I recently re-listened to Al Mohler's address on the age of the universe at a recent Ligoner Ministeries Conference.
In it he remarked that the Bible has four essential movements that condition the span of action between God and man: creation, fall, redemption and new creation.
These are four moments in the relation between God and us, where God's actions are material in the relationship.
And the relationship parameters are isotropic. That is, the zone of contact doesn't shift between them: sometimes metaphor, sometimes imaginary, sometimes real-world. They all must be real world and interact with our life-perspective, our experience as subjects, uniformly. Some cannot be appraised as 'lets agree this is important' (myth), and others as 'this occupies unique space in the time-space zone that effects and constrains my actions, choices and life-perspective'.
But even more, the zone of contact is action by God.
Most of the views of the account in Genesis 1 that depart from the direct meaning also seem to set aside that this is God telling us what he has done. Him describing the actions through which he represents himself to us in an unavoidably meaningfully tangible manner. It is not some artful allusion to 'teach that God is creator' but is the sequence of things that he did, being creator by which he communicates himself to us, and demonstrates that his claim to being creator is not empty, but delivered! So its 'personal'. Most of what I've read seems to want to de-personalise the account; yet the Bible is all about God's actions towards his creation, within his creation to the end of the new creation; once it is denied that he can give information about his acts, or that they occur in terms of different parameters from all his other acts, and from how acts 'work' (with causal continuity and contingency) in the time-space creation, then we don't have God's telling us about himself at all, but about someone/thing else. Strange way for one who is love to operate then. Does one write to a friend to tell him what one didn't do, or what one did do, as genuine self-revelation?
A friend made this comment in response to the above:
Interesting to note that when Philip said to our Lord Jesus "Lord show us the Father and that will be enough for us." The Lord Jesus replied with "Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father...at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves."
The historical evidence of the Lord Jesus' recreative acts gave testimony of who he is; and so the evidence of God's creative acts giving testimony to who the creator is. Undo one, and you undo the other.
