In His Image
I believe in God the Father, almighty maker of Heaven and maker of Earth…
--The Apostles’ Creed
The following is an excerpt from Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy…
While I was teaching in South Africa some time ago, a young man … took me out to see the beaches near his home in Port Elizabeth. I was totally unprepared for the experience. I had seen beaches, or so I thought. But when we came over the rise where the sea and land opened up to us, I stood in stunned silence and then slowly walked toward the waves. Words cannot capture the view that confronted me ….
[I realized] that God sees this all the time. He sees it, experiences it, knows it from every possible point of view, this and billions of other scenes like and unlike it, in this and billions of other worlds. Great tidal waves of joy must constantly wash through his being ….
We pay a lot of money to get a tank with a few tropical fish in it and never tire of looking at their [beauty] and marvelous forms and movements. But God has seas full of them, which he constantly enjoys …. We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them. But he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right ….
I think he’s right about this. I think the words of Genesis, the very first book of the Bible support what he’s saying. Just read through Genesis one and see how many times God declares creation to be “good.” I grew up thinking about God as this stern old (white) man going about creation in a very business-like manner. Now I think it must have been a much more joyful spectacle.
As we get back to basics this Sunday, we start where every story should start: “In the Beginning.”