Episode Details

Prayer

Our Lord and our God,

our Heavenly Father,

we pray as we give our attention to your word now that you may open our eyes and

renew our minds and hearts.

Lord God, may your name be exalted and magnified to our vision as we turn our attention to your word.

Lord, be merciful to us and forgive us for our many sins, and lead us in your ways.

We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Reading

Genesis 2:5-7.

“When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground— 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 creature.”

Meditation

What are the most important things in your life? Now I want you to think seriously about that, don’t just give cliché answers to yourself. Really think – what are the things, in your heart of hearts, that you treasure the most in your life? Is it the work you do? It it the things you have? Is it the hopes that you’re looking forward to? Is it the people you love? Life is a gift. Life is precious. We are launching into the narrative of Eden in these studies, and the theme of life is very much front and centre here. We’ve already seen that God is the author of the story and of history, it is “his-story”, the story that he is telling, and it is the story in which we find ourselves to be characters, so to speak.

Now when we write our stories, our characters are just that: they are made up stories. They are reflections of ourselves. But in God’s story, he writes with living characters. People created in his image. Whereas we write on paper, he writes on pages of earth and stone, of flesh and blood. He writes with living words, and above all his story is about THE living word. Because as we see in scripture, God himself stepped in to the story. As the Word became flesh, and Jesus Christ, the Son of God, walked upon the earth. But at this point in our studies, we’re still at the very start of the story. So God is the author, but the question remains: what’s going to happen? That’s what we want to know in any story isn’t it? What’s going to happen?

In our previous studies of Genesis 1, we saw the overall goal of this story that God is telling: that God wants to fill the earth with his glory and presence. That’s the big picture. He wants the earth to be a place where He will dwell and His glory and excellence will shine. In Genesis 2 we begin the journey of finding out just out how this story will unfold, and where we will find our part to play as well. So, the scene has been set, the world has been made, but what happens next? It’s very simple: God starts filling the earth. That’s the first, and most basic thing that we see God doing in v5-7 as this story of history begins to unfold: God starts filling the earth.

Verse five, as we’ve previously noted, focuses not so much on what’s happening as it is on what’s missing. What’s missing in verse five? There’s no water so that the plants can grow, and there’s no man to work the earth. The ground is not yet productive because there’s no water and no worker, and so there’s a real lack here, a kind of emptiness. God responds to this emptiness by filling the earth with life.

You see, one of the most basic things about life, is life itself. It’s the basic thing about our planet. What would this place be without life? Life itself is thus at the heartbeat of God’s purposes for history. There’s a doctrine about God that theologians call “the aseity of God.” The aseity of God is really talking about God’s self-existence. It’s talking about the fact that God is life, and that he is and has life in and of himself. In f