Imagine the scene. You look up and see the clock. It’s almost time for family members to make their way to the kitchen, wondering what’s for dinner. You check the fridge and there’s absolutely nothing to eat—just one baked potato, a tiny bit of leftover rotisserie chicken, three eggs, and the dregs of a jar of salsa very near its pull date. The freezer offers up two bagels. Maybe there’s a can of beans in the pantry.

And before you know it, your family is enjoying a tasty scramble, toasted bagel topped with the marmalade you retrieved from your gift cupboard, and a cup of exotic tea from that collection of teas you got for Christmas. Neither big nor fancy, this meal seems to satisfy everyone around your table. And to think you made it out of “nothing”!

Impressive. But it’s nothing compared to God creating the universe by nothing more than the word of his mouth (Psalm 33:7-9).

If you know the Bible, you know that it begins with the Creation Story (Genesis 1, MSG). Many of us have read it so often that we have at least parts of it memorized. It is astounding. Yet I wonder if we don’t miss how mind-blowing it is that by his word alone, God called everything into being. God didn’t combine simple elements to make complex things, like in our dinner story. He didn’t take existing things and morph them into something new. With God, everything was new.

There is order in God’s creation. In the first three days he created the framework of the universe: calling into being light, sky, land; he set the boundaries for the oceans and called for the land to produce vegetation. The next three days he populated his creation, first with sun, moon, and stars, then he made fish and birds, then animals, and finally humans. He provided food for them and blessed them, assigning humans responsibility for the care of the earth and its creatures.

All of this God called “good.” And so it was.

In Genesis 3, however, when sin entered the world, things changed. But God did not! Can we trust the God of Creation with every issue that we face, every concern for ourselves, our families, our world? Yes we can!

There is none like our God. He who spoke the world into being still speaks today. He invites us to experience his love, his peace, his presence. He is altogether trustworthy, our good, good God.

Ginger

You can get a whole new perspective of creation when you read Job 38:1-42:6. Check out the Scripture directly or go to  God’s Got Questions, a blog post I wrote a while back. The language in this passage paints so many vivid pictures and God’s creativity, wisdom, and power shine through beautifully in this reading.