Creation

In the beginning, God created the world. Many people consider this creation to be ex nihilo, a creation from nothing. However, God describes the earth as being "without form, and void" (Moses 2:2). The Hebrew translation of this phrase, tohu wa bohu, seems to imply that the world, rather than not existing, was simply in an unorganized state, as tohu is the word for "chaos" or "confusion".

Thus, God's act of creation seems to be less of an act of creating matter, and more of an act of creating order. And this creation of order would appear to have two different parts, of which Lehi speaks in 2 Nephi 2:11. The first part of which he speaks is that there must be a creation of "an opposition in all things." Everything has its individual purpose for which it was created. This is the creation that we see most in the physical creation of the world. God separated the light and the dark, the heavens and the earth, the land and the sea. He created "every herb yielding seed after his kind" and "the beasts of the earth after their kind" (Moses 2:12,25). Everything was assigned its own unique function and a realm within which it would work.

This physical creation is what occurred during the first seven days. This is simply the first part of creation, though. Lehi also speaks of a second part of creation, saying that "all things must needs be a compound in one" (2 Nephi 2:11). Everything needs to be put together to create a compound.

But wait, that seems contradictory, doesn't it? Why would God separate things, then put them right back together?

Well, think about it. If you were to write a story, would you be able to throw a bunch of letters and punctuation randomly onto the page? You probably wouldn't end up with a very good story. Instead, it's important to separate those letters out into words. Each word has a series of letters and a meaning. This is the first step to creating a story.

However, can one word convey the whole story? More often than not, it can't. Rather, you must "unify" the words, putting them together into a structure in order to form a sentence, a paragraph, and eventually, the full story. Thus, after the letters have been separated from a big blob into unique words with their own function, you must then unify them again in order to form the story.

In the same way, God's act of creation begins with a separation, as represented by the physical creation. However, He continues with a unification, a creation of relationships, of social structure. And that social creation can teach us a lot about God's vision for society.