God: The Original Author; Part Two: Creating the Story

So I’ve established that God is the only Author to every create a truly original story. Then I looked at how He did it.

On the first day of Writing, He came up with the raw materials: matter and energy. Then He brought order to the energy by separating the light from the dark, creating the day and the night.

In verse six, the second day of Writing began. In the second and third days, God shaped the world in which He would write his story, creating the sea and the sky, and pulling the land up out of the water and causing plants to grow.

In verse fourteen, the fourth day begins, and God gives a source to the light by creating the sun and the moon and setting up the orbit of the world, that we can have seasons and days.

Then comes one of my favorite verses in the Bible, one of the most concise, potent declarations of God’s ultimate power. Our Author just spent fifteen verses and four days making our world, shaping it carefully. In the second half of verse sixteen, it says, “He made the stars also.”

‘The stars’. The rest of the entire universe, which we have only seen a tiny fraction of, and only understand an even smaller fraction of, was little more than an afterthought to the Author. His story came first. His characters and their world came first.

In the fifth and sixth days, the Author populated His world with life.  Fish and birds came first, followed on day six by the land animals.

Then, in the second half of day six, God creates his character.  He spends six verses on the creation of man in this first chapter, the same amount of time all other animals combined had spent on them, and that’s not all. The Author spent all of chapter two describing man and his purpose.

He creates Adam and breathes life into him, giving him very simple instructions, and then creates a companion for him. Being the best Author, He spends more time on His characters than on anything else.

The world is made. The characters are in place, and the plot of the story is clear in the Author’s mind. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how that story unfolded, and what it means to us.

God: The Original Author; Part One

It’s every author’s dream to write an original, best-selling story. However, I realized today that no one has ever done that. Every story ever written draws on other things.

I’m not saying they aren’t good. I’m not saying they don’t have unique aspects. I’m just saying they aren’t original. Even the most bizarre fantasy or outlandish science fiction is still based in our way of understanding things, and so we draw on things we know.

Take the Chanur saga, by C. J. Cherryh. In her books, two of the races breathe methane instead of oxygen, and their language is so different from ours that it can only be translated into a matrix of words that needs to be read up, down, sideways, and diagonal. Wow! Original, right?

No. A unique combination, but not quite original. Methane is still a gas, like oxygen, they still travel on land, and matrices are familiar to us, though using them as language is a new twist.

There has only ever been one truly original story ever written; we’re all living it right now.

In the beginning, there was nothing. No-thing. There wasn’t even emptiness, because there was no space to be empty. But in that nothingness, God is.

God, drawing on nothing but himself, created the concept, and the reality, of time. He invented time. He is (for all my Whovian friends) the first and the last and the greatest Timelord.

The He created space. Not anything in it yet, but He replaced nothingness with emptiness. Then He filled the emptiness. With a word, He invented energy. “Let there be Light.” And there was. Out of nothing, He made everything. After energy, He invented matter.

And isn’t that what every author wants to do? Create something from nothing? We can’t, of course. Our minds can’t come up with something totally different from everything that is. But we try to emulate our Author, and so we write.

Write on, wyrms.