Chaos into which the ordered universe was inserted through the actions of the gods. The Hebrew Book of Genesis is merely a variant of pagan Egyptian mythology. The Hebrew God is just Amun, Atum, Ptah or Thoth by another name. He collects all of the powers of the Ogdoad or Ennead into himself, but all the same factors and ingredients are still at play, and there is absolutely no sign of science, mathematics or philosophy. Do you see that the Bible’s Creation myth is of a very familiar nature? If the Book of Genesis were taught alongside Egyptian Creation myths, which long preceded it and set the ground for it, all the believers in the Bible would see that it’s just another story, another myth, and that Yahweh, the Hebrew God is no more real than any of the Egyptian deities. If Yahweh goes, so does his “son” – Jesus Christ! Christianity is just a myth cobbled together from Egyptian, Greek and Persian sources. It’s amazing how Abrahamists are unable to see that their entire religion is in fact derived from the pagan Egyptians.

One could not imagine a process more open to the elephantine logic of the Bible-smasher than this: that the sun should be created after the sunlight. The conception that lies at the back of the phrase is indeed profoundly antagonistic to much of the modern point of view. To many modern people it would sound like saying that foliage existed before the first leaf ; it would sound like saying that childhood existed before a baby was born. The idea is, as I have said, alien to most modern thought, and like many other ideas which are alien to most modern thought, it is a very subtle and a very sound idea. Whatever be the meaning of the passage in the actual primeval poem, there is a very real metaphysical meaning in the idea that light existed before the sun and stars. It is not barbaric; it is rather Platonic. The idea existed before any of the machinery which made manifest the idea. Justice existed when there was no need of judges, and mercy existed before any man was oppressed. The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child. In creative art the essence of a book exists before the book or before even the details or main features of the book; the author enjoys it and lives in it with a kind of prophetic rapture. He wishes to write a comic story before he has thought of a single comic incident. He desires to write a sad story before he has thought of  anything sad. He knows the atmosphere before he knows anything. There is a low priggish maxim sometimes uttered by men so frivolous as to take humour seriously a maxim that a man should not laugh at his own jokes. But the great artist not only laughs at his own jokes; he laughs at his own jokes before he has made them.

You, then, are very much at play in the Kingdom, like a child in a sandbox. And each event that arises for you need not be judged. I have shared with you many times that it is the egoic mind that compares and contrasts. Therefore, never compare or contrast your experience with another person’s. Yours is unique. And though the world would say, perhaps, that your experience is not as valuable because you are only worth twenty thousand dollars and somebody else is worth four hundred million, therefore, they have manifested more powerfully, that is simply not true. For manifestation is simply the expression that reveals where the mind has been focusing. The real power is the very mystery that anything can be manifested at all. And you are free to constantly choose anew. Cultivate, then, a very childlike attitude toward all of your experience. Learn to ponder it, to wonder about it, to look upon it like a father does to a child, like your Father does to you: Behold, I have created all things and it is good! In your Bible in the creation story that is told there, it is said that God said something like that. For God looked upon all that She had created and said, “Behold, it is very good!” You are the father of your creations. You are the father of your thoughts, your attitudes, and your choices. Look upon all of these things and say, “Behold, it is very good.” For goodness begets goodness. Judgment begets judgment. For nothing can produce except that which is like itself. An acorn cannot produce a fish. A man and a woman cannot produce an acorn. The thoughts you hold about yourself will reproduce themselves. When you look upon all things as good, goodness will be begotten from that decision. Each time, then, that you have chosen to hold a negative thought about yourself, or about anyone, you have only insured the kind of inconsistency in your mind that interrupts the power of your ability to create, more and more, as a living embodied master. This can only be because you have held deep within the mind some belief that says, “No matter what I do, it won’t work out.” There is some conflicted belief. A belief in goodness and a belief in evil create a conflict that must entrap the soul.

The first claim of the Bible, then, setting the stage for marriage, is that manhood and womanhood are not our own cultural constructs. Human concepts are too small and artificial a context for the glory of our sexuality. Manhood and womanhood find their true meaning in the context of nothing less than the heavens and the earth, the cosmos, the universe, the entire creation. That is the first claim of the biblical love story.

