Everything – literally everything – begins here
And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy: because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done:
The Bible begins with words that have become famous, “In the beginning God created.” God, like an artist, fashioned a universe. How can we grasp the grandeur of this?
Michelangelo, perhaps the greatest artist in history, may help us to understand. He painted the famous Sistine Chapel to retell Genesis’ story of creation. His experience proves one thing: creativity is work.
An Exhausting Effort:
Michelangelo had 6,000 square feet of ceiling to cover – the size of four average house roofs. Anyone who has painted a ceiling with a roller has caught a hint of the physical difficulty of such a task. But Michelangelo’s plan called for 300 separate, detailed portraits of men and women. For more than three years the 5’4″ artist devoted his labors to the exhausting strain of painting the vast overhead space with his tiny brushes.
Sometimes he painted standing on a huge scaffold, a paintbrush high over his head. Sometimes he sat, his nose inches from the ceiling. Sometimes he painted while lying on his back. His back, shoulders, neck, and arms cramping painfully.
In the long days of summer, he had light to paint 17 hours a day, taking food and a chamberpot with him on the 60-foot scaffold. For 30 days at a stretch, he slept in his clothes, not even taking off his boots. Paint dribbled into his eyes so he could barely see. Freezing in the winter, and sweating in the summer, he painted until at last the ceiling looked like a ceiling no more. He had transformed it into the creation drama, with creatures so real they seemed to breathe. Never before or since have paint and plaster been so changed.
The Miracle of Life:
But, as Michelangelo knew very well, his work was a poor, dim image of what God had created. Over the plaster vault of the Sistine Chapel rose the immense dome of God’s sky, breathtaking in its simple beauty. Mountains. sea, the continents – all these, and much more, are the creative work of God, the master artist.
God’s world, so much bigger and more beautiful than Michelangelo’s masterpiece, is the product of incomparably greater energy. As Eugene Peterson has written, “The Bible begins with the announcement, ‘In the beginning God created’ not ‘sat majestic in the heavens,’ and not ‘was filled with beauty and love.’ He created. He did something. “In the beginning, God went to work.
Genesis focuses attention on this creative, hard-working God. The word God appears 30 times in the 31 verses of chapter 1. He grabs our attention in action. Genesis is an account of his deeds, ringing splendidly with the magnificent effort of creation.
Mending Broken Pieces:
Genesis also talks about the work of humankind – but the tone changes abruptly. God had barely finished creating the universe when human rebellion marred it, like a delinquent spraying graffiti on the Sistine Chapel. Chapters 3-11 of Genesis portray a series of disasters: Adam and Eve’s rebellion, Cain’s calculated murder of his brother, the worldwide wickedness leading to the great flood, and human arrogance at Babel.
God immediately began to mend the pieces his creatures had broken. He narrowed his scope from the whole universe to a single man – not a king or wealthy landowner, but a childless nomad, Abraham. Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Rachel, Joseph – the upward thrust from chapter 12 on came through God’s work in these startlingly human individuals. They were far from perfect, yet God picked them up where they were and carried them forward. He promised them great things. He moved through them to restore his art. His creative activity did not stop on the seventh day.
Genesis and Revelation:
Many people read the Old Testament as though it portrayed the “bad ole days’ before Jesus. But, that’s not an accurate picture. Actually, the first three chapters of Genesis link to the last book of the Bible, Revelation. They are like brackets of perfection around the sadness of life marred by sin, death, suffering, and hatred. In Genesis, we learn that life didn’t start out that way. In Revelation we find out it won’t end that way either. But the Old and New Testaments take place between those brackets. Through Abraham, through Moses, and ultimately in Jesus, God is hard at work to make things right.