#cosmic temple

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A luminous vision of a sacred futuristic temple where light, energy, and cosmic design guide the path forward. A blend of spirituality, fantasy, and digital imagination from the Xctext creative art series.

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Cosmic Temple of God

I've been reading and re-reading Genesis one for nearly my whole life.  I'll probably always be affected by it in an incredibly positive way. 

Something that has always struck me uncomfortably is the idea that God rested on the seventh day from the work of creating.  I mean I don't like the idea of God going on vacation for aeons while things just unravel beyond his hearing.  However, it also doesn't make sense to think that God determines every thought and action for every mind and body in existence as though he childishly needs us to be good in order to deserve his respect.  I don't want to give up believing in God's constant providence and I just can't deny the reality of free will.  

Thankfully, I don't think that's what Genesis demands.  I think Genesis means that God rested from creating a functional Universe, especially functional for the life and vocation of human beings.  I can't think of anything harder to do.

I believe before God organized this Universe that it was "formless and void," in Hebrew: tohu and vohu.  These words are used in the ancient Hebrew world only to describe nonfunction not nonmaterial.  In other words, tohu/vohu describe a wilderness versus a garden or a woodpile versus a house or pointless words versus a promise. 

If it's true, then God made the unfunctional make-up of the Universe into a functional order.  It's like a carpenter taking a pile of wood and making a table out of it or a gardener turning a desert into a food forest.  God breathed humans into being, turning the Universe into both a consciousness- and a conscience-producing world of creative beings.  It's a universe in which we co-create with God in the space he originally differentiated. 

But I'm using too much scientific language, I guess.  I mean the first chapter of Genesis was written for us in our science-flooded world, but it wasn't written to us.  It was written to certain people, a people who believed gods rested in temples.  The message of Genesis was clear to those ancient people without scientific language.  To them, God resting meant he had entered his temple and was ready to govern.

Genesis becomes even more incredibly remarkable to me.  According to an "original" reading of Genesis, on the seventh day God was entering the temple of his cosmos not to go to sleep or vacation, but to do the new and refreshing work of blessing and sustaining creation, especially human creatures, since God had already set everything up in the first six "days."  It was like when the new President and his or her cabinet gets into the oval office to govern from that "temple."  After the creative work of fundraising and envisioning and planning is complete, they can execute their plans and actually run things.  [Read John Walton's book and/or this video if you want to get more about this.]

What does this mean?  It's a world totally inhabited by God.  It's a world of freedom in which God creates space and fills it--makes it "teem"--with purpose.  Lights--sun by day, moon and stars by night--fill the sky for human purposes, for example.  At least, that's how they're discussed in Genesis.  It's not about their chemical composition at all, but about their purpose, which is the same whether you're ancient or modern scientifically speaking.

As a man I'm encouraged to reflect on this because it makes sense of why I'm often dissatisfied with worship in buildings.  I'm determined that for me (and maybe for all of our sex), to re-connect with Transcendent and Immanent God, the Being which is both personal and beyond personal, both beyond the universe and in it, . . . I must go into God's creation in addition to a human-made building.  In other words, I think I can better find God if I occasionally go out there where there are no walls, where God is resting in a temple of his own making.  Am I the only one?

The Psalmist said:

Where shall I go from your Spirit?    Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there!    If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning    and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

even there your hand shall lead me,    and your right hand shall hold me.

If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me,    and the light about me be night," even the darkness is not dark to you;    the night is bright as the day,    for darkness is as light with you.

Psalm 139:7ff