Purpose of Creation

Then God said, "Let the earth sprout vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them"; and it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.  Genesis 1:11-12

When my son was very young, my parents bought him a Brio table.  It was about two feet high, four by three feet in area, and it had a four inch lip around it so the Brio train pieces wouldn’t fall off.  The center of it had a river, a road and other designs painted on it.  It was nice, but not especially pretty.  When it was clean, it looked decidedly empty. 

Almost the instant the table reached home, it was filled with Brio pieces, some connected, some strewn about, awaiting their turn to be a part of play.  And this is the state the table was for years, until at last it was replaced by a computer and it was no longer needed.   It was cleared, the pieces packed away and given to another child who would spend his young years building and rebuilding train tracks.

Recently, someone “donated” (e.g. abandoned) a Brio table at our church facility.  There were no tracks or bridges or trains, just the table, all made and set up.  It looked so lonely, so empty.  Having seen this kind of table filled for so many years it seemed strange for it to sit there, without purpose, without life.

I wonder if this is how God saw the world.  He had separated light and darkness, established the sun moon and stars, the sea and land were in their proper places.  I wonder if he looked out at this creation and said, “It’s so empty.  I mean, it’s pretty enough but without movement, without stuff to play with there’s really nothing there. “

So God filled the land and filled the sea and filled the sky so that the world wouldn’t seem so bland.  Because what is a whole world if you don’t have anything to play with?

He waters the mountains from His upper chambers; The earth is satisfied with the fruit of His works.

He causes the grass to grow for the cattle, And vegetation for the labor of man, So that he may bring forth food from the earth,

And wine which makes man's heart glad, So that he may make his face glisten with oil, And food which sustains man's heart.

The trees of the LORD drink their fill, The cedars of Lebanon which He planted,

Where the birds build their nests, And the stork, whose home is the fir trees.

The high mountains are for the wild goats; The cliffs are a refuge for the shephanim.

Psalm 104:13-18 

Now I have to make a confession that my previous portrayal of God is inadequate.  Yes, he certainly wanted to fill the earth with life, but it wasn’t spontaneous.  Certainly he wanted moving parts in his world to play with, but it was much better planned than I presented above.

To a certain degree, the battle between science and religion in terms of creation has less to do with whether God was involved in creation, and more with the timing of the planning.  Did God, in one fell swoop, create all things, great and small and that one great plan established all things for all time?  Or was creation done by the seat of God’s pants, one piece at a time, and the process of creation is still going on, even now?  Theologians and fundamentalists have argued over this, but there is not real clear answer in the Bible. 

What is clear, however, is that in the planning God established the world and life to work together.  It wasn’t just that God woke up one day and decided to create the world.  Poof!  There it is!  And the next day he woke up and said, “Hmm.  Something’s missing,” as if he were a cook figuring out a missing ingredient for a soup and determining that Life was the missing ingredient.  Life and the world were made to work together.  Whether they were made at the same time is insignificant.  But the world was made to sustain life and life was made to live in the world.

There are basic ingredients to sustaining life.  The Bible mentions food, water and shelter.  Of course, most life also needs oxygen and carbon dioxide, a certain temperature range and protection from the rays and objects in space.  God made the world specifically in order to sustain the life he desired.  This world was created with life in mind.

There are other ideas of what life might be like.  Perhaps there is a kind of intelligent life that could be gaseous.  Certainly most life found in the ocean are of a very different type than us mammals (dolphins, whales and their kin excepted).  A wider array of potential life could be found.  But life was made to be sustained in this particular world.

When God created the world, he created it to be sustainable.  When God said that creation was “good” he was, at the very least, speaking of a world and life that could sustain each other, and they would. 

It is fascinating that humanity has sometimes forsaken this basic model of sustainability, not only for the world at large, but for others in their own species.  If someone is hungry or thirsty or without shelter, a large portion of humanity says, “It’s not my problem,” as if mutual sustainability wasn’t something in our very nature.