CREATION-FALL-REDEMPTION-CONSUMMATION IS NOT THE GOSPEL Many Christians have outlined the story of the Bible using the four words creation, fall, redemption, consummation. Actually that outline is a really good way to summarize the Bible’s main story line. God creates the world, man sins, God acts in the Messiah Jesus to redeem a people for himself, and history comes to an end with the final consummation of his glorious kingdom. From Genesis to Revelation, that’s a great way to remember the Bible’s basic narrative. In fact, when you understand and articulate it rightly, the creation-fall-redemption-consummation outline provides a good framework for a faithful presentation of the biblical gospel. The problem, though, is that creation-fall-redemption-consummation has been used wrongly by some as a way to place the emphasis of the gospel on God’s promise to renew the world, rather than on the cross.

The other goal was to prohibit teaching of evolution. The Klan backed a new law in Tennessee that made it a crime for a public school teacher to explain “any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.

There is another reason I’m starting with God’s goodness. It’s where the Bible starts. Before the world existed, God existed, which means love and goodness have always been, and will always be. And to emphasize this point, the creation narrative declares, over and over again, “God is good. God is good. God is good.” When I tell kids the creation story from Genesis 1–2, I tell it like this: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. There had been nothing at all, and God’s Spirit hovered over the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.” God spoke and there was… Light and dark. Day and night. God spoke and sky and land were made. God spoke and plants were made. The sun, moon, and stars. God spoke and land animals, birds, and ocean creatures were made. Every time, God says just a word and things are made. God can create with just Their voice. God speaks, and there is goodness all around. We know it’s good because there used to be chaos, but God gave things order. There used to be emptiness, but God started filling it up. For the people who first knew God and gave us God’s story in the Bible, these were clues that led to a very important truth.

As Augustine intimates in On Christian Teaching, “the deepest of philosophical chasms, the distinction between subject and object is itself an illusion born of sin and not an inherent quality of reality.”42 It is born of the sin that reduces love to mastery, praise to possession, and creation to calculation.

God’s act of salvation in Exodus hearkens back to God’s act of creation in Genesis, when God separated the waters on the second and third days of creation. Saving Israel is a divine act of “re-creation.

This theme has a lot of moving parts. The bottom line is that when God saves Israel, it is an “act of creation”—or perhaps better, “an act of re-creation.” To save is to re-create because to be saved is to start anew.

the Bible is more than a book of morality and religion. Fundamentally, it’s a narrative. It tells the Story of the world, from the creation to the new creation.

Biblical dramas do not follow the patterns of literary dramas because someone ’massaged’ the stories to make them fit. Rather, God has structured human nature and creation so that certain elements are present in all stories worth telling. If biblical dramas have the same structure as fiction, it is because art imitates life, not because the Bible imitates art.

To be a Christian includes, then, believing that the Bible does not simply offer one interpretation, among others, of the world in which we live and our role in it. To be a Christian means to believe that the world is the creation of the God of Israel, revealed decisively in Jesus Christ. It is also to believe that the Bible testifies faithfully to Jesus’ words and deeds, and thus reveals the nature and purposes of our Maker.

In a sense, then, the entire Bible is a story, with a beginning (creation), a crucial turn in the plot (human sin), a divine response (the people of Israel and, out of them, Jesus the Messiah), and an anxiously anticipated end (“a new heaven and a new earth”).

Why do you think God made the day of rest holy? Sunday is a lazy day for lots of families. When people rest, that’s often when they’re able to most clearly understand God and His loving messages. A PRAYER OF APPRECIATION FOR GOD’S CREATION Dear God, Thank You for creating the earth, the sky, the sea, and me. I’ll always put my trust in You—Your perfect love’s in all You do!

So now we still have to ask: Is the distinction between the image and what is intended to be expressed only an evasion, because we can no longer rely on the text even though we still want to make something of it, or are there criteria from the Bible itself that attest to this distinction?

The Bible is thus the story of God’s struggle with human beings to make himself understandable to them over the course of time; but it is also the story of their struggle to seize hold of God over the course of time.

Thus we can see how the Bible itself constantly readapts its images to a continually developing way of thinking, how it changes time and again in order to bear witness, time and again, to the one thing that has come to it, in truth, from God’s Word, which is the message of his creating act. In the Bible itself the images are free and they correct themselves ongoingly. In this way they show, by means of a gradual and interactive process, that they are only images, which reveal something deeper and greater.

John quite consciously took up here once again the first words of the Bible and read the creation account anew, with Christ, in order to tell us definitively what the Word is which appears throughout the Bible and with which God desires to shake our hearts. Thus it becomes clear to us that we Christians do not read the Old Testament for its own sake but always with Christ and through Christ.

