Genesis 1:32

From our perspective 13.5 billion years is a long time.

Perhaps it is an appreciable amount of time even for those comfortable with eternity.

Science has four separate approaches to measuring the age of the universe, and they all land somewhen in there. 13.5 billion years.

Some of my brothers and sisters believe it to be quite a bit younger, and that’s OK too. They may be right.

Still, the evidence is the universe has spent that much time expanding, and cooling, since it blossomed from the tiniest of all possible space... none at all.

Just about any other Christ Follower knows more scripture than I, but it seems to me that the arguments proposed against such a date stand upon several assumptions.

I’m not referring to the usual ones of what “day” or “world” means.

There is the assumption that the biblical account of creation is referring to the creation of everything. The common usage of the word, Genesis, is “beginning,” though the Greek root of the word, gignesthai, is more accurately translated as “to be born.” What is being born seems to me to be life and relationship... not nescessarily the maternity ward.

A straight forward reading of the Genesis story indicates that there was more to the situation than is commonly described.


In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He 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—the first day.
-- Genesis 1:1-5

Hmmmm... Did you catch that? Before God began creating He “was hovering over the waters.” The universe was already here. In fact, the world was here as well, there was a location, "the surface of the deep," a great sea.


Then He rolls up His enormously creative sleeves and created light... the world, the atmosphere, opened and light poured down. (Much as science says the early atmosphere cleared of its sooty cloak.)


After He made that fundamental, that foundational, change to the world, He looked, claimed it right, labeled it good, and let darkness fall, let day come, and enjoyed that first day.

Interesting to note that the first day happens after He created light. From the Judaic perspective each day begins at the beginning of darkness and ends with the failing light of the following evening.

Then the first day, after God did His creative work.


The universe existed before His work in this place, His artistic sculpting of our world, of us.

And I am certain there was a time and place even before there was a time and place.

I wonder... perhaps there was an eternity in which He shared Himself with the others who came before us... the powers, and dominions... the time, place, realm of angels.

I wonder... perhaps there was an eternity before that... an eternity... a time and place where He dwelt in the community of Himself, the Triune mystery of three perspectives, three separate eternal beings so powerful, so mighty, so close to each other that they blur in our limited vision into a single force of Aware Love.

In that first eternity He was creative. He was Love and He was Work, fashioning a time and place for eternity, a place of shining glory, a place of purity untainted by the stain of self centeredness, the stain Man is dyed in.

In that eternity He was at work.

And in the eternity which followed, the eternity of spacious spirits, mighty enough to turn their powerful gazes upon the whole of the new creation He made, He fashioned, the universe.





And within that time and space of four dimensions, of linear time, the taut line of time that stretches from the moment of the expansion of all matter from an infinitely small space to one that is at least 26 billion light years across, He went to work again.


He took up His artist’s tools and fashioned our world, sculpting and shaping and bringing light upon the surface of the deep.

Fascinating to think that for every member of the foundation of The Church, Christ and His twelve, there was a billion years for the preparation of the Creative work which culminated in this ball of dirt rolling around a candle in the darkness, which in turn swirls around this island of billions of stars, the Milky Way, which flows with thousands of other such islands, a small portion of the pulsing, expanding, twisting strands of structures too large for our world’s largest of mechanical eyes to discern.


The important point here isn’t the size and age of this particular universe, the recent addition floating within the greater realm of heavenly eternity.


The point is work.

What is it like beyond the veil of our four dimensions?

What is it like beyond the edges of time, before this universe began, beyond the edge of time, when entropy completes its enormous meal of linear time?

There is work.

God worked before us. He worked within eternity and made... this.

And He worked before that. He fashioned eternity as well.

He worked.

What will it be like, when we slip into eternity?

I think it will be work.

Well, not the sort of work we think of as work. In this universe we tend to think of work as something unpleasant... some sort of exertion, fashioning temporary order out of the inexorable tide of entropy.

I’m very fortunate in that regard. The work I do, the creative tasks given me to teach the children of my neighbors, is more like a purposeful framework for me to express the blessings He has given me... creativity, curiosity, even a touch of parenting.

I’m not sure how many “days” have passed since He laid down those creative tools which fashioned this world. Perhaps one. Perhaps many more. Since that week of creativity, He has let loose the force which opposed Him.

Since that week of creativity He has guided a family, a clan, a nation, to shape His message to us, to provide a setting for His entrance into mortality. Since that week of creativity His body, the Church, has grown to help guide Man onto the trail ending in eternity.

Certainly when we slip into that larger reality it will be the beginning of a new day for us.

I think eternity will be something like that.

The aspects of who we really are, the us that isn’t limited by mortal bodies and the demands of expressing ourselves through these limited senses bound in four dimensions, will be free to fully be, fully work, fully express the talents He gave us, so we may go to work with Him.

I think eternity will be like going to work with Dad.

I wonder what kind of work He will have us do.