The New Creation

May 29, 2018

New-mown hay has an aroma like nothing else in the world, and the air was filled with its sweetness as I rode my sidecar to town early this morning. The last time I remember that delectable aroma being that strong was some 45 years ago when we lived in Alma, NY. A farmer friend lived on the other side of Wellsvillle, and I can still see his Timothy hay undulating in the afternoon breeze as we stood talking beside his tractor. Just a few years before, I had been transplanted from the olfactory sterility of the suburbs of Rochester, NY to the countryside of the Southern Tier where such fragrances abounded. 

As I drove along reveling in the beauty around me, I thought of the Biblical Creation story in which God spoke all that is into being in a mere six days. Modern cosmology and even theology have done their best to debunk this story, ridiculing the very idea that anyone with any brains at all would have to accede to an evolutionary and scientific method that demonstrates the true age of the universe to be some 13.8 billion of years.

All this misses the point of the story, which was to ground the weekly rhythm of the Sabbath in the very order of Creation, giving ancient Jewish life and practice divine validity. Science and theology have quite different goals and methods, so to judge the Bible because it doesn’t conform to modern scientific theory is to do injustice to both science and the Bible.

Did Jesus understood the Creation story as a literal six days of creation? It’s quite likely that he did, which makes one of his statements even more remarkable that it first appears. In John 14:1-2, he comforts his disciples with these words: “Don’t let your heart’s be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” If God made the world in six days, and it’s been 2,000 years since Jesus uttered this promise, I cannot imagine the beauty and magnificence of that place he has prepared. I know this: its glory is not in the place, but in the Person whose presence will permeate the whole of it. I am thankful for Jesus’ promise, and am looking forward to that day, not as an escape from this world, but as the culmination of the Father’s love which gave us his Son, who gave us his life.