I consulted the Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, as one does in these cases.
The word in question is a stative verb, qal, and its sense in the context of the creation narrative is defined as “state in which objects are of a high quality and/or a pleasure to look at.”
So, seems like beautiful could capture that.
Another use of the same word occurs in Numbers 24:5 and is translated beautiful.
“How beautiful are your tents, Jacob,
your dwelling places, Israel!" (NIV)
Other translations render the word fair or lovely in that context. The idea relates to being a pleasure to behold.
Similarly in Genesis 49:15, beautiful would probably work too:
"When he sees how good the countryside is
and how pleasant the land,
he will bend his shoulder to the load
and submit himself to hard labor. (NLT)
Other senses of the same verb include describing just or right behavior or character (being morally good), being in high spirits, merry, rejoicing (feeling emotionally good) and being in a state of safety, health, and prosperity (“doing well”).
In regard to the sacred, the I/Thou distinction always applies regardless whether or not one regards God as humanoid or familial. I think of “God” as a placeholder name for what we will never completely understand so long as we are as we are now. I don’t think it hurts anything to think of God in more specific ways than we have direct evidence for if it helps one form a better relationship. But for my money being human-like is faint praise and being familial is far too distant to describe the relationship of oneself to God,
My personal emphasis on the ‘God being the creator’ is not in the past, it is here and now. It is awesome to think that we can communicate and walk with the One who has the wisdom and power to start and create everything we can see.
Even if I can do next to nothing to matters that affect our life, everything is possible for Him. He created and owns what we can see and nothing can happen if He says ‘No, stop’. For some reason, He has allowed much bad to happen but even among all the evil happening, He has the dominion. It is just a matter of staying close to Him, listening what He tells (through scriptures & the Holy Spirit) and act based on it, live it. Then we can say that the Creator is here and in Him, impossible can turn to possible and invisible can become visible - if He decides so.
I don’t sense this is true. Whether or not He has such power I think He first of all creates from love and so bestows freedom to all He brings forth. Would He rescind that freedom or start over if the result displeased Him enough? I have no idea but it doesn’t seem to necessarily be so and doubt it.
I believe the Creator has given some amount of free will to us creatures and much of the destructive behaviors we see are caused by us creatures using our free will. In that sense, the stage is relatively free for our play.
I do not believe we have totally free will. Our free will is restricted to making a choice between a very limited set of options at any given moment. God denying something to happen is compatible with this kind of restricted free will. The underlying assumption is that the Creator is still active in this world and sometimes intervenes to what might happen.
He can even create something novel or mold something existing to something else - that is ongoing creation. How this happens is a technical question. If we believe that evolution is one of the processes the Creator uses, then we can view the ongoing evolution as a part of the ongoing creation.
No. But He might (and I think He did) change strategies in His dealings with us – changing the conditions under which free will is not producing the best results. I think the Bible tells of such a change of strategy in Genesis 11 dividing humanity up into competing cultures and nations. This limits our choices if we want to survive because other nations doing things in a better way are always ready willing and able to take advantage if we become too depraved.
Consider the cold war. Depriving its population of economic freedom under communism only ended up depriving everyone of the fruits of human enterprise and ingenuity. It was a lesson learned over and over in communists regimes around the world as communist policies only achieved greater starvation and poverty, and it was non-communists countries who came to the rescue with food and other products which they had in plenty.
Thanks for sharing your perspective and I know there are biblical stories in which God is portrayed as washing His hands of us - even literally with a flood. But while I’ve come to think I need the placeholder name “God” to make sense of existence and the ‘something greater’ I’ve always intuited, I don’t think of God as a mighty human being with our emotional proclivities and reactions. Fine in a mythos of course and I am gaining appreciation for some ways in which the mythos of Christianity is most excellent.
I think the idea that God creates like either an engineer or a magician, the way we see ourselves creating things, is overly anthropomorphic. I see God as acting primarily through nature to create the universe. I would say that nature is God’s technology and he uses it to create the way we might use a hammer. Sometimes he manipulates nature in ways that we do not understand and call miracles. In practice though, I don’t see God’s relationship with his creation being as impersonal as our relationship with a hammer. Instead, he is partnering with his creation to continue to create and he gives it freedom to go its own direction, which is also my explanation for why things happen that don’t seem like they are in God’s will. At the end of the day though, he is always gently nudging nature in the direction he wants. The emergence of humanity, Israel, and the incarnation of Jesus Christ are examples of this nudging in my opinion. In this way, I would say that God is more like a cosmic lion tamer than he is a cosmic engineer. He is constantly working in and with the universe, “training” it to behave the way in which he ultimately intends it to behave. I do not not think of God as being an explanation for what science cannot explain. I would not be troubled if science was able to explain everything. God is not the answer to the question of how, but for what purpose and who it was all for. This of course is just the way I think about it. God is at least the mystery we all feel is at the heart of the universe. Even nontheists get a numinous feeling when considering the mysteries of the cosmos, though they don’t attribute it to God. God will always be a mystery but I believe that he has revealed enough of himself to us in order for us to participate in his being in an intentional way rather than just by virtue of existing in his creation.
