Telling a Better Story: Beginning in the Beginning

© 2021 Elbe Spurling

© 2021 Elbe Spurling

What if God wasn’t Lonely? Taking another look at the “Beginning”

Like I said in this post, if you ask most people where the Bible starts, and what happens at the beginning, they would probably say it begins with Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The story begins, we think, with a lonely God creating a beautiful world, filling it with creatures including humans, and they enjoy each other for a period of time before the story goes sideways, as the humans “fall away” from God by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. From there on out it becomes a story of God’s perfection, human brokenness, and the humans trying to make their way back to a God who refuses to accept them in their imperfection. But what if that’s not actually where the story begins? If it had a different beginning, might we end up understanding the whole story differently? And what if there’s a starting point that gives us a more detailed picture of what’s happening “in the beginning”?

Before I show you what I’m talking about, I want you to imagine something: When you picture the God of the Genesis story creating, what image(s) come to mind?  Do you picture God looking like Gandalf from Lord of the Rings in a bad mood?  The image above shows how God is depicted in The Brick Bible, an illustrated Bible done completely in Lego! 

Leslie Newbigin said that "the ordinary Christian in the Western world who hears or reads the word 'God' does not immediately and inevitably think of the Triune being--Father, Son, and Spirit. They think of a supreme monad." [Leslie Newbigin, Missionary Theologian--A Reader.]

When you think about God creating, do you picture one of these images of God just flinging things out into the cosmos like, “Oh, this is fun”?  Or perhaps another image comes to mind.  But how we picture God shapes how we see God, who we believe God is, and what we think about God.  So it is important for us to consider and be aware of what comes to mind when we imagine God in action and think about God’s heart and posture toward us.

If we want to read the story from its true beginning, there are a few places we will look before we get to Genesis chapter 1. Once we see this, the story unfolds even more beautifully than before. 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

You’ve probably read, heard, and been perplexed by these words. That is the line found in the Gospel of John, chapter 1. The author of the Gospel of John is using that Genesis language deliberately, to invoke in our minds the story of Creation. He’s pulling back the curtain to tell us what is going on in Genesis 1, and Who is doing the creating.  In a way, John is trying to get our minds to re-understand what's going on in Genesis 1.  He's saying that there's something before the beginning that needs to be held onto--a new starting point.  My friend Baxter says, “Genesis 1:1 is true, but in John's mind it's not quite true enough.  There's another layer of truth that needs to be held onto.”  John wants us to see what is really going on there, so he says, “In the beginning was the Word.” 

The word for “Word” in its original form in Greek is logos.  So we could read this as “In the beginning was the logos.”  Logos is where we get our word “logic.”  It means structure.  It means order.  Generally speaking, when the Greeks talked about “universe” they had this idea that there was a logic, that there was this ultimate abstract mind behind the universe.  And they called that logos.  So what John is doing here is connecting what the Greeks believed about the “universe” in the beginning to the logos—he connects that they are the same thing.  Then, John says, “Well, that Logos—the logic of the universe—it's personal. It's in relationship.”

Now, John also tells us that, “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” * (John 1:14).   So what is John doing to the Greek mindset?  He's saying, “This universe idea you have, it became a human.”  And what is he doing to the Jewish mindset, because he’s messing with that, too?  For the Jews, Logos represented the Word and the Word for them was the Law, or the Pentateuch, those 613 different laws in the Old Testament. 

John tells us, “In the beginning was the Logos (the Word) and the Word was with God,” (John 1:1).  The word translated here in English as “with” is the Greek word pros.  In the English language, “with” can be kind of weak and diluted.  For example, sometimes when I am talking with my wife, my brain goes off to some distant place as she is saying something.  She will look at me and ask, “Where did you go?”  But what does she mean?  I didn't go anywhere.  I'm sitting right next to her.  So what is she really saying?  “You're not present to me anymore. Emotionally, mentally, you went somewhere else.”  So this idea of pros in Greek isn't just “with” in this weak, diluted sense.  It actually means face-to-face, an intimate relationship and communion.  So we understand it as, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God—face-to-face, in relationship, in communion and connection.”  John describes this intimacy that we don't really know how to talk about because face-to-face can feel a little awkward to us.  (Try looking at another person’s eyes for just 10 seconds without looking away.)  But notice what John clarifies here, “...and the Word was God.”  He's not saying the Word was just with God as a separate being, but rather the Word was (is) God.   

