Sunday, June 30
This world and all life on it, our own life and all we do with it—our existence begins with God, “for in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
Here’s where the Bible’s story begins: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). And the fact that He spoke it into existence points to a power and a process that we can’t even begin to imagine.
And yet, God didn’t create from a distance; He was intimately involved, especially when it came to creating the first human being (see Genesis 2:7).
Read the story of the creation of the first human beings in Genesis 1:26-31. What important things does this account tell us about God? What important things does it tell us about people?
It has often been said that we can learn a lot about God from spending time in nature, from looking at His creation, and seeing in it glimpses of the character of the Creator Himself. But we can also see glimpses of how God created the world to be from examining our understanding of God Himself. For example, if God is a God of order, we should expect to find order in His creation. Or if we believe that God is a God of creativity, we should not be surprised to find incredible examples of that creativity in the world He made.
Similarly, we believe that God is a God of relationships, and so, we find relationships as a core element in how God put the world together. He created each element of the world in relation to the rest of Creation. He created animals in relational harmony. He created human beings in relationship with Himself, with each other, and with the rest of creation.
While our understanding of God is limited in many ways, what we can see of His character should prompt us to reconsider how the world should be.
How helpful is it to your understanding of the world to see it as a reflection of the character of God, even with the ravages of sin so readily apparent?
