Tag: genesis

Devo 25

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“I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.” Ecclesiastes 1:14

My homework for our ladies Bible study had me in Genesis 2 and 3 this morning.  I’ll take Genesis any day over Ecclesiastes.  I never know what to do with Ecclesiastes.  Genesis is just so PURPOSEFUL.  Every single element of creation intentionally placed to play its part in the great drama of redemption.  Types and shadows of the coming Messiah, the last Adam and the bride He purchases for Himself, the Sabbath rest that is to come, the New Heavens and Earth where we, clothed in Christ’s righteousness, will dwell securely— these just seem to jump from the page at me.

So it was a reluctant leap for me this afternoon from the loftiness of Genesis into the murky waters of Ecclesiastes.  But when I dove in, I found Eden all over again.

Solomon’s descriptions of life under the sun, read like a dirge of lament over what was lost in the garden.  The purposefulness of creation carries now an air of purposelessness, or vanity, as the Preacher calls it.  Here sits the king in Jerusalem, another imperfect ruler like Eden’s first, in the imperfect shadow of the City of God, and all he can see is how nothing on earth can ever be made right again as long as sin and death reign.  

“What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?”  He asks.  Generations come and go.  The sun keeps on rising and setting and there is nothing new under it (Eccl. 1:3-9).  You work.  And then you die.  “All are from the dust, and to dust all return (Eccl. 2:20).  Is he not echoing the very words of God to Adam in Genesis 3:19?  

“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

Welcome to the curse.

Was the curse intended to make us happy and contented with our lot?  No!  Solomon’s depression over the situation in which we all find ourselves makes perfect sense.  What wouldn’t make sense is for one to revel in the vanity of life and somehow find fulfillment therein.  He even tests this approach to see if it would work.  And in doing so only ends up repeating all of Eve’s first foibles.  

When the serpent challenges God’s authority by twisting His command thusly, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?” Eve should have rebuked his error but instead she falls prey to it and adds her own twist to God’s command not to eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  “Neither shall you touch it,” she adds. 

In the same way, Solomon twists the creation mandate by adding to it.  He doesn’t just stop with the God-given task of building houses and planting vineyards, gardens, parks, and fruit trees and making pools of water to irrigate it all.  Instead of being content to work and tend his gardens, he acquires slaves to do the work for him.  And instead of cleaving to one wife he collects concubines.  And just as Adam is led astray by his wife, Solomon’s many wives and concubines turn his heart away from the one true God as well.

Like Eve, Solomon’s choices are governed by his appetites.  Eve “saw that the tree was good for food.” He searched his heart how to cheer his body with wine (Eccl. 2:3.) Eve saw that the tree was “a delight to the eyes.”  Whatever Solomon’s eyes desired he did not keep from them (Eccl. 2:10).  Eve saw that the tree “was desired to make one wise.” Solomon, too applied himself to know wisdom, with an infamous fervor, only to discover that “in much wisdom is much vexation and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow (Eccl. 1:18).”

Tragically, Eve discovered the same thing.  “She took of its fruit and ate and gave some to her husband.” Just as the serpent foretold, Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened to both good and evil and they immediately saw their own nakedness.  Solomon reached for wisdom and his eyes too were opened to all the vanity and evil and oppression and vexation under the sun. “I applied my heart to know wisdom” but this also he perceived to be “a striving after the wind (Eccl. 1:17).”

Adam and Eve commenced their striving after the wind right away.  

“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.  And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths (Gen. 3:7).”

Oh the vanity!  As if that would cover their disgrace!  And then vanity of vanities, as soon as they become aware of God’s presence in the garden, they hide!  

Two truly remarkable things happen next.  The first is, God calls Adam’s name. Think of the power behind that summons!  “Samuel! (1Sam.3),” “Lazarus! (John 11),” “Saul! (Acts 9).” One has to assume that had God not come calling for them, Adam and Eve would have tried hiding forever.  But when God calls, you come out, you wake up, you rise from the dead, you fall to the ground in repentance. 

Adam’s response is also noteworthy. He claims to have been hiding due to their nakedness, except that was AFTER they had sown themselves the leafy loincloths.  But amid the soul- penetrating sound of the voice of God, all our pretenses fall away, don’t they?  Our own vain attempts at self-righteousness are exposed for what they are, filthy rags.  

And so God stoops to clothe his pathetic, naked, rebellious creatures.  He slays an animal and makes them skins and in so doing Adam and Eve are given a glimpse of what their disobedience will some day result in —the brutal death of God’s own Son, who will willingly lay down His life so that we might be clothed in His own righteousness, creating a way for us cowering creatures to once again come boldly into God’s presence without shame. 

THIS, my friends, is the righteousness Jesus was encouraging us to seek after in Matthew 6:28-32.

“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.  But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?”

Solomon’s royal robes were no more impressive to God than Adam and Eve’s leafy loincloths.  We, all of us, are as helpless in covering our own nakedness as the grass of the field.  God, Himself must do the covering.  And He does it gloriously.

