The Word and the Big Bang
One of the things I like about the Bible is how I can read a section over and over and then a couple of years later when I read it again I find all kinds of meaning I hadn’t seen before.
Right now I often have this experience with the Bible because I have been reflecting more on God’s calling to humans to take care of the world. This theme jumps out at me now from unexpected places.
Today I had that experience as I read one of my favorite parts of the Bible. It’s the first chapter of John, a section I like so much that I have memorized the first 18 verses.
New Light from the Big Bang
But today it was as if I hadn’t read it before. I think the reason was that I’ve done some study on the the Big Bang lately, and today I saw John’s writing in that light.
My thoughts sprang from John’s concept of Jesus as the Word. In these verses John depicts the Word in three states.
The first state describes God’s existence before a single atom came into being. The Word, a term which suggests communication, making known that which might have been unknowable otherwise, was with God and was God.
Then in the second state God creates through the Word. The Word’s involvement was so thorough and far reaching that John expresses himself in both the positive and negative. Everything was made through the Word and nothing was made without the Word.
Sounds at the Beginning of the Universe
Two scientific discoveries about the Big Bang came to my mind at this point.
The first is the finding that in the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with sound. This sound was created by plasma which was pulled by gravity and pushed by heat. The movement back and forth created sound waves, called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs). If we had been floating around in space at that time we couldn’t have heard the sound because it was too deep for the human ear. But it pervaded the young universe. This fact makes me think of the book The Magician’s Nephew, part of The Chronicles of Narnia, in which C. S. Lewis depicts the lion Aslan, the Christ figure, singing creation into existence. John’s idea of Jesus as the Word fits with this, because a word is an audible expression of an idea. So it seems appropriate that the early years of the universe were filled with sound, before any stars gave light, and before life sprang into existence on one planet. Interesting that John says the Word also contains light and life.
The Word Becomes a Friend
Then comes the Word’s third state. The Word takes on flesh and lives on this planet. John says this was such an astounding development that many could not believe it. Many still cannot conceive of this. From the perspective of cosmic space and time, perhaps the most striking part of the transition of the Word from one state to the other is that He became a human who could be known. John’s words “we have seen His glory” also partly mean “I have seen His glory.” John is saying, this Word became a person, someone I knew.
Later in his book, John records Jesus’ words to his closest followers: “I have called you friends” (15:15). This Word from before the beginning of time embodies God’s desire to know humans so personally that we would think of each other as friends.
The Energy that Shows God’s Intention
I think this desire was expressed in the very beginning. The second aspect of the Big Bang that I thought about today was that it wasn’t a chaotic explosion. There were tremendous forces involved, but there was nothing haphazard about what happened. One program I watched called it “a transformation of energy into matter.” It was a transformation, a careful process, not chaos. The tiny ripples in energy became tendrils of gasses which overlapped, creating points of gravity that coalesced into stars, which in turn forged new elements and shot those elements through space through supernovas, and this process continued over and over until the earth was born, and life sprang up. The beauty of life revealed God’s essence, His loving kindness to the creatures He made. It was all in God’s mind from the very beginning. It was His intention, expressed through the Word.