Week 1 Genesis 1
The bible’s story begins: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was empty, a formless mass cloaked in darkness. And the Spirit of God was hovering over its surface.
The footnote says the opener could read: in the beginning when God created… Or even: when God began to create…
But the alternate readings don’t make much of a difference. The main thing for me today is how the New Earth is described:
Empty
An unformed mass
Dark.
In the beginning the earth had no contents. No structure. No light.
I try to picture it. I don’t think of it like the dark side of the moon – a barren – but solid – surface. I visualize it more like the middle of the Pacific Ocean at night during a storm. Mostly water. Something…but almost nothing. A shapeless unstructured dark mass with nothing in or on it.
If someone described hell this way I guess I could believe it. It’s an eerie & terrible-sounding place. But it was physical & material. It was something at least. Not nothing.
One thing I wonder about this empty unstructured dark place is how long it stayed that way. A week? A thousand years? Five billion years?
I don’t really need to know the answer. But I’m curious. So I’m only two-verses into my bible-reading year and I get Example #1 of an unexplained curiosity. Plus I’m reminded that not all my curiosities are likely going to get explained.
Note: quote from Genesis 1:1-2 (NLT)