Day 1
Memory Verse – 2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
Read Genesis 1
In the beginning there was nothing…no form, just void. There was disordered, chaotic, deep waters. But that wasn’t all. There was someone there in the chaos. The Spirit of God hovered over these waters. The word for Spirit in Hebrew is Ruach which also means wind or breath. The Wind of the Spirit hovered over the chaotic waters…and then God spoke! And creation came into existence. Land and life emerged from the deep chaos. Order appeared where only disorder had previously been.
We see this theme repeated throughout the Bible. Over and over, The Spirit of God enters chaos and transforms the disordered into creation. He takes the void and fills it. He brings life to the barren places, to quote a familiar worship song.
Then, God continued His creation with His crowning achievement – His own image bearing man!
Genesis 2:5 Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground, 6 but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. 7 Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
8 Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. 9 The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And do you see what He did? He took the unformed dust and formed man, and then He breathed into the man – He put His Ruach in the man, and He gave the man life!
Over the next few days we will dive deep into the Word to see how God performs this transformative act of new creation out of chaos for HIs people over and over. We will see the Lord bring His people from slavery to salvation, from death to life, from the wilderness to the Promised Land. But there is another theme that we will see as well…each and every time God provides new creation, salvation, and life, man cannot seem to maintain the creation but falls into sin and plunges back into chaos. Nevertheless, God is faithful even in our sin and weakness. He does not abandon us to our disorder, but delivers us time and again. His mercies are new every morning.
To see this second theme, consider what happens in the very next chapter of Genesis. God provided a beautiful new creation for mankind, even giving them a perfect garden to live in. But they fell in sin. They saw the fruit and desired what they could not have. And this act of defiance to God meant they had to leave the perfect garden and live in a not-so-perfect world. Still, God made a covenant with them that they would be fruitful, multiply, and subdue that now corrupted creation. And a promise is made: God would ultimately one day provide a Messiah who would restore creation. This man would not fall, but through the Spirit of God, would bring final order to the chaos.
The very next chapter of Genesis is a story of procreation. Eve began to have children, and life and creation continue. As we will see, mankind will continue to fail, but God will continue to bring creation out of chaos for His people. And He will for you, too.