One God and Creator of All…But What About…..?

The fifth biblical image of God that we will consider is that of God as Creator - and, more specifically, of God as the Creator of all, all that is, all that ever was, and all of whatever shall be.

Now, it might seem strange that this image of God as Creator was not the first image we considered much less the fifth. The Bible, as most of us know from picking it up, tells us on the first page: “In the beginning God created…” So why didn’t we begin with this image of God?

First, we are attempting to approach the biblical images of God in a way which may reflect how they chronologically developed out of the experiences of the people who composed the scriptural books. Trying to see when these images may have developed and/or evolved will help us understand why they did so, and what they may have actually meant to those who first, in light of their experiences, wrestled with these images. Coming to a deeper understanding and appreciate of this history may grant us a greater sense of what these images may mean for us in our own time and, perhaps more importantly, what they most definitely are not about or what they question about current popular but questionable beliefs.

Second, though this is not directly related to our particular pursuit today, the books of the Bible - as we are most accustomed to having them arranged - are not chronologically ordered. The Bible can not be read through as either a chronological sequencing of events nor as a timeline of compositional development. This may come as a surprise to many - and some may even find such a claim shocking but, the first words presented to us in our Bibles were composed very late in the game and they were composed for reasons which reflected realities of the time they were composed. Understanding those realities will help us in understanding why the image of God as Creator of all had implications for the developing beliefs of biblical people and, indeed, for our own developing understandings and the implications of maintaining belief in a God who is the Creator of all. The biblical witness suggests that the image of God as Creator took on special significance at a time when the people of Israel, due to geo-political circumstances, found themselves increasingly confronted and exposed to the images of gods which other peoples claimed.

In about 587 BCE, the great majority of Israel’s religious and cultural elites were forcefully exiled to the land of Babylon. The Babylonian Empire, whose center was in the general vicinity of modern-day Baghdad in Iraq, had been militarily addressing Israel’s opposition to its rule for about twenty years when they decisively ended such rebellion which not only razed the walls of Jerusalem but also resulted in the mass deportation of many Israelis. To help assure their dominance over the Jewish people, the great Temple of Solomon, which having stood in the center of Jerusalem for almost 500 years, was utterly destroyed. The destruction of temples was a means by which a conquering country inflicted shame and embarrassment upon the weak impotence of other people’s gods. For the Jews, the destruction of the Temple represented a devastating blow to their very identity as a people. These events are what brought about that chapter in Israel’s history known as the Babylonian Captivity.

Among other things, this exile in Babylon - which lasted not quite fifty years - immersed the people of Israel in a religious culture and among a people who radically challenged the foundational Jewish belief that there was but One God. Babylonian society was dominated by a more-or-less homegrown religion which was, at its heart, dualistic in nature. The great religions of the Persians - whose greatest bloom was Zoroastrianism - had an understanding of the universe as one which was caught up in a cosmic battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Creation itself was claimed to be the result of a mighty pre-cosmic fight between a good god and an evil god. Furthermore, the cosmology of Persian religion suggested that the matter of creation was little more than matter which had made up the evil god who had lost the primal battle at the beginning of history. The battle, however, was understood to be still going on and people were admonished to choose their side to fight on. The evil we experience in the world was easily explained as a continuing result of this battles between the gods. It was a very popular way of understanding the gods, creation, the world, and our place in it. This world view may also feel very similar to what passes for much of popularly conceived Christianity in the world today wherein the forces of a god are engaged in combat with the devil god and we are expected to choose which side we will fight on. However, as the exiled Jews concluded in their confrontation with these beliefs, such a cosmology is not biblical. Therefore, neither is it essentially Jewish or Christian.

Jewish contentions with these beliefs are first centered around the absolutely central biblical belief that there is but One God. The Shema, arguably the most central, and perhaps ancient, declaration of Jewish belief, recited daily by adherents of the faith, declares: “Hear, O Israel, Yahweh our God is One!” If there is but One God, and all that is derives from that One God, then it is only one short step to embracing the belief that all that is must derive from the heart of that God. The creation story, as outlined in the first chapter of Genesis, was likely composed during the Babylonian captivity as a ways of refuting the entire cosmology of Persian religion. It declares the One God as the source of all that is. It also refutes the notion that the matter of creation if somehow infected with traces of some primeval evil. “No!” the Jews claim. Instead, the One God looks upon the matter of creation with great delight declaring it all good, all so very good. However, this does seem to leave unaddressed the question and the experience of evil in the world and in our lives. Biblically speaking, in a relative short period of time, the Jewish faith and its further development and composition of scripture unashamedly wrestles down the implications of holding to a radical monotheistic faith. These will include, but are not limited to: 1) the embrace of a much fuller vision of universal wholeness; 2) the relegation of the problem of evil as an act of faith in accepting that the evil we experience in the fabric of creation is something which can be held and understood only in the heart of God; and, 3) there is a marked shift away from an exclusively tribal and nationalistic privileged status of being God’s chosen people to a status as instruments who share a vocation to witness to the loving light of God for the well-being of the whole world and all its peoples. These inspire the writings of the later disciples of the school of the prophet Isaiah, the literary work of the books of Jonah and Job, and the good news proclaimed in the person and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Each of these, can be readily identified as seeds in or the blooms of the various biblical images of we are and will continue to wrestle with.