The Hidden Key

Coming home to find out you’ve left your keys in your locked house.  Maddening and most frustrating isn’t it?  At our house, we’ve hidden a set of keys.  We are so smart LOL.  But where do you suppose we learned that?  Did our moms teach us or is there a more ancient significance to hiding a key?

“At the place of entry, the key is often hidden.”

 Do you think this is so with the most ancient of books, the Hebrew Bible.  If there is a message encoded in the beginning, what would it be? Would it be the Bible’s first and most urgent message to us; the key that opens our understanding to the treasures that lie beyond. The treasures are endlessly bountiful.  My finite mind will never come to a full comprehension of the beauty of the gift my Creator has given in His love for us.

The opening words of the Bible set out the first act of Creation.  It’s all there in Genesis 1:1.  In a world where there seems to be so much failure, so much pain, so much hopelessness and despondency; in a world where human beings fail to honor that most simple commandment – to love one another;  these words in Genesis 1 still have mysteries to tell.  Could they give us hope? Is there a secret not to be divulged or do they tell us to bring into the open that which is hidden? What is it that we miss in an attempt to grasp the beginning? What is hidden, yet in plain sight?

My quest was to find a key that can lead us to His answers. A key that can break open our hearts to see home in the beginning.

“But a key is concealed for a reason.”

To gain so great a key, how do we search, what must we do and how can we prepare our understanding to grasp its message?  Our expectation of what the opening words of Genesis can reveal should be set unreasonably high; so high that they cannot possibly be met by human reason.  And that works for me.  I want whatever understanding I can come to, to be only the words He wants me to hear.    I want His words there in Genesis 1, to be so rich and so full that this incredible thirst I have for understanding will be at least partially quenched. I want to throw human reason totally out the door and simply bask in the revelation and look to the home that I found in the beginning.  What is in my heart looking for home in His heart? Why does my heartbeat seek home in His?

These words in Genesis 1:1 speak profoundly if you care to seek; find the key and open the door.  The heartbeat of creation lies in those first few words.  Genesis – the book of origins.  To be fully human is to be both of the dust (Genesis 2:7) AND in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).  That is our origin.  ‘

There is hidden within these first words His message of trustworthiness and His authority.  A voyage through these first words caused me to find myself coming upon a deep puzzle.  I knew, or so I thought.  There were clues and contradictions that I found I am challenged to resolve.  And as I work through this I share the journey…………a journey home to the beginning.

The Journey Begins

Gen 1:1   בראשׁיתH7225 In the beginning  בראH1254 created  אלהיםH430 God  אתH853  השׁמיםH8064 the heaven  ואתH853  הארץ׃H776 and the earth.

Pondering, contemplating, thinking, meditating…………………and it all goes back to why?  What is it that causes something to take hold of us inside in the deepest parts of who we are? It pulls and tugs, creating a hunger for an answer that on the surface seems so elusive at its very depth, yet, it is the core of who we are and why we were created.

Here, in this place I have found myself for a few years now, I have come to acknowledge I will never have all the answers.  I am not supposed to.  Fancy that!  The answer is the journey.  An ancient journey of covenant and relationship.  An archeological dig in the words breathed into existence and given to man to quench a thirst of insatiable  desire to know and be known.

In reading a book the other day, I came across the statement, “I want to know your soul”.  That sent shivers down my spine and I had to pause and ask why.  The author made it clear that what he spoke of was not the annihilation of personal identity, but knowing the soul in order to love it. The creation of trust allows the revelation of the soul in our fleshly relationships.  If there is not trust, there is not safety in revelation, and if there is not safety in revelation it becomes rape of the soul.

My mind flies every which way as I’m thinking about this and alas, I find I have to blend the earthly, fleshly relationship and the heavenly, spiritual relationship to get a glimpse of understanding what it truly means “to know”.  I know and trust my husband in that earthly, fleshly relationship.  I know and trust my God in that heavenly, spiritual relationship.  Or do I?  And the answer is……………… the journey.

The ancient journey of finding home in the beginning.  And so it begins.