Let There Be...

 

Tuesday, March 2, 2021

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters.  And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.  Genesis 1:1-2
By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen.  Hebrews 11:3

I can’t remember when I first heard it, but the old sermon illustration about the creation and God’s powerful hand has stuck in my mind for decades.  It is about an old-time country preacher attempting to tell his flock about what God did to bring about everything we can see.  Having stood with Bible opened to the first chapter of Genesis he read the first two verses of Scripture, and completed his sermon in three short sentences:

In da’ beginnin’ they weren’t nuthin’.

An’ God, He reached out his’n hand, an’ cotched him a bit o’ da’ nuthin.

An’ wit da’ bit o’ nuthin’ God made somethin’…ever’thin’!

I fail to see how you can improve on that kind of preaching.

There are certain Scripture verses that stand out in my mind as formative for sound Christian doctrine of how, and why God created the universe.  These not only answer the darkness of our beginnings, but the purpose for why we exist.

Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.  He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation, for through him God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth.  He made the things we can see and the things we can’t see—such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world.  Everything was created through him and for him.  He existed before anything else, and he holds all creation together. Colossians 1:15-17

In the beginning the Word already existed.  The Word was with God, and the Word was God….So the Word became human and made his home among us.  He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. And we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father’s one and only Son.  John 1:1, 14

The debate on how the universe started, and how it came to be the kind of place it is, extends back generations…all of them.  The debate began in the Garden of Eden when the serpent cast doubt in Eve’s mind about whether God really said to leave the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil alone.  That question got to Eve.  She tried to defend God and said that the Lord had said to not even touch it.  This was going beyond what God had told them; God told them that in the day they ate of that tree’s fruit they would die.  With one simple question Satan muddied the waters of God’s clear teaching for humans on living a life of faith in God’s way.  And we have been stirring that mudhole ever since![1]

For Adam and Eve, and for every descendant of theirs, the whole issue has been one of faith.  We humans have a hard time taking things on faith, believing what we have not seen.  Yet, with a God whom no living person has ever seen, this is the chief requirement – that we take God’s word for our marching orders.  And, despite how small and insignificant each of us might appear, compared to, let’s say, the universe, taking God’s existence, sovereignty, and plans for us on faith is, to put it softly, putting every egg we have in this faith basket. 

And therefore we call it a leap of faith.  Believing in God is a choice which He has given us as one of those eggs in our basket.  You either believe-in, trust-in, and rely-on God…or you don’t.  The choice is entirely up to us.

For You Today

If you’ve never taken that “faith-leap” what you’ve been sensing as the missing piece in your life’s puzzle is the assurance that there is God, and He’s good, and He loves you.  That’s what’s on the other side of that nervous step of letting-go, and letting-God.  Today can be that one pivotal moment in your life. 

Trust in God.  Choose to place your faith in God’s only Son who died in your place.  He created you, and everything you can see, and everything beyond your sight.  Trust that he knows your every need.  You’ll find He’s waiting for you with open arms.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

[1] Title Image:  Courtesy of Pixabay.com    Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©

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[1] Read this account in Genesis 3:1-13

Earth Day - Part 3

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Wednesday, June 8, 2016

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Genesis 1:1^(NLT)

This week we are looking at the trace evidence of our God in creation.  So far we see that He is unique, all-powerful, and has all knowledge.  Now:

HE IS AN ORDERLY CREATOR

That God brought order out of the chaos is another statement of our text. 

The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.  Genesis 1:2^(NLT)

St. Augustine            wrote:  Men go abroad to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.

Our text says that God brought all creation into being after his kind; this means our “kind” was created with beauty, symmetry, and function, just as God exists in these.  We are, as the Psalmist says, fearfully and wonderfully made.[2] 

Dr. Lewis Thomas was president of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.  In the 1970's he wrote of what he called The Great Astonishment:

A short while ago the newest astonishment in medicine, covering all the front pages, was the birth of an English baby whose conception had taken place in a dish.  The older surprise, which should still be fazing us all, is that a solitary sperm and a single egg can fuse under any circumstance, and grow into eight pounds of human baby; this procedure has gone on for so long that we're used to it; hence the outcries of amazement at a minor technical modification – nothing much, really, beyond relocating the beginning of the process from the Fallopian tube to a plastic container. 

The real amazement is this:  you start out as a single cell; this divides into two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage, as the cells differentiate, there emerges one cluster of cells which will have as its progeny the human brain.  The mere existence of those special cells should be one of the great astonishments of the earth.  One group of cells is switched on to become the whole trillion-cell, massive apparatus for thinking and imagining.  All the information needed for learning to read and write, playing the piano, or the marvelous act of putting out one hand and leaning against a tree, is contained in that first cell.  All of grammar, all arithmetic, all music.

It is not known how the switching-on occurs.  At the very beginning of an embryo, when it is nothing more than a cluster of cells, all of this information and much more is latent inside every cell in the cluster.  No one has the ghost of an idea how some of them suddenly assume the special quality of brainness.  If anyone succeeds in explaining it within my lifetime, I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another, around the whole sky, until all my money runs out."^[3]       

The orderliness of the creation suggests an orderly, infinitely knowledgeable and volitional Creator.  Belief at the point of God’s creation settles the entirety of our culture’s religious debate.  According to Dr. Henry Morris, Genesis 1:1 refutes:

Atheism – because the universe was created by God.

