The LORD hung the moon; exploring Creation
By Elizabeth Prata
It’s January 2 and people, including me, are in the throes of their new Bible Reading Plan for the year. I chose to go through the G3 Bible Reading plan again. It’s a 5-day Narratives plan accompanied by hymn, prayer, workbook for reflection. You read through all of the major narratives of Scripture, plus Psalms and Proverbs, in a year. Read only 5 days per week. It also includes a 52-Weekly Catechism, Bible memory, and weekly hymns that correspond with the larger Devotional Guide. I had bought the whole spiral bound booklet. Or you can download for free one by one the parts you like. You can find it all here, and there is a lot available: https://g3min.org/tune-my-heart/
This Plan starts with Genesis 1 and 2. I love the Creation account. I believe what the Bible says in Genesis 1 and 2. There was a literal 6 day creation by God who made it all, and created the first 2 humans. Male and female He made them.
Did you ever think about what that moment was like? God creating Adam fully formed. A thinking, speaking adult. He could have spoken Adam into existence like He’d just done with the universe, stars, moon, sun, lands, and animals. But He didn’t. Genesis 2:7 says,
Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living person.
We often say we would love to have been a fly on the wall watching this or that. The angels did have a balcony seat. (Job 38:4-7) and they shouted for joy when they saw it.
Barnes’ Notes says of that moment of creation:
Shouted for joy – That is, they joined in praise for so glorious a work as the creation of a new world. They saw that it was an event which was fitted to honor God. It was a new manifestation of his goodness and power; it was an enlargement of his empire…
No one can demonstrate that the work of creation may not now be going on in some remote part of the universe, nor that God may not yet form many more worlds to be the monuments of his wisdom and goodness, and to give occasion for augmented praise. Who can tell but that this process may be carried on forever, and that new worlds and systems may continue to start into being, and there be continually new displays of this inexhaustible goodness and wisdom of the Creator? When this world was made, there was occasion for songs of praise among the angels. It was a beautiful world. All was pure, and lovely, and holy. Man was made like his God, and everything was full of love.”
“Surveying the beautiful scene, as the world arose under the plastic hand of the Almighty – its hills, and vales, and trees, and flowers, and animals, there was occasion for songs and rejoicings in heaven. Could the angels have foreseen, as perhaps they did, what was to occur here, there was also occasion for songs of praise such as would exist in the creation of no other world. This was to be the world of redeeming love; this the world where the Son of God was to become incarnate and die for sinners; this the world where an immense host was to be redeemed to praise God in a song unknown to the angels – the song of redemption, in the sweet notes which shall ascend from the lips of those who shall have been ransomed from death by the great work of the atonement.” –-end Barnes’ Notes
Man, those old timey men could write.
I love adventure stories. Exploration particularly intrigues me. Shackleton’s survival story after the Endurance sank in 1916 near the South Pole has to be one of the most gripping ever. And most amazing ever. By the way, the Endurance22 crew completed the most difficult shipwreck search in the world when in 2022 announced they had found the Endurance at the bottom of the Weddell Sea at the South Pole. The photos are mouth-droppingly stunning.
I just finished reading a book recounting the reconnaissance mission to Mount Everest in 1951, which laid the groundwork for the successful ascent of Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and Kiwi Edmund Hillary to the top in 1953. The book isn’t long and is heavy on photos. Some of the pictures show some of the mission’s climbers from the back, as he looks forward and up to the mountains at the roof of the world. And it’s aptly named, the Range does look like the roof of the world.
I look at those pictures and wonder, with all the ice and crags and forbidding rocks like teeth, ready to grip a man forever to hold him in an icy embrace (like it did to George Mallory, who wasn’t found for 75 years), what prompts a man to say ‘I want to climb that’? Or a man to look at the south pole and say “I want to sail there”? Why?
It was famed alpine climber George Mallory who took part in a 1921 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition who is said to have replied to a reporter why he wanted to climb the tallest mountain in the world:
“Because it’s there”.
When God breathed life into Adam, did He also breathe into us an insatiable curiosity about His creation? Or is that willingness to wander and observe, to know what is over the next rise, to see behind the next wave, part of the mandate God told Adam to cultivate the Garden and keep it? Or did that come from after the Fall with man wanting to dominate the world and subdue it as a god himself?
There are many things about the creation account that intrigue me. Maybe the LORD will be gracious and tell us when we get over yonder. Or maybe we will simply be satisfied with who He is, THE I AM, and not ask about those origins.
Meanwhile men still wander all over the earth. The submersible Titan in 2023 which descended to view the wreck of the Titanic imploded is testament to that, men want to explore the final earthly frontier, the deeps. Men have hurled themselves into space…crawled all over the earth from the top of Everest to the deepest point, Mariana Trench (by camera). Why? “Because it’s there.”
But the best exploration is to the depths of man’s soul, introspection of the deepest abyss that here exists: our sinful depravity. Standing transcendently apart from our corrupted soul is God. He is there.
All this roaming and exploring and seeing and understanding is vain. Standing on the moon is pointless unless one acknowledges the God who made it. Looking down upon the world from the roof of Everest is void unless one acknowledges the God who made it.
because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. 20For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. (Romans 1:19-20).
In the beginning, God created…
