On the night before Christmas in the year 1968 Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders, the crew of Apollo 8, were further away from the earth than any human beings had been. It was the first time a spacecraft had broken earth’s orbit and ventured out across a quarter million miles to orbit the moon. The distant earth was a small blue disk in the blackness of space, and on that blue disk is where the whole drama of human history had unfolded: the creation, the fall, wars, explorations, feast and famine, marriages and divorces, births and deaths. On a historic broadcast on that Christmas Eve the astronauts beamed back to earth a video picture of the earth, and spoke of the “vast loneliness” of space. And then their voices crackled over the radio: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void; and darkness was over the face of the deep.”
Genesis 1:1 begins with the Hebrew words b’reshith bara Elohim. In beginning, God created. If we just stop there, we gain a decisive view of life. There was a beginning, so there is meaning and purpose to life. Prior to this “beginning” was the God who began it. God is the prior reality, the higher being, the starter, the beginner, the initiator. There is only one being who can explain the world and life, only one who knows it intimately. He “created.” The Hebrew word bara emphasizes originality. An artist may create a painting by spreading paint on a canvas, but that is just pushing molecules around. Even the vision of the artist is not truly original because it is drawn from a lifetime of mental pictures. When God created it was an act of bringing into existence. A truly original act. Behind the act was vision, and will, and love.
So the question is: as we try to figure out life on the blue disk, what are the main questions we should be asking the Creator?
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