I Can Describe Order

He can take you through the first chapter of Genesis at a level almost nobody in that town could follow, and he has, twice, to a room of about forty.

The structure of the days. The way the second three answer the first three: light and dark, then the lights; water and sky, then the birds and the fish; land, then what walks on it. He can show you the shape of it on a board and people sit forward when he does, because it is genuinely beautiful and because he loves it and that shows.

He can do it in three languages, one of which he learned at forty two, at night, over four years, from a grammar and a dictionary and a habit of not giving up.

He is fifty and his own week is a shambles.

Not morally. He wants that established. There is nothing hidden and nothing shameful; he is a decent man with a decent marriage and a job he does properly.

It is that his week does not hold together. He is late for things he cares about. There is a drawer with eleven months of unopened post in it. He has canceled the same dental appointment three times. He starts a day with a clear intention and arrives at the evening having done four things that were not it, and he could not tell you what happened to the hours, and this has been true for about twenty years, and he has stopped believing it will change.

His wife has an arrangement now where she does not ask.

And here is the thing that has been sitting on him since a Tuesday in June, when he was at the board in front of those forty people and he had just finished showing them the beauty of the ordering of the days.

He thought: I can describe order and I cannot produce any.

He wrote it down that night, which is what he does, and it is on a card on his desk, and he has looked at it most days since.

You know that card. Yours may say something different. But you know what it is to be genuinely expert in a thing you cannot live in, and to have that gap sit in you for years without anybody else ever seeing it.

The second sentence, not the first chapter

Let me name the pit before we go on, because if this becomes a discussion of the structure of Genesis 1 you will enjoy it and it will not help you.

The pit is that you live in the wrong verse. You have spent twenty years in the days: the beautiful ordering, the correspondence, the architecture. And you cannot get into the days, because nobody can; the days are the finished thing. The verse you actually live in is the one before all of that, the one you can quote and have never once stood inside.

Here it is.

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.Genesis 1:2

Without form. Void. Dark. Nothing holding together, nothing arranged, no correspondence between anything and anything.

That is your week. It is described, accurately, in the second sentence of the book you can teach in three languages.

And look at what is over it. The word for what the Spirit is doing is a brooding word, and Deuteronomy 32:11 uses the same picture for an eagle spreading herself over her nest and over her young. A bird over a nest. Not arranging it. Over it.

Here I teach the Hebrew and draw the line in the same breath, because on this ground the two never travel apart, and you of all people will want the line drawn properly. The word for Spirit there is ruach, which also means breath and wind, and in Hebrew it is a feminine noun, so the verb beside it takes a feminine form, exactly as it does with the word for a hand, a city, a soul. That is grammatical gender and grammatical gender is not sex, and you know that better than most people reading this. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and Scripture describes Him with a father's traits and a mother's both, and the bird over the nest is one of the motherly pictures and He chose it Himself. It does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess. It makes the picture true.

Take that at your own desk, and know it is not my comfort, it is the verse you have quoted a hundred times. You are being brooded over in a week that does not hold together. Genesis 1:2 puts the Spirit over the formless thing, and it is the Holy Spirit who is over your Tuesday, which has never once been arranged and is not therefore outside His attention.

And then, the sentence you have taught so well and never applied to yourself.

And God said, Let there be light.Genesis 1:3

The order comes down. That is the thing you show on the board. Every one of those beautiful days arrives by a word from above the water, and not one of them is produced by the deep, and the deep is never once addressed, instructed, thanked or blamed during the whole of the process.

You have been trying to be the days, and you are the water. That is not a diminishment; it is the position Scripture assigns to everything that is not God, and it is the Holy Spirit who broods, and He has been over twenty years of a shambolic week without ever having required a schema from you.