"It was a dark and stormy night..."

Gen 1:2 - The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep water. The Spirit of God was hovering over the water.

The second verse of the Bible is one shrouded in mystery. An earth exists, but it is an earth with which we are completely unfamiliar, and one that we could barely imagine. What we are told here paints a pretty bleak picture of darkness. I can tell you also that the water (which seems to be the only real matter of the earth at this point), can be described by the wording of the original language as a "surging mass of water." It was not a scene of calmness!

It was also an earth completely without life or light. The Spirit of God is described as "hovering" here, but other versions state that the Spirit was "moving" or "moving gently" over these stormy waters. The contrast is clear between a violent, dark, lifeless world and a serene and gently moving God.

If you have ever been in a violent storm, on land or especially at sea, you may recognize that it is very difficult to remain calm. One of the reasons this is true is because of the unpredictability of the power being unleashed. If you are on a boat that seems about to capsize because of a storm, you can't predict whether or not it will stay afloat, or if sinks whether you will survive, or if you do survive at first whether there will be any rescue, and so on.

It is the same when we are facing storms that come in life as well. A financial disaster; a loved one ill or hurt; the loss of a dream; or any number of dark and seemingly hopeless "storms" can come on any of us. It is also very hard to remain calm in those circumstances for mainly the same reasons of unpredictability. During life's storms, we rarely know how we will survive and what the future will bring if we do.

If, however, we know that God is not worried at all, and that, as in this verse, He is hovering around you and "moving gently" through your circumstances, we can face a dark and stormy time with assurance that the light is just ahead. Our God is the Creator King of the universe, and He is definitely in control during the darkest, bleakest, and stormiest parts of existence; the earth's and our own.

Your joyfully loquacious believer,
LEE

He Did It All!

It's time to look at the last half of the first verse of the Bible. Genesis 1:1 states "In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth." We have already checked out the "In the beginning, God" part (see below). Now we'll look at the claim that God "made the heavens and the earth."

Two separate claims are being made here. FIRST is the claim that God "made the heavens." This literally means that God made all of the universe except the earth. I know that the popular scientific "explanation" for the origin of the universe is the so-called "Big-Bang Theory." The theory could be stated non-scientifically, but accurately, like this - In the beginning was a very compressed ball of matter that exploded with so much force that it sent all kinds of 'stuff' flying outwards from the point of the explosion. Eventually, as the speed of this stuff slowed down enough, the stuff began to become organized into galaxies, solar systems, planets and moons, and the rest is history! Let's say, for the moment, that this claim is accurate. One of my first questions would be this, "Where did this ball of stuff come from?" The answer can really only be one of two things. Either this stuff was always there, or it just appeared out of nothing! If the stuff was always there, it means the universe is eternal, and the explosion just happened, or God caused the explosion to happen. Either way, we are facing the same problem I noted before. The "beginning" is not really the beginning at all. An eternal universe, whether in the current form or not, means that there can never be a real beginning!

If the stuff just appeared out of nothing, we are looking at magic without a magician again! That is, unless you say that there is a magician, God, who started it all by at least creating the ball of stuff. Some people believe this and say that is what the Bible means in Genesis 1:1 and the verses that follow. But, the Bible itself doesn't state that at all. As we will see in the later verses, the Big Bang theory is not what the bible describes here.

The SECOND claim is that God "made the earth." How God did this is explained later. I think it is easy to see if it is true that God made the heavens, it should be easy to believe that God made the earth as well.

What all of verse one means then, is that God did it all; He made all that there is and, as we will see, He did it for His grand purpose as a loving God.

Next time we will move to verse 2, finally ;), and begin to see what God's method of creation was according to the Bible.


Your Joyfully Loquacious Believer,
LEE