Happy New Years!!! Whoopdeedoo! The calendar went back to January 1st, alert the media, break out the fireworks, dance in the streets… with coats and mittens. Why do we make such a big tadoo over it? Is it not just a calendar… just one more trip around the sun on a cosmic speck?
To be honest, No.
New Year is much more than that and always has been. The Ancient peoples of the Biblical world viewed New Years as a cosmic reset button on creation and life. Each cycle of seasons is a cycle of life. There is wisdom in hoping for a renewal of all things in Fall’s death, winter’s languish, springs newness, and summer’s bounty. As days shrink and lengthen again, there is wisdom in our determinations that this time things will be better. This time, I will be better.
I spend a lot of time reading Ancient texts other than the Bible, in fact, my doctoral dissertation spends a considerable amount of space considering the similarities and distinctions between the biblical creation & flood stories and those found among the people surrounding Israel. There, I had to deal with an ongoing debate about something that would seem deceptively obvious to most people—What makes a creation story a creation story?
For example: In The Baal Epic, Baal conquers the sea god Yamm and seizes control over an already existing world. Being a storm god, however, he changes that world forever by establishing seasonal rains to water the earth. Some say that The Baal Epic is NOT a creation story because the world already exists when the story begins. Others say that it IS a creation story because it concerns the establishment of a new pattern of reality in creation.
The problem stems, largely, I believe, from a shift in interest in creation from the ancient “mythic” world to the modern “scientific” world. Modern creation interests focus on ORIGINS—When & how did all this stuff come to be? Ancient peoples were concerned with ORDER—Who made everything, Why did He make it? What did He make it be? How did He make it function? More importantly, how can people function best in it?
ANE people sought to understand the way of things, the way God (or the gods) made the world to function so that they could replicate life sustaining patterns in society and, thus, thrive. They sought patterns that would make society healthy, and allow their people to go on living and reproducing for generation after generation after generation. The Egyptians called the pulse of this life sustaining pattern MA’AT.
Let me illustrate MA’AT. I’m not a great swimmer. While my wife could float in a puddle, I sink like a lead weight. On one fateful day, I got a chance to get into my first wave pool. I was so excited. As the waves started coming, however, I noticed a pattern. When the wave was high, I was on the bottom of the pool. As I struggled to the surface the wave would pass me by and I would free fall to the bottom of the pool and crash. As I rolled around nursing my ankles another wave would leave me under 10 feet of water again, struggling to the surface for air again, only to fall on my already injured ankles, again. I knew I would drown and that the 16 year old, 110 lb girlie lifeguard wasn’t going to be able to pull me out.
The wave is the MA’AT. A pulse of rightness and goodness woven into the fabric of reality that brings its own rewards to those who get with the program and punishments to those fool enough to live at odds with it.
Stories of creation were designed in one way or another to provide these patterns, to educate the community about the WHO (worship), the WHAT (right pattern), and the WHY (reason for being) of life in the existing created order. Based on this understanding, a creation story is any story designed to disclose these fundamental patterns of life in the world in which the reader lives. Creation stories are a kind of wisdom literature.
In the Bible, creation is not just Genesis 1-2. The writer and first readers of Genesis didn’t live in that world. They lived in a world after sin and the inauguration of God’s plan for redemption. They lived in a post flood world after God deconstructs and reconstructs the world, adding law and the basis for all just law in 9:6, in order to prevent a return to pre-flood corruption, and gifting man with hamburgers in 9:3, in order to make the world a yummier place. Ancient Israel lived in a world formed after the division of languages in 11:7-8. Each world shaping event in the story of Genesis played a role in building the world that Abraham and his seed actually inhabited and had to navigate.
Exodus brings us to the next great world shaping event which God calls a creation—the making of Israel. Isaiah 44:1 declares, “Thus says the Lord, He Who created you, O Jacob, He Who formed you, O Israel.”
Just as God seeded the world with law and the basis for all just law in Genesis 9:6, saying, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image,” so also he seeded the world with Israel, saying of them in Exodus 19:5-6, “Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” With Israel in place, God’s instruments of redemption for the world on multiple levels, the world is renewed and being transformed.
Just as God renewed creation with the creation of Israel, He has brought new creation again through His son, seeding the world with the saints of Christ. So too, every sinner who comes to faith in Him experiences his or her own new creation as the world of their hearts is remade, as their minds are renewed, as their purposes die and His purposes flourish in their souls. As Jesus told Nicodemus that no one would see the kingdom of God without being born again, Paul declares in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” Paul declares salvation in Christ a new genesis, a re-genesis, a regeneration, saying in Titus 3:5-7, “He saved us…by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.”
So too, we find in Scripture a yet future hope of recreation. This world will pass away and a new heavens and a new earth is brought forth by God. In that day, we too will be made completely new, transformed into God’s likeness fully. Just so, 1 John 3:2 tells us, “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” In 1 Corinthians 15:51-53, Paul says of this moment, “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. … For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.”
So this time, when the old year passes away and the new year rings in, may it be a reflection of the ongoing work of recreation in your own soul. Cry to those around you, “Happy New Creation!”
