For Goodness Sake...
Beginnings are really neat. From our favorite billionaire who started by selling pizzas, our favorite neighbors who grew into generous, full individuals from some quaint town, or our favorite superhero who gained his start from some inhuman cause, beginnings rock. If you’re like me, you’re plagued with loving the beginning so much that actually seeing things to an end might not come about. Often the joys of a new, fresh beginning supersede and blind us to old endeavors. In a very real sense I have so many blog entries that are incomplete.
First thought is what a joy it is that the Lord never fails to complete what he starts in us!
At the same time the Lord loves creating new beginnings. He gives and works new mercies in us each day (Lamentations 3).
In Sunday School this past week we started a 3 year journey to work through the entirety of the bible; and of course we started with the first few verses of Genesis. Timeless as to its tangibility but concrete as to purpose, this passage often seems…familiar. As we were going through the passage I realized my tendency with this passage that to see the story in how it points to Christ, but I’ve never seen how it points to the Spirit in us.
“The very first things God made—the earth and heaven—He did not deem ‘good.’”
The first thirty one verses are dedicated to telling the creation story and how everything was good after God made it — light, people, planets, those kinds of things. However, the very first things God made—the earth and heaven—He did not deem “good.” Never have I found this odd up to this moment, but it seems strange that the very places God would be decorating and dwelling would not be given the stamp of approval.
What’s even more interesting with this first creation is the way in which God interacts with it. It says he created the earth, but the scripture’s don’t specify if he spoke it into existence or crafted it with his hands or spat into the nothingness. So now we have a neutral blob-planet where, get this, God hovers over the face of the water. I imagine this to be like a fog over the lake, mysterious, observing, planning, rejoicing in what He is about to do.
Why does he hover? I feel God was enjoying his creation before it was ever conceived. It also points to his encompassing nature—this notion that he is in and around all things. He could see what was to come and He spent time with creation before it was beautiful, before it was good or bad.
The life of a believer is one often defined by “formless and void” notions—areas of our new life that are undefined to us because we have not experienced God in a certain revealing way. Granted, there has been a bridge between the Heavenly and the earthly through Jesus, and the Spirit is there…hovering. Planning. Mysteriously surrounding in anticipation for what He is about to do.
Then in a moment, a revelation from scripture, statement of a friend, or the chirping of a distant melodic bird, the spirit speaks light into our void, enacts the power and truth of the word in our heart and mind, and declares what was revealed “good.” (James 1:17 “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”)
Following the light is an expanse; a separation between water and water. Often the spirit is seen as water, so my mind sees this new spiritual, personal revelation surrounded and guarded by the Spirit who revealed it. The expanse is also a picture of the Christian’s life on earth; the spirit is same in substance as the Spirit of God, but separated in that our job is to establish heaven on earth as the Spirit is established in heaven.
The next day there is another expanse. In the Christian life there are two areas of expansion or separation I want to draw attention to; one, when the word is enacted in our hearts, our concepts and understandings of God are increased, expanded, stretched, grown. Second we see that the expansion in Genesis is one separating the water from the land, in a sense a defining of boundaries between water and land, between spirit and skeleton. Just as the world was made, separated, and defined, we are beings of distinct—but unified—spirit and body. God sees a healthy distinction between the two as good.
“LET THERE BE FRUIT!”
“Let the heart sprout vegetation,” let there be fruit! When God grows us, when we are expanded and stretched, our natural response is fruit producing! This looks like “yielding seed”/ sharing the word, multiplying the graces and mercies of God in our lives.
We then see a second string of light creation, this time lights in the dark expanse of the heavens. When God shines and illuminates his first light of understanding on us we are called to be lights in the darkness, “light of the world, a city set on a hill!” Verse 16 says, “And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars.” We’re those stars y’all!
The last couple of days of creation are all the living things God makes and then gives them the joy and command to multiply, to rule, and to work.
It’s humbling to say the least that the sanctification process of a believer is seen in the first days of creation. It’s like God knows what he’s doing.
God is really good at taking what is formless in our own hearts and souls and turning it into something good. To the Only who can make form from the formless and form from the deformed, may we formative people in the expanse of the Gospel.