NOTES for Gn 1:1-2:2
The biblical account of the creation of the world is filled with inner drama. At first glance, it may seem to be a measured narrative about a succession of days, each of which constitutes an entire age, at the end of which the world we know and inhabit appears. In reality, what lies before us is not a narrative but a poem, a poem about a world in which chaos struggles against order and light against darkness.
Creation was not a calm, measured process. It took place amid a constant struggle against the forces that, having set themselves against God, made it their aim to destroy God’s plan. Water becomes the poem’s symbol of chaos. At first, in the prologue, in the first two verses, it is merely mentioned as part of the earth severed from heaven, an earth that has lost its unity with God’s greater world. Then, on the second day, it bursts into the world as a turbulent flood, dimming the light of God’s presence that had illuminated this world on the first day of creation.
But God does not abandon His plans. He does not dry up the water; He merely directs it into the proper channel. On the third day, the water gives rise to seas and oceans, and on the sixth it gives rise to life, which will become God’s principal instrument in His opposition to the forces of darkness and chaos from within the world He created and that those who oppose Him have corrupted. This is how the Creator acts: He transforms chaos, turning it from a dark and blind force into a force of light and life, without which creation is inconceivable.
This is not surprising: even a world corrupted by the devil still remains God’s world. God has the power to create and re-create; He can repair everything that His enemy has corrupted. The enemy can do nothing; he cannot even make use of the fruits of his efforts, which slip from his grasp when chaos becomes water that brings forth life. He can be king and ruler only in his own little world, separated from God’s great world and vanishingly small in comparison with it. All that remains for us human beings is to choose between the two worlds and the two paths: the path of life and the path of death.