Our Origin Story #3 of 21:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (Genesis 1:1)

That’s how our origin story begins: “In the beginning God created…”.  Our origin story is about God and about how God, out of his absolute freedom, decided to create something. Our Creator creates creation. It’s God’s idea. It’s God’s doing. Soon, our creation story will tell how God is pleased with it all. The Creator delights in his creation. It’s good. It’s very good.

However, it will take some ongoing work to bring his creation to a place of goodness and beauty: “In the beginning …the earth was formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep,” It will take some doing to make this chaos into something beautiful—a paradise fit for humans. For six days, God works to bring chaos into order, goodness and beauty. It’s creative work. Even God “rested on the seventh day from all the work he had done” (Gn 2:2). Each week we relive our creation story by working for six days and resting on the seventh. It’s a godly thing to do. Creation gives us our week. It parleys into our work week task of turning chaos into something orderly, good and beautiful.

The other origin story, the new one told by David C in his recent book Origin Story, begins with a Big Bang. That’s when some hot dense something smaller than an atom exploded spewing out all the matter that makes up our universe. This Explosion, that took place some thirteen billion years ago, continues its outward expansion to this day until it burns out into a cold, dark and lonely nothingness, 

The Big Bang reads like God speaking into the void and something exploding into being. What is more interesting, is how this chaotic Explosion took on order and structure—something fit for humans like us. David C. speaks of the odds with a parable:

If you throw a bomb into a construction site full of bricks, mortar, wires, and paint, what are the odds that when the dust clears, you’ll find an apartment building all wired up, decorated, and ready for buyers?

Even David C. seems tempted to bring in a creator god:

If our story had a creator god, explaining structure would be easy. We could just assume that God preferred structure to chaos. But most versions of the modern origin story no longer accept the idea of a creator god because modern science can find no direct evidence for a god. (p. 25)

We need not be gleeful here—as if science has found a slot for God. It’s to David Cs credit, that he acknowledges these gaps in the “modern science origin story”.  I’ll try to be as honest about problems in our own story—like the sun and moon showing up on the fourth day, for example.

For now, I delight in both stories. They have a way of playing off one another. Both tell the story of this movement from chaos to order. I might object to David C. thinking it easy for a god to turn chaos into order. Our creation story tells us it wasn’t easy. It took work. Our story doesn’t end with the universe drifting off into cold dark nothingness. In our story, the Creator sticks with his creation redeeming it and renewing it.  This story of creation’s redemption won’t be easy either. It has to do with Calvary.