BEGINNINGS.
With the New Year at hand many of us will focus our thoughts on new beginnings. Meditate this week on some of the BEGINNINGS in the Bible. Perhaps God is calling you to something new in the coming year; resolve to follow that calling and set out in a new direction, and then persevere with it.
v 1. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
In the run up to Christmas I found myself sitting for a meal between two people who were quite adamant that there was no creator God. “Then who made God?” was their united and slightly scornful riposte. The concept of a ‘beginning’ to the universe as we see it was, in their eyes, utterly fantastic. “How come there is something rather than nothing?” drew from them the reply that the universe has always been there.
It is here that we all – believers or sceptics – find ourselves faced with the challenge of trying to understand what we mean by ‘Eternity’. Is there a ‘Pre-time’ and if so, what might our puny minds make of it? The mindset that declares ‘The universe has always existed’ is every bit as much a leap of faith as believing in a moment when time and creation began. Disciplined science may tell us a great deal about processes in the development of the universe, and even tries to describe a moment when ‘something happened’ and the universe as we can see it started to expand. The Christian declares that before anything existed, GOD WAS. Before the beginning, God was there – and He called it all into being.
Do I understand all that? No, I certainly don’t, but it makes as much – if not more – rational sense to believe in a moment of beginning as it does to believe in an eternal non-beginning to all existing things.
So it is at this time of the year, the turning of the calendar page, that we take our stand on our faith in the God of all creation, who determined the existence of all things, and who reveals himself as the God of love and mercy to the wonderful creation he spoke into being.