The beginning

Wars, disasters, disease, crime, grief and loss, financial distress. Are you anxious about the future? I invite you to grab your anxiety and carry it back into the past—to the very distant past. All the way back to the beginning. “In the beginning God created” (Genesis 1:1). In this beginning, you can have your anxiety recreated into meaning, purpose, peace. You did not come from nothing—you came from God. Your daily struggles do not amount to nothing; they are significant to God. Your present life will not end in nothing; it will go forward in God. “In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind” (Job 12:10). For an excellent future, go back to the beginning!

Evidence for God

Huge sections of humankind do not believe in the Creation week as described in Genesis. That story appears beyond credibility—infantile, primitive, irrational, unscientific. But consider the journey of science itself. Many findings and theories of years gone by now seem . . . well . . . they look infantile, primitive, irrational and unscientific! We humans are a strange lot. We fix and declare our certainties even while we acknowledge the astounding unknown. Genesis 1 is a declaration from the Unknown, shaped for Earth’s first century and its last. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” If this is wrong, all declarations may well be wrong and life is established on nothing. If this is right, and I accept it as right, my life is built on God and becomes evidence for Him.

Darkness to light

“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters” (Genesis 1:2). Before God’s intervention, there was shapelessness, emptiness, darkness. But when the Spirit of God hovered in expectancy, life stirred! The Spirit of God still hovers over our planet. God is doing a work of re-creation. Let there be light. . . . Let there be life! Filled with the same stirring Spirit, the Son of God strode onto our soil and spoke: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness” (John 8:12). Today, will you find your form, your fullness and your light in the power of the creating Christ?

A gift of rest

Creation week ends not with a thundering climatic roar, but in breathtaking silence. It’s Earth’s Sabbath—the first, the original (Genesis 2:2, 3). God at rest. Earth at peace. Creation celebrated. Beings in intimacy. God with His children present in a sanctuary of time. This is Sabbath—divine family time. It’s when God’s kids turn their attention from the things that are made to the Maker of things. Today, Sabbath is the recurring reminder God gives humanity that their story began in perfect rest, and that through Christ they can discover perfect rest again (Hebrews 4:9, 10). If Sabbath was needed in the pure peace of Eden, it’s needed much more in the sin-ravaged commotion of our modern lives. What a gift!