This coming week, on eBay, you could bid on a 1954 letter from Albert Einstein in which he declares that the "the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish." There are many people in world today which would appreciate that description. For others, those would be "fighting words." Conservative Christians see the scriptures as the very Spirit breathed words of God; perfect in every aspect. Still others see the scriptures as a long historical and theological record of God's people and their spiritual journey. Regardless of how one sees the scriptures they are at their heart a singular story with a beginning, a middle and an end. They are the story of God's work in the world; told in saga, history, poetry, letters, and lament. This strange amalgam of components can be confusing and confounding. Nevertheless if we allow them to speak to us as a whole we will hear a five part story emerging from them. This article will address the first part of that five part story; God loves the world.
The Biblical story opens with two stories of creation in Genesis chapters one and two. In Chapter One we are told that God created the heavens and the earth. Additionally we learn that those initial heavens and earth are a chaotic mess. There is no light and dark, night or day or even heaven and earth. God then proceeds to bring some order out of the chaos (remind anyone of the long evolutionary process from the Big Bang to the present?). For six days God goes about speaking order to the disorderly universe. At the end of each day God declares God's work to be "good." Finally at the end of the sixth day, when all is completed God decides that creation is "very good." (Genesis 1:31) This story makes clear that creation is God's very good thing that God has made. God not only has a vested interest in what happens on this blue-green planet, but will be intimately involved in its ongoing life.
This sense of God's love for creation continues in God's work to bring this creation back to its former glory (next week we will look at how creation lost its way). These stories are replete throughout the Old Testament. When humanity becomes too wicked God begins the human experiment over again with Noah and his family. In the Tower of Babel story God insures that humanity will go forth and care for creation. Next God chooses a family, Abram's, through whom the entire creation will be blessed. When this family finds itself in captivity in Egypt God sets them free with mighty acts of power. Once they are free God not only provides for their physical needs, God gives them a set of rules which are to guide their interpersonal, intercommunity and religious lives. These rules include many that protect the weak and powerless. As time goes by and the people refuse to follow these rules God works with them (sometimes in rather tough love kind of ways) in order that they continue to be a blessing to the world (these are the stories of the prophets, exile and return). In all of these of stories we see God loving the world.
The penultimate demonstration of God's love for the world comes to us in the Gospel of John where we read about God becoming one of us. John makes it clear that God's love for the world was so great that God, rather than abandoning the world, becomes enfleshed in it and then dies for it. In the work of Jesus, the "Word made flesh" we see God's absolute unconditional love for all of the created order. This love in and through Jesus does not end with Jesus' resurrection and ascension but is made real to and for us through the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. The story of God's love for the world is completed in the Book of Revelation where we witness God recreating the world in such a way that once again God can say that creation is "very good."
God loves the world is the foundational conviction upon which we base all that we believe and all that we do at Everybody's Church. Our goal is to try and allow God's love to live in us that all we encounter might experience that love as well.
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