The Earth Archetype: A Dwelling Place Within

Introduction

A man may sit beneath the word of God for thirty years and remain as angry, as cold, and as divided as he was on the day he first heard it. This is not a rare thing. It is the quiet scandal of congregations everywhere, and it is the occasion for this essay. Change is the measure of spiritual progress. If a man was given to anger before he met the word of God, then his growth is measured by his being less angry afterwards, or by his being angry no more. If he has met the word and stands in the same state in which he stood before, that fact does not impeach the word, for the word to which he was introduced is the word that made the world. No evidence can be produced against the power that is inherent in it. The changelessness of the man points instead to the man himself, to the quality of his receptors, to his inability to assimilate what has been given him.

My purpose is to search out the causes of that changelessness, and I propose to do so by reading three verses of Genesis as an archetype. I will argue that Genesis 1:1–3 is not only an account of the origin of the cosmos; it is a portrait of the human heart. The earth that was without form and void, the darkness upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit who hovered and did not yet dwell, together describe what stands before every man who has heard the word and has not been changed. To some metaphysical degree, each of us is present in those three verses. The heart is the earth that the Word seeks for His habitation, and it is an earth already occupied by another. Until the Word comes and makes war upon that occupation, the heart will remain formless, empty, and dark, whatever sermons are heard.

The argument proceeds in order. I begin with the condition of man between two contrary realities, since a doctrine of the heart that ignores that condition will mislead. I then establish, from Ephesians, John, and Proverbs, who it is that created the heaven and the earth, because the identity of the Creator governs everything that follows. From there I turn to the state of the earth in the second verse, to the war in heaven that explains it, to the seat that Satan has built within the heart, and to the war by which the Word must evict him. The stakes are not academic. If the heart is an occupied earth, then the struggles of a believer with sin are not accidents of temperament; they are the marks of a kingdom that has been set up within him, and they will yield only to the coming of the Word in power.

The Receptor and the Word

Every rational man aspires to positive change. No one wakes in the morning desiring that his condition should worsen, whether the condition in view is the state of his own person or the state of his life. Yet many of us find ourselves in states we never chose and cannot escape. Our lives drift or evolve into shapes that we despise, and in the quiet of the soul a good number of men secretly hate what they have become. They look out through their physical eyes at others whose reality appears better than their own, and they wish, if only for a single day, to be someone else. They would not say so aloud. They carry the wish beneath the surface, and they wonder whether anything will ever improve for them, since the grass seems greener everywhere but beneath their own feet, where they reap only thorns and bristles.

The word of God is given to such men as the instrument of their transformation. It is not given as an ornament, nor as a topic for discussion, but as the power by which a life is rebuilt. When the word fails to produce the change it is able to produce, there are only two places to look for the cause: the word, or the one who receives it. The word created the heavens and the earth, so I will not look there. The fault is found in the receptor, in the soil, in the heart that has received the word without being rearranged by it. That is the claim I wish to press, and I am aware that it is an uncomfortable one. It would be easier to blame the preaching, the congregation, or the times. But the discipline of honesty requires me to look inward, at the ground upon which the word has fallen.

The Two Estates of Man

Before turning to the text, I must say something about the condition in which man lives, because the archetype in Genesis speaks directly to it. When life is going well, it is difficult for a man to imagine the contrary. When life is going badly, it is just as difficult for him to imagine that it could be good again. We are buried in the reality we happen to be experiencing, and from inside it we judge the realities of others. The man whose affairs prosper looks at the man whose affairs collapse and asks what is wrong with him, and whether he has angered God. The man whose affairs collapse looks at the prosperous and concludes that God has favoured them, and has turned His face from him.

This was the reasoning of Job's friends. They came to a man whose fortunes had suddenly turned, and they supposed that he must have injured some law of God. "Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off?" (Job 4:7). That reasoning does not possess divine intelligence. It is not always the case that things go badly because a man has done wrong, and it is not always the case that they go well because he has done right. I ask the Holy Spirit to carry us beyond the limits of our own thinking, so that we may see something true about man and about life, and so that we may accept what we did not ask for and be changed in the process.