20 Another difference is the role of women in creation. In an ancient context where men, rulers, and kings alone bore God’s image, the biblical story depicts a world in which men and women are created in God’s image.21 Among patriarchal societies, no other sacred text held such a high view of women as the Hebrew Bible.

As Christians we read Holy Scripture with Christ. He is our guide all the way through it. He indicates to us in reliable fashion what an image is and where the real, enduring content of a biblical expression may be found. At the same time he is freedom from a false slavery to literalism and a guarantee of the solid, realistic truth of the Bible, which does not dissipate into a cloud of pious pleasantries but remains the sure ground upon which we can stand. Our second realization was this: Faith in creation is reasonable.

this does not imply that the individual passages of the Bible sink into meaninglessness and that this bare extract alone has any value. They, too, express the truth—in another way, to be sure, than is the case in physics and biology. They represent truth in the way that symbols do—just as, for example, a Gothic window gives us a deep insight into reality, thanks to the effects of light that it produces and to the figures that it portrays.

In the Bible this thought goes still further. It lets us know that the rhythm of the heavenly bodies is, more profoundly, a way of expressing the rhythm of the heart and the rhythm of God’s love, which manifests itself there.

Creation

The Bible takes its place among the great mythologies of the ancients with their great creation stories, resurrections, and battles for the hearts and minds of the puny humans who they created. Their subjects are ordered not to think for themselves or question God under penalties of eternal suffering and punishment in hell.

Christianity teaches that the world is broken, and this brokenness is out fault. And the only way it can be fixed is through God's work. It's a work that only God can do and there are no other options. The biblical teaching is consistent on this point. This is not about the Bible being intolerant or sounding crazy. It's simply an ancient story stemming back to the creation, a story of one God who sent one Savior, Jesus, to be the way to relate to him and be in relationship with him.

The Bible opens with a poetic and stylized account of creation, but then comes another creation story. This story is set in a place, a garden in Eden, a region which, from the perspective of the teller, is in the east (Gen. 2: 8). Very few would seek to place Eden on a map, seeing it as belonging to the realm of myth, but it is noteworthy that it does reflect a geographical interest, both in the indication of the direction (‘ east’) and in the description of the river which flowed out of Eden, its four branches, and where they flowed (Gen. 2: 10–14). Similarly, the New Jerusalem, described almost at the end of the Bible (Rev. 21: 10–22: 5), would not be located on a map, but an awareness of what Jerusalem was actually like would help the appreciation of how different the New Jerusalem would be.

The ancient and mediaeval church had always acknowledged that the Bible ought to be read allegorically in many instances, according to the spiritual doctrines of the church, and that the principal truths of scripture are not confined to its literal level, which often reflects only the minds of its human authors. Origen, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine—all denied that, for instance, the creation story in Genesis was an actual historical record of how the world was made

All this was due in no small measure to the emergence in the ancient Near East of systems of writing (see on ‘Writing Systems’). Thanks to the Sumerians’ development of the cuneiform script to record their language, it is possible to know something of their stories of creation and flood which seem to have provided the pattern for other later accounts from widely scattered areas of the ancient Near East.

The other goal was to prohibit teaching of evolution. The Klan backed a new law in Tennessee that made it a crime for a public school teacher to explain “any theory that denies the story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.” The fear was that if evolution were accepted, it would imply that all people had a common origin. For the Klan, that meant there was “no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise,” as the Defender, a Black newspaper in Chicago, put it. A part-time science teacher and high school football coach, John T. Scopes, challenged the new law. William Jennings Bryan, the aging populist and former Democratic presidential nominee, was enlisted to take up the creationist cause in what became known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. Bryan withered in the summer heat of the outdoor courtroom in 1925, and melted under questioning about biblical literalism from his opponent, Clarence Darrow. The trial ended with a $100 fine of the high school science teacher. Bryan died five days later.

Shalom is “the webbing together of God, humans and all creation in equity, fulfilment and delight.”17

It is one thing for modern educated people to feel they must believe these old stories as factual when science proves otherwise. It is quite another for ancient people living before the dawn of scientific technology to venture clever but inevitably mistaken explanations. My guess is that many secular folks in our day take a dim view of biblical tales of a six-day creation, a universal flood, etc., blaming these stories for the oppressive use of them by religious leaders who ought to know better. But that’s not fair. Who, after all, scorns and ridicules the Greek or the Norse myths? No one, because no one catechizes us to believe these literally. They haven’t left a bad taste in our mouths. Nor should the myths of Genesis. If we could somehow visit the past and explain to the authors of Genesis the true origins of the earth and its life-forms, of languages, and of ethnicities, I suspect they would rejoice to learn the truth of the matter.