What is God’s “Pronoun?”

So let’s go back to Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning, God created...”  In the original Hebrew, God is translated from Elohim and this word is actually plural.  Do you know why that matters?  If we were to translate this Scripture literally, it would translate to, “In the beginning, Gods,” with an “s” because the noun is plural.  So were the Jews polytheistic?  Did they believe in many gods?  No, they believed in one God, and yet they're using this plural word.  Then, we translate the word “created” from bara, which is actually a singular verb.  So we have a plural noun with a singular verb—a noun-verb disagreement.   “In the beginning, They creates,” sounds weird, doesn't it?  We wouldn’t say it that way in English, but that's what we see in Hebrew, because the author of Genesis understands that there are plurality and oneness working together that transcends our boundaries of language.  Then, John offers to fill out the picture a little bit more for us with what's going on here “in the beginning.”  This God who is in the beginning creating is also this multi-personal oneness somehow.

Let’s just take this all in for a minute.  We have these two pictures portrayed by these Scriptures.  Genesis 1 tells us that in the beginning, They created; and John 1 says that in the beginning, was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  The God in John 1 is the God that's doing the creating in Genesis 1 as this three-person oneness that we don't have language to talk about. 

We see this language coming into play a few verses later as well. Listen closely: 

God said, “Let the earth produce every kind of living thing: livestock, crawling things, and wildlife.” And that’s what happened. 25 God made every kind of wildlife, every kind of livestock, and every kind of creature that crawls on the ground. God saw how good it was. 26 Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.”

27 God created humanity in God’s own image,

        in the divine image God created them,

            male and female God created them.

Let us make humanity in our image. I don’t how many years I read right past that without noticing the significance of the plural language, and how it pulled the rug out from underneath my image of the solitary, lonely, white-haired ‘God”! 

Genesis is painting a picture for us of a relational being that creates more relationships as an overflow of their image, their imprint, their being.

A lack of glory? A lack of love? 

Speaking of verses that I had skipped right over for years, I remember one day when I saw for the first time what Jesus is saying in John 17, and what it reveals about God from the beginning. When I was growing up, I had heard that God created because God was lonely, and that God created us to “glorify Him”. Have you ever heard it framed that way? Think about that for a minute. If God created us because God was lonely, that’s a lot of pressure on us--to entertain a being of infinite loneliness! And if God created us to “glorify Him,” that kind of sounds like God is pretty insecure, like the parents who rest their identity on their child’s musical or athletic performance (which never happens, right?). Either way, that’s a lot of pressure!

But listen to what Jesus prays, as it’s recorded in the 17th chapter of the Gospel of John:  “Father, I glorified You on earth by finishing the work You gave Me to do.  Now, Father, glorify Me in Your presence with the glory I shared with You before the world was created” (John 17:4-5).  What does Jesus want us to see was going on before anything ever came into existence?  He calls it “glory.”  He says before anything was ever created there was glory that He and the Father shared.  Jesus says glory already existed in the very being of God from the beginning.  The glory Jesus shared with the Father before the world was.  So did God need to create us because there was a lack of glory?  Doesn’t sound like the primary reason God created was that there was an absence of glory or even that there wasn't enough glory.  Before anything was created, there was glory. 

Later on in Jesus’ prayer, we read this: “Father, I want those You gave Me to be with Me where I am. Then they can see My glory, which You gave Me because You loved Me before the foundation of the world.” (John 17:24) That doesn’t sound very lonely to me!

So there are glory and love in the beginning before anything was created.  God didn’t create to generate glory and love, or because God needed more of them, or because there was a lack of them—both already existed in God’s very being.

If God wasn’t lonely, and if there was already plenty of glory, then why would God create? That’s the question we’ll look at in a future post. For now, remember that from the beginning, God was not lonely or lacking glory, but rather God has always been a beautiful relationship, flow, dance of self-giving, always outpouring endless fountain of love! Which means there must be another reason (or set of reasons) that you exist.


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Reframing God’s Love Pt. 1—Why is sometimes hard to accept God’s love?

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A Story that Needs Reframing