Well I certainly don’t believe God simply loses faith in us (like in the movie “Legion”). I don’t think that is in God’s character. But I think there are conditions where a loving parent will conclude this has simply got to stop. In other words, I don’t think God kills women and children just because He is tired or disgusted with mankind. But when He sees us making a complete hell of the lives of those women and children (where even they would prefer death) then that is a different matter entirely.
Yes, what I often call an authentic relationship… writing the story of our lives together.
Indeed! I frankly don’t see God offering explanations for much of anything. There is little point in explaining most things to a two year old. But as we grow up see a bit more explanation like in the teachings of Jesus and Paul… but not about nature. The thing about science is that this sort of knowledge basically represents power and power is only a solution for superficial things. The deeper problems of our lives is not something more power can solve.
God being the creator means that He is necessary to the existence of the creation. The Bible tells us that it is a Romantic connection rather than a Rational connection. Science can only examine rational cause and effect relationships. Science develops an epistemic translation of the empirical evidence from creation. It is valid but incomplete as it cannot examine the romantic connection between the creation and God. The Bible was written with manmade words in an ancient language with limited vocabulary. It has been translated literally meaning that it is limited to the human knowledge of the time. That is okay but it only gives us a romantic view rather than a rational explanation. The Bible must be translated epistemically in order to compare it to what science discovers. An epistemic translation of Genesis would read, “In the beginning God created space and matter, and the matter was without form and void. And darkness was on the face of the deep.” It matches with what the creation tells us but it loses the romance. Albert Einstein solved the riddle of the time problem with his theory of relativity. Don’t lose the romance with God. God is Love.
I find it unlikely that ט֥וֹב is verbal here; that’s rare to absent in Genesis and even Exodus, and the phrase כִּי־ ט֥וֹב generally carries the implied verb of being, i.e. “that it was good”.
Though this reminded me of one of my Hebrew professors noted that the Hebrew can be read as God actually speaking, e.g. in verse 10 God would be speaking to the waters and saying, “Seas!”
In some Jewish mythology the nations were actually given different languages to make it harder for the “Watchers” who’d been set over them to collude in their rebellious schemes.
My older brother the mathematician conceived of God as an entire universe – and God only knows how universes feel!
It also removes God from things by a gap; if the universe is a machine then God is less immediate and less personal.
I think everyone here knows my treatment of the hymn of the Firstborn in Colossians and the firm commitment to the teaching that God sustains everything in existence from moment to moment. That’s the core of what God being Creator means for me, but more specifically–
When I look at the world and remember that God is Creator, I know that behind every object there is our Lord, holding together both it and all the elementary particles that make it up. It’s as though there is an energy hiding behind, under, and inside everything, just a slight shift in realm or dimension away from the world we call real – not any impersonal energy, but the energy of God, Father Son and Holy Spirit. So if I could just see farther, or deeper, or higher I would see Him peering out and calling, “Learn more! Learn more! Seek Me!”
So when I pick up the bucket of ashes from the cold fireplace God is with me both in my action and in the ashes, in my muscles and in the bucket; and when I pull weeds in the flower beds He is in my hands and in the weeds; and when I plant a tree in the dunes He is with me in the hole I dig and in the tree I put in it as well as the water I give it and the stimulant fertilizer I soak into the sand.
The immediate and particular will of the Creator is that each created energy should act according to its kind. That is the meaning of saying that the Creator wills the existence of such a being, for such a being can exist only by exercising such an action; he
cannot will the existence without willing the activity. If there is any mystery here about what God wills, the mystery is natural, not theological; it is the mystery which shrouds the being or action of physical ultimates. We cannot determine the immediate divine will for atomic (or as we now somewhat absurdly say, sub-atomic) energies, because we cannot perfectly isolate or define those energies themselves. If we could know them as they are, we should know what their Creator immediately wills in them.
