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The cover art for Corey Paul's "Creation" showing the rapper in a white hoodie with a halo around his head and a cloud background.

Creation

Corey Paul

God is so intentional. This is something that really sunk in for me recently while working on my latest project. In the Bible when we read, "In the beginning," it talks about the Spirit hovering over this inky darkness. The world is just water and then from that comes the dry land and the trees and all of that. Then when I think about the flood, with Noah’s ark and God floods the world, I’m like, "Oh, God’s taking it back." That’s how it was before. In the beginning, it was just all water. It went back to that again for a new beginning. Like, yo, that’s crazy work. There’s so much intentionality.

 

For the culture’s sake, it’s like when you listen to a Jay Z or a Kendrick Lamar line five years later and you’re like, "Oh! That’s what he was talking about." But on the ultimate level. God is the original lyricist. That’s what I was understanding just by reading the Creation story is He’s so intentional.

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It's concepts like this that inspired me to write "Creation" as a rap song and then make a cinematic video to go with it. The purpose of “Creation” was to recontextualize a story from the Bible that a lot of us know. If you’re a Christian, you one hundred percent know the Creation story in Genesis. I wanted to tell it in a way that makes the listener hear it with fresh ears, see it with fresh eyes. I feel like the story is timeless, so I wanted to create something that showcased just how timeless it was by hopefully giving you some kind of "Oos" and "Ahhs" about verses you’ve read a hundred times.

 

For me and my brothers and sisters in Christ, everything points back to the Bible. There’s nothing I’ve ever read of any substance in any self-help book, in any self-development book, or anything else that can’t be found in the Bible. Different life coaches or authors might say it in their own way, but there’s always some Scripture that’s gonna back their concepts that work. I believe that is the foundation for these truths about ourselves and the world around us. 

 

But often times the Bible is set apart from different aspects of life. People build entire lives off giving people advice on how to build a career or manage their money or take care of their families because we all are so desperate for answers to these major life questions. My big vision is to intersect the Bible with all of these pillars that make life worth living. 

Having a breakdown of Scripture like this when hip-hop was influencing me growing up would have impacted me greatly because you don’t know what you don’t know. So I remember listening to early Christian rap where the storytelling wasn’t necessarily rapping the Bible, but they would mention the Bible. They would mention verses, they would mention stories, they would mention different things from the Bible and I had no idea what they were talking about. It was all new to me. I had never heard of these stories and concepts and people before. 

 

How I broke down the Bible verse by verse in “Creation” comes from my own study of the Scripture and my many years of trial and error and learning and growing as a follower of Christ. It’s powerful because I am sharing with listeners what I’ve learned. What I'm doing different is I'm offering an opportunity to have the lightbulb go on in your head and understand things in a way that you never understood them before, just like I had to for myself. This can frame your thinking and then also lead to how you act upon what you think.

 

And that ties to the bigger picture that God wants us to understand in the Creation story itself. In the beginning, God says, “Let there be light.” Then later, He creates the sun and the moon and the stars. So then the question is, “Well what was the light when He said, ‘Let there be light?’” Then later the Bible would tell us that God is the light, right? Over and over, the Bible talks about God being the light and then the sources being just that, God’s resources. The sun is just a resource that’s being used to display God's light. Then that points back to our life, how God is the light of our life even if our bank account ain’t reflecting it, even if our relationships aren't reflecting it. He doesn’t need those things in order to illuminate our life. He is the sustaining light. So tying those things together is like wow. But it was years after being a Christian that I understood that concept.

Another concept that I’ve unpacked for myself and that I hope people understand more for themselves through “Creation” is how God made us in His image. I think the simplest way I can explain it is there are four different perspectives of thinking: 1) Things happen to me. Something happened and it happened to me, meaning I’m a victim of it. 2) Things happened alongside me. I was a part of it, I play a part and I witnessed it, but it doesn't really affect me. 3) Things happen through me. Something happened and that experience channeled through me. I wasn’t independent, I was a part of it that way and it affected me, but I have some responsibility in it. 4) But then kind of the ultimate life experience is this oneness where things are happening and I’m the watcher of these things with the perspective of God's sovereignty.

 

I don’t wanna get too deep into it, but the point is if you’re a believer, you believe that God is all-knowing and He’s been here and He knows the end of it. He’s not watching my life like, "Hmm, I wonder what’s gonna happen next?" So with that understood, there’s a oneness that I need to have with God to genuinely experience life. If it’s good and something great happens today, I’m sitting with God knowing He already knew that was happening and grateful for that blessing. But if it was something that’s really bad, I’m sitting with God knowing that He already knew that was going to happen and that He is a good God and He won’t leave me. I think this oneness can only happen if you genuinely believe you are created in His image. So I talk about on Day 6, the Father, the Son and the Spirit — the Trinity — always being one from the beginning. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. So that oneness can only occur if you believe that you are created in His image.

 

Having a foundation in truth allows you to process life with a sense of hope. So the reason why I’m excited about this project and I encourage others and say, "Hey listen to this, pay attention to this" is because it’s joy there, it’s peace there because there's hope. There’s a line that says, talking to the Christian that’s struggling, “You thinkin bout leaving, He been thinking bout you since the Genesis like where we going then?” So it’s like something happens to you today and you’re upset with God, but it’s like He’s been thinking about you for thousands of years. If you really understand that, then the relationship that didn’t work, the job that didn’t work, the money that you don’t have, your Instagram post not doing what you thought it was gonna do, these things become very trivial in the grand scheme of things. It helps us frame our life. Don’t mean it don’t hurt, don’t mean it’s not pain, but you can always get up from it, dust yourself off and be even better on the other end because you understand these foundational truths about yourself, about life and the God that created us.​

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