Though it is never appropriate
to hunt and peck through the Scriptures for isolated proof texts to support
positions, “tohu” and “bohu” stand in stark contrast to that which is insisted
upon in Isaiah, which is that the Creator God “formed the earth and made it; He
established it, He did not create it without order, He formed it to be
inhabited” (45:18b). Though this can have the appearance of proof-texting
as part of an effort at Scriptural exegesis, it actually falls well in line
with a grasp of the overall narrative-based structure of Scripture that reveals
the Creator God, pointing readers to that God’s long-held plan to redeem a
fallen creation into which disorder was disastrously introduced. This
seems to be well within the line of thought suggested by the covenant God’s
creation becoming “without shape and empty,” which also suggests some type of
catastrophic activity that produced such a state.
Is it proper to here
insert an idea of the devil sinning from the beginning? Is it appropriate
to here posit the reported fall of Lucifer and his cohorts, as they seem to have
entered into a violation of their covenants with the Creator God (sin), with
the result of that violation being a world subjected to tohu and bohu? Is
it possible that the author of John views the world through this type of cosmology?
One should dare not become dogmatic in this area, but this could very well
account for the insistence that the devil had been sinning from the
beginning.
If this is so, then
the creation account of Genesis, which reflects the ordering of the world into
a cosmic temple in which the Creator God would rest (which would have fit well
within ancient near east mythology and the idea that a temple was the resting
place of a god), is the restoration of the world to the state which had been previously
established by its Creator, as it had been marred by the first act of covenant
unfaithfulness, with this marring carried out by the one now referred to as the
devil.
If this is so, then it
becomes possible to gain an even better understanding of the role that is given
to Adam. Why is Adam created? Why is the one that is called the son
of God revealed? First and foremost, it is to bear the image of the
Creator God in and to and for His creation, in proper and loving stewardship of
the world. That was part and parcel of the covenant that the Creator God is
said to have made with Adam, with the mark of that covenant being Adam’s
obedience in regards to the trees from which he could and could not
partake. Secondly, it is to be in a position to come against and destroy
the works of the devil, who, as is revealed in the Genesis account of the
activities in the garden, is present in the world.
If this is a
reasonable position, then one can see that the author of the letter goes on to
write about an ideal situation in which “Everyone who has been fathered by God
does not practice sin” (John 3:9a). Sin, as one must remember in an
effort to constantly steer away from thinking about sin as “the bad stuff that
I do,” is “being unfaithful to the covenant that is designed to bring glory to the
Creator God via man’s participation in his role of stewardship of the creation,
and thereby falling short of the Creator God’s intention for man as His
image-bearer in and to and for this world.”
The author goes on to
write that the reason those fathered by the Creator God do not practice sin is
“because God’s seed resides in him, and thus he is not able to sin, because he
has been fathered by God” (3:9b). This hardly describes Adam, so it
should be reiterated that this is an ideal representation, which would then appear
to be hyperbolic usage that is designed to point his audience to the uniqueness
of the one that is most properly looked to as the Son of God, and to His
unbroken faithfulness to God’s covenant.
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