EVERY STEP AN ARRIVAL

Take ninety days and walk through the pages of the Bible with the definitive voice today in Christian spirituality. Eugene Peterson provides brief commentary and challenging thoughts designed to stir the biblical imagination and encourage even the weary believer.

Each entry begins with two capital letters. As haphazard as they may feel, the devotions do lend themselves to shedding light on “your life” (YL) or “God's nature” (GN). In addition, each entry is followed by a pause of sorts – sometimes a question, sometimes a reflection. Readers can use the words there to form their own prayer for the day, certainly not as an ending point, but rather as a beginning for the arrivals that await them.

Eugene H. Peterson is the translator of the bestselling The Message Bible, and the author of over thirty spiritual classics such as A Long Obedience in the Same Direction and Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. He has been praised by such names at U2's Bono, Max Lucado, Philip Yancey and many others. His website: www.eugenepeterson.com. His last book, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, sold to Hodder Faith/UK and Blessed People Publishing in Korea.


Excerpt:

The Contrast of Darkness and Light
Day 1
First this: God created the Heavens and Earth – all you see, all you don't see.
Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness.
God's Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.
God spoke: “Light!”
And light appeared.
Genesis 1:1-3

YL: There is significance in the first day's creative act: And God said, “Light!” And light appeared. The universe is established with God's light shining through everything. There is a profound understanding of this in the way in which a day is described in Genesis, and subsequently in all Jewish life. “And there was evening and there was morning, one day.” An odd way to describe a day, but not if you see it as a victory of God's light. “Evening” has the sense, in Hebrew, of termination, bringing to a conclusion. A day is described first as the conclusion of the creative work of God. Then night, a time of sleep, the incursion of darkness, a threat to the order of creation, a sign of chaos to come. Does night or light have the last word? The answer is in the phrase “and there was morning, one day.”

“Morning” in Hebrew has the meaning of “penetration.” God's day is not complete until light shines again, penetrates the darkness and disperses the shadows. The creative action of God is light which encloses and limits a temporary darkness. All that we see as a threat to God's creative action is held in check and controlled by the light of God. The shadows are there – night descends upon life – and there is that which seems to defy God, to disturb his order and his purpose: sickness, death, trouble, and sorrow. But it does not have the last word: “And there was morning, one day.”
~
Identify an area of your life in which you need God's light to penetrate the dimness. Will night or light have the last word? Talk with God about the clarity you seek.