The doctrinal content of the story, the lessons that persist after we finish
reading it, the theological lessons we might call fundamental could include:
- God is the only Creator of all things, of all the concrete and abstract,
of what is above and what is below, of all entities and creatures. All matter,
and the forces acting on it are created by Him and respond to His mandate.
- The power of God, omnipotent and omnipresent, is an expression of His
intelligence and wisdom, reflected in the order, balance and functioning of
creation.
- Every creature is good for it has been created according to that
idea of order and perfection. They are created by God, they are created by
parts of God but they are not God. This distinction, this separation is
crucial because it is very subtle, and can be easy to confuse Creator and
creature. God creates everything from itself, thus we would all be part of God,
but we are not God; we are ultimately His creation. At this point the comment
that a student of the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred book of Hinduism, is
interesting: "A comparison that allows us to clarify this separation between
Creator and creature would be the fruit of the pomegranate. Grains within the
pomegranate are part of the grenade but not the grenade. They are part of the
fruit but they are not fruit."
- The stars, which at the time were recognized as gods, are clearly objects
created by God; He decides how they move; and the purpose of their passage
through the universe is helping men tell the time.
- The fertility of animals is a blessing from God and part of the machinery,
the operation of the system; there is no deity responsible for that, it's just
functionality.
- Man - we might call him creation´s summit- is the only one made in the
image and likeness of God and is therefore special and rises above the rest of
living things; this immediately gives him rights and obligations.
- And finally, this one, in gratitude and as second to God, should keep one
day a week to worship him, resting as God Himself did, the seventh day.
In these key ideas-that the sacred author gives us so accurately and in as
few lines-there is a true revelation of antiquity which no other ancient
civilization gave us. No other people dwelling the earth at the time came to an
explanation as close to scientific truth as the Hebrew, the chosen people.
It is clear to me that the hagiographer in these first lines of Genesis attempts
to explain the origin of the world but not from a scientific perspective but
from the point of view of the relationship between creation and God. Everything
is God's work, both the world and space, the stars, the forces, ideas and
whatever is there and we cannot yet see. Heaven and earth...
The observer author