Jesus is shown healing the blind in Mark 8:22-26. This episode is especially remarkable in that it has Jesus employ common magical healing techniques ("Here's mud in your eye!"), something Matthew and Luke did not care for and so omitted. Equally notable is the fact that the healed man does not recover his sight all at once. Jesus has to try again before sight is fully restored. Some critics have understood this detail as symbolic of the two stages of the awakening of the disciples' faith. They see the truth clearly enough to heed Jesus' call to follow, and yet they have no understanding of his divine fate till the end. Their spiritual blindness, then, would have cleared up in two stages. If we accept this interpretation, we are pretty much saying Mark created the detail. [...] My guess is that it is a Markan creation, drawing upon magical techniques that were commonenough knowledge in order to make it seem authentic. He thought no more of having Jesus have to try again than he did of having him repent in baptism. His Christology was not "high" enough for any of this to be an embarrassment [...] Matthew would never have created such a story, true, but Mark saw nothing wrong with it.

The Old Testament begins with creation and tells the story of the Jewish people up to the time of Christ. It is made up of thirty-nine individual “books” (the book of Genesis, the book of Exodus, etc.) written by twenty-eight different authors and spans a period of over two thousand years.

The end of the story is not about individuals going to heaven but about a community reconciled to God, living together in a city: a communal life where humans have taken the good gifts of God’s creation and collaborated to build something new.

The weekly Sabbath was intended to jog Israel’s collective memory concerning God’s sufficiency and supply in the past and his promise concerning the future. They were to remember his work of creation as well as his work of redemption. It was to serve as an ever-present sign of loving relationship between God and his people.

Indeed, the Bible has been cast adrift from its moorings and left to float on a sea of modern relativity. The “play” of meanings in the stories is seen to be open-ended, and modern readers must construct their own interpretation. Rhoads and Michie thus call Mark “a literary creation with an autonomous integrity” existing independently from any resemblance to the actual person and life of Jesus. It is a “closed and self-sufficient world,” and its portrayals, “rather than being a representation of historical events, refer to people, places and events in the story” (1982:3-4).21

Professor Goldziher also shows, in his "Mythology Among the Hebrews," [99:5] that the story of the creation was borrowed by the Hebrews from the Babylonians. He also informs us that the notion of the bôrê and yôsêr, "Creator" (the term used in the cosmogony in Genesis) as an integral part of the idea of God, are first brought into use by the prophets of the captivity. "Thus also the story of the Garden of Eden, as a supplement to the history of the Creation, was written down at Babylon.

Many of the early Christian Fathers declared that, in the story of the Creation and Fall of Man, there was but an allegorical fiction.

it is not just the incarnation that reveals God by means of condescension. Any involvement of God in his world is an act of condescension. Further, that God humbles himself and interacts with his creation is the major plotline of the Bible and of each of the biblical stories.

only the last two chapters of Revelation are devoted to the new creation, although it is the goal toward which the biblical story is moving, and it is the implicit focus of every word of the biblical text. The trajectory of the biblical story is toward the new creation.

People were no longer concerned with understanding what a text said or what a thing was from the aspect of its fulfillment, but from that of its beginning, its source. As a result of this isolation from the whole and of this literal-mindedness with respect to particulars, which contradicts the entire inner nature of the Bible but which was now considered to be the truly scientific approach, there arose that conflict between the natural sciences and theology which has been, up to our own day, a burden for the faith.

The reasonableness of the universe provides us with access to God's Reason, and the Bible is and continues to be the true "enlightenment," which has given the world over to human reason and not to exploitation by human beings, because it opened reason to God's truth and love.

one like a son of man. In Aramaic and Hebrew the phrase “son of man” is simply a common expression to describe someone or something as human or humanlike. In Ezekiel, God often addresses the prophet as “son of man” to emphasize his humanness (e.g., Eze 2:6). coming with the clouds of heaven. In ancient Near Eastern literature clouds are often associated with the appearances of deities. In the OT it is Yahweh, the God of Israel, who rides on the clouds as his chariot (Ps 104:3; Isa 19:1). In Canaanite mythology Baal, the son of El, is described as “rider/charioteer of the clouds.” After doing battle with, and defeating, Yamm/Sea, Baal is promised an everlasting kingdom and eternal dominion. Some scholars see echoes of this story in Da 7:9–14. Others argue for a background in Mesopotamian cosmic conflict myths (such as the creation epic Enuma Elish and the Myth of Anzu), which depict a deity (Marduk and Ninurta, respectively) defeating the representative of chaos (Tiamat and Anzu, respectively) and regaining authority and dominion for the gods and for himself. Daniel’s vision has no conflict between the “one like a son of man” and the beasts. The interpretation in vv. 17–27, however, makes it clear that the “one like a son of man” in some way represents “the holy people of the Most High” (vv. 18, 22), who are in conflict with the “little horn” that arises out of the fourth beast (v. 8).

