“Let’s start at the very beginning, it’s a very good place to start” - so sang Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.
I have recently started at the very beginning: I’ve decided to read through the Bible. It’s going to take me three years. I confess to being a slow reader! Not really, it’s just that I like the time to really mull over a passage so one chapter a day is about all I can manage (plus if you get behind it’s not too daunting to catch up). I figure that if I actually manage it in three years that’ll be better than attempting it and failing every now and then. Plus, now I’m getting older, three years doesn’t seem so long.
So I’ve started in Genesis and this week’s devotionals will be some rich pickings from my first five days.
‘Now the earth was formless and empty’ [NIV]
Genesis 1:2
This phrase ‘formless and empty’ is translated in a variety of ways:
- ‘barren and without life’ [CEV]
- ‘a formless void’ [NRSV]
- ‘without form and an empty waste’ [The Amplified Bible]
- ‘shapeless, chaotic mass’ [Living Bible]
- And finally, and most poetically, ‘a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness’ [The Message Bible]
The original words in Hebrew are difficult to translate, hence all the variations. We could equally well use the words chaotic, unfulfilled, messy, disordered, confused, waiting or uncertain.
Do any of those words describe you or any part of your life? I think all of us have areas of ‘formless void’ somewhere in our lives. Sometimes it can feel like our whole life is ‘formless and empty’.
What did God do in Genesis 1 with this ‘formless void’? He made something from nothing. But it was rather more than a ‘something’! A cosmos and a world populated with creatures, plants and humans and it was all ‘very good’.
How did this all come about?
‘a wind from God swept over the face of the waters’ [NRSV].
Why not stop right now and invite the breeze from God to move over everything in your life that is meaningless and empty? Let the same Holy Spirit present in the creation of the world create from your ‘mess’ something that God calls ‘very good’.
