What Happens When
God Speaks?
God called the light "day" and the darkness he
called
"night."
And there was evening, and there was morning the first day
(Genesis 1:5).
And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the
waters to separate water from water" (Genesis 1:6).
And God said, "Let
the water under the sky be gathered unto one place, and let dry ground
appear." And it was so (Genesis 1:9). Then God said, "Let the land
produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that
bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds" (Genesis 1:11).
As you read the above passages, what do you see happening? Are sound
waves doing something? Is God giving orders to angels and they are
doing something? Does the subject of each of the statements mean that
something appears and then God gives recognition to it? Is this just a
poetic expression that has no meaning and was not intended to describe
anything that is happening at all? I have had people give me all of
those answers to the question of what is going on when God says "Let
there be light," as well as references like it.
Process is an important question in discussions
about the Bible and
questions about the existence of God. The Bible does not portray God as
speaking everything into existence, because sometimes words like "God
formed man of the dust of the earth" appear in scripture sounding like
a direct physical manipulation. How literally we take the Bible is a
function of what we do with these differences, and many disagreements
about Genesis are rooted in the fact that people fail to think about
the methods that God has chosen to use to bring things into existence.
On top of all of these biblical questions is the
fact that as we look
at the natural world, we seemany cases where the evidence strongly
shows that natural processes produce the things that we see. Anyone who
has worked with coal for any period of time has come across the remains
of plants and the imprints of plants in the coal, implying that a
natural environment produced the coal. In today's world we see oil
produced in marine environments by a small form of life called a
diatom. These microscopic animals form a drop of oil in their bodies as
they live, and when they die they settle to the bottom of the ocean
taking their drop of oil and their skeletal material with them. The
skeletal material is called diatomaceous earth. When we drill oil wells
we very frequently find diatomaceous earth in the area where we find
oil. That leads petroleum geologists to believe that most if not all of
our oil is produced by a natural process we think we understand.
Similar evidence exists for mountains. We see mountains produced today
by volcanoes, by erosion, and by forces within the earth producing;
faults by compression and by stretching. As we look at mountains from
the pasts we see evidence of the same forces having produced them in
ancient times. It is obvious that if you believe in God, you believe
that God can create by any process that He chooses, but God is also
described in the Bible as incapable of lying, misleading, or deceiving
man and for God to place massive amounts of evidence falsely in the
ground knowing that honest seeking men and women would be misled is a
form of lying. God simply will not operate that way--it is
incompatible with His nature.
Even the question of light can be approached with an
eye as to whether
it is produced by natural processes or not. Today we know that all
light is produced by an acceleration of charge in one way or another.
In the Bible it appears that many references to light are actually
referring to energy; but in those cases where light is produced as the
opposite of darkness (see verses 3-4), the question arises as to what
did God do to accomplish what was done.
Speaking
cannot be a methodology and is in fact normally a form of
communication. There are those who believe that the sound waves
spoken
by God actually did the things that are being described. We have
already pointed out that God can function any way He likes, but He will
not mislead us. Sound waves are not physical material. All that sound
does is to change what is already there. In the Bible there are cases
where God speaks in a dream which is not actually sound, so the
reference may not even deal with sound waves per se. Sound does not
have an intelligence of its own, and the energy of a sound wave is not
its own energy, but gets its energy from that which produced it and
thus it is not creative or capable of intelligent action.
When sound waves are used, someone is communicating with someone else
in the natural world. In the Genesis account there are some verses
which clearly demonstrate that communication is taking place. The
statement let us create man in
our image, clearly is being
spoken for
purposes of communication. The whole purpose of the physical creation
is to communicate and demonstrate to receptive beings God's
communication (Ephesians
6:12; 3:16).
The fact that Genesis is Hebrew
poetry further supports the notion that the speaking references are for
communicative purposes. Poetry is for the benefit of those who listen,
not to explain complex scientific material. That does not mean that
poetry is in error. but the question becomes what was God trying to
convey and why was this style of writing chosen?
What
the message is provides the key to understanding. The obvious
purpose of Genesis I was to convey two messages to all who read
it: 1)God has created everything and 2) God has created man
specially in the image of God. There are secondary purposes in the
Genesis language. The fact that there was a beginning, that the
beginning was caused, and that God has created with purpose, logic, and
intelligence are also set clearly before the reader. There is a
sequence given to the creation and man's role is spelled out. The
spiritual history of man and the need that man has for salvation and
for reunification with his creator is clearly shown.
What is not given and not
intended by Genesis is a detailed explanation of the methods by which
God did the creating. God does not explain every thing that has lived
on this planet, and with some 26 million different forms of life known
now by man, we can understand why. The creation of minerals, the
complexities of weather and all of the "why" questions that we hear are
not included in the Genesis account. Any writing must be used for the
purposes that it was intended, and using the Genesis account to explain
science or to establish human creeds and denominational traditions is a
destructive use of the Genesis message.
The
role of science is to learn "how". The role of science and its
relationship to the Genesis account is to learn how God did what He
did, and use that knowledge to help mankind. Studies of the sun have
given us the hope of developing fusion power to solve the world's
energy problems. We have learned how to find gold, oil, and coal by
studying the earth. The fact that God has used the methods He has used
to create the earth give us this ability. If God had used methods that
are alien to us to produce the coal, gas, and oil thousands of feet
underground, we could never find them. The only way that the standard
of living we enjoy is possible is because of the way God accomplished
His creative processes.
God
speaking things into existence is not a mystic fairy tale. The
creation process spoke of God s power and wisdom to the forces and
powers described in Ephesians
6:12. It is recorded so that we can know
that God is and that He has created our world for us in marvelous ways
that testify to Him every where we look. In Genesis 1:1,
every word is
pregnant with meaning scientifically. The fact that there was a
beginning establishes God as the creator of time and places all other
explanations out of reach. The word shanyhim
(heaven) in
Hebrew conveys the notion that all of the cosmos was brought into
existence by God--so there is unity and purpose in all we see. The
word bara (created) tells us
that God accomplished something that is
peculiar to the power and nature of God, as bara is never used in
reference to man or what man can do. The word erets (earth) does not
refer to some fairy land where things functioned in an illogical and
unnatural way. The normal use of the word erets is to refer to the
earth we live on, farm, travel across, and are a part of. How long God
used in developing that earth and what it was like is not spelled out
to us because it is redundant to the purpose of the passage. I would
suggest that it was part of the plan of God to prepare the earth for
man. Natural designed processes produced our soil, and all that makes
our form of life possible was developed during that time.
At the end of it all God says, "It is good." God communicates to us, to
spiritual powers and beings, and the heavenly hosts that what has been
accomplished in the creation of the earth has the potential for
enormous good and for the purposes that God had in the creation from
the beginning. It is up to us to make that goodness as evident to our
fellow man and fulfill the promise that God gave us when He sent His
Son.
--John
N. Clayton
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Does God Exist?, MarApr04.