A Word that Creates

I admire people with great manual skills and dexterity.  We recently toured the National Quilt Museum with Ryson and Faith and I was astonished again at the amazing detail, creativity, resourcefulness, and skill that went into those quilts (that’s one of them in the picture).  I respect great woodworking skills, the ability to paint and draw, and the manual control it takes to perform minute surgery or repair a tiny machine.

So as I was recently pondering God creating the world, I was struck by how incomprehensible it is that He did it with JUST HIS WORD – all the complexity, all the beauty, all the power.  Just words coming out of His mouth formed everything instantly.  Oh, my gosh, how I would like to see that happen.  I wonder if you could see the power from His words actually ripping out of his mouth?

How can a word create a concrete thing?  We know the power of the spoken word to affect us emotionally.  There’s power to build up or destroy in the mere spoken word, even to the point of totally changing someone’s life or causing death.  So that gives us an inkling of the power of God’s words.  But think of the power of this Word that doesn’t just AFFECT the physical world but CREATES it!  Out of nothing.  Incredible.  

Then in the opening chapter of John, the image and idea of this Word of God is expanded.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word with with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  In him was life, and that life was the light of men . . . .The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us.”  John 1:1-4,14. 

It’s a sort of mind-boggling concept to try to think about the Word of God coming out of His mouth and creating the physical world and also taking on a body – literally becoming an embodiment of God’s words.  The Word created itself.  That’s an even greater power and warps my mind to try to imagine.  

So this is something to ponder with me this week:  the power of words in general, the specific power of God’s words and His Word, and the power of Jesus, the living Word.  When we feel powerless this week, let’s turn to His Word – the actual words and the incarnation of His words:  Jesus.