Let There Be

The first creative act in scripture is not a hand or a tool or even a thought. It is a voice. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. Before bone, before water, before star or seed, there is sound — and out of the sound, the world.

We tend to read past this too quickly. Then God said… and there was… — a poetic device, we say. A way of meaning that God made things. But the text is more careful than that. The voice does not symbolize creation. The voice is the means. Speech itself, vibration itself, is what brings the thing into being.

John felt the weight of this when he opened his gospel. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Not in the beginning was the idea. Not in the beginning was the plan. In the beginning was the spoken thing. Hebrews puts it plainer still: By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God. Worlds — plural — framed. Built. Held together by speech.

If you sit with this long enough, the implications keep arriving. Every visible thing has, somewhere beneath it, a frequency that called it forth. The mountain is what a particular vibration sounded like when the voice that made it spoke. So is the river. So is the lung. So are you.

This is not metaphor, and it is not science fiction. It is the testimony of the text. The world is built of language. The blueprint is sound.

Which means — and this is the part most worth sitting with — your body, every cell of it, was first spoken. You came into being through a voice. Whatever frequency was named over you when the worlds were framed is still your underwriting. The hum of your bones still answers to it.

This is why a tuning fork on the sternum can do what no instruction ever could. The body is being reminded — not taught, not corrected, reminded — of the note it was first sung in. The fork is small. The voice that made you is older than the fork. But the small fork can echo what is already true.

I think this is also why the prayer-language of scripture so often sounds like sound. Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet. Sing to Him a new song. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. The instructions are physical. The reverence is acoustic. Even the warnings come in audio: Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.

We are made by voice. We are met by voice. We are healed, when we are, by voice — His first, ours after.

So I am unhurried with the bowls. I am unhurried with the forks. The materials matter less than what they are pointing at: the original speech that is still going on, somewhere underneath everything that hums.

Let there be. And there was. And there still is.