CHAPTER I
Elohistic Account of
Creation
Gen. 1:31; Gen. 3:1-3
Agnes M. Lawson
Hints
to Bible Study
The Colorado College of Divine
Science
Denver, 1920.
The creation
allegories stamp the Hebrew as
pre-eminently artistic. A true artist, of
necessity, must be a seer. Recently a
prominent American said, “The
greatest thing one can do is to see a
truth and tell it in a plain way.”
The Hebrew saw a truth and told it in an
artistic way. Is not this the
greater faculty? Truth is always
beautiful, why not give her a garment
becoming to her loveliness? A pleasing
melody of rythmic sound or phrases
satisfies us and makes an impression upon
us, while a bald statement of scientific
facts fails to penetrate our
consciousness, and we pass it by
unnoticed. A beautiful and valuable gem
should have an appropriate setting.
The Hebrews
(they who cross over), when they
emigrated to Canaan, brought the
Babylonian myths with them. The myth is
the infantile speech of the infantile
nation. Those myths were skeletons, bare
events, plain, definite statements, told
without grace or beauty. The Hebrew did
for those myths what Shakespeare did for
the old stories and legends he picked up
here and there. He passed them through
his spiritualized and artistic
consciousness and they came out not
myths, but allegories of personal
interest to each of us. As Shakespeare
took the old skeletons of former stories
and clothed them with sinew, muscle and
flesh, and then breathed a living soul
into them, so the Hebrew does for the
Mesopotamian myths.
I was asked
in my Bible Class recently: “Are
those creation stories true?” I
answered: “They are truer than if
they were true.” If something is
true of and applicable to every member of
the race all of the time it is certainly
truer than if it were an historic event
of a fixed time, a definite locality, and
confined to one man and one woman.
The first
chapter of Genesis is a dignified and
impressive account of creation. It is
full of the characteristics which mark
the Priestly account. The word translated
God here is plural, Elohim. It is both
masculine and feminine, and most
appropriately can we call it the Supreme,
Father-Mother, for in this duality we
find the creative principle of expression
and unity.
In the
beginning God created the heavens and the
earth. The earth was waste and void, and
darkness was over the face of the deep.
Then God said: “Let there be
Light.” The eternal brooding of our
Father-Mother God, over the face of the
deep with life-giving power as the bird
broods over the eggs to which she had
previously given existence, this is
something to feel. This brooding Love
over the vast void never ceases. It
broods through its majestic seven days
continuously; seven is the mystic symbol
of completion, and every cycle ends in
the commencement of another.
Seven is
written in the constitution of the
universe. The moon changes every seven
days, there are seven notes in music, and
seven primary colors. There are seven
stages in the evolution of every living
thing. There are seven steps in the soul
life, found in the life of the Nazarene,
the only one who completed his soul
cycle. This is the history of every soul
that is true to itself. These seven steps
correspond to the seven
“days” of creation. They are
conception, birth, unfoldment, testings,
self-renunciation, self-elimination, and
resurrection. These days, periods or
cycles, are the spiritual experiences of
every soul from birth to
resurrection.
It is the
warmth of the brooding mother that woos
the chick from the shell. It is the
everlasting Love and Light of the
Father-Mother which breaks the shell of
our selfish and material isolation into
the warmth and light of spiritual
expression.
This chapter
does not describe God as creating the
world out of nothing, but of forming it
out of pre-existing chaos. Man has not
been created by God, he is the eternal
consequence of God. Infinite Mind and its
ideas co-existed eternally. Chaos is man
not conscious of himself nor his own
power. Spiritually we could interpret
this creative fiat: Let there be
consciousness. The spiritual and physical
worlds are reality and manifestation.
What light is to the world, intelligence
or consciousness is to the spiritual
world. Illustrations of the physical
world are employed to teach spiritual
truths. The spiritual includes the
physical.
“And
there was evening and there was morning
one day.” There is a sublimely
beautiful meaning to this description of
the day. The evening in the Hebrew means
a blending and the morning means
a coming forth. As the only
intelligence is the Infinite
Intelligence, we must blend in prayer
into it as we appropriate it, and come
forth with it in the morning. Jesus gives
this same idea in another illustration as
the one method of effective prayer:
“When thou prayest enter into thy
closet, and when thou hast shut the door,
pray to thy Father which is in secret;
and thy Father which seeth in secret
shall reward thee openly.” Our
description of the day, commencing with
the morning and ending with the evening,
is lacking in this spiritual
significance.
In the Court
of the Universe, in the Panama-Pacific
Exposition, this concept was superbly
illustrated. On either side of the court
at the main entrance huge figures stood
on illuminated pedestals. Evening, a
female figure with great wings
overshadowing and half enclosing the
curved body, reverently closed eyes and
folded hands, stood on the right hand
side of the entrance. I invariably
greeted Evening first and would then turn
to Morning, and the glory of this
masculine body, with open wings spread
wide, face gazing forward and upward,
lightly poised on the globe which held
him aloft, will always linger as one of
memory’s greatest treasures. He had
stepped forth on the ledges of the world,
for he owned it. And so do we make
“evening and morning one
day.”
How did this
unknown Hebrew author know what science
found out so many centuries later, that
life begins in the water? How did he know
that the bird is a flying fish, making it
follow in the order of creation? If this
is not “inspired,” then I
know not what inspiration is. God never
leaves himself without a witness. He who
is “closer than breathing, and
nearer than hands or feet” is
whispering his truths into the ear of
everyone who is able to hear and
comprehend them.
While we may
not have anything better than man to look
forward to, we shall gain a very much
better conception of man as the ideal of
infinite Mind unfolds upon us. This body
to which there is nothing more to add is
to be spiritualized. Confronting man as a
task yet to be accomplished by him, is
the transfiguration of his body into a
spiritual one. We are transformed by the
renewing of our minds. As we daily rise
to new air in our lungs, new food in our
bodies, we must have new thoughts in our
minds continuously, new concepts of mind
and body. We are acted upon from above,
because God has never ceased His creative
process, and so it doth not yet appear
what we shall be. We know, however, that
we can never be anything but like Him.
Listening to the Spirit as did this
Hebrew of old, the image will form in our
minds, and the likeness be expressed in
our bodies. As we have appropriated our
bodies out of the infinite whole, so our
mind must be appropriated also.
On the
seventh day there is rest. “On
every height there lies repose,”
and we gain insight for our next ascent.
But God rests. His creation is eternally
complete. He is singing the order and
beauty and harmony of it into the heart
of man. Watching over Israel, He slumbers
not nor sleeps. We are never alone nor
comfortless. Until the “last
day” of our darkness and all is
light and life, will He keep vigil.
* * * *
*
Hints to Bible Study
Table
of Contents
