One Man's Thoughts

It has been brought to my attention that there are those among my constituents who fully believe that war, famine and things like disease and poverty are a result of sin in the world. Of this there can be no doubt. But then I hear a very strange utterance escape their lips: where did all this badness come from and how does it fit into God’s grand design? Let us take a few moments to ponder this seeming conundrum.

It seems evident that, at one point, (more likely thousands of years) God called His creation ‘good.’ At a specific time in that plan something became ‘not good’ and then remained in this state ever after. In Genesis 1:4, we see the beginning of this talk about goodness in the form of something that is apart from darkness. This ‘good,’ had a name and it is something that has become mundane to many of us today. God called this good, ‘light.’ God wanted to make sure no one would confuse the two and went so far as to separate them from one another, even going so far as to assign different names for them. Let us look at the whole account:  

“Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘Day,’ and the darkness He called ‘Night.’ And there was evening and there was morning, one day.” –Genesis 1:3-5

Very well, it seems obvious now where this state of ‘non-good,’ originated. God only called the light good. He did not call the darkness good. That is it then—darkness must be to blame for all the badness in the world. But of course it is not that simple. In Genesis 1:2, we are informed that “darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.” So then, badness was over the surface of the deep? But that does not seem to be quite right, does it? I do not think darkness is meant to be synonymous with badness in this context. The reader is being informed, as well as Moses knows how to convey it to us, that something other than God personified was present at the beginning of creation.

This ‘state of darkness’ must be something other than God personified, otherwise Moses would have said, ‘The Spirit was hovering over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.’ In this instance, we would now have a repetition. Moses told us the Spirit was hovering over the water. If the darkness was the Spirit of God, then this statement is attempting to inform us that God was not only ‘hovering over’ but was also ‘over’ the surface. But surely these are the same thing, and Moses was only being poetic in his attempt to communicate meaning that God was present when all was formless? I think we can gather that this is not the case. The point at which we may become bold in this assertion is with the use of the word ‘and.’ We have a list of items, not a joining of one thing said three ways. I say three and not two for the reason that I will show. Let us look at verse one:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Now, look at what Moses does next. He does not continue this idea of God creating right away.  God doesn’t create light until verse 3. So what then are we to make of verse 2? It is a list.  

1. And…the earth was formless and desolate emptiness.

2. And…darkness was over the surface of the deep.

3 And…the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.

These three are clearly separate pieces of information and when sliced into segments as we have just done, this becomes easier to see. It is therefore, able to be concluded that the ‘Spirit that hovereth’ is different than this ‘darkness that was’. So then what was it? A space of untapped creative potential, if you will, (indeed, do we not today call the darkness that is without our cosmic home space? We do not call it badness—the badness that stretches outside the earth). In the same light (no pun intended), the darkness that was present when the Spirit hovered over the waters was also not badness or any opposite of good as we would understand light to be good.

This gives rise to the possibility that the darkness that existed when light was brought into being in verse 3, also was not badness. If it was then surely verse 5 would read:

“God called the light ‘day’ and the badness He called ‘night.’ ”

But this is not what Moses writes to us at all. Even though God separates the light from the night in verse 4 and calls the light good and does not call the darkness good, it seems this is so because the darkness is simply what we would call potential—the substance that God used to make light from and in which He separated it, or took it out from.  In this view, darkness is not badness at all but is the very substance that God’s creative potential springs forth from. Still a mystery certainly, but it is not a ‘thing’ to have brought about the devastation of peoples that live within the earth. Furthermore, God gives this potential a name—Night. God does not call it evil. He does not denounce this darkness. Remember, sin had not entered into the world at this point and thus, there is no place to compare darkness and sin to oppose light and righteousness. It truly does seem then that Moses is simply attempting to show that God made something unlike darkness and made it a new thing and gave them different names so as to set their proper place within the heavens.

Though we have established what is not responsible for the suffering we see around us in our world, we have leapt forward mightily in our endeavor to isolate the substance of the thing that does make up what we call badness in the world today. More to come in PART TWO.