In the Beginning

In the beginning, God said, “Let us make Man in Our image, to be like Us.” Looking over the vast possibilities of all the futures that might have been, He saw the best path, the one path leading to the best outcomes for all. All would suffer some, and some would suffer terribly, but He would make everything better in the end for all but those who steadfastly refused to heed His words. When they all stood before Him and saw Him as He is, then all the unanswered riddles of the ages would become clear at last, and dropping to their knees every one of them would confess that He is Lord of all. But that’s getting ahead of the story, so let us turn back to the beginning.

God made a man in His own image from the dust of the earth. Now everything that lives upon the earth came up from the dust of the earth and the waters of the deep. Even the atheists believe this is so, for they believe that the tide pools, or other likely places, gave rise spontaneously to life. Did God form the man in a single day? Yes, but a day with the Lord is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day, so the actual time of the period is meaningless to us now. God saw the man He’d made and knew that it was good for the man to live in the likeness of God, forever an echo and reflection of the glory in eternity. His story would be God’s Story, and God’s Story, the story of Christ, would be his story.

God is a god of order. All that He creates operates according to rules, some that He explains and others that He does not. Knowing that it is to our benefit, like children who grow, He keeps some things hidden to give us an opportunity to figure them out. The rules for the likeness of God, the image in which He made Man, would be that He would spare human beings the worst parts of the story of Christ until they would no longer obey God’s rule. And so God placed a tree within reach of the man He’d made and forbade him to eat of it, warning that on the day he did so, he would die. Eventually the man and the woman He made to accompany him would break the rule and suffer both the bad and the good, knowing fully what it meant to be made an echo and reflection of the Christ, the Son Who is the Image of the Father. But before that, in the luxury and shade of the Garden, before the tasks appointed to our kind became but burdensome chores, there was a shining age, a golden kingdom undreamed of and only hinted at in our oldest tales and dimmest remembrances of Dawn, felt now and then in momentary flutters of the heart when some of us look back on the childhood fancies that yet stir within our breasts.

Now, there was among all the created orders of beings one more subtle and clever than the rest. This was the ancient evil, the usurper of old, the heel-biter and backstabber jealous of Man’s position and God’s attention. God had created him perfect, but in that perfection lay the egg of tragedy, for it became a stumbling stone to him, a weight to drag him down into the dust of the earth, forever cursed to have lost his lofty position. God knew before He made our enemy all that would come, but it must be so because the story needed a villain to give Good meaning and depth, for without darkness, light is only a color drowning all in its embrace.

The crawling and winged things of the earth would offer many opportunities for Him to create beings without corruption or the possibility of hope and despair or greater love beyond the placid, tranquil hum of day-to-day. But Man, made in His image, would differ from the ants, bees, and bugs. A price would be paid for the privilege of holding such a lofty position, but the rewards in perpetuity would be worth all of it when, after coming from the very dust to which that other He’d consigned, they would eventually ascend into the heights, taking their seats beside Him over the angels, among whom their ancient enemy once dwelled.