Just think!  Those words in Matthew were the very words of the one wise “Shepherd” referenced at the end of Ecclesiastes.  “Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man,” Solomon concludes, which is exactly what Adam and Eve failed so miserably in doing.  And it’s where we all fall short as well.  That’s why we need the ‘Shepherd’s’ righteous covering.  That’s why we need His wisdom and not our own! 1 Corinthians 1: 21-24 says,

“For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.  For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, BUT TO THOSE WHO ARE CALLED, both Jews and Greeks, CHRIST THE POWER OF GOD AND THE WISDOM OF GOD.”

And what does Christ, the very wisdom of God, command us to do?  Take of Him and eat! 

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever (John 6:58).”

Is God calling your name?  Come out and be clothed in the righteousness of His Son, Jesus Christ!  Reach for Him, the Living Bread, the Beauty and the Wisdom of God!  Take of Him and eat and live forever!

Devo 1

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“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.   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.”  Genesis 1:1,2

No three sentences ever penned could be so pregnant with purpose and possibility as those.  This isn’t the beginning of everything, God Himself has always been, but it is the beginning of the great story of redemption as revealed to mankind.  And the first thing God wants to tell us about everything is that He made it. He created it on purpose and therefore no part of creation is without purpose. 

So the earth was not without purpose, but it was without form. It was a wasteland, a dark, colorless, vacuous space.  The Hebrew word for “the deep” implies an abyss, a deep, surging mass of water.  This might all sound like a description of nothing but in reality “without form” is a pretty accurate description of the physical properties of water.  And void is an extremely accurate description of everything else!  

Consider this: all matter is made of atoms. Atoms are made up of protons and neutrons, which form a nucleus, and electrons which orbit it.  Now electrons are about 2000 times smaller than protons and neutrons and the space between them is relatively enormous.  If the orbit of the electrons were represented by the walls of a major-league baseball stadium, the nucleus of protons and neutrons would be a marble placed in the center of it.  And you know what would fill up all the rest of that space?  Nothing!  Atoms are actually made up of 99.99999% empty space, or void.  And since everything is made up of atoms, everything is made up of mostly nothing!  It’s still 99.99999% void, just like it was in the beginning. 

Hebrews 11:3 tells us that God is the creator of both the visible and the invisible and that the visible things are actually made out of things that are invisible.  

“By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”

Sounds a lot like atoms, right?  In fact, Colossians 1:15-17 gives us even more insight by stating that it is through Jesus Christ that not only was everything created, but in Him everything holds together.  If the electrical charge between the proton and the electrons held in orbit around it were altered by just one billionth of one percent, the matter it represented would explode!  Check out this article for more blind-blowing scientific speculation about what holds the universe together.

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.  For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible— all things were created through Him and for Him.  And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”

So Genesis 1 is the account of how the .0001% that we call matter interrupted all that void.  When God created the heavens and the earth, He created all the matter that was ever going to exist in them apart from His own miraculous intervention.  And when the Holy Spirit “hovered over the face of the waters” all the energy that was ever going to exist had it’s source right there.  Scientists call this the First Law of Thermodynamics.  It states that neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed.

The law of conservation of energy states further that we can’t run out of or make new energy.  It just changes forms, from potential to kinetic, and visa-versa. Just like matter, all energy comes from God.  Paul says it this way in Acts 17:24-28,

“The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is He served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since He himself gives to all mankind life and breath and EVERYTHING… In Him we live and MOVE and have our being.”

Energy is the ability to do work.  And what a work was about to be done! That third sentence of the Bible is just oozing with the anticipation of it!  SOMETHING was going on over that dark, watery abyss.  The Hebrew word Rachaph means to brood, flutter, move, or shake.  The Holy Spirit was certainly about to shake things up!  God was at work! 

The energy I used to type these words, the energy you used to take this up and read it, existed in God at the time of creation.  We move because He Moved.  And we exist because Jesus Christ holds our atoms together by the word of His power.

Do you need a better reason than that to worship Him, the Alpha and Omega, the God of the beginning?  How about 2 Peter 3:7? 

“By the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgement and destruction of the ungodly.”

Peter warns us that scoffers will come in the last day following their own sinful desires (not scientific method).  According to Peter, these scoffers deliberately overlook the fact that the earth was formed out of water by the word of God and destroyed by water in the flood of Noah’s day.  But listen to the words of hope he gives us through the rest of chapter 3.

“The Lord… is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance… According to His promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells…Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by Him without spot or blemish, and at peace.  And count the patience of our Lord as salvation.”

Do you hear that hope?  The world God created, now marred by scoffers, will be destroyed in judgement.  But oh the patience and salvation of the Lord!  Those who repent will see the new heavens and new earth where righteousness dwells.  Peter concludes with another warning, that knowing these scoffers will come we need to take care that we not be carried away by their error and lose our own stability, 

“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  To Him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity.  Amen.”