The truth is that we cannot speak of good without evil, nor of God without the enemy of God, nor of man without both. The environment in which man exists contains contrary realities at the same moment: the presence of God and the presence of Satan, the presence of light and the presence of darkness. Man lives out his days on earth in these two estates, and he cannot admit the one without acknowledging the other. This is the arena, and this is the dilemma, of human life. Only the wisdom of God can teach a man to live rightly within that balance. It is that wisdom which Genesis begins to teach us in its first three verses.

The Instrument of Creation

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." (Genesis 1:1). The Hebrew verb is bara, which means to shape into form out of nothing. Creation, in the strict sense, is creation out of nothing, because before creation there was only God. If one asks out of what the heaven and the earth were made, the answer is that they were made out of nothing; if one asks whence they came, the answer is God. A further question remains, and it is the question on which this entire essay turns: by what instrumentality did God create? For this I call two witnesses, the Apostle Paul in Ephesians and the Apostle John in the first chapter of his Gospel.

Paul writes of a grace given to him, and he names the grace precisely: "Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ; And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ: To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God," (Ephesians 3:8–10). Preaching is a grace. It is the grace to open the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make men see their participation in a mystery that God held within Himself from before the world. That mystery is Christ, and the participation of the Gentiles in Him is its nature. The mystery reaches further than men, since the church is instructing the principalities and powers of the heavenly places in the manifold wisdom of God, and the manifold wisdom of God is Christ.

There is a statement in the ninth verse on which the rest of my argument depends: God "created all things by Jesus Christ." Consider what follows from it. Before God created creation, there was no creation. Nothing created stood before the act of creating. If this is so, then Jesus Christ, by whom all things were created, cannot Himself be part of the created order, because there was nothing created for Him to belong to before the creating began. Before creation there was only God. Therefore Christ belongs to the uncreated. If He is uncreated, there was never a time when He was not. The mystery that Paul says was held back in God from the beginning of the world is the very Person through whom the world was made, and the Jesus who became a man is Himself God.

The Word Who Was in the Beginning

John arrives at the same conclusion by another road. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made." (John 1:1–3). The word John uses for beginning is archē, which carries the senses of chief, principality, and principle. It names that which is first in time, first in space, and first in power. When John says that the Word was in the beginning, he is not marking the point at which the Word started. He is saying that the Word was already there, and that nothing is before Him.

The three clauses of the first verse each do distinct work, and I wish to name them plainly. The first is positional: in the beginning was the Word. It fixes the place of the LogosLogosThe eternal Word of God, through whom all things were made, who became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1–14). in relation to all creation. The second is relational: the Word was with God. The Greek is pros ton theon, and it expresses a distinction of persons, for the Word cannot be with God if He is simply identical with the One He is with. The third is a statement of identity: the Word was God. Here John speaks of essence. The Logos is a different Person from the God with whom He is, yet He shares that God's very nature. There is distinction of persons within the Godhead and equality of essence between them, and John gives both so that no man may conclude, when he reads that all things were made by Him, that the Maker is something less than God.

Return now to Genesis 1:1 with John and Paul in hand. John has told us that all things were made by the Word, and Paul has told us that the Word is Jesus Christ. It would not be wrong, therefore, to read the verse in this way: In the beginning Jesus Christ created the heaven and the earth. The soul of man is a fabrication of Christ. The heart of man is His handiwork. He made the earth out of His benevolence and out of His desire for a creation, and I would have the reader hold that fact firmly, for it makes the sorrow of the second verse intelligible. The One who made the heart is the One who has the first claim upon it, and the condition of the heart is therefore a matter of immediate concern to Him.

