The First Day

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Today marks the beginning of our Genesis reading plan. Readings are Mondays-Friday, all the way up to Thanksgiving. As we begin, the readings are fairly brief; they will get longer as we move further into Genesis. I’ve written brief commentary to go with each day’s reading in an attempt to help you understand and appreciate what you read. If my commentary is helpful to that end, great. If it isn’t, skip it and just focus on the words of the scripture instead!

Let’s go.

 
 

Genesis 1:1-5

1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

 
 

There is one God, and he made everything.

There is nothing that God did not make. In ancient times people worshipped sun, moon, stars; in modern times we worship sex, money, success. This is foolish, because everything we can see has been created and is therefore not worthy of worship; only God should be worshiped. If you worship something created rather than the Creator, it will not go well with you. To worship something is to make it your source of strength and hope; that which you most admire—that’s what you worship. What or whom do you need to put in its appropriate place in your life?

 
 

And what this God does is bring order out of chaos.

When God begins to create, note that the Bible starts to describe God working, not with literal nothing—absolute non-being, which is im- possible for humans to understand, both then and now—but with the basic building blocks of reality—a wild waste, a deep churning chaos, a swirling ocean of the blackest night. Even in the Bible, the true beginning of everything is shrouded in mystery. So here, it’s not that there is nothing but rather that what’s there is unformed. It’s like saying you are in the middle of nowhere—the something that’s there has not yet been turned into anything useful, so we call it nothing. God takes the wild waste of chaos and begins to make it into something. God’s activity is always to bring order out of chaos—think of the healings of Jesus, who brings order and stability into crazed, wild minds. God takes messes and brings meaning out of them.

What mess do you need to ask God to make into something meaningful?

 

P.S. Know anyone who would benefit from receiving these daily scriptures over email each morning? Subscribe here. Each day’s reading gets posted on my website at 3:30 AM CDT and is emailed to everyone on my Daily Bible list at 4:00 AM CDT.

 

The Second Day

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When God begins to create, all that’s there is a watery mess of nothingness—chaos. So, after he creates Light on Day One, God begins to bring order to the waters of chaos, and he does so by first separating the waters into upper waters—”sky” or “heavens”—and lower waters, which (we learn on Day Three) are covering the land. He separates the waters above and the waters below with a “firmanent”—a strange Hebrew word that means a hammered-out, flat, hard thing. (Think huge manhole cover or piece of hard glass, like a gigantic car’s windshield.)

So, the ancient Israelites believed that the sky was this hard firmament which got its blue color from the waters above it. From time to time, the firmament’s windows would open and would release the waters above onto the land below (which is uncovered on Day Three)—in other words, rain.

Now, we “know” that the sky is not hard, and that the space beyond our atmosphere is not actually liquid, but Genesis is not trying to provide a scientific understanding of reality, but a moral and theological understanding. So, think about it: the amazing thing about the universe is not only that it exists, but that is has a form and a shape and is intelligible—it has meaning. That’s what God did—he made something out of nothing, and gave it a meaningful order. Today, no matter where you are in the universe, the laws of physics still apply. That consistency and intelligibility doesn’t have to be there, but that’s how God made things to be.

Today, he still does that. Why not pray that God makes this day meaningful to you?

 

Today’s Scripture

Genesis 1:6-8