CreationSample

Day 3: When God gets serious

As a young boy, I found Bible lists to be a tedious affair.

Commandments, disciples, books of the Bible. Peculiarly the creation story caught my attention. The third day especially. To my mind, the third day was where God got serious! In one day, He separated water from land and then He got about building the planet for real.

My boyish imagination bulged with panoramas of peaks rising in slow motion out of a bleak heaving sea. Waterfalls cascading off fingers of rock, and earth jutting skyward. I’d muse about standing in an open field feeling the earth’s quaking core rumble up through the soles of my feet to my ears and producing a roar a thousand times louder than Uncle Jack’s snoring (Jack lived in a granny flat in our backyard). Boulders bomb into pristine fjords at the base of sheer cliff faces. Bellowing blow holes and thundering white-water rapids all shouting for my attention. Roots meander across and claw into the rich brown soil. Fruit trees bolt skyward, closely followed by vast plains of waving knee-length grasses. Flowers and tomato bushes sprout up in an instant.

My father was perpetually locked into a life-and-death struggle with our tomato plants, so healthy tomatoes seemed to me to be an apex creation miracle. No chokos or pumpkins though. I had already formed a theological view (at 6) that they were both the devil’s work.

No animals, birds, insects, fish, humans, yet. Just a vast new noisy emptiness. At the end of the third day, God declared that it was good. Good? Sounds perfect, doesn’t it?

Written by DWAYNE JEFFRIES