Ex Nihilo

 

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

Genesis 1:1

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But before the beginning, there was God; beyond comprehension and behind the veil of darkness called beginning. Then suddenly, in that first moment of creation, there was something else; something unexplainably other from God. Creation is the act of God's own self-othering, making the Many from One yet remaining One in Himself. The mystery of creation is of manifold impossibilities; from eternity came temporality, from infinity came finitude, from sameness came difference, from immutability came change, from nothing came all things.

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The willing Thought, Word and Breath of God established all beginnings in a moment. The beginning of space; a stage on which the glory of God can manifest and resonate on a spacial plane, in a fixed place. The beginning of matter; the creation of an unquantifiable number of objects in which His limitless grace can interact, each corresponding to the Word in particular ways. The beginning of time; the subjection of space and matter to the constant change of the ever-moving present, the potentiality of an ever-approaching future, the movement of all beings sealed in an ever-unfolding past. This great beginning is the initial expression of a loving God to all things unique from Him, the unveiling of the uncreated energies in an expanse of grace, the prevailing Light of God being expressed in and through creation.

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The existence of beings other than the Self Existent One seems an impossibility in itself and yet has been proven by the fact of its own existence. To consider "before" the beginning leads us not to a summation of theory in which it becomes reasonable, but rather, to an awestruck reverence by the utter transcendency of God. The church fathers had the same difficulty in describing this concept of a Creator, for He is not a mere Cosmic Architect or Divine Artificer of the Greeks, arranging and ordering pre-existing material but the Source of existence and the Sole Beginning of all things. The fathers express all the mystery of the Creator God in a single definitive phrase: He made all things ex nihilo- out of nothing.

Part 1 of 12 of the Creation Days series