Wisdom Brought Up With Him

The book of Proverbs confirms the witness of the Gospel and sharpens it, because it lets us hear the Word speak of His own existence before the world. In the eighth chapter, Wisdom cries aloud, and what she says cannot be said of any creature:

"The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world." (Proverbs 8:22–26)

The Hebrew for way means a journey, so that Wisdom is possessed in the beginning of God's journey, before any of His works of old. The works of old are the works of creation, and Wisdom stands before them. She is therefore not within the created order; she belongs to the uncreated order of the Godhead. When the heavens were prepared, she was there. When the clouds were established above, and the fountains of the deep strengthened, and the sea given its decree, she was there. The text does not say that she came after God. It says that she was "brought up with him," and the closeness of that phrase is the closeness of equals who share one life.

Then Wisdom tells us her work and her joy: "Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men." (Proverbs 8:30–31). The word rendered brought up with him has also been understood as the artificer, the master workman, and the two senses belong together: the One who was brought up with God is the One through whom God worked. The Son is not a lofty creature, the first and finest of the things that were made. He is God, and between Him, the Father, and the Spirit there is an inconceivable mystery that they share. Notice also where His rejoicing lies. His delight is in the habitable part of the earth and in the sons of men. I ask the reader to carry that sentence to the second verse of Genesis, because the second verse describes an earth that was not habitable.

The Earth Without Form and Void

"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." (Genesis 1:2). Here a difficulty confronts us. The Word rejoices in the habitable part of His earth and takes His delight in the sons of men, yet the earth that Genesis shows us is formless, empty, and dark. It was uninhabitable. The Creator, whose affections were set upon the earth as a dwelling place, found no part of it in which He could rejoice or dwell. We must qualify our reading of the verse accordingly, for the condition of the earth in the second verse cannot have been His design. He does not delight in chaos, and He does not choose to inhabit a void.

The explanation lies in the archetype. Our Lord Himself taught us how to read it when He said, "The seed is the word of God," and when He described the good ground as those who "in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience." (Luke 8:11, 15). The earth is the heart, the seed is the word, and the word seeks the heart as its place to dwell. Read in that light, the earth of Genesis 1:2 is the heart of man as God finds it: He desires to inhabit it, and it is uninhabitable. The state of the heart is chaos, it is darkness, it is emptiness. The Creator has no room within His own creation.

Why should this be so? The answer I will argue is that another occupant is already in residence. The earth that the Logos desires is occupied, and the occupier has seen to it that the heart is unfit for the habitation of Christ. This is the reason the heart is formless and void and dark; it is not an empty lot awaiting its builder but a territory held by an entity that has an interest in keeping it uninhabitable. To make that case, I must go to the book of Revelation, where the history of the occupation is recorded.

The War in Heaven and the Occupation of the Earth

"And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him." (Revelation 12:7–9). We are dealing with two abodes, heaven and earth, and with nothing in between. If the dragon and his angels have lost their place in heaven, there is only one other residence open to them. Having lost the war, they sought and entered the earth.

Notice what John says Satan deceives. The word translated world is the Greek oikoumenē, which does not mean the cosmos at large. It means an inhabited territory, a dominion, the portion of the earth that is inhabited. Recall the words of Wisdom: she rejoiced in the habitable part of the earth, and her delights were with the sons of men. Satan is cast down to deceive that very portion, the territory where the Logos desires to dwell. He goes where God's affections are set, and he sets himself against them.

The event cannot belong to the period after man's fall. It precedes the creation of man, and it is what Genesis 1:2 explains. The earth was without form and void because it had become the ground upon which the dragon and his host were thrown. John tells us elsewhere that his tail "drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth" (Revelation 12:4), and a third is a large figure, since it depends upon the whole. If the host of heaven numbered a billion, a third of them is some three hundred and thirty million; if a trillion, some three hundred and thirty billion; if a hundred trillion, thirty trillion and more. Whatever the total, a full third of the angelic host descended with Satan. The space that was meant for the Logos and the Godhead was infested by a legion of beings who sought to overthrow God and to replace Him.

