| I purchased a new personal Bible on Saturday. It’s the CSB translation, but I’m not really a translation purist, especially for my own devotional time. What I really liked was that it had spaces on the sides for me to write notes. And because of those spaces, I engaged with my reading differently, and I found something in scripture I’d never seen before. While reading Genesis 1 – I felt compelled to start reading at The Beginning – I found a word choice that was really interesting to me. On the fifth day, as God is creating ocean life, God says (according to the CSB): “Let the water swarm with living creatures” (Gen. 1:20). That word, swarm, is actually included in the CEB, which we use most Sundays, and the NASB, which my Old Testament Professor called one of the more “Wooden” (i.e. more rigidly adhering to the literal language) of the various Bible translations. Swarms have a rather messy connotation. How would you feel if you saw a “swarm” of anything coming towards you? You’d probably be unnerved, right? This unnerving quality is only magnified when the passage describes God creating what the CSB calls “Creatures that crawl,” the NASB calls “Creeping things” and the CEB calls “Crawling things.” This just sounds gross. It makes me think of snakes and rodents and spiders and bugs. And now that you’re thinking about those things too, I bet you don’t like me very much. Even so, God calls all of this “Good.”According to our tradition, Genesis 3 tells the story of humanity’s fall, and removal from the Garden of Eden. That moment is where evil enters the human story. Before that, the world was good, and Eden was a paradise. But apparently, that version of reality was still a pretty messy place. Fish swarming in the sea. Vermin and insects crawling around in Eden’s underbrush. Neither of these things correspond neatly to our image of paradise. For us, paradise is a well maintained beachside resort with attentive staff and restaurants with good food and ambience a short walk away. And yet, those swarming fish and crawling critters were a feature of life in a world that didn’t yet know evil. God has just told us that, in true paradise, it’s pretty likely that one day you’d wake up, grab a mug for your morning coffee, and see a spider crawling around inside. Paradise was never neat. The world God created was messy, and rough, and full of things that we might call gross. It was only after we drifted away from God and evil entered the world that we started trying to control this. It was only after evil came about that we thought life was a thing to be mastered, rather than embraced. What can we learn about faith, if we accept that grossness and disorder are not innately evil but part of God’s original creation? Could faithfulness mean learning to accept the messy parts of life? Could being a disciple mean embracing the moments when chaos is all around you? Could the next step in your relationship with God be to understand the difference between God’s vision of “The Good Life” and your own? Certainly I get why those questions are challenging. But the presence of orderliness wasn’t what made Eden paradise. What made Eden paradise was that everything in the Garden knew to rely on God for it’s own existence, and the God who created people alongside crawling things and swarming fish and every other gross or creepy thing in nature held life together, preserving the balance needed for everything that exists to flourish and thrive. Let go of control, and embrace the chaos. It’s here that you’ll begin to get to know who God really is, how much God loves you, and how God is able to strengthen you to weather any storm. The chaos will come, but when it does, God will guide you through. |
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