In the beginning God played with the planets (StF 108)

Ideas for use

David Lee’s swing-style setting is one that a praise band could have a lot of fun with; at the same time it is a contemporary song that is effective with just a piano or keyboard accompaniment. Certainly, it requires a certain level of piano-playing proficiency to pull off effectively but, if it seems a little daunting at first, as soon as you start singing Andrew Pratt’s words to it the syncopations and triplet rhythms fall neatly into place.

More information

Andrew Pratt’s words follow closely the first of the creation stories in Genesis (Genesis 1), from God’s first “Let there be light” to the emergence of people “made in God’s likeness to live on the earth”. The language is accessible and unusually perky for a hymn (God, in this hymn, is clearly having fun), and includes references to earth as the “blue planet” – a description arising from the great amount of water on the earth’s surface which, especially when shaded by cloud, gives the earth the appearance of a blue marble if viewed from space.