A painter stands before a blank canvas. A sculptor approaches raw stone. A musician sits at an
instrument before the first note sounds. There's a moment of pure potential, pregnant with everything that might
be
Genesis 1:3 "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light."
No fight. No struggle. No blood sacrifice or cosmic battle. God speaks, and reality rearranges itself.
The Hebrew Scriptures are filled with this stunning simplicity. Verse after verse in Genesis 1 follows the same
pattern: And God said... and it was so. The rhythm is almost musical, poetic—because it is. Moses didn't give
Israel a scientific treatise. He gave them a song.
John will later pick up this thread and weave it into his gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God... Through him all things were made." The same voice that scattered
galaxies into existence is the voice that speaks to you in Scripture, in prayer, in the still small moments of
ordinary life.
We live in a world that worships power through force—political might, military strength, economic leverage.
But divine power operates differently. God's creative authority is exercised through speech, through word,
through what we might almost call conversation. The universe exists because God said so.
This same God speaks into your darkness. Not with violence or coercion, but with the same creative word that
separated light from darkness at the beginning of all things.
When have you experienced God's word bringing light into a dark place in your life?
What does it say about God's character that he creates through speaking rather than through force?
Read Genesis 1:3 slowly, several times. Let the words settle. Then ask: "Lord, what are you
speaking into my chaos today? What light are you calling forth?"
Theological Insight: The early church saw in John 1 a clear connection: Jesus is the Word made flesh, the same
creative speech of God now walking among us in human form. When Jesus speaks to storms and they calm, to
the dead and they rise, he is exercising the same authority by which "the heavens were made by the word of the
LORD."
John 1:1-5; Psalm 33:6; Hebrews 1:3