Those who wished to replace God in heaven would wish to replace Him on earth also. When the coup in heaven failed, the earth became their second plan. If they could not take heaven, they would take the earth, and the earth is, archetypally, the heart. Here is the reason the heart has become the first target of the adversary: it is where God desires to dwell, and it is therefore where Satan desires to rule. The prophet records the ambition in the adversary's own words: "I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God" and "I will be like the most High." (Isaiah 14:13–14). He wants what the Most High wants. If the Most High wants to be enthroned in heaven, so does he; if the Most High wants a dwelling in the earth, so does he.

The Heart as the Seat of the Adversary

The Wisdom of God addresses each of us in a single sentence: "My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways." (Proverbs 23:26). God asks for the heart. If God asks for it, then Satan will rush to make his house in it. This is why our Lord located the source of defilement where He did: "But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies:" (Matthew 15:18–19). I ask why these things proceed from the heart, and from the heart alone, and the answer is that the heart is the place He desires to reside, and the place in which a rival has built a kingdom. The Lord wrote to the church at Pergamos, "I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan's seat is." (Revelation 2:13). In the heart of the unconverted man, Satan's seat is already set.

The man himself does not realise it. He has been told that the kingdom of God is within him, for "behold, the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21), and "the kingdom of God is not meat and drink" (Romans 14:17), and he understands that the kingdom is inward rather than outward. He has not yet understood that another kingdom is also inward, and that it was established before he arrived. This explains why he lusts after what he should not have. His eyes lust and his flesh lusts, and he does not know why. Something within him is contrary to the nature in which he was created, and he wants what he should not want, because an ancient order has taken up residence in him. That old serpent, who deceives the inhabited world, does not need to be sought outside; he is already within, masquerading as the thing he is not, for "Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light." (2 Corinthians 11:14).

His labour is chiefly one of suppression. He works to dim the knowledge of God in the heart, and to remove from the memory of man his need of God. When our Lord explained the parable of the sower, He said: "When any one heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart." (Matthew 13:19). The wicked one is already present in the vicinity of the heart, or he could not catch away at once what has been sown. And of the seed that falls among thorns, the Lord said: "He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful." (Matthew 13:22). The thorns grow in the ground itself. They are there before the seed arrives, and they are part of the occupation.

I invite the reader to study his own heart in this light. Consider how cold it is toward God, and how indifferent to the things of God. Consider how empty it is, and with what forms of vanity he fills it, and how, for all that filling, his life grows steadily more destructive. The entire landscape of the heart has become a ground of deception. The Apostle foresaw the character of the occupants when he wrote that "men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers," (2 Timothy 3:2), and when he named some of them "haters of God" (Romans 1:30). We are arrogant, we are proud, and we are liars; we love ourselves and we love money, and we are given to corruption. The cause lies in the controller. The heart has a king, and the king governs its movements and decisions.

The Hovering Spirit and the War of the Word

Genesis 1:2 says that the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. He moved, or hovered; He did not settle. The Spirit of God was present, but He did not dwell, because there was no place for Him. The earth was a resident of Satan and his angels, and the Spirit of God could do no more than hover above it. This is the condition of the heart before the Word comes into possession. The One who would inhabit it is near, and He is moving over it, and yet He is outside the house.

What must happen before He can dwell? The Scripture identifies Him: "and his name is called The Word of God" (Revelation 19:13), and of that same Rider it is written that "in righteousness he doth judge and make war." (Revelation 19:11). Before the dwelling of the Word, there must be war. This is not an accident of imagery. It is the order of the thing. The Word comes to uproot every civilisation that Satan has planted in the heart, and to tear down every structure he has erected there. Before the heart will be good ground for the word to yield, it must be the field of a battle. That is what is meant by the war of worlds within us.

