Have you ever missed the first five minutes of a movie and been unsure about what was happening the rest of the movie? The Creation Story was the first chapter of the first book of the Pentateuch, the first 5 books of Scripture, that were written around the same time. It is also the first chapter of the first book of the whole Bible. A solid understanding of what the original human author intended to convey will provide insight into what follows. This is called the literal sense which doesn’t necessarily mean the word-for-word sense although each word needs to be considered carefully. This sense needs to be understood first before going into what the Holy Spirit as Divine author intended to convey.
What was going on at the time of its writing was the Hebrews had escaped from Egypt. Moses had gone up Mt. Sinai and had seen the temple of God in the heavens and was building a model of it, here on earth in the Tabernacle. His first understanding, as expressed in Genesis 1, was that creation itself was a Temple, or a model of the Temple. When you view the creation story as temple building exercise many things fall into place including the words formless and void.
Drs. Bergsma and Pitre explain the creation story this way, “In the first three days, God creates the forms of day and night (time), sky and seas (spaces), dry land and vegetation (habitat). Over the following three days, he populates these three realms with appropriate rulers: the sun, the moon and the stars (markers of time); the birds and fish (who traverse the great spaces); animals (who dominate the land); and finally, man (who rules over all). ” [1]
The world is no longer in chaos, but it has form and it is not empty. In this peace, in this order, we are now ready to properly enter into the worship of God on the Sabbath (7th) day. The Sabbath becomes the capstone for creation, its final purpose for being is to bring us into the worship of God.
You see elements of creation adorn the Tabernacle and later the Temple in Jerusalem. For the Jews, the Temple was the real world, the exterior world was just a model. So, the destruction of the Temple was literally the end of the world for them. Modern eyes tend to reverse the outlook, but the Tabernacle and Temple were closer to what Moses saw in heaven, than the earth was. The presence of God was in the Temple in a more specific way, than He was present in all of creation.
So, the closer you get to the Real Presence of God, the closer you come to entering the true worship of God and entering the sabbath rest. The final experience will be heaven itself, everything else is a living divine model, accommodating our human weakness and capacity.
[1] John Bergsma, Brant Pitre A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: The Old Testament (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2018) 97
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The Transfiguration of Creation 