“It must be so lonely knowing what you know.” –Dan Smith, “Campus”
“And He that sat upon the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.” And he said unto me, “Write: for these words are true and faithful.” –Revelation 21:5
*
In the beginning, God was all alone.
The universe was vast, and vastly empty. God was a solitary creature, building stars and moons, weaving galaxies into elaborate tapestries of dancing light and icy darkness. All-powerful, he yearned to create mighty worlds in the hopes that someday, they would have mighty inhabitants… and finally, he wouldn’t be alone anymore.
He molded a great many planets in astounding iterations of each other. Planets of ice and snow, planets of gas and rock and dust, planets of impossible heat. On all of them, God created life. Breathed other creatures into existence, waiting for them to realize he was there.
They never did. They never survived.
God was an artist. A terrifying, overwhelming, heart-rending artist. His planets weren’t just functional; he drenched them in beauty. He painted them in awe-inspiring colors of terror and wonder. He wanted his creations to be the same. Not just existing, but alive. Thriving. He wanted them to be aware; to be able to learn, to try and match his power, to be as smart as him. God believed in miracles, and a miracle would be born of his beings, of their ability to adapt, survive, and grow. He wanted them to explore the universe, branch out until they touched every far-reaching corner. Life would bloom in all his extraordinary galaxies. His universe would be full of beauty.
He would love them, and be loved by them.
But God knew everything. He knew what caused his dereliction… what caused his creations to fail to thrive. It was the curse of knowing the way their lives would end.
In every version of reality where they survived, God knew they would destroy themselves. The universe, in these scenarios when they survived, was not full of beauty, but full of pain. Full to bursting with suffering. But God had hope, and loneliness motivated his fear.
Fear leads to desperate, desperate acts— even from gods.
God gave away a piece of his power. He gave his creations the opportunity to choose their path, believing that their intelligence, their ability to distinguish between right and wrong, would save them. He saw two paths stretch out before his creations when he did: the path of grace, peace, knowledge, and the path of destruction, violence, ruin. His hope was more powerful than his unease. He wanted to believe they would choose correctly.
The creations survived for the first time. Evolved exactly as he had designed them to. They built cities of iron, tamed the wild world they lived upon, and performed outstanding feats of engineering, designing technology that would allow them to explore the rest of the universe.
And they did know God.
But God’s hope was misplaced.
His creations deteriorated. Their periods of tranquility and growth were short lived, lost to anger and abhorrence. Instead of being creatures of peace and knowledge, they became instruments of annihilation. Their unwillingness to admit they could be wrong, that they could choose wrong, led them down the path of hatred. They turned upon one another; their societies became divided by hostility and loathing. They turned their back on God, declaring wars in his name despite his pleas not to. The din of their world collapsing deafened them to his cries.
God saw their ruin coming before they did. He saw the way they tore apart the planet they lived on; stripped it bare of its resources, decimated the other creatures that inhabited it, left it in such desolation that no future generations would survive. Knew the way their incredible cities crumbled to dust, or else stood abandoned in wild disrepair. Felt the agony of his creations as they died at the hands of each other. He saw how these calamities extended, following his creations like a plague no matter where they went in the universe. Tragedy trailed in their wake, a constant reminder of their failure.
God, for all his strength, for all his efforts, couldn’t save them from themselves.
He grieved their loss. He waited centuries for them to return to him, to find their way back to the lightened path of hope that still waited for them. Time and again, he gave them every opportunity. Watched, despairingly, as they always, always chose wrong. They were blind to everything but their own desires, their own selfish trivialities. In his grief, he wanted to spare them. He had to stop them and end their suffering, which he had caused by creating them— which he had known he would cause— and his guilt found solace in destruction.
He obliterated the planet. Drowned the ones left there. Purged the world of all sentient creatures. Then he found the rest, hidden in every crevice and crack they could find in the universe, and he destroyed them, too. God was alone once more, trapped in an existence of immeasurable pain.
Unimaginable sorrow. Grief that could eat him alive.
He had to try again. He tried hundreds of different realities. Hundreds of different versions of their souls and minds. It didn’t matter; in every version, the end was inevitably the same.
Total carnage.
He pleaded with them. Sent down pieces of his own massive soul in efforts to persuade them to listen. Spoke to those who he thought still believed in him enough to hear his voice.
“Please,” he whispered to them. “Please stop.”
“Please,” he begged.
“Please,” he sobbed.
They never heard him. If they did, they didn’t listen.
He tried again.
“Help us,” they always begged in the end. Maybe they thought he could fix their mistakes. Right the wrongs they had so egregiously, unthinkingly committed.
He always heard them.
And he always helped them the only way he knew how.
In anguish, he took their lives. Snuffed out their existences in a single, massive sweep. The universe shook with the weight of the loss. Cosmos collapsed under the weight of his pain.
But he tried again.
And again.
And again.
God has never been what he was imagined to be. His creations were never meant to be saved; despite what their creator dreamt of, there was never any hope for salvation. No hope for redemption. He had nothing but their lives to offer them. They were only meant to love him, after all. All he had ever wanted, in his painfully isolated existence, was to be known.
His creations endured breathtaking, excruciating torture in their short lives— but it was nothing compared to what pain he inflicted upon himself each time he made them, and each time he killed them.
And even that was nothing compared to the torment of being alone.
God was so lonely.
The universe, in the end, was very dark. Quiet. Empty.
In the end, God created the heavens and the earth.