Prayer
O God the author of all good, I come to You for the grace another day will require for its duties and events. I step out into a wicked world; I carry about with me an evil heart. I know that without You I can do nothing, that everything with which I shall be concerned, however harmless in itself, may prove an occasion of sin or folly, unless I am kept by Your power. Hold me up and I shall be safe.
Preserve my understanding from subtilty of error, my affections from love of idols, my character from stain of vice, my profession from every form of evil. May I engage in nothing in which I cannot implore Your blessing, and in which I cannot invite Your inspection. Prosper me in all lawful undertakings, or prepare me for disappointments. Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with food convenient for me, lest I be full and deny You and say, Who is the Lord? or be poor, and steal, and take Your name in vain.
May every creature be made good to me by prayer and Your will. Teach me how to use the world and not abuse it, to improve my talents, to redeem my time, to walk in wisdom toward those without, and in kindness to those within, to do good to all men, and especially to my fellow Christians. And to You be the glory.
Reading
Psalm 145 & Romans 11.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”Genesis 1:1.
Meditation
Who is God? Whether you realise it or not, whether you feel it or not, that is the single greatest and most important question you or I could ever ask. It is the question of questions, the question in which every other question finds its meaning and purpose. Who is God? As we have seen, the Pentateuch is a historical narrative – a true story – and, as with any narrative, one meets people and characters as the story unfolds. As we open up the narrative of the Pentateuch, the first question we ask, then, is: Who is this? Who is God? Genesis 1:1 gives us our first introduction.
We have already seen that God is holy, that there is a distinction between God and his creation, and that he is transcendent above his creation in every possible way – that’s what holiness means. But verse one of this magnificent chapter contains far more for us to consider, it is a treasure trove of riches! Another grand revelation that we learn of God here is that God is also incomprehensible.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Now you tell me, can you get your head around the idea that God existed before creation was made? The simple and honest answer is and must be: “No”. What would it mean to exist as a soul without a body? What would it mean to exist before life on earth and the universe itself existed? What would it mean to create the heavens and the earth? Creating a work of art, building a house, carving a sculpture – these things we can grasp, but how does one design and build the human brain from scratch? How does one speak matter into existence?
To say that God is incomprehensible is not to say that we cannot know him. To the extent that he reveals himself we can know him. We can know about him. We can have a relationship with him. No, to say God is incomprehensible is to say that God is so big, so infinitely big, that we cannot and never will be able to, get our heads around him. There will always be more we don’t understand. In the words of RC Sproul: “Theologically speaking, to say God is incomprehensible is not to say that God is utterly unknowable. It is to say that none of us can comprehend God exhaustively.” To quote another one of my mentors: “He is not subject to our scrutiny.” In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. “Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable” (Ps 145:3). God is incomprehensible.
Be ye doers of the word…
A natural application that flows from this, or ought to flow from this, is that we must be awed by God. The problem with that application is that you can’t make yourself be awed by God, regardless of how many times I tell you it ought to be so. Someone might tell us that Niagra falls is an awesome sight to behold, but there’s no substitute for seeing them, having your ears filled with the roar of the waters and your body reverberating with the raw tonnage of the moving waters. I can tell you to be awed by God, but truth is that you actually have to be awed by God. Let me attempt to help you to begin moving in that direction.
Consider your morning routine for a moment – let’s make it specific. Just think about what God is doing for you while you pour your morning coffee. The immediate thing we should notice is that as you pour your coffee, your kitchen is filled with light. Now God arranged that light for you. That light in your kitchen has just travelled 150 million kilometres to get to you. Let me give you some perspective on that. If you drove your car at 160kph, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it would take you about 106 years to get to the sun. That light in your kitchen covered that distance in 8 minutes and 20 seconds. The reason it’s capable of doing that is because God set a perfect sphere of burning hot plasma in its place (109 times larger than the earth, though it is one of hundreds of billions in existence). This light in the sky is sustained by a constant sequence of nuclear fusions capable of propelling that light in to your kitchen at such a rate. And it’s a good thing the sun is so far away, because those nuclear fusions produce about the power of 10 million hydrogen bombs every second. That is something you don’t want in your kitchen! And God arranged all of this so that you would have the light you need to be able to pour out your coffee in the morning. That happens every single day.
There is more to consider here, however, because that light would be utterly useless if you didn’t have eyes. As that light hits yours eyes, it goes through a clear front layer which bends the light on the way to your pupil. Once the light passes through your pupil, an inner lense works with your cornea to focus the light correctly to your retina. Your retina is a light sensitive layer of tissue at the back of your eye, and that tissue is capable of turning the light into electrical signals which travel down your optic nerve and are translated by your brain into the images that you can see. If that didn’t happen, all that wonderful light from the sun would be utterly useless, you wouldn’t be able to see your coffee, and you would accidentally pour it all over the bench instead of into your coffee cup.
Now we begin to make some progress, but light from the sun and the architecture of your eyes are only the beginning of your Monday morning coffee making. We could go on. We could talk about the extraordinary achievement that it is for your brain to coordinate your hands as you pour your coffee. We could talk about the fact that your brain even exists (there’s so much that we do not yet understand about our brains!). And let’s not even mention what’s going in your body at a molecular level. “All thy works shall praise thee, O Lord”, including the pouring of coffee on a Monday morning.
Now I don’t know about you, but just starting to think about these sorts of things begins to melt my brain. I cannot get my head around what God is doing as one person pours their coffee in the morning. As the Psalmist said: “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, it is high, I cannot attain it”. But even this singular example, massive and incomprehensible as it is, is just a grain of sand in the ocean of God’s incomprehensibility. In every moment God is doing countless incomprehensible things on countless levels that we are not even aware of. He is an infinite and incomprehensible being. Now if you are not awed to think about these things, either you don’t understand them, or you’ve hardened yourself in unbelief. In the next couple of chapters, we will meditate further on the incomprehensibility of God. Want some more fuel for thought and worship? Go and read “In Six Days”, a collection of essays edited by John F. Ashton: https://www.amazon.com.au/Six-Days-Scientists-Believe-Creation/dp/0890513414 SDG.
Prayer of confession & consecration.
My dear Lord, I can but tell You that You know I long for nothing but Yourself, nothing but holiness, nothing but union with Your will. You have given me these desires, and You alone canst give me the thing desired. My soul longs for communion with You, for mortification of indwelling corruption, especially spiritual pride. How precious it is to have a tender sense and clear apprehension of the mystery of godliness, of true holiness! What a blessedness to be like You as much as it is possible for a creature to be like its creator! Lord, give me more of Your likeness; enlarge my soul to contain fullness of holiness; engage me to live more for You. Help me to be less pleased with my spiritual experiences, and when I feel at ease after sweet communings, teach me it is far too little I know and do. Blessed Lord, let me climb up near to You, and love, and long, and plead, and wrestle with You, and pant for deliverance from the body of sin, for my heart is wandering and lifeless, and my soul mourns to think it should ever lose sight of its beloved. Wrap my life in divine love, and keep me ever desiring You, always humble and resigned to Your will, more fixed on Yourself, that I may be more fitted for doing and-suffering.
Day 6: God is incomprehensible (Gen 1:1).