Meanwhile, it needs to be recognized, and talked about more frankly, that for philosophy the elephant in the kitchen is organized religion. More precisely, the understanding of human condition often foretold by the blending of science and religion is inhibited by the intervention of supernatural creation stories, each defining a separate tribe. It is one thing to hold and share the elevated spiritual values of theological religion, with a belief in the divine and trust in the existence of an afterlife. It is another thing entirely to adopt a particular supernatural creation story. Faith in a creation story gives comforting membership in a tribe. But it bears stressing that not all creation stories can be true, no two can be true, and most assuredly, all are false. Each is sustained by blind tribalistic faith alone. The study of religion is an essential part of the humanities. It should nonetheless be studied as an element of human nature, and the evolution thereof, and not, in the manner of Christian bible colleges and Islamic madaris, a manual for the promotion of a faith defined by a particular creation story.

The third act of the biblical story is the completion of God’s work of redemption, the culmination of his plan for his creation in the re-creation of all things in a new heaven and a new earth. Rather than destroying the earth and replacing it with a new earth, God plans to re-create the earth he had cursed.26 In the culmination of his plan of redemption in the eschatological state, God does not take his creatures to be with him; rather, he moves into their world. Rather than taking us to be with him in heaven, God will bring heaven to earth. The Creator will move into our neighborhood forever (Rev. 21–22).

The books called “Law” (or Pentateuch) have carried the account of God’s actions from creation to the borders of the promised land. That story is continued in the second main division of the Hebrew Bible: the “Prophets,” which is subdivided into “Former Prophets” and “Latter Prophets.” The Former Prophets consist of four books: Joshua, Judges, Samuel (later divided into 1-2 Samuel), and Kings (later divided into 1-2 Kings). Their record of divine activity spans nearly seven centuries from Joshua’s call to Jehoiachin’s release.

This is extremely significant. Knowing something of when the Pentateuch came to be, even generally, affects our understanding of why it was produced in the first place—which is the entire reason why we are dipping our toes into this otherwise esoteric pool of Old Testament studies. The final form of the creation story in Genesis (along with the rest of the Pentateuch) reflects the concerns of the community that produced it: postexilic Israelites who had experienced God’s rejection in Babylon. The Genesis creation narrative we have in our Bibles today, although surely rooted in much older material, was shaped as a theological response to Israel’s national crisis of exile. These stories were not written to speak of “origins” as we might think of them today (in a natural-science sense). They were written to say something of God and Israel’s place in the world as God’s chosen people.

At the same time as suggesting the language game we clearly do not have a change in the name of God as our only way to think in New Testament terms of an earth at peace. There is Jesus! It is very hard to attribute violence to the originator of the gospel, of the good news of God’s forgiveness and love, of divine healing and welcome. Despite the fact that people refer to his action in the temple in the last days of his life as an exceptional yet conclusive ‘proof’ of Jesus’ use of violence no serious bible scholar would look on these actions divorced from his whole ministry. And because of that we have to see them as a conscious and deliberate prophetic sign-action, taking control of the temple for a brief period to show how it stood in contrast to the direct relationship with God which he proclaimed, and to make the point with a definitive emphasis. The whip he plaits in John is used to drive the animals, probably with the sound of the crack alone. No one is attacked. No one gets hurt. And very soon the situation reverts to the status quo: the authorities take back control of the temple and decide on Jesus’ suffering and death in order to control him. Overall the event is to be seen as Jesus placing himself purposely and calculatedly in the cross-hairs for the sake of the truth, much rather than doing harm to anyone else. The consequences of his actions were indeed ‘the cross’, and supremely in the situation of crucifixion Jesus does not invoke retaliation on his enemies, or threaten those who reject redemption; rather he prays for their forgiveness. No, Jesus’ whole life-story makes him unmistakably a figure of transcendent nonviolence. The problem lies elsewhere, with the way the cross is interpreted within the framework of a violent God. It is unfathomably ironic that the icon of human non-retaliation, Jesus’ cross, gets turned in the tradition into a supreme piece of vengeance—God’s ‘just’ punishment of Jesus in our place. My book, Cross Purposes, is about the way this tradition got formed and it represents just one of a constant stream of writing, gathering force at the end of the last century and continuing into this, questioning how this could be the meaning of the central symbol of Christianity.2 I think the vigor of that question can only continue to grow, while the nonviolence of Jesus’ response must at the same time stand out in greater and greater relief, in its own right and for its own sake. And for that same reason the argument at hand, of ‘No-name’ for a nonviolent God, can only be strengthened when we highlight the nonviolence of Jesus against the traditional violent concept of ‘God’. Now

