“In my beginning,” wrote poet T.S. Eliot, “is my end.”
Eliot has a point, actually. Particularly when it comes to human beginnings; human origins. After all, if our beginning, our origins, were the chance products of blind cosmic forces that never saw us coming, that never intended to create us, and that don’t care about us, at all—which means that we are nothing but “blobs of organized mud”, then we can logically assume that the same cold forces that blindly brought us “blobs of organized mud” into existence will one day blindly lead us blobs out as well. Hence, the entire Christian message of hope, of salvation, of eternal life in Jesus in “a new heavens and a new earth” (2 Peter 3:13), is all a lie, a myth, some kind of Freudian wish-fulfillment subconsciously scrounged up from the depths of damaged human psyches.
So, yes, creation matters, origins matter, they matter greatly even. One could argue, in fact, based on the seventh-day Sabbath alone, that origins matter more than anything else, perhaps.
Think about it. What biblical doctrine, what teaching, is so foundational, so crucial, that God demands one-seventh of our lives every week and without exception, to remind us of it, to all but shove it in our faces 52 times a year? (It comes to us, we don’t go to it.) We don’t keep the Sabbath, at least directly, as a memorial of the incarnation, the cross, the resurrection, the state of the dead, the sanctuary; no, we have been commanded (right up there with Thou shalt not murder, Thou shalt not steal) to keep the Sabbath as a memorial of the six-days of creation.
Which makes perfect sense because none of these other teachings, i.e., the incarnation, the cross, the sanctuary mean anything apart from the creation. If God hadn’t created us, as we have been told in Scripture, then, these beliefs become nothing but myths made by blobs of mud.
And, somehow, and one doesn’t need to be a Bible believing Christian to understand that this idea, that we’re just blobs of mud, doesn’t make sense, does it? Of course not. And the weekly Sabbath is reminder of just how nonsensical it really is.
