The Word

I've been thinking about words, especially one. The Gospel of John, in the New Testament of the Bible, begins with this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. (John 1:1-2)

The rest of John's Gospel goes on to explain that the Word is Jesus Christ, God himself in human flesh. It's all bound up with the creation story. In the next part, John writes:

Through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made that has been made. (John 1:3)

It's about speaking, about language, about saying and accomplishing. God speaks, and the world comes into being. Through Jesus, God speaks to the whole world about his nature and purposes. God's speaking is at the core of all that he does, and the minds he gave us when he created us in his image are receptors for his speaking, because our minds, in some dim way, correspond to his. Thus he can speak, and a world is made or his son is delivered into our world. He can speak and we can know his will.

If we are going to understand the human condition, we will never grasp it by sharing our collective ignorance with one another. Understanding comes from someone with much greater understanding who speaks to us from outside of our experience, who tells us what is real. That is why God speaking is so essential. God has explained himself in the pages of a sacred book, the Bible.

Because of this, even we who are limited in knowing what is real, can have understanding.

How We Lost It

We could blame our flaws on God. That would be easy. The nasty people of this world are the result of a defective plan in creation that gave us some people who are lemons, though most of us, undoubtedly, are good.

Blaming it on God is easy and very common. If he's the all-powerful Maker of everything, then bad things shouldn't happen and "bad people" should be an oxymoron. A God truly in control, and who defines the very essence of mercy, shouldn't allow any unhappy thing to enter the paradise he made.

But what if he made us truly free, so free that is was possible not to do his will, not to live according to the pattern for which we were made? Then it would be possible for us to break ourselves out of the pattern and become something other than what we were made for. It would be possible for us to embrace evil, which, by definition, would be that which God is not.

Genesis 3 says that's exactly what we did. Hitler or the BTK killer are the product of human choices. If God is to be blamed for anything, it is that he made us free. The result was that some, by free choice, made themselves monsters, Hallowe'en without the fun.

More on this later. But in my next post I'd like to look at this whole creation thing again from a different viewpoint.