Genesis 1

Wherever there is chaos, the Spirit of God comes
to consider, to brood, to watch.

Darkness is disorder
and chaos is confusion boiling out of nothingness.
All of it - the antithesis of God.

When the Spirit comes present,
the chaos is disturbed by its waste
and darkness becomes unendurable.
The emptiness groans for God . . . .

Out of the murky waters of drowning,
a terrible need for God's flawless order
becomes the cry of the dark.
 

And the Voice of Harmony boomed the
words of healing by radical adjustment.
God called this Ultimate Solution, LIGHT.
Comes Light: the Son!
 

But Light does not bring initial rest and
order does not descend gently.
Light causes upheaval and
turbulence, a whole new disturbance.

The first fruit of Light is division.
All creation is founded on separation.
Not multiplication.
Division, not addition.

God's creating divides and separates.
Most of what was created had the result
of massive separation.

What God initiates must be removed from the
chaos of all that is without Him.

Light being born, darkness was separated out.

Water and land were divided into specifics.
No longer mixed.
God is not mixture on any basis.
He is ultimate order and that means
absolute separation from disorder.

Day was parted from night.
The waters were unjoined, the heavens
held its water and the
earth pooled its own.

The resounding of God's creative Word . . . divided.

Land was detached from water and
though joined, they were . . . apart.

And by this Dominioned God, both
the creating and the separating were
declared . . . good.
 
Though bound in earth,
seed and plant were
of a different living order than soil.
Attached but divisible, functioning apart yet
together.
So even earth and seed were called to be separate
that each might live in His called-for purpose.
Purpose calls for: division;
Intact separation comes first -
before anything created can perform
according to God's original idea.

The repeated word within creation
was "separate."

The Lights were divided into their function.
The great Light for the day and the
reflective light for night.
And so, by that division,
day and night appeared.

After this, the light of stars were planted in
their places, separate from earth and sun,
serving their distant glittering role.

And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens
to give light on the earth,
and to govern the day and the night, and
to separate the light from the darkness;
and God saw that it was good.

What God made and did was good and
separation within the making, also was "good."

When the creatures were made
there was the first absence of division,
only the command of multiplication.

Yet even man was subject to this basis of
creation-by-separation.
Man was separated out of dust and
combined with
elements to become something
from earth but no longer of earth.
Woman was separated out of man to be
a full entity of her own distinction.
And man was not alone, for the woman was
his other, an entirely "other."

His companion was only a companion
because she was separate. Not in him.
Nor like him.
His loneliness was filled by her individuality,
by her otherness, not her sameness.
Unity only follows separateness.

All of God's creation rests on specific identity
for particular placing.
The new creation in Christ Jesus
is therefore an entire original,
unmixed into another's identity,
and unlike any other person.

God's ongoing creation is ever on this basis:
the Spirit brooding over the chaos,
the Word of God going forth.
Light precedes all other appearances
and division is the result of light.

Copyright © 2003 Martha Kilpatrick