AN INTERACTIVE WORK OF ART

“In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.” Genesis 1:1

In the beginning of Genesis, God first creates an environment for Man.

…And God saw that it was good.

Then He creates Man himself:

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness….So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

(Genesis 1:26-27)

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.

Then we discover a little more about how Man was created and about the very special environment God places His new creatures in:

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” (Genesis 2:7-9)

God is a creator by nature. He creates merely by Intending that it be so:

“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” (Genesis 1:3)

We are created ‘in the image and after the likeness of God’, to be creators also.

Paradise was much more than a nice place that God made for us to live in, it was an interactive work of art that we created together with God.

It was like a ‘kindergarten’ work of art where we were just learning how to make use of our shared abilities with God.

Had we continued along those lines of creating our environment together with God, God would have raised us up into greater and greater degrees of Glory and creative freedom.

God wanted this to happen with the cooperation of our complete freedom of will, not out of necessity or by coercion.

As it is, we decided to ‘go it alone’ and see what we could create without a shared consciousness with God.

This was perhaps an immature and ill judged decision, nevertheless, God responds by exiling us from Paradise and placing us into a much more limited framework where we could do less permanent damage and have Time and Space and the Laws of Physics to, hopefully, learn from our mistakes.

(This is in essence what takes place in Genesis, chapter 3.)

At the same time, God continues to try to communicate with us, albeit, in a much less intimate manner than before, and continuously tries to make a way for us to be restored to our Original Blessed State and to carry on from there.

Thus we have the entire history of the rest of the Old Testament in a nutshell.

Throughout the Old Testament, there are the people of God, who have at least some sense of what and how much they have lost by becoming estranged from their original shared consciousness with God and who want nothing more than to get it back and so, try to live accordingly.

Then there are the people of this world, who try to simply make the best out of this limited framework and try to improve their situation by any means possible, on their own, without God's help or assistance, predominantly through a more and more complex usage of Science and Technology.

We see these two approaches to life play themselves out throughout the history of the world that we are familiar with.

God, on His part, raises up and inspires Prophets who try their best to guide the race of Man back towards God and who foretell a time when God Himself will intervene in the life of Man directly to finally bring him back to where he once belonged.

With the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ, this brings us up to the entire history of the New Testament and of the history of the world since then.

God has made a way for us to be reconciled with Himself and to enter in once more, into the shared consciousness that we first enjoyed and to continue from there in our shared, interactive work of art together with God.

We've seen how it is on our own and with each other, by ourselves and what we have been able to come up with.

Most of us would agree that it lacks something, at the very least.

Even at this seemingly late date, God is offering for us to participate in a shared work of art that intrinsically is much more Holistic and Balanced than what we have been able to come up with on our own.

And from there, He will continue to raise us up into the limitless creative freedom that He had in mind for us in the first place and which is our True Birthright.

IF WE SO DESIRE…