Bible Basics 101 –
Chaos and the Squeaky Car
One reason for writing
this blog is I think many people need a bit of “Bible Basics” in their
lives. If we as God’s people are going to act in his world, then we must know
what he wishes us to do. We can only understand this with a basic grasp of the
Biblical Story. The great questions of life: why did God make me? What does he
desire from me? What does the story of creation have to do with me? Why does it
seem that half of the time or more, my life is a mess no matter what I do? All
of these and many more questions are answered in just the first three Chapters
of the Bible, with Genesis.
Why should we
start there? Why not just jump right to the Gospels or the Letters of Paul? A
short answer is the New Testament, its thoughts and teachings, build upon what
is found in the Old Testament. Meaning that short words like “salvation” and
many others, have a very long history and to realize their full meaning, we need
a firm foundation, a blue print, of what those words mean for us today. Not just from our modern limited
view, but the full scope in the story of the Bible. We have to know why God
has “saved” his people, what does he want us to do with this “salvation” found
through Jesus Christ? I am convinced that God has laid out for us, with
the two Stories of Creation, his own basic desires and goals he has for us, and
sadly many times our own are far away from his. This causes our view of what life
should look like to be vastly different and nothing resembling what the Bible reveals to us.
An image may help
to illustrate the point I am trying to make. Let’s say you have a mechanic and
the only cars that he has been around and knows about are cars that the brakes squeak,
the engine smokes, they burn lots of oil, and every time you stop, there is a
big backfire. Now he thinks this is the description of a proper running car and
he also thinks your car should run like this one. Would any of us go to this mechanic?
Of course not. We would go to someone who knows how a car is meant to run and
drive. Smooth as silk, not spitting and spurting all the way back home. That
bad car will get you from A to B, but that is about all, and half the time you
would be broken down beside the road. This is the problem with many of us and
how we are living our lives. We are spitting and spurting, and since we do not
know how God intended us to act and for what purpose he made us, we never
change. Then to go along with this picture, the people many of us live around or choose to seek advice from, are squeaking
as much as we are.
This is why the
account of Creation, found in Genesis can help us. Here God lays out his plan
for the world and each of us. He tells us why he made us, what purpose he has
for us, and what he wants us to do. The manual to a fully function human life
is found there. We just have to dig down a bit and open our eyes to see the
full display of what God is trying to teach each of us.
Chapter One begins
with a picture of our “squeaky car”, God has yet to give any purpose or
function to what exists. We read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and
the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the
face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.”
(Gen 1:1-2) This is a description of chaos; the water has no purpose and there
is just darkness. A kind of “no man’s land” we might say. But the “Spirit of
God” is there upon the waters, telling us that the chaos is about to change. God
himself is about to go to work in his world, to turn this broken-down Pinto,
into a purring Rolls Royce.
Over the next several
posts, it is my plan to go through the Days of Creation and see how this “manual
or guide” works for us. Then we can move to the story of Adam and Eve, building
upon Chapter One, to fully understand our “vocation or calling” as God’s image
bearing people.
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