Genesis 1:1-2 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep…”
Observation: Time now begins. The uncreated, eternal God who had ‘til now communed within Himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, created. No light yet existed for there was nothing to be observed except an unwieldy, heavy, swirling mass of material where none had existed a moment before. Untamed waters mixed with amorphous elements to form chaos—an unimaginably huge mixture from which God would later form the heavens and the firmament called earth.
Application: Darkness was profound, not because God created the darkness, but because He had not yet created light. The formless chaos was said to be empty, yet it had a surface to it, a surface which covered what could only be called “the deep”.
Thinking about this, the senses are helpless; they require a reference point or they are reduced to meaninglessness. To understand what this “deep” must have been like, two ideas come to mind. First is the grave…not the grave as experienced by mourners seated on bright green astro-turf at its yawing entry, but the grave as experienced by one who inhabits it forever with no hope of eternal life in Christ’s glorious presence, sealed in a box of steel, sunk into a concrete sarcophagus, covered by tons of dirt.
The second idea for understanding the deep is related to the first. It is both the pre-grave and the post-grave darkness inhabited forever by the soul never infused with the light and life of Christ. Jeremiah 4:23 speaks to the power of unregenerate sin to recreate this darkness when he says, “I looked at the earth and it was formless and empty, and at the heavens, and their light was gone.”
I was born into a sin-darkened world. Until I reunited with my Creator God through the redemption of His Son, my life could never overcome the morass of deep darkness that overwhelmed my soul. The conviction for me in this is how casually I consider the utter darkness of the lost. Having been delivered unto the light so many years ago, I no longer spend much time contemplating the deep’s darkness, yet I should. Such thought will radically impact what I do with money, with relationships, and with every moment of time I have left on this earth. In a moment, I will move back into the glorious light of timeless eternity. But what about her? What about him?
Prayer: Father, it seems odd to think about heavy, unending darkness as part of my devotional time this morning, yet it is a profound reminder that my salvation wasn’t just for me. Others, too, desperately need to find rescue as I did. Move upon my heart, Lord, even as you moved upon the deep.