Becoming Human: A Devotion on Genesis 1-11Sýnishorn

A couple of years ago, I travelled across the UK with a colleague for an important work meeting as we met with some potential partners. Being the first time we had met in person, I was keen on making a good first impression. Unfortunately for me, as the meeting was due to start at 9 am and we had to travel a fair way, it meant setting my alarm for 3:45 am. Now, I am not great first thing in the morning, and I was about to be confronted with the limitations of my cognitive functionality at that time in the morning. As I was driving, I started to feel some significant discomfort in my feet. I glanced down. I tried to absorb what I was looking at. My shoes looked different from usual. The realisation spread across my mind. These weren't my shoes. Somehow, the 4 am me had managed to wrestle on my housemate's shoes, a clean two sizes too small, onto my feet, walk to the car and begin to drive. The next 24 hours consisted of me trying to offer my best first impression whilst sweating as the squeeze on my feet felt ever tighter.

One of the striking things we find on the first page of God’s relationship with human beings is how everything fits perfectly. Everything He fashions is not only perfectly made but also perfectly placed. Even the order of what God decides to do each day complements each other. In the first three days, we find God creating space. Space between light and dark, space between the waters above and the waters below, and space between sea and shore. In the following three days, He creates things to fill those spaces in the same order. In the light and dark, he fills it with the sun, moon, and stars. In the waters above and below, He creates birds for the sky and fish for the sea. And in the space he creates on the land, he fills it with vegetation and animals. There’s a poetic beauty in the symmetry.

At the beginning of the story, we read that ‘the earth was formless and empty.’ The Hebrew here is ṯōhū wāḇōhū.Rabbis have described this phrase as referring to something confused or even chaotic! Imagine opening a bank safe, which you imagine is full of your most important possessions, only to find it empty. That’s ṯōhū wāḇōhū.Or imagine being swept out to sea at night, and no matter how hard you swim, nothing you do seems to compete with the tide. That’sṯōhū wāḇōhū. Chaotic. Dark. Nothing. But out of the chaos, God brings order. He makes systems. Solar systems, ecosystems, digestive systems! Everything was made to fit just right. Each day being confirmed by God’s exclamation of how everything was ‘good.’

But even after these 26 verses of ‘good’ creating and filling, things get even better! We have an early contender for what I think is one of the most extraordinary verses in the whole Bible:

So God created mankind in his own image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

- Genesis 1:27

We will discover more of this in the next devotional, but notice what God does next. After all the creating and filling. After all the order that is developed out of chaos. It poses a question: what about us? What about human beings? How do we fit in? What is our place? At this point, humans seem like an addition to the other animals that God makes on day 6. But then God speaks again, this time not to create but to convey.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

- Genesis 1:28

So far, God has been the only one being fruitful and increasing things in number. He has been the one filling the earth and subduing it. God is the ultimate ruler of the animals he has created, and he turns towards human beings, blesses them, and invites them to partner with him. Ok… woah, that’s awesome. But how the heck are we supposed to do that? It feels like the natural progression would be for God to sit down with human beings and lay out all that he had done, how he did it, and to give some instructions on how he wants them to carry out his command. But that’s not what he does. Instead, we find something unexpected.

By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.

Genesis 2:1-3

That’s weird. Think about it. This is God we are talking about on page 1 of his autobiography. Resting isn’t really the kind of thing that we would expect of an all-powerful creator God. I mean, where is the instruction manual? It’s like God is shifting all the responsibility on the new guy, wishing them luck and heading out early! But perhaps something else is going on.

Maybe day 7, rather than being some kind of abdication of responsibility, is actually the playbook for who we are supposed to be when we carry out God’s invitation to rule and subdue the earth. Before anything else, before any creating or filling, God shows people who he wants them to be. A people who know rest. Who knows that they are enough, simply as God’s own. Who know that it is not in anything that they do that gains the love of God. That it is from that place in which all else follows. That your value is not something you earn. Let me ask you a question:

What do you rely on to gain, maintain, or avoid losing God’s love? It could be church attendance, financial generosity, having well-behaved kids, or a functioning marriage. Maybe it's keeping up-to-date with your Bible plan or praying out loud each day. All of those things are good things. Some are great things. But they are never things that will gain, maintain, or avoid losing God’s love. He offers His love to you as a blessing before anything else. And it's from knowing that and knowing Him that we get to enjoy building his kingdom of peace.