In The Beginning...

Here I am again; hoping to improve my Bible study by writing blog posts.  It worked best for me when I wrote directly from daily Bible readings, going through it, book by book.  So... we'll see.

Today I begin "In the beginning..." Genesis 1:1.  I've been here before!  I can recite the first few verses by heart.  I'm going a little deeper this time, really studying theology that I agree with and theology that I don't so much agree with. 

What's not to love about about this first verse?  A wonderful phrase in the Message from this first verse of the Bible is: "God created the Heavens and Earth—all you see, all you don’t see."  All you DON'T see?  I love that.  All we don't see.  Wind. Atmosphere. Microscopic organisms. Maybe the scientific foundations that brought about the earth in the way science has taught us.

Then as we travel into verse two, the pre-formed earth is described slightly differently in different Bible versions.  NRSV says the earth was a "formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep."  The Tree of Life version (which uses many of the original Hebrew words that I can then look up) says it was "chaos and waste and darkness was on the surface of the deep."  But my favorite. again, comes from The Message: "Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness."  I love "soup of nothingness."  In our wildest imaginations, we cannot ever imagine nothing.  We can imagine blank space, but that is not "nothing," it is blank space.  That is the best we can do, because if we can imagine it, it is not "nothing."  But add chaos to that nothing and you get a "soup of nothingness."  Wrap your mind around that!  Imagine nothing (not even blank space) and then make it a soup!

Some believe the opening chapters of Genesis give us the literal and historical version of how the earth came to be.  That's fine, if it works for you.  I think I would struggle a lot more with my faith if I had to believe that.  But I do believe it is a wonderful story of the beginning of God's love for us.  When I feel that we have created total chaos on this earth, I know I can look to the One who brings beauty and peace out of chaos and trust the love that so many eons ago made a place for me.

Holy God, Creator of All:

Thank you for our home and for the amazing beauty that shows up whenever we just open our eyes and hearts to see it:  a turtle struggling through a yard to get to a pond, the birds enjoying the shade of a maple tree, a deer dashing across a country road.... all the way to the magnificence of a mountain glacier, the Grand Canyon and the deep, sparkling blue waters of the Caribbean. Take our breath away with the beauty of your creation today. Amen.