The Creation and the Rest

The Bible opens on the beginning of everything. Before the history of Israel, before the patriarchs, Genesis goes back to the origin of the world and of man. It tells their religious sense: who God is, what the world he made is, and what place man holds in it, leaving to reason the search for the scientific how. This first account, that of the seven days, lays the foundations of all the faith: one single God, a free creator, a good creation, a man made in his image and called to rest with him.

In the Beginning, God

The first word of the Bible already says the essential. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1 Before all things, God is; and everything that exists comes from him. The Hebrew verb rendered as “create,” bara (בָּרָא), never has man for its subject in the Bible: it names the act proper to God, who makes to be what was not. The world therefore is not born of a combat between gods, nor of the matter of a slain divine body, as the peoples neighboring Israel recounted; it is born of a free decision of the one God, who needed nothing and creates out of pure goodness. At the start, the earth is but an empty and dark chaos, and over this disorder the Spirit of God holds, ready to order all things. “The earth was formless and empty; darkness covered the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters.” Genesis 1:2 The whole account that follows will be the passage from this formless void to a world ordered, filled, and inhabited.

God Said, and It Was

God does not shape the world in the manner of a workman struggling against his material: he speaks, and his word suffices. “God said, Let there be light! And there was light.” Genesis 1:3 Ten times this “God said” returns, and ten times the thing is. The six days unfold a considered order: God first separates, then he fills what he has separated. The first three days set up the frames, the light and the darkness, the waters above and below, the sea and the dry land; the following three people them, the stars in the sky, the birds and the fish, the beasts and man upon the earth. The world is like a house that God builds and then fills with guests. At each stage, a refrain returns like a seal: God saw that it was good. Creation is good because it comes from a good God; there is in it no evil principle, and matter itself is the willed work of God, not a prison or a fall. This creating word the New Testament recognizes as the Word, the Son through whom all was made. “Through him all things were made, and nothing that exists was made without him.” John 1:3 The world came forth from the word of God, and this word is his Son. “for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible.” Colossians 1:16 The account of the seven days thus tells the sense of creation, the order and the goodness God set in it, without claiming to fix the measure of its time or its manner, which reason may seek elsewhere.

Man, the Image of God

On the sixth day, creation reaches its summit with a being apart. This time, God deliberates, as if to mark the price of what he is about to make: to the “let there be” of the previous days succeeds a “Let us make.” “God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Genesis 1:26 Man alone is made in the image of God, and this image sets him apart from every other creature: it is his reason, his freedom, his capacity to know God and to love him. Man and woman bear it equally, both of them fully. “God created man in his image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Genesis 1:27 Among the neighboring peoples, man was made to serve the gods as a slave serves his master; here, he is made in the image of the one God and set up as a king over creation, blessed and charged to hand it on and to keep it. “God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.” Genesis 1:28 This rule is not that of a tyrant, but of a steward who cultivates and keeps in God’s name the world he has received. The second account tells the same dignity by a more intimate image: God shapes man with his hands and gives him his breath. “the Lord God shaped man from the dust of the ground; he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.” Genesis 2:7 Man, drawn from the soil (adam from adamah, “the ground”), holds from the earth his body and from God his breath: humble by his origin, great by what animates him.

The Seventh Day, the Rest of God

The work finished, God creates no more, but he does something still: he rests, and he blesses this rest. “God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, for on that day he rested from all the work he had created.” Genesis 2:3 This rest of God is not weariness, but completion: he looks upon his work, delights in it, and invites man to enter into this same rest. The seventh day, the sabbath, is thus inscribed in creation itself, before any law: time bears at its heart a day given back to God, on which man ceases his work to stand before the one who made him. All creation tends toward this rest, for man is not made first to produce, but for communion with God, in whom alone he finds his end. This rest of the seventh day already announces the eternal rest into which God wills to lead his own, and which Christ opens on the first day of the new week, on the morning of his Resurrection.