A Perspective on Creation

Service date: 18th June 2023

Theme: Creation

Speaker: Robin Attfield

If you were at the service in mid-June, I may have distracted you by passing round a book showing photos of the two ends of Hezekiah’s Conduit. This led some of you to get hooked on the other pictures in the book, and on my fellow-students, who (like me) walked through that underground waterway. Those who took part by zoom will not have been distracted in the same way, any more than some of those in the Meeting Room. All the same, this helps explain me returning now to the subject of Creation, which is what I was talking about then (in part).

The other part was about how the Chapters of the book of Isaiah from Chapter 40 onwards cannot have been written by Isaiah of Jerusalem, who composed chapters 1-39, because they relate to events of some 160 years later. Chapter 39 foretells the Jews being taken away into captivity, and must have been written around 700 BCE, when Hezekiah was king. And that actually happened around 587 BCE. But Chapters 40 and following concern the captive Jews being allowed to return to Jerusalem by the Persian King Cyrus in around 540 BCE. So the author of those Chapters (or of most of them) is usually known as Second Isaiah (or Deutero-Isaiah, which means the same thing.)

Second Isaiah has some good lines, several of which found their way into Handel’s ‘Messiah’ some 2250 years later. There is ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people’ (Isaiah 40:1). There is ‘Every valley shall be exalted’ (Isaiah 40:6). And there is ‘O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion’ (Isaiah 40:9). The overall message is that this is a new beginning (which is why it fits our church’s new beginning), and that God has made this possible by raising up King Cyrus, and implicitly inspiring him to set free the captives and send them home. Their traditional God turns out to have power over the whole of history and the whole Earth.

And that, says second Isaiah, is because he created it (Isaiah 40: 28). The Jews were now for the first time arriving at belief in divine creation. Genesis 1 also expresses this belief, and may have been written around the same time. The other gods are nothing but images, whereas God the Lord, unlike his creatures, is everlasting.

This gets me back to writing about creation. These days, we tend to stress how God the creator is also present in the whole of his creation, and that theme is also present in the Bible, which urges the sun, the moon, the stars and the planets to praise him (see the last few Psalms). But the message of Second Isaiah was rather that everything in the universe is dependent on God, and that God is independent of everything else. As one of the Psalms says, ‘He made us, and not we ourselves’.

How the creation emerged is not depicted by Second Isaiah, and probably lies beyond his (or her) interests. He does not seem committed to the six days of creation described in Genesis 1, and there would be nothing to prevent him accepting Big Bang cosmology, if he had ever come across it. What he does convey, though, is that the worship of God is for all nations, and that the Jews are to spread this belief and welcome all the nations to come and worship him in Jerusalem. (Second Isaiah was a kind of early Unitarian Universalist!) That, perhaps, is why the Jews were to rebuild the Temple of Solomon, which had been destroyed back in 587 BCE. And rebuild it they did. But that is another story.

The same belief in God the creator can be found in the New Testament, in the teaching of Paul at Athens (Acts of the Apostles, 17: 28). Later it was developed by Thomas Aquinas into the first three of his ‘Five Ways’ that seek to explain the reality of God to anyone who doubts it. But God is not just the ‘first mower’ or just the ‘first cause’; he has purposes for his world and for his people; and that includes us.

That will do, for a first blog. This blog has also brought to light some of the themes that ministerial students of all denominations (I was one from 1964 to 1966) are taught, and that somehow never get passed on to congregations. One is that there was more than one Isaiah. Another is that Matthew and Luke probably had at least two sources in common, one being the earlier gospel of Mark, and the other a long-lost text full of the teachings of Jesus, which is usually called ‘Q’ (short for the German for ‘source’, rather than the name of a master-spy!). There are more. But that is almost certainly quite enough for the present.

Robin Attfield