[gospel is that the] right and proper judgment of God against our rebellion has not been overturned; it has been exhausted, embraced in full by the eternal Son of God himself. . . . God uses words in the service of his intention to rescue men and women, drawing them into fellowship with him and preparing a new creation as an appropriate venue for the enjoyment of that fellowship. In other words, the knowledge of God that is the goal of God's speaking ought never to be separated from the centerpiece of Christian theology; namely, the salvation of sinners. This is certainly not elementary theologizing, but a grounding of even the very philosophy and understanding of human language in the gospel. The Word of the Lord (as we see in Jonah 1:1) is never abstract theologizing, but is a life-changing message about the severity and mercy of God. Why is this so important? First, in a time in which there is so much ignorance of the basic Christian worldview, we have to get to the core of things, the gospel, every time we speak. Second, the gospel of salvation doesn't really relate to theology like the first steps relate to the rest of the stairway but more like the hub relates through the spokes to the rest of the wheel. The gospel of a glorious, other-oriented triune God giving himself in love to his people in creation and redemption and re-creation is the core of every doctrine--of the Bible, of God, of humanity, of salvation, of ecclesiology, of eschatology. However, third, we must recognize that in a postmodern society where everyone is against abstract speculation, we will be ignored unless we ground all we say in the gospel. Why? The postmodern era has produced in its citizens a hunger for beauty and justice. This is not an abstract culture, but a culture of story and image. The gospel is not less than a set of revealed propositions (God, sin, Christ, faith), but it is more. It is also a narrative (creation, fall, redemption, restoration.) Unfortunately, there are people under the influence of postmodernism who are so obsessed with narrative rather than propositions that they are rejecting inerrancy, are moving toward open theism, and so on. But to some extent they are reacting to abstract theologizing that was not grounded in the gospel and real history. They want to put more emphasis on the actual history of salvation, on the coming of the kingdom, on the importance of community, and on the renewal of the material creation. But we must not pit systematic theology and biblical theology against each other, nor the substitutionary atonement against the kingdom of God. Look again at the above quote from Mark Thompson and you will see a skillful blending of both individual salvation from God's wrath and the creation of a new community and material world. This world is reborn along with us--cleansed, beautified, perfected, and purified of all death, disease, brokenness, injustice, poverty, deformity. It is not just tacked on as a chapter in abstract "eschatology," but is the only appropriate venue for enjoyment of that fellowship with God brought to us by grace through our union with Christ.

The answer to what we're looking for, fixing the world with love, has to be traced back to something, and we can only trace it back to the God who is love. If we dive into the rest of Genesis and say, "What is this 'day' nonsense? As modern people, we can't believe that," then we have already missed the point. God has revealed to us through Moses the foundations of our desire for love and we want to talk about matter? When we lie in bed at night, do we miss matter or do we miss love? We miss love.

The answer to what we're looking for, fixing the world with love, has to be traced back to something, and we can only trace it back to the God who is love. If we dive into the rest of Genesis and say, "What is this 'day' nonsense? As modern people, we can't believe that," then we have already missed the point.

the Book of Psalms is primarily a book of praise to God for His creation, mercy, and salvation. Even when life is hard, our enemies strong, and our health poor, God can be praised for life itself and the ultimate victory to come for those who trust Him.

