When Light Leans Into Darkness
When Light Leans Into Darkness
What if the chaos you're sitting in right now is exactly where God wants to be?
We come to Genesis expecting a history lesson. We come looking for debates about days and dates, arguments to win and positions to defend. But what if we're reading a love letter with the wrong glasses?
The ancient Israelites who first heard these words weren't curious academics wondering about cosmic timelines. They were slaves. For four hundred years, they had marinated in Egyptian creation myths—stories of warring gods, divine bloodshed, and humans fashioned as cosmic afterthoughts, mere servants to capricious deities. Their world was chaos. Their story was darkness.
And into that darkness, Moses speaks poetry.
"In the beginning, God..."
There's a reason the Spirit chose to give us poetry instead of data. As Pastor Chad observes, "Trying to say I love you with an algorithm doesn't really work, does it?" Charles Dickens didn't open A Tale of Two Cities with French Revolution casualty statistics. He wrote, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." The poetry doesn't diminish the history—it deepens it.
The same God who hovered over primordial waters walked the road to Emmaus with two disciples drowning in grief. Luke 24 is a re-creation story. The disciples had all the information—three years with Jesus, memorized scriptures, eyewitness accounts of an empty tomb. Yet their hearts remained cold, their eyes unseeing. "We had hoped," they said in the past tense, their faith spoken of like something already buried.
Jesus doesn't rebuke their darkness. He walks into it.
This is the scandal of Genesis: God is attracted to our nothing. "He looks at your nothingness," Chad preaches, "and he says, 'Let me at it.' Because God doesn't see something he wants to avoid. He looks at your life and says, 'I love this. I love your nothingness.'" The wild and waste of verse two isn't a problem to be solved but a canvas awaiting an artist blazing with creative love.
The eternal dance of the Trinity—what Eugene Peterson calls perichoresis—overflows into creation not because God was bored or lonely, but because love cannot help but create, cannot help but pursue, cannot help but speak light into darkness.
When we read Scripture looking for formulas, we miss the fire. When we approach God's word as security camera footage to analyze or ammunition to stockpile, our hearts stay cold even as our arguments sharpen. But when we come as the disciples finally did—hungry, honest, inviting Jesus to stay—something happens. Eyes open. Hearts ignite.
"Were not our hearts burning within us?"
This is what Scripture is for. Not to arm us with certainty but to set us ablaze with love. Not to give us control but to draw us into communion. The word that spoke galaxies into existence—that made two trillion galaxies with such ease that the text almost yawns, "He also made the stars"—that word chooses to enter our chaos, to hover over our darkness, to call us by name.
The purpose behind creation was never merely to display power. It was to show love to you.