"Out of Chaos" by Jason Edwards
“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3).
Scripture tells us that at the outset of creation, the earth was formless, void, darkness covered the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. The Hebrew phrase translated “formless and void is “Tohu va bohu.” Literally: Chaos.
So, creation existed initially as chaos, but then, God spoke into the chaos of creation and shaped, fashioned, and formed it into something very, very good.
Why is this significant? Well, it was to the first readers of the story because they were living in chaos.
Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann says this text was originally addressed to Israelites who were living in exile in Babylon. It served as a refutation of the Babylonian theological claims that the gods of Babylon controlled the future and as one answer to the questions the Israelites might have been asking in light of that. And what were those questions?
Imagine you are living in exile. Your home has been taken away from you. You’ve been separated from many of your loved ones. You no longer have permission to do what you’ve been trained to do. You have to find a new way to survive, new ways to support yourself, new ways to support your family. And your freedom—the freedom you’ve become so acquainted with you can’t conceive of reality without it—it’s gone. Just imagine.
Now imagine that in the midst of all of this, you’re also afraid you’ve lost your connection to God. You thought God could only be known or experienced back there and that God could only do something to help you back there. Everything you’ve known has been taken away from you. Life is starting to seem hopeless. Things are getting very, very dark.
If you were living in that kind of situation, what kinds of questions might you be asking?
The exiled Israelites were beaten down. Broken. Tired. Depressed. They were wondering if they had a future. They wanted to know if God could make something good out of the chaos of their lives again.
Many of us have been there with them this past year. 2020 has held its own special brand of chaos, further disrupting Earth’s peace and ours. And in the midst of it, Genesis 1 holds very good news.
At the outset of this holy season, you may be in a dark place. Everything seems to be spinning out of control. There is a void in your life, and you’re not sure how to fill it. Could God still bring some good from all of this? Might there be better days ahead? A chance for new beginnings? The advent of a new day?
Genesis 1 offers a resounding “yes.”
Genesis 1 tells us that God is here with us, hovering like an eagle over the void of our lives. God still has the power to create something out of nothing, to speak light into darkness, to breathe peace into every kind of chaos. God has done it before, and God can do it again and again and again.
And that is very good news.
Jason Edwards,
Senior Pastor