Did you hear it? Can you picture the symmetry? Our God is a God of hospitality, creating a place for a people, a place where all life can flourish. God provides for all creation, as our Story shows. Our God is a God of order; we can trust God to provide for us now as in the beginning. “I know that it may not seem that way today, for here we are, exiles in a foreign land. Life is hard. We know that. And that is why we must tell each other the Story, and keep telling it, to do exactly what God has continually told us to do: remember . . . remember . . . remember.”[5]

Someone rightly said a closed mouth is a closed destiny! We must begin to speak out the word of God over our lives, family and circumstances. It is not enough to know the word, read it, and practice it. When it comes to praying God's word over our lives, we must open our mouth and SPEAK! Even God, our Maker, and the Creator of ALL things spoke things into existence. In Genesis 1, we see several accounts of God making declarations, commanding, speaking. “God said..." is a statement that is so common all through the bible; particularly in the story of creation.   So, what do you desire to create

Okay, so if the conscious energy is what we collectively refer to as God, what was the vessel?” “The collective immortal soul in its unified state prior to the Big Bang.” I closed my eyes, attempting to absorb everything I had just heard. “Well, then, organized religion sure screwed that creation story up. Chalk that one up to quantum physics.” “The primer of existence is communicated to every physical species, including yours. Humans were given the information 3,409 Earth years ago.” “Really? I’d love to see it. Is it buried somewhere?” “The information was encoded into the Old Testament’s original Aramaic, transcribed on Mount Sinai to the entity Moses. Fourteen centuries later, the information was decoded and recorded in the text referred to as the Zohar.” “So all those hokey Bible stories were just written as an excuse to encrypt the info contained in our owner’s manual? What are Adam and Eve supposed to represent?” “Protons and electrons—the male and female aspect of the atom.” “Nice. What about the creation of the world in six days?” “Six days refers to the bundle of six dimensions. The only creation is the vessel of the unified soul. The physical world is not the real reality. The physical world is the lucid dream where fulfillment must be earned.

The scriptures begin not with a set of principles or proverbs but with the voice of a narrator, a storyteller: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:1–2), and they end with a worshipful cry for the story of God to move to its next, dramatic chapter: “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:20). The Bible contains diverse literary forms and genres, but they are all enclosed in a grand narrative parenthesis. To the eye of faith, to be human is to be a creature, and to be a creature is to be enmeshed in the story of creation. A major theme in the theology of baptism, to name another place of narrative investment, is that through baptism Christians are gathered up into the identity of Jesus Christ, which means at least in part that we now see our lives in the shape and pattern of the story of Jesus. Jesus is, as Hebrews puts it, the “pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:2). He has blazed the trail ahead of us, and his story is now our story.

Genesis 1 and 2 don’t provide the Bible’s only creation story. Psalm 74 describes creation as well—as Yahweh’s victory over the forces of primeval chaos. Yahweh brought the world into order, making it habitable for humanity, his people as it were. The creation act as described in Psalm 74 was theologically crucial for establishing Yahweh’s superiority over all other gods. Baal was not king of the gods, as the Ugaritic story proclaimed—Yahweh was.

Will We Become Angels? I’m often asked if people, particularly children, become angels when they die. The answer is no. Death is a relocation of the same person from one place to another. The place changes, but the person remains the same. The same person who becomes absent from his or her body becomes present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5: 8). The person who departs is the one who goes to be with Christ (Philippians 1: 23). Angels are angels. Humans are humans. Angels are beings with their own histories and memories, with distinct identities, reflected in the fact that they have personal names, such as Michael and Gabriel. Under God’s direction, they serve us on Earth (Hebrews 1: 14). Michael the archangel serves under God, and the other angels, in various positions, serve under Michael (Daniel 10: 13; Revelation 12: 7). In Heaven human beings will govern angels (1 Corinthians 6: 2-3). The fact that angels have served us on Earth will make meeting them in Heaven particularly fascinating. They may have been with us from childhood, protecting us, standing by us, doing whatever they could on our behalf (Matthew 18: 10). They may have witnessed virtually every moment of our lives. Besides God himself, no one could know us better. What will it be like not only to have them show us around the intermediate Heaven but also to walk and talk with them on the New Earth? What stories will they tell us, including what really happened that day at the lake thirty-five years ago when we almost drowned? They’ve guarded us, gone to fierce battle for us, served as God’s agents in answer to prayers. How great it will be to get to know these brilliant ancient creatures who’ve lived with God from their creation. We’ll consult them as well as advise them, realizing they too can learn from us, God’s image-bearers. Will an angel who guarded us be placed under our management? If we really believed angels were with us daily, here and now, wouldn’t it motivate us to make wiser choices? Wouldn’t we feel an accountability to holy beings who serve us as God’s representatives? Despite what some popular books say, there’s no biblical basis for trying to make contact with angels now. We’re to ask God, not angels, for wisdom (James 1: 5). As Scripture says and as I portray in my novels Dominion, Lord Foulgrin’s Letters, and The Ishbane Conspiracy, Satan’s servants can “masquerade as servants of righteousness” and bring us messages that appear to be from God but aren’t (2 Corinthians 11: 15). Nevertheless, because Scripture teaches that one or more of God’s angels may be in the room with me now, every once in a while I say “Thank you” out loud. And sometimes I add, “I look forward to meeting you.” I can’t wait to hear their stories. We won’t be angels, but we’ll be with angels—and that’ll be far better. Will We Have Emotions? In Scripture, God is said to enjoy, love, laugh, take delight, and rejoice, as well as be angry, happy, jealous, and glad. Rather than viewing these actions and descriptors as mere anthropomorphisms, we should consider that our emotions are derived from God’s. While we should always avoid creating God in our image, the fact remains we are created in his. Therefore, our emotions are a reflection of and sometimes (because of our sin) a distortion of God’s emotions. To be like God means to have and express emotions. Hence, we should expect that in Heaven

