Green Lights are a Go: in the beginning...

It’s a short journey, to reach my favorite coffee place, only around a mile from where I live to where I currently sit.  Some days, when the weather permits, I can even be found to don my walking shoes and hoof it, enjoying the sunshine overhead, the birds chirping their song in the trees, the peaceful quiet of the approaching day ahead.

Not this day, however, as I slid into my car for the journey, and every light was a go.  As green as an emerald, the road to my destination for this new adventure was clear sailing; and since the road was new, what better place is there to begin, with this invitation to my daily embrace of coffee and the Scriptures, than In The Beginning...

I utilize a variety of translations (is “translations” the proper term for the different Bibles?  “Versions” doesn’t suffice, as there should be one Bible, interpreted from different eyes), one being the Amplified Bible which adds more of the intent from the original Hebrew and Greek; and the Amplified adds to the opening verse “God created [by forming from nothing] the heavens and the earth.”  This simple concept begs the question, what is “nothing”?  Can we conceive of such a thing? If it is even a thing.

The next verse adds to the mystery by declaring “the earth was formless and a void or a waste and emptiness”.  How can there be something which exists, the earth, without possessing a form?  Does not the mere fact of existence constitute the presence of a form?  Perhaps “formless and void” refers best to a lack of structure, an order to its presence that made sense.

Verse 3 declares, “And God said ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.”  What precisely was that light?  It has always fascinated me, and I have yet to hear any commentary on this matter from those far wiser than myself, what was the light God created here in the beginning?  For it wasn’t our conception of light because He didn’t create the sun until later - day 3, I believe.  So what was this light?  And how can there be day 1, which is declared at the end of verse five, without the presence of the sun, created on day 3?

Obviously, what our conception of “day” entails (the length of time it takes the earth to revolve one complete revolution) is not God’s.  In other words, why should our limited conception of ‘day’ be applied to other recesses of the illimitable, vast universe?

My father pointed this out to me one time during some show, I believe it was one of the Star Trek incarnations, commenting on the passage of time amidst deep space.  When one is theoretically far removed from the earth, how is time measured when the means of doing so is not within one's sphere of reality?  It's a question none of the series, nor any science fiction story I am aware of, ever attempts to address.  At what point does the human brain lose conception for the measure of time, when the means time is measured by becomes far removed from that human's reality?  Just a few thoughts to begin the day and this new adventure called exploration,