In the biblical worldview, Word and Act must never be divorced. God acts, but he is always careful to clearly and accurately interpret for us what those actions mean. Nonetheless, the emphasis on action in Mark offers a vision of Christ that is tangible, dramatic, and theologically rich when understood in the context of all God’s redemptive purposes (more on that later). Christ came to do things, not just talk about things.The same thoughts could easily and appropriately apply to the account of creation in G1. It tells us the mechanism by which God created: he spoke, and his speaking: his will given words, is contiguous with and comprehensively causal of what he intends.
Genesis is structured in our-world terms, terms that we can make sense of and that have meaning in our world, offering a vision of the creation that is tangible, dramatic, and theologically rich when understood in the context of all God's redemptive purposes. God does things, not just talk about them!
Those who deny that G1 has any correspondence in actual events make a God who prefers to talk about rather than act, or, whose action and words are so far apart as to be non-commutative, pushing the things talked about into an 'upper storey' 'spritual' world that only intersects with our world verbally, not really. It is the pagan philosophical idealism that dogs theology at work, distorting the relationship between God, his creation and humanity.
The focus of G1. to take Claridge's words again, is on the most critical features of God's creative mission: we are only told what is essential to our knowledge of God, the creation and us, for us to discharge our role as stewards of the creation. If merely a piece of analogy, fantasy, or make-believe (which is the end state of most non-realist views of G1), then we are left with no knowledge at all and an ungrounded state of being: that is, nothing to do with the real world that it purports to concern, but limited to a world of the mind with no necessary reference to our event-stream.
