God Wants Us to Move

A series on music's essence and role: part 3

Welcome back to the newsletter! Over the past two issues, we introduced the importance of music for corporate worship and then we traced God’s creative work in forming and filling the world.

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Careful readers may have noticed that I skipped a few verses in my survey of Genesis 1, namely verses 11 and then 20–22. I’m returning now with this important truth: God forms and fills for further fruit. God forms and fills, but he doesn’t just form and fill. He forms into fills for further fruit.

You can see this in Genesis 1:11,

“And God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.’ And it was so.”

Notice what sort of things God creates. God creates things with capacities. In Genesis 1, God did not create all the apples that would ever exist. Instead, he made apples that had the capacity to make more apples (“plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed”).

God made a world charged with creative capacity. He intentionally creates, he intentionally forms and fills, with the idea of further fruit. Look at Genesis 1:20–22 and see the same concept for plants applied to living creatures.

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

Genesis 1:20–22, “[20] And God said, ‘Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.’ [21] So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. [22] And God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.’”

In Genesis 1, God did not create all the cardinals that would ever exist. God made cardinals that have the capacity to make more cardinals.

Two Mistakes to Avoid

This important insight protects us from two mistakes: (1) The Pagan View of Perfection, and (2) The Modern Theory of the God of the Gaps.

Briefly, the Pagan View of Perfection would be the Greco-Roman, Platonic view of perfection that any change to the perfect must be introducing inferiority.[1] In the Platonic worldview, a perfect world would be static, since change is a departure or contamination that makes things worse.

But the Bible tells a different story. In Genesis 1, God did not make a perfect world and then tell everyone to maintain it as is. Being holy is not the same as holding still or being static. Notice the first blessing in the Bible: God created a good world and blessed the animals by calling them to move—to be fruitful and fill the waters, sky, and earth.

Even from the beginning, this was God’s plan for his good creation. When people miss this truth, they get tricked into a false perspective that sets up God against his creation as competitors or enemies. When something happens through what people call “natural circumstances,” and they don’t give God credit.

A second mistake is the Modern Theory of the God of the Gaps. The theory argues that back in our naïve past, when people didn’t understand the world, they attributed the unexplained—the “gaps”—to God.[2] When our ancestors heard, say, thunder, they couldn’t explain its cause. So, the theory goes, they attributed it to God (“I guess God must be bowling,” or something).

Photo by richard hewat on Unsplash

The theory suggests that “god” was a useful way to explain the world in the olden days, but now people have discovered explanations through scientific inquiry. Now, following the example, we know that the charged electrons in lightning, which are hotter than the temperature of the sun, cause the air to so quickly expand that there’s a huge bolt of thunder. Thus, the theory goes, there’s no need for a god to fill in the knowledge gap of this natural phenomenon. Or, say, we’ve discovered how reproduction works, so now we don’t need a fertility god. What divine mythology used to explain is now seen as simply the way nature works.

Again, the Bible teaches a very different story. Genesis 1 teaches that from the beginning, God created a world with capacities, and those capacities, working and functioning, should not take our attention and affection away from God. Instead, they should cause us to praise Him because their work follows his design and decree. God wanted creation to have processes in it. He wanted apples to make more apples. He wanted cardinals to make more cardinals. He charged the world to work in these flowering and increasing ways.[3]

God’s good plan for his good world has always included the good work of growth and change. And that includes the good work of growth and change that he commissions. God’s work is the basis for human work. His creativity gives value to human creativity and meaning to human movement.

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Thanks for reading! Next time, we will discuss how God’s creative work relates to creativity—including MUSICAL creativity.

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THE FOOTNOTES

[1] This is a simplification of Plato’s distinction between timeless, unchanging forms and qualified, changing things. See the dialogue with Timaeus.

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche said “into every gap they put their delusion, their stopgap, which they called God” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part Two, “On Priests”).

[3] God “charged” the world, as Gerard Manly Hopkins has said, with his “grandeur” to “flame out, like shining from shook foil” in these flowering and increasing ways: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”