Dear Friend,
We've all heard it a thousand times: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Sunday school flannel boards. Creation museum dioramas. It's the Bible's opening line, and we think we've got it nailed down.
But here's the thing: the Hebrew word bara doesn't mean "create" the way we think it does.
When we hear "create," we picture an artist starting with a blank canvas or a builder working from scratch, which is beautiful. But bara is more than that—it's specifically used in the Hebrew Bible for something God does that humans could never do. It's a word that conveys radical transformation, bringing order from chaos, making something functional from something formless.
Genesis 1:2 tells us the earth or land was tohu wabohu—formless and void, chaotic and uninhabitable. As you can see 'tohu wabohu' rhymes in Hebrew and is very similar to how we would say something like 'helter-skelter' or 'topsy-turvy'.
Ancient Near Eastern readers of the time, familiar with the primordial 'chaos waters' would've immediately recognized that God isn't making matter appear from nothing (that's a later theological concept). He's taking the cosmic chaos—the dark, swirling deep—and ordering it.
Genesis 1 doesn't say how the chaos waters came to be. Some suggest a gap between verses 1 and 2, others see it as God's starting point for creative process, still others as literary backdrop common to ancient cosmologies—but what we do see is God speaking and acting and nothing can stop Him. He separates light from darkness. Sets boundaries for the seas. And installs the sun and moon like lamps in His cosmic temple—the entire creation as the space where God's presence dwells with His people.
From Genesis we clearly see that bara in relation to God is less about making stuff exist from nothing (see Colossians 1:16) and more about turning chaos into something livable.
He takes what's wild and dark and terrifying and shapes it into a home. A place for the sun, moon and the stars and a place called Earth where humans can and will flourish. An edenic sanctuary where Heaven and earth overlap.
And that same God is still doing bara work.
He's not waiting for your life to be a blank slate. He's not requiring you to have it all together before He shows up. He's showing up in the chaos—in the 'tohu wabohu' of your anxiety, your broken relationships, your dreams that fell apart—and He's speaking:
"Let there be light."
The God who brought order to primordial chaos is the God who steps into your chaos and says,
"I can work with this."
Where in your life does it feel formless and void right now? What if God isn't waiting for you to fix it—but is already hovering over it, ready to speak light into your darkness?
