Poised Upon the Instant

A person might decide to drag the tip of a paintbrush across a piece of paper.  At some point that person might decide to turn that continuous line into a written letter or a painted figure.  Also, at some point that letter or figure becomes something existing outside the will of the person with the paintbrush.

When that point arrives, only God knows.

I write this in opposition to the contention--meant to counter pantheism--that Creation exists separately from the Creator in the same way a painting exists separately from the one who painted it.  Of course, like all such mental pictures of the divine, this anti-pantheist painter-versus-painting analogy is tainted.  Along with the will of the painter, the painter's mere existence is inseparable from the creation.  Body heat affects the environment of the studio, as does emitted moisture, and certain of the painter's very molecules will become incorporated into the picture.

What is most important, however, about the weakness of the "painter" analogy is that very point of the transmission of the will of the creator.  Of this, only God knows.  Similarly, only God knows at what point his image of Creation became an existing, effectively-independent, creation.  And since Creation can be understood to have no existence outside the will of God, then in our understanding the act of Creation occurs always--as does every sovereign act of God.

As I described in the previous post, this phenomenon can be understood in terms of the teachings of Jesus.  The sparrow receiving the tender care of the God who feeds it is not betrayed forthwith by the God who notes the sparrow's inevitable cursed-Creation demise.  There is no proper understanding of "forthwith" in this application to be held by us, because to us it can only be that God's acts and determinations defy our conceits about time.  The sovereign act of Creation is ever-immediate, and the sovereign act of Creation's curse is ever-immediate.  The sparrow's vigor and the sparrow's demise are each phenomena of the divinely-encompassed Now.

Much of what I have found myself writing in "Roused, Readied, Reaped" and here in "Aware, Away, Awry" has dealt with this very idea--that the will of God has not been displayed in discrete dispensations, but rather in varied manifestations that, while waxing and waning in Scripture, have timeless expressions.  Adam's rebellion was greater or lesser, and Adam's cursedness was greater or lesser, but "Adam" as a concept understandable to us is not something that we can hold responsibly to be ever in entire concert with the will of God--unless we accord to Adam a title of "perfect man" that ought properly to apply to someone else.

Understanding God to be independent of time and space, we must hold that when God does something, the proper entry-point of this occurrence to our consciousness ought to be the proportion-jarring blast of its immediacy--so that the fact of something being wrought by God ought not to be appreciated by the manifestation of its existence, but by the ever-resounding blow of the hammer upon the anvil.  The God who created the mountains--indeed, created any such things that bring to us the imagery of such majesty--is the proper object of wonder.  The mountains themselves are as nothing, to be cast about by us at will--provided our faith be as monumental as a mustard seed.

This fusion of timelessness and immediacy is--will we but ponder it for a moment--a necessity of any musings about God's sovereignty.  This fusion of timelessness and immediacy is displayed for us repeatedly in Genesis.

God made Creation out of nothing--but we are not confronted by initial description of Nothing.  We are confronted by an imagery of space without content somehow surrounding a world without terrain.  The imagery does not purport to show a nothing that becomes a something.  What is the imagery provides is the experiential blast that would confront any finite witness to the phenomena.  The proper lesson of this imagery-choice has been ignored--nay, violently cast aside--by the religions of the western world.  Our chosen God is one who glides sedately through an eternity of time until he fills a space alongside himself with a blemish-free Creation.  Time and space coexist with this ridiculous version of God, until he decides to launch upon a farce about himself and a man imbued with imperfection who might enjoy the status of a perfect creation if only he would behave with a perfection he does not possess.

In the scriptural version of God, it is the blow of the hammer against the anvil that matters.  Time explodes into existence as surely as the text explodes with "In the beginning."  Space and non-space are blasted apart from God-knows-what to define each other.  Light's existence is described as initiated--or is it?  Light, as any ancient reader could know, could be "created" by human hands and, as any modern reader might know, photons as yet released (to say nothing of registered by optic nerves) would have existed in the primordial mix.  The explosion of light (as still today) was what mattered.

Dry land appears between the gathered waters.  Was the land under the waters, or was it created at that moment?  What matters is the blast of its appearance--the land always "existed," because the mind of its timeless Creator exists.  The plants and the animals are described as coming from the earth--the blast of their appearance associated by the reader with the immediacy of the reader's surrounding environment.  The creatures of the sea and the air are described as though they came from nothing--and of course they would seem to the reader to be expelled from beyond far-off vistas.  The lights in the sky need merely to be the gathering of masses that would, with sufficient bulk, harbor within themselves the mechanism of the continual creation (or reflection) of light.

My description here is not to provide some scientific (or science-y) rationale for the Creation Story.  What is important here is the striking lack of connection between the Genesis account and any time-and-space matrix for interpreters' extrapolation.  The true duty of the interpreter is not extrapolation, but expansion.  Any insipid theology can decide on this or that theory of God's will, and weave therefrom a story of God's relations with humanity by deciding which of any number of aspects of a purported God are understood to be operative in any time and place.  In truth, not only are all aspects of God pertinent to all times and places, but also all acts of God are presumptively ever-happening and ever-relevant.

Any critic of Christianity can cite Jesus' announcement of a new commandment to love one another as being a fundamental misrepresentation of God' longstanding relationship with people.  What must be understood is that in this context a description by Jesus of how people must behave is not understood in terms of God's longstanding dealings with people, but rather in the immediacy of God's timeless dealings with people.  Every commandment of God is ever new, and every hearer is ever and always in Adam's stead, with the glow of God's approval and the blast of God's disapproval poised upon the instant.

It is one thing to note, as I have often, Jesus' disregard for humanity's concentration on time and space.  It is important additionally to see that aspect of Jesus' teaching in the context of the particular Scriptures on which he relies, and also in the context of the reverential approach to the character of God that Jesus presumes.