God’s work in creation is a similar affair, and if there’s an encouraging aside to take from this story so far (a lesson that recurs throughout the Bible), it’s that God is drawn to the broken and neglected things, and does the miraculous with them.

What makes Israel’s God better than the other gods? For one thing, he is the true creator of the cosmos. In the stories of Israel’s ancient neighbors, creation is a group activity and involves, as we’ve seen, some sort of conflict among the gods—as in the Babylonian story Enuma Elish, where Marduk slices Tiamat in half to make the sky and the earth. In the biblical creation story, however, we see no conflict, no battle. Israel’s God acts alone and speaks things into existence.

Jesus, as I’ve been saying, was a surprise ending that could not be adequately expressed in the old language of Israel’s story. But these early followers of Jesus couldn’t toss out the script, nor would it remotely enter their minds to do so. Like Jesus himself, they were Jewish (at least most of them). Israel’s story was their story, and the God of Israel was the same God responsible for this surprise ending. Israel’s story was the only God-talk these Jewish followers of Jesus had available to them. So what did they do? They adapted and transformed their sacred story to serve the story of Jesus—the story of the future invading the present, of an executed and raised messiah, of a “new creation.

Just as all life begins with the gratuity of the unnecessary creation, all new life begins with the gratuity of Christ’s voluntary self-giving on the cross. Both creation and new creation are justified not by necessity but by love: nowhere in the Bible does it say that God so calculated profit and loss that he gave his only Son. The cross is not adequately explained by all that came before it, just as the creation of the universe is not adequately explained by all that comes after it. Both events are grounded in God’s freely given love.

As you’ll read in these stories, almost to a person these subjects were highly intelligent and educated people of science. But it wasn’t until after their NDE experience did they fully begin to understand the power of the super-conscious mind and its existence outside the human brain. The super-conscious mind is the source of all pure creativity. It is the super-conscious mind that is functioning at the creation of anything that is completely new in the universe. The super-conscious mind is tapped into and used by all the great inventors, writers, artists and composers of history on a regular basis, right up to the present day. Every great work of art or creativity is infused with super-conscious energy. Your super-conscious mind can access every piece of information stored in your conscious and subconscious minds. It can also access data and ideas outside your own experience, because it actually lies outside your human mind. This is why it is called a form of universal intelligence. You will often get ideas that come to you from far beyond you. It is not unusual for two people separated by thousands of miles of distance to come up with the same idea at the same time. When you are well-attuned to another person, such as your spouse or mate, you will often have thoughts identical to him or her at the same time during the day, and you will only find out that you had reached the same conclusion when you compare notes hours later. This is an example of your super-conscious mind at work. Sometimes when you are with other positive, goal-oriented people, your combined super-conscious minds will form a higher mind that you can all tap into. This is why, when you are involved in a conversation or listening to a lecture, ideas and inspirations will often leap into your mind that have no direct connection to what is being discussed. But those ideas and inspirations may be exactly what you need at that moment to move you forward on your journey. Because of your super-conscious powers, virtually anything that you can hold in your mind on a continuing basis, you can have. Emerson wrote, “A man becomes what he thinks about, most of the time.” Earl Nightingale wrote, “You become what you think about.” In the Bible it says that, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap.” And this law of sowing and reaping refers to mental states; to your thoughts. Of course, there is a potential danger in the use of your super-conscious mind. It is like fire - a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. If you use it improperly, and think negative, fearful thoughts, your super-conscious mind will accept your thoughts as a command and go to work to materialize them into your reality.

The doctrine of creation, as Terry Eagleton points out, is a “salve for humanist arrogance” because if the world is not “our possession, to be molded and manipulated how we please” but is the creation of God, then its “material density and autonomy must be respected.