Not only is mutual sustainability part of our nature, it is in the very DNA of the earth itself.  Life supports the world and the world supports life.  The mountains provide homes for the goats and bones from dead creatures create limestone, which builds the world.  And it is the responsibility of humanity to sustain creation, even as creation sustains humanity.  It is, if possible even more, the responsibility for humanity to sustain humanity.  Because if we do not, we do not even have ourselves.  To ignore our sister in need is to vote against our own existence.

O LORD, how many are Your works! In wisdom You have made them all; The earth is full of Your possessions.

There is the sea, great and broad, In which are swarms without number, Animals both small and great.

There the ships move along, And Leviathan, which You have formed to sport in it.

Psalm 104:24-26

The great and powerful sea is the work of God.  But the greatest of the creatures in the sea is Leviathan.

Mind you, few of humanity has ever seen Leviathan, yet we are told some of this creature in the Bible.  It is a creature that lives, not in the oceans that remain on the earth, but in the waters above, in the spirit world, where it lives with other sea dragons, powerful and wise and terrible.

In Job 41, we have a poetic but detailed description of this creature:

Around his teeth there is terror.

Better not to get too close to the mouth, then.

 ¹⁵ "His strong scales are his pride, Shut up as with a tight seal.

 ¹⁶ "One is so near to another That no air can come between them.         

Very well made.  Like a tortoise shell, or a Tupperware bowl.

  ¹⁸ "His sneezes flash forth light…

That must be some pretty bad cold.

 ¹⁹ "Out of his mouth go burning torches; Sparks of fire leap forth.

 ²⁰ "Out of his nostrils smoke goes forth As from a boiling pot and burning rushes.

 ²¹ "His breath kindles coals, And a flame goes forth from his mouth.

Wow, that’s what I call morning breath.  I’ve had some horrible gingivitis in my time, but I’ve never had it dark and flaming out of my mouth.  This is not the kind of creature I think I want to be near. 

²⁵ "When he raises himself up, the mighty fear; Because of the crashing they are bewildered.

 ²⁶ "The sword that reaches him cannot avail, Nor the spear, the dart or the javelin.

 ²⁷ "He regards iron as straw, Bronze as rotten wood.

He’s scary because no one can defeat him.  Call out St. George or Bard, because they’re the only ones who could face up to this character.

³¹ "He makes the depths boil like a pot;

You know, I’m not really interested in approaching a sea creature that makes the sea boil.  I don’t care whether it’s hot or not, a monster that makes his own rapids is someone to keep away from.

Leviathan is a scary dude.  He is used as a symbol of the greatest enemies of God and humanity.  In Canaanite myths, all creation was scared to death of this serpent, and it required Baal, the greatest of all warrior gods in Canaanite mythology to take him on, and after one epic (literally) battle, Leviathan was finally defeated.  In Revelation the description of many-headed Leviathan is used to describe Satan, the enemy of Jesus and all humanity.

For YHWH God, creator of heaven and earth, his perspective on Leviathan is quite different.  It says that the archnemesis of Baal, the fear of humanity was created by God for “his sport.”  Leviathan was made to splash around the water, for God’s entertainment.

Wow.

Yes, this monster, this terror, who breathes flame and destroys all that comes near him was God’s plaything, his bathtub toy. 

Not only that, but this was his purpose of creation.  He wasn’t created to protect the sea, or to destroy or to cause havoc or to destroy.  He was created to play with, to have fun.  God perhaps has an odd idea of fun, and I’m glad he doesn’t make toys for children, but that was Leviathan’s purpose.

It seems that Leviathan might have strayed from his purpose of creation.  He was made to be good, to be a part of the creation that sustains and enjoys and is enjoyed, but now he is the byword for terror, and no one would want to come near him. 

But isn’t that like all of us.  God has created each one of us for a certain purpose, for a cause, a reason… but how many of us have fulfilled the purpose of our creation.  Perhaps few of us have made such a drastic departure as Leviathan, but some of us have come close.  Some of us have drifted such a distance from who we were supposed to be that we don’t even recognize ourselves. 

But with God, there is always another opportunity.  God made us for a certain purpose, and He has not forgotten that purpose, nor can we drift away to such a degree from that purpose that we can never fulfill it.  God, and God alone, can lead us back to our original path.  If we would but allow Him to do so.

“I want to be all that You dreamed of
When You saw my frame.”  -Isa