Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father remind us of who we are. Father we are your children. Our worth comes from your making of us, not what we can make for you. Father help us to remember that, to embrace that truth, and rest in your perfect will. Heavenly Father, reveal your will to us today, your desires, your purposes. In the name of your Son Jesus, reveal us to us, and reveal yourself to us, and let us by the Spirit be bold to do your will as you show it to us!
Your Morning Song: "Great Are You Lord" by All Sons & Daughters
Your Morning Scripture: Genesis 1:31-2:3
31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
On the first five days in this, the very first chapter of Genesis, God creates and then calls it good. But what is different about day six? Why does it say, "very good" instead of just good?
And what is the deal with days beginning with evening and ending with morning?
And where is the evening and morning for day seven?
These are among some of the questions we recently worked through at our Bible study this past Thursday night. And for those who couldn't join us, I thought you might enjoy a brief peak.
Mindful that this devo is supposed to last as long as a cup of coffee, consider these answers to these questions in this context. Who was the initial audience for the book of Genesis?
Brick making Hebrew slaves.
Moses, together with God, wrote these opening words of Genesis to men and women who had spent their entire lives as slaves for the Egyptians. They worked seven days a week, sun-up to sundown. They were only as good as the bricks they could produce.
And God exposes that lie for what it is. He says to his newly saved people, "I made you, 'very good." Amongst a good creation, humans are the pinnacle of God's creative work. And the identity of those Hebrew slaves, along with our identity, is found in who made us (and who saved us), not in what we can produce.
That is why the Jewish day begins with evening. Because for slaves to be told that as God's people their days would now begin with rest and end with work, it was a complete and total identity change from who they had been brutally forced to be.
And as for the seventh day, why no transition? No measurement? No evening and morning? Because on the seventh day, when God rested, he welcomed his people, and all of us as well, all who he claims as his children, into an eternal rest.
A seventh day of Sabbath rest without end.
God calls us his very good creation. He calls us to "be" according to his doings, not ours. And he calls us to rest.
How do we see ourselves amidst the ins and outs, the nooks and crannies, the guts of our everyday lives? What daily shapes our identity?
What we can do? Or what God has done?
Are we resting our soul, our whole, in the peace of God's making?
Or are we just baking bricks?
