Excerpt
30 Days to Crush Chaos
ChaosChapter 1In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
—Genesis 1:1–2
“In the beginning . . .” When did you first hear those words that begin the Bible?
I grew up in church, so I heard that phrase maybe a thousand times or more before I started reading Genesis differently. I had read about God creating, and I believed it, but I was missing so much of the depth. After years in ministry, I circled back to Genesis because I was watching a trend in my congregation: Anxiety was on the rise. We were seeing fear and helplessness and panic attacks. I had preached dozens of messages about anxiety and panic. We had devoted prayer and ministry time specifically focusing on anxiety, but clearly, we hadn’t cracked the code on the path to peace. Nothing had changed. We had no idea what we were doing wrong. Could anything be done about the chaos of anxiety? What would restore peace to our hearts?
Then I remembered that the creation account in Genesis has a whole lot to say about Chaos and that it describes the original state of creation as a deep, wild, raging ocean of Chaos. I wondered how the very first audience would have responded to this depiction, so I started looking in Scripture for the patterns, symbols, and repeated storylines they would have listened for. And the connections floored me. The creation story encompasses more than just the first two chapters of the Bible. God’s work of creation echoes throughout the book of Genesis and the rest of the Old Testament, as well as throughout the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. Once I started reading Genesis with the ancient context in mind, it became much more relevant to my life. It wasn’t just a story anymore. These words, as old as they are, revealed something about my twenty-first-century heart.
Let’s start with the first two verses in the Bible—today’s passage. We’re told that God is the creator of the earth and everything else, and then we zoom in on the earth itself to see that it was “formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Simply put, Scripture’s first words declare that creation was a chaotic, untamed mess and that the Spirit of the Lord God was brooding over the surface of this barren, unintelligible, chaotic ocean abyss. Pretty epic visual, if you ask me.
Here’s something that makes it even more epic—the ancient audience would have recognized the emptiness (or “wilderness” in some translations), the covering darkness, and the deep waters as symbols for Chaos. When hearing of the rushing waters of the great, unknowable deep, they would have felt the fear that such impenetrable darkness evokes. They would have recognized the challenge inherent in the creation story and wondered, What does God do about that? The world was uninhabitable. For anyone or anything to live or be planted in such a place, conquest would have to happen first.
You know what else is an untamed mess? We are. I am. Without God, the natural state of things is chaos, whether on the cosmic or personal level. We’re messes. We’re full of contradictions. Don’t even get me started on our priorities. We don’t even know what to want. We find ourselves doing things we know we shouldn’t all the time. We’re hurt by the chaotic choices other people make.
Disease, anxiety, abuse, poverty—they’re all chaos. Sin is chaos.
What does your own chaos look like? Is it relational? Physical? Emotional? What chaos in your life leaves you feeling helpless, trapped, or anxious? How would you describe your experience of chaos to a friend who cared?
Whether or not it was your fault, it was never supposed to be this way. Maybe you have become enveloped by your own chaos and wondered, like I have, God, what could You do about this mess? Even though we may find ourselves pondering that question, we have good reasons to hope.
Chaos was there at the beginning, and it has persisted throughout human history. Just grab any history book off the shelf, and in its pages you’ll find that things have been chaotic for a long time. Most of us don’t give the people who lived thousands of years ago enough credit; we have a bad habit of thinking our lives are more complicated than theirs. But they knew the same kinds of chaos that we do, and they longed for the chaos to be crushed. They wanted peace too. And Genesis—the story about the very first moments of the world—revealed the path they were looking for.
I wonder how many of us have rebuked anxiety but have yet to reject the forms of chaos that produce anxiety in our lives. The Bible provides a path out of Chaos, but it requires that we recover an ancient way of reading the Scriptures.
So, I invite you back to the beginning—either again or for the first time—to open Genesis and look for some symbols and signs we’ll consider together. Maybe you’ve seen them before, or maybe you haven’t. Either way, we’re going to read the creation story carefully with ancient eyes because that perspective illuminates everything that comes afterward, all the way up to us, here and now. And we’ll see that God knows exactly what to do with teeming, untamed chaos—in the world and in us.
