“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
From a void and formless place, with the Spirit of God hovering over its deeps, God brought forth a splendid orb from which He crafted man and all the intricacies of life. “We are His workmanship” Paul declares in Ephesians 2. The Greek for “workmanship” is “poiema,” from which we get our word “poem.” What a wonderful thing. We are God’s poem. We have verse and rhyme and rhythm. There is a story for us to walk in. There is theme to our lives and purpose to our existence. There is a flow...a cadence; life is not random. And, yet, there are times when it seems random rhythms have wrecked our lives and ruined our rhyme and verse; rhythms that surely could not have come from the Poet’s hand. In a different metaphor, Bishop Fulton Sheen’s book, The Life of Christ, speaks of the random rhythms of sin as a “discordant note” introduced into God’s symphony. “If that note is made the first note in a new melody, then it will become harmonious. This is precisely what happened when Christ was born. There had been a false note of moral discord introduced by the first man which infected all humanity....What [God] did, therefore, was to ask a woman, representing humanity, freely to give Him a human nature with which to start a new humanity.” We are His workmanship...His poem... damaged but not destroyed by the distorted rhythms and discordant notes of sin. It’s time the lives of Christians - no matter what their circumstances or experiences - reflect the awesome reality of a God who is greater than all the created realm. It is time we move into the full embrace of His personal creation for us. If God can create from that which is void and without form, a breathtaking realm, He can take our void and formless places and create a wondrous new thing. It is time the principles of God intersect the lives of His people in such a way that their reality for healing and abundance, for conquering and overcoming will collide with the vehicles of maintenance and mediocrity and total them. Out of the formless places of such a collision, as the Holy Spirit moves over our deep, will emerge a wondrous new thing...God’s poem for the world.