THE CREATOR AND THE COSMOS

We must begin where God begins and I want suggest to you that you read chapters 1 & 2 of Genesis. (Yes, go read it in a physical Bible!) The Book begins with God and his ‘good’ creation.

Jewish history and Jewish life from its beginnings has always acknowledged the God of Israel as Creator and as the Living and True God. This was the wisdom that Jewish people brought to the pagan world!

But God died?

But immediately I face a problem that must be addressed, Why is atheism so popular among Jewish people? Yes, I know the old answer – that God died in the Holocaust. But come on… if He was real for thousands of years, He cannot become unreal in the 20th century. (The Holocaust issue is a debate for another time or another webpage and we must bow our heads under the mystery of that dark and heavy period.)

Even Einstein with his atheism, still believed in Design (yes, I know that is a contradiction). Indeed he was so troubled in the latter part of his life because he was unable to reduce the complexities he saw to a single formula. He died a sad, broken man.

 Jewish people have been at the forefront of ‘science’ and have been ‘gifted’ beyond other ethnic groups – blessed even; ‘chosen’! Well, later chapters of that first book of Genesis gives the story of that. (I’ll leave you to continue your further study in the first book!)

 But ‘Houston we have a problem’. Please read (in your physical Bible) Genesis 3 and you will learn of the failure or Fall of the first man and woman. (Why do we have difficulty in believing there was an initial one male and female?) Yet, immediately after the Fall, we find God declaring a promise concerning a Coming Man who would crush the serpent, the devil.

A Chosen Race

The promise developed into a covenant with Abram / Abraham (Read Genesis 12:1-3, 17:1-7). And so we have the beginnings of that favored nation, the people of Israel, who would, by God’s grace, be a blessing to the world.

But here we must fast forward and consider the whole content of the Hebrew Scriptures, while asking the most relevant question. Did the chosen people obey? Did they fulfil the terms of the covenant? Would they? Could they? The simple answer is that due to the Fall, ‘all our righteousness is as filthy rags (literally a menstrual cloth)’. (Isaiah 64:6)

But God’s Plan A, the Coming Man, or ‘Son of Man’, was not frustrated in the least.