Thought for Today
Genesis 1:3 Then God said, "Let there be . . .
Psalm 19:14 Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.
Luke 4:22 All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, "Is not this Joseph's son?"
John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
“Thank you, God, for loving me into being. Amen” (These Days, June 13, 2024)
That simple prayer from yesterday’s devotional is one of the most powerful and theologically deep statements of faith I have ever encountered. Genesis 2:7 tells us, “then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” Our very lives are a demonstration of the God who loves the world so much that God sent God’s Son for our, and all of Creation’s, salvation and redemption. Our life force represents God’s breath, God’s love in action.
Until seminary, I never really grasped the incredible power of words. Despite the heroic efforts of many primary and secondary educators, I did not really ‘get it.’ Thankfully, our ancestors-in-the-faith, all the way back to the beginning, to the minds that captured and shaped the understanding of our relationship with our Creator, did. Fortuitously, for us, they left us a written record, the collection of words we call the Bible.
Consider, we shape our thoughts, we create our ideas, with words. Could we have conceived any of our fundamental knowledge without forming those thoughts and ideas? Newton did not witness an apple falling from a tree and immediately form in his mind F=MA. Nor did Einstein see something and immediately form E=MC2. Each went through a complex process of observation followed by forming words in their minds to create sentences to describe the phenomena they imagined.
In seminary, I remember the first time I read the creation story in koine Greek and then read John 1 in that same Greek. In Genesis, repeatedly we find “καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός γενηθήτω” (and God said, “Let there be”). That Greek word εἶπεν is a particular construction of the base verb λέγω (to speak or to say). In John’s gospel, in the first chapter we encounter ὁ λόγος, (the word). John understood Jesus, the Christ, as the Incarnate Creative Word of God; Jesus as the embodiment of God’s own “Let there be.”
Words have power. Words shape and express our thoughts and ideas. That simple prayer from yesterday was for me a recognition of our omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God as the very source of our being. It acknowledges the reality that the basic reason for it all is love. God literally loved existence into being. Irrespective of whether one believes in the Big Bang Theory or in Creationism, the reason for it all is love, God’s own love. That Big Bang Theory or that Creationism theory are merely our human concepts of the mechanics our Creator God might have used to accomplish “Let there be.”
As a Christian, as a pastor, the reason why (and our response to that reason) are a lot more important than any consideration of mechanics. The real significance of Genesis chapters 1-3 and of John chapter 1 is in “καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός γενηθήτω” (and God said, “Let there be”), is in λέγω (to speak or to say), in ὁ λόγος, (the word). God created everything which is, from nothing, through simply saying “Let there be.” And God later sent the Incarnate Creative Word of God, Jesus, the Christ, into the world, as an act of God’s love, to save and redeem the world God created.
Now, after encountering that simple prayer, I will incorporate that prayer and that recognition into my own prayer life, “Thank you, God, for loving me into being. Amen” Powerful words of thanksgiving, of love and of our special relationship with our Creator God.
Stay safe, chose your own words carefully, trust God,
Pastor Ray