How does God intervene?

This is a continuation of the question posed in my last piece (what does God do all day?) and we have reached the point where it is right to think about how God intervenes in our lives.

Obviously I have skipped through the question: does God intervene in our lives? This is another maxim, an absolute assumption, a matter of faith. The revelation of the Bible is very much that God has intervened, does intervene, and will intervene. If all this is wrong, then we are left with a 'Cosmic Spectator' God. Such a God would not command my respect, nor yours I dare say.

But the record of the Bible tells us much about how God has, does, and will, intervene, and I want to look at this in some detail.

It is possible to categorise God's interventions into the creative, the cataclysmic (of which there is one on record and one promised), the pivotal, and the mundane. All very unsatisfactory words, but then that goes with subject matter; there are rarely big enough words in everyday language for what is eternal and very much beyond our experience.

It is a matter of the Biblical record and of faith that God is the Creator of all that is: without Him was not anything made that was made. As written to the Hebrews (ch 11 v 3), by faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command.

The record in the first three chapters of Genesis is the only detail we have, but it is worth a meticulous study. With much trepidation I offer the comments that follow, knowing they are inadequate, as must any human effort to understand the mind of God be. But here goes.

We are told that 'God is Light' (1 John 1,5). We are told that God's first creative command was 'let there be light' (Genesis 1,3). The conjunction of these two statements in my view reveals the very nature of creation. Creation is not 'ex nihilo' (out of nothing). God, who is Light, commands 'let Light be'. God gives of Himself, giving an autonomous existence to what previously was part of God, namely Light. Creation is a sort of diminishing process, a giving process, an emptying (the Greek word - kenosis - is used most significantly in another passage, explaining the incarnation - Philippians 2,7).

This makes much more sense to us who have a scientific view of life. 'Ex nihilo' creation would seem to us to be contrary to the most fundamental rule of the observed universe. But if God, before His creative acts, was the sum of 'all that is', then the process of creation is to gives a new independence to part of this sum of all that is. Before the first command there was God - who is Light. After the first command, there was God and Light.

It is interesting that from a scientific point of view, we know remarkably little about light. Is it energy (whatever that means)? Is it to be thought of as particles, or waves, or both?

The more physicists try to define what 'matter' is, the more they discover how the horizon of knowledge is constantly retreating. An atom (literally meaning the 'indivisible') is made up of electrons and neutrons, which themselves are made up of ... (as soon as another 'indivisible' element is added, the search for the definition of what is inside that begins).

And Genesis was written in such a way as to be understood by the earliest of literate humans, with no scientific language at their disposal.

From the single opening command by which Light is given an existence of its own, all that follows is a process of differentiation. Light is separated from non-light (darkness), and with that simple statement we have what we now call 'space'. Light is concentrated into sources of light, stars and planets, and suchlike. One particular planet has its fundamentals differentiated (solids and liquids). God (who is Life) gives differentiated life-forms their particularity, along with the means of propagation. The means of propagation (seeds) become the food for higher forms.

And finally God gives a life-form which is 'like Himself, made in His own image'. Interestingly, in these sentences God is not a male or female entity, but plural. Male and female forms share the likeness, the image, of God.

God has given His/Her own likeness to creatures, maleness and femaleness, what makes a human a human is the reality of possession of God's own nature.

So I reach this simple (but huge) conclusion: that God's first intervention was a sequence of acts of giving, giving of Himself, emptying of Himself. This is the first characteristic of God's intervention.

I ponder the enormity of this concept, and invite you to do so too.