In September, churches all over the world are celebrating Creationtide, and celebrating God's gifts to us in creation. So what?
The writers of the Bible were firm in their belief. God made the world and put us there. Exactly how was not for them to say. In one account, God plants an oasis and breathes life into a pile of dust. In another, God acts as an architect (Ps. 104), a bringer of order out of chaos (Ps. 74). The account we know best is at the beginning of our Bibles, and describes six stages of creation, followed by a day of rest.
This account is not meant as a science textbook. It is meant to show God's power and God's wisdom (a theme taken up in Proverbs 8:22-32). It is about God, not about dinosaurs. It is about God's relation to us, not about physics or biology. It is to teach us to put God first, not to teach us about tigers and mosquitoes.
So we find the sun being created on the fourth day, long after the light of which it is the source, and a day even after the plants which would have relied on it for life. The reason is almost surely that the writer was demoting the sun from a position it held in other cultures, where it was a god in its own right - Apollo to the Greeks, Ra to the Egyptians, Shamash to the Babylonians. It was not an astronomical statement about the formation of stars and galaxies, but a theological statement about God.
Another bit of theology is the seven times repeated statement: "God saw that it was good. " The world is not inherently good. It is good because God has made it and because God has approved of it. This contains a lesson for all of us as well. We are not inherently good. We are only good when we act in accord with God's creative will. This does not limit us legalistically, but it does mean that we should always be asking ourselves if what we are doing is really what God wants for us.
In the account at the beginning of Genesis, God carries out two "good" actions on the sixth day. Firstly, "living creatures of every kind" are brought forth from the earth: lions, lambs, millipedes - all the members of the animal kingdom that do not live in the water or the air. And then, in a final act, God creates human life. (To stretch the translation, she creates women in her own image, and he creates men in his own image!)
It is food for thought to wonder what we should be like if we are indeed "made in God's image". And it is food for thought to wonder what God is like: what aspects of God's nature are reflected in us? In Jesus we see and meet God in person: we can know God and share God's life - food indeed!
But this Creationtide, we should also think about God's words to the women and men so newly created. "Fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. " How easy it is to confuse dominion with exploitation! To subjugate rather than purely to ensure order!
If we are indeed "God's image", then our "dominion" over the rest of creation will be like God's own dominion - loving, caring, generous, kind, peaceful. God's dominion over us is like God's dominion over all the world. God wants the best for us, so that everything can be good, and can be seen to be good.
In the same way, we should want the best for the world around us. For the true message of this first account of Creation is that what God made was good. In all our actions, not just towards our neighbours but towards the world around us, it is up to us to keep it as God made it: not just good, but very good!
HD