Not long ago, from a California hotel balcony I watched the biggest thing in our solar system, the star we call the sun, rise over the biggest thing on Earth, a body of water which, when he first encountered it in 1520, Ferdinand Magellan described as Pacific.
Having already crossed the Atlantic and sailed through the straits that would later bear his name below South America (a continent that he didn’t even know existed when he left on his journey in 1519), Magellan, a forty-two year-old Portuguese captain sailing under the Spanish flag, called a meeting of his small fleet’s highest officers. Once aboard his ship, Magellan asked each of them whether they thought they ought to turn around and head home with the news of a great discovery—this passage to a new ocean—or continue on to their hoped-for destination, the Spice Islands. Running short of supplies and their ships badly in need of refitting, his officers, virtually to a man, insisted on returning to Europe. Magellan briefly considered then ignored their advice and set out across the Pacific.
Had he somehow been informed of the actual distance that lay ahead, Magellan would never have believed it. William Manchester, in his remarkable book A World Lit Only by Fire, wrote this of Magellan’s voyage across the world’s largest ocean:
The little armada‘s 12,600 mile crossing of the Pacific, the greatest physical unit on earth, is one of history’s imperishable tales of the sea...Lacking maps, adequate navigational instruments, or the remotest idea of where they were, they sailed onward for over three months, moving northwestward under frayed rigging, rotting sails, and a pitiless sun...lost on the earth’s greatest ocean, a trackless seascape so enormous that if all the earth’s land masses were dumped inside it, thousands of miles of water would still remain.
This is all to say, the size of the Pacific Ocean is almost inconceivable.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Our Bible, the reliable navigational instrument God gives us for our lives, begins like this, then goes on from there, offering us big stories about big things. Stories not only about this planet on which we live and how it came to be but also about our nature as human beings, the myriad of troubles we get into, and the blessing of God’s grace that addresses them.
Over the course of the next year, I plan on using this space each Monday morning to journey through the Bible, starting in Genesis, and concluding at the end of the year in Revelation. But before we set out into this vastness, we might ask a big question: With all manner of scientific knowledge literally at our fingertips, why devote our precious time and valuable attention to a series of ancient texts that speak to us largely through poetry, prophecy, history, prayer, and odd stories? These stories, more often than not, present not stellar role models for us to emulate but rather defective and dysfunctional characters and families seemingly bent more on murder, trickery, and betraying one another, than serving the God who saw fit to choose them.
Once a rabbi teaching the Torah to a classful of youthful students launched into a lesson about these early narratives in Genesis but didn’t get too far before one of his young pupils spoke up asking, “Rabbi, did all of this really happen?” The wise rabbi responded, “No, it’s what always happens.”
Adam and Eve in the Garden. Cain and Abel. Noah and the Flood. The Tower of Babel. They’re all stories that show us how human beings tend to stray, how we delude ourselves about our place in Creation, and then how God somehow always manages to turn the story back around. That’s the theme of Genesis: God creates and things are good, then we take things off course, and God, sometimes through judgment, more often through grace, and sometimes through a kind of grace that feels like judgment, “plans things over for good” as we’re told at the end of this incredibly intriguing first book of the Bible.
It’s what always, always happens in our great big world even now. Even now, we human beings are still doing our thing, but God is still doing God’s thing as only God can, all the while offering us a trustworthy map—His Word—our most reliable instrument for navigating the adventure ahead.
God—Thank you for Scripture, our reliable navigation through life. Amen.
