Apollo 8

arago.si.edu/media/000/027/498/27498_xl.jpg

God as initiator" is not merely a catchy phrase that inspires intrigue, it is a theological starting point.  God is the initiator of all reality.  Whenever we mistake ourselves as the starting point, forgetting or rejecting God’s rightful position, we fall into idolatry and pagan living.  In a former post “Pride and Grace” I suggested that “Pride is an attitude I poses that doggedly distorts the reality of my fallenness, and suggests that I can climb out of the hole of my sin, or at least I can earn God’s helping hand.”  In other words, pride appears whenever I take myself as the starting point.  Eugene Peterson has posited this thought wonderfully in a discourse to pastors who fail to recognize that God is the initiator.  He writes…

We misunderstand and distort reality when we take ourselves as the starting point and our present situation as the basic datum.  Instead of confronting the bogged-down human condition and taking charge of changing it with no time wasted, we look at divine prevenience and discern how we can get in on it at the right time, in the right way. The cure of souls takes time to read the minutes of the previous meeting, a meeting more likely than not at which I was not present.  When I engage in conversation, meet with a committee, or visit a home, I am coming in on something that has already been in process for a long time.  God has been and is the central reality in that process.  The biblical conviction is that God is “long beforehand with my soul.”  God has already taken the initiative.  Like one who walks in late to a meeting, I am entering a complex situation in which God has already said decisive words and acted in decisive ways.  My work is not necessarily to announce that but to discover what he is doing and live appropriately with it.”

Consider the Biblical witness:

Genesis 1:1, "In the Beginning God — Revelation does not begin with a narrative on about human nature and the origin of sin.  I might even suggest that it is not so concerned with explaining how everything came to be.  Rather the very first lesson we learn in the Bible is that God is the initiator of everything, the starting point for all reality

Exodus 20, The very first commandment God instructs with is, “You shall have no other God’s before me”.  God is first, he is the initiator of our lives and we should respond by keeping him in that initial position.  Every time Israel got this wrong, they fell into rank paganism marked by idolatry

Deuteronomy 6:4, The Shema as it is known became a very important test for Israel.  Every morning, upon waking up a faithful Hebrew would recite the word, "Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one.  And you shall love the Lord your God, with all you heart, and all you soul, and all your might.”  The first thing that Israel is to understand about God, is that He must be one devotion of my life and I should love him with all that I have got.  The “oneness” language in the Shema does not merely indicate that we are monotheists, it also expresses that we are people devoted to only One God, because YHWH, unlike the gods of the pagan world, is not divided.   

The Greatest Commandment, When Jesus was questioned concerning the most important of all the commandments, he instructed that one should love the Lord God and love you neighbor.  This seems to be a powerful reminded that if we cannot participate in the love of God, we will never be able to participate in love, because love is initiated by God.

It is interesting that the humanism that drives contemporary thought is marked by a human’s desire to be the initiator.  However, there is something within the human breast that cannot escape the fact that we are not the starting point.  No wonder that Bill Anders’ first words in the Apollo 8 flight around the dark side of the moon would be “in the beginning God…”  Riding on a ship, in a program, in a moment that was to be the pinnacle of human effort and achievement, the one message that these men thought most premier to communicate was a profound statement concerning the greatness of God,and more specifically, the initiation of God.