Hence the Beatitude is both a promise and a diagnosis: "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God." (Matthew 5:8). If I have not seen God, it is because I am not pure. If I am not pure, it is because there is one who occupies me. The Lord has given us the principle: "For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together." (Matthew 24:28). Where the passions are, there are the demons. A man may wake one morning and find himself angry with God, and feel a deep anger toward Him that has no cause that he can name. The motive is not his own. The adversary works behind deception, and a deception can only be unmasked by the truth. Only the Word can uproot it, because only the Word knows the enemy.

The demons themselves show how well the enemy knows the Word. They cried out in the synagogue, "what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God," and the Lord answered with a command: "Hold thy peace, and come out of him." (Mark 1:24–25). The purpose of His manifestation was announced in a single clause: "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil." (1 John 3:8). It follows that no man can come into the fullness of salvation until the Word has entered his heart and made war against every establishment of Satan there. Lust is a signal that an entity is present. It does not retreat by resolution, and it is not softened by good intentions; it is removed when the Word comes and makes evictions.

The Inevitability of the Fall

I turn to a question that every pastor must face, and that every believer asks in private. Why are the struggles with sin so persistent, and why does the will seem so weak? The serpent was in the garden. "Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made." (Genesis 3:1). We are never told that anyone let him in, nor that anyone opened the door. We see no permission given, and yet he was there, lurking, and always seeking to undermine the love of man for God. He sought to make the word of God mean nothing, and to make the world appear to be something above God. He was in the garden before the man was tempted, and he is in the heart before the believer opens his mouth in prayer.

For this reason I say with all the weight I can place upon it that the fall of man is not accidental. The struggles of a believer with sin are not accidental. The weakness of his will is not accidental, and neither is his indifference to God, nor to the word of God. There is something at work within the heart, and it is a deposit left by an occupier. Our Lord could say, as no other man could say: "Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me." (John 14:30). The prince of this world had nothing in Christ. But he has something in every one of us, and that is why, when he comes, there is no resistance. I would add what the Gospels show: on the night of the betrayal, even the best of the apostles could not stand against him, for "they all forsook him, and fled." (Mark 14:50). A heart that God has not taken over cannot resist. The second verse of Genesis is the inevitable state of any human being who has not opened his doors to the Word.

A man who thinks himself a ripe dwelling for God deceives himself, having not done the work, because the work must be done first. If he has not allowed the Word to war within him, he lives on the surface, deceived, and is on his way to hell. This is a hard saying, and I do not offer it lightly. But a physician who hides the diagnosis does no kindness to his patient. We must not suppose that hearing is the same as being changed; we must not mistake the presence of the word in the ear for the presence of the word in the heart, since the heart is where the battle is fought.

Conclusion

I began with a man who had sat under the word for thirty years and had not changed. The explanation I have given for him is the second verse of the Bible. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, because the earth had become the territory of a defeated rebel and his host. The Spirit of God hovered over it and could not dwell. That earth is the heart, and the heart of man is formless and empty and dark where it has not been taken by God. This is the cause of the changelessness. The word is not weak; the ground is occupied.

Yet the Bible does not end with the second verse. "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." (Genesis 1:3). The Word who stood outside the house and was not given room speaks, and His speaking is the beginning of the recovery of the earth. He takes ownership; He restores and recreates; He drives out the occupant and makes the ground fit for His dwelling. What He did in the first chapter of Genesis He is able to do in the heart of any man who will bring it to Him. The war must come before the dwelling, and the war will be costly, but its end is a heart that the Creator inhabits with delight, a throne fit for the One who made it.

My prayer, and the prayer I would have every reader make his own, is that the Lord would speak His word again over the earth of our hearts, and retake, recreate, remake, and restore it for Himself. Let every infestation and every veil and every stronghold within be undone by His mighty power, and let the heart that Satan has ravaged and desecrated become a kingdom in which God finds His pleasure to dwell. Until the Word has done this work in us, no knowledge of Genesis will save us; when He has done it, we shall know by experience what we have only seen in the text: "That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." (John 1:9).