Pantheism – for God is transcendent to that which He created.

Polytheism – for one God created all things.

Materialism – for matter had a beginning.

Dualism – because God was alone when He created.

Humanism – because God, not man, is the ultimate reality.

Evolutionism – because God created all things.^[4]         

For You Today

A great hymn of the church is Have Faith in God; that includes His creation!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road today…have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO

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[1] Title Image: By NASA/ GSFC/ NOAA/ USGS [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

[2] Psalm 139:14

[3]Thomas, Lewis, The Medussa and the Snail, (New York, Viking Press, 1978 - quoted in The Reader's Digest, October 1979

[4][4]Morris, Henry M., The Genesis Record, (Grand Rapids, Baker Book House, 1976), 38

In the Chaos That is Life

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Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Devotion VIDEO here

For Christ himself has brought peace to us. He united Jews and Gentiles into one people when, in his own body on the cross, he broke down the wall of hostility that separated us.  Ephesians 2:14^(NLT)

A professor I studied with at Duke was a “Gen-X’r”[2].  He didn’t give tests, but rather moved the class along with mini-projects, breaking into small groups for interaction; he builds a sense of community so the whole class can work on a learning curve together. 

(Not exactly the Little House on the Prairie school marm teaching the three R’s!) 

To a 1940’s-born Baby Boomer it is chaos. 

Give me a book, three quizzes, a mid-term and a final and I’ll get an “A”.  Force me into small groups and I break into a cold sweat.

There has always been a gap between generations.  I’m certain I gave my parents more gray hair than they deserved.  When it was my turn to be the parent, I was the one on the receiving end.  When my son was a pre-teen he would get lazy about cleaning his room (big surprise!).  Elizabeth would drop a hint or two, but never get any results. 

Then, inevitably, one day while our son was at school, the white tornado would visit his room, restoring order and reclaiming a view of the floor surface.  When Jason would come home in the afternoon you could hear it all over the house:  Oh NO!  She trashed my room again! 

One person’s orderliness is another’s chaos!

So what does chaos have to do with Paul’s letter to the Ephesians?  There’s a connection between Paul and Moses.  Listen to the first and second verses of the creation account in Genesis:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.   Genesis 1:1 - 2^(NRSV)

That expression formless void in Hebrew is bo'-hoo, and it means to be empty[3].  Formless, empty and covered in darkness; this is the very essence of chaos.   (That also pretty much describes my room when I was a teen).

Paul uses the word peace a couple of times in his letter to the Ephesian church.  This word is eirēnē, and it means to join (as in knit back together that which was broken apart).  When healthy bones are broken due to an injury, often they knit back together stronger than before the break. 

On the one hand we have chaos – void, empty and dark – a kind of brokenness; on the other hand we have peace – brokenness being healed, knit back together.  This is the kind of peace of which Paul spoke.

Peace and chaos – words and worlds that collide!

For You Today

The conclusion of Advent, our waiting, is only a few days away.  Could it be that God wants to use this time of anticipation to knit something together for you…bring healing and strength to some brokenness?

You chew on that out on the Rocky Road today…and have a joy-filled and blessed day!

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[1] Title image:  By Yinan Chen, via Wikimedia Commons

[2] The people born between 1965 and 1976 are referred to as “Generation X”; they are 51 million strong. 

[3] Strong’s Hebrew and Greek Dictionaries© 2003, QuickVerse

Science and Creation

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I was intrigued by a friend’s post on FaceBook™ concerning an article on the rising scientific thought that matter is always created by mind.^{(Read the article here)}

Here is a brief excerpt:

It’s been more than one hundred years since Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics, said that he regards “consciousness as fundamental,” that he regards “matter as a derivative from consciousness,” and that “everything we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

He is basically saying that the immaterial ‘substance’ of consciousness is directly intertwined with what we perceive to be our physical material world in some sort of way, shape or form, that consciousness is required for matter to be, that it becomes after consciousness….[2]

Now this is not very far from the way Genesis begins:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters.  And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.  Genesis 1:1-2^(NLT)

Even the Hebrew word used for “created” (bar-a) translates literally (and loosely) “brought into being from nothing”.  The Biblical concept of the Genesis creative event depicts God as Spirit who brings into existence (from nothing) all things. 

What’s intriguing to me is that some scientists are hailing this as “new discovery” when it is something the worshiping community of faith has celebrated as bedrock truth for millennia; God, as Spirit, beheld the nothingness and made something outside of Himself.  With God it was not simply mind OVER matter; before God created, there WAS no matter.

This is so consistent with ancient thought which marries “word” and “deed”.  God spoke, saying Let there be…, and it became reality…light, heavens, stars, atmosphere, animals…and us!  The word became what God thought.

Let me allow the article to have (nearly) the last word today:

Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction. Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.[3]

As for me, if the scientific community is turning towards the metaphysical, where, as the article suggests “consciousness is required for matter to be”, then I have to add my applause for the great minds that have seen the light!

And I have to invite them to come worship the Source of all light this Sunday!

For You Today

What do you believe about creation?

What was God’s purpose?

Where do you fit in with that purpose?

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[1] By NASA/JPL-Caltech/2MASS/B. Whitney, and © Michel Royon, via Wikimedia Commons

[2] Physicists Say Consciousness May Be A State Of Matter: The Non-Physical Is Indeed Real

[3] Ibid.