Tohu va bohu
Readings: Genesis 1.1-2.3, Romans 8. 18-25
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was tohu va bohu. We tend to translate those words formless and void or empty. It’s a picture of chaos and disorder and yet here over the waters is the God who brings order and life out of chaos and darkness.
Tohu va bohu, don’t worry, you’re not in for a Hebrew lecture, but we’re going to stick with those words for a bit. Bohu appears only in the Bible three times, and always in conjunction with Tohu, so some believe it’s a sort of nonsense word that rhymes with Tohu for added emphasis on the chaos at the start of creation. But Tohu, that appears 20 times in the Old Testament, I’ll give you a few to give a flavour.
It appears in the Song of Moses at the end of Deuteronomy where Moses is soon to die, and he’s praising the God who sustained them in the tohu wilderness, the wastelands, through which the people of God have been journeying towards the promised land. It’s used by Job in a similar way. Isaiah uses it the most, to speak of chaos and confusion, futility and emptiness.
You get the sense then that this isn’t a positive word. Combined with bohu it’s really not. So here is God, with the earth tohu va bohu, and God speaks. He speaks and begins to bring order. He starts by dividing; light from darkness, heavens from seas, land from water. He’s creating space which can be filled with life. He brings order to the chaos and wilderness and emptiness and confusion of the new-made earth, so that life can thrive here.
So on days 1-3 God is separating, creating space. And then during the next three days he goes back to the start and begins populating it. Having separated light from darkness on day one, now on day four he creates the sun and moon and stars. Having created the skies and the seas on day two, God fills them with fish and sea creatures and birds on day five. Having created the land on day three and having filled it with plants and vegetation, God now fills it with animals on day six.
First God creates space, then he fills it with life. And as the days go on the descriptions slowly get longer and longer, there’s this sense of increasing momentum, increasing fruitfulness, this is going somewhere. And finally God creates human beings. He creates us in his image, we reflect him, and we’re meant to reflect him to creation. We’re the crown upon creation, all of it has been leading up to us; the ones who will be the stewards of this creation. And God gives us two instructions. We’re to be fruitful and multiply, and we’re to have dominion over creation. In other words, having been made in God’s image, we’re to reflect those characteristics we’ve seen so far in God in this first chapter of Genesis, the first chapter of the whole Bible. We’re to have dominion, that’s not domination or exploitation, rather we’re to continue to do the work of bringing order and structure where there is chaos, emptiness and confusion. And we’re to be fruitful, we’re to continue to bring life to the creation, having children yes, but fruitfulness is also about quality of life as well as quantity. As God brought order and then life, we are to do the same.
And yet it’s all gone wrong since then. We’ll think about Genesis chapter 3 and the fall in a fortnight as Lent begins. But suffice to say we do not always live out the mission we have been given. We bring chaos and emptiness where there was order, death reigns where there should have been life. And on the day we fell, all creation fell with us. All is not as it should be. And in rejecting God, and in rejecting his ways, is it any wonder that we see tohu va bohu on the earth. Emptiness and chaos, confusion and that lingering sense of futility. If God is the one who brings life and order, then without him we end up with the opposite.
And with the current mixed up order of everything, and with a continued rejection of God, we can take that as meaning that we have to create order for ourselves, find meaning for ourselves and our world. The world is a mess but I can try to find a way through. Everything is meaningless but I can find my own meaning, find a purpose amongst the confusion. It’s what the world around us does. The culture around us has started to buy into the idea that there’s nothing underneath any of this and so it’s up to us. To save the planet, to save ourselves, to create our own order and meaning and purpose. And sure we’ve made it all up, but it helps everything feel less futile. At least there’s something that makes us feel secure.
But what is God’s response to the chaos and disorder in our world? I wonder, when you break something do you fix it or throw it away? It depends on what it means to you doesn’t it. A cheap plate from Ikea, probably throw it out, your wedding china, you may try to fix it. And sometimes it matters to us more when we’ve made it.
I’ll be honest, I’m a bit of a perfectionist when I’m trying to make stuff. Even if it’s my first attempt, I want it to be great, and if it starts not to work out so great I’ll get discouraged and stop working on it, I’ll abandon it, it’s not working out how I’d hoped. Katy often pushes me to get it done anyway, at least then I’ve completed it and learned from it.
The world is not as it should be, but God has not thrown it away. He could rip it all up in a heartbeat and throw it away, after all it is God who actively sustains our universe. He doesn’t create then wander off, he is the one who ensures all that is continues to be. But he also hasn’t abandoned us as a lost cause. Given up that it will never be what he hoped. Mercifully and wonderfully, God is not like me. Jesus speaks of how God continues to provide for creation in our Gospel today, yes all is not as it should be, but he has not abandoned us completely to the tohu va bohu. And given how much of a mess our world is, how much of a mess we often are, God must really love this universe, and he must really love us. There’s this idea amongst some of the more extreme climate activists that the world would be better if humanity went extinct, all would be better if we ceased to be. God categorically disagrees, the world is better with us in it. But he does take the point that we are part of the problem, and so he is working to fix all that is wrong, to once again bring order and fruitfulness to our universe, it is why he sent us his Son.
Paul writing to the Romans, in our passage today, tells us about where all of this is heading. To the redemption and renewal of all things. Our destiny is not to escape creation, to be liberated from it, but to be liberated with it from decay and suffering. Whilst Paul is writing in Greek not Hebrew, God is nevertheless working to put an end to the tohu va bohu of our world. God is working to once again bring order and life. In this we have hope, Paul says, reading backwards. We have hope because the firstfruits of the Spirit within us groan eagerly for our full adoption and the redemption of our bodies. We and all creation with us, which for now is subject to decay, but will be liberated from it with us. And so all creation is longing for us to be revealed as God’s children, because that means it’s liberation is at hand, and therefore, with all of this in mind, all the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to what is to come. When we get there, all of this will be worth it. Not in a thousand years, not in a hundred years, not in a decade or a day or a minute. But once all is made new, the glory revealed will be worth all the suffering in an instant.
And that’s not our work to do, that’s God’s work to do. We long and we hope and we wait patiently, perhaps we even lament the suffering crying our ‘how long O Lord’, but in all of this we have hope, hope in what we have been promised by God who is faithful. God loves this creation, and he loves us, he has not given up on us.
So what are we to do? How are we to respond to this? We are to bring ourselves before God and open our lives to him. We were created by God, to bring his order to the world, and to bring life and fruitfulness wherever we go. In other words we were created to thrive. But we will only thrive in so far as we are living for him. In so far as we are living in accordance to his commands.
We recently got a new microwave, in the manual it says that it must only be used in accordance with the manufacturers instructions. I’m not sure what they expect people to do with their microwaves, but someone has clearly done something that warrants that advice. It will work best when it’s used as it was meant to be. That’s life advice, we will only thrive in so far as we live in accordance with God’s ways. We’re not to live as the world around us lives, either trying to find our own purpose and identity and meaning in the tobu va bohu of our world. Nor are we meant to lean in and just embrace the chaos. We’re to live as people who believe in the God who brings order and life, even when the world around us insists things work otherwise, even when they prove they work otherwise, for we are living for a world where God will bring life and order and an end to the chaos and emptiness of our world as it is now. We’re to live a different story, that starts in Genesis and ends in Revelation, living out that reality.
If your life is chaotic, if there’s a deep emptiness there, if your life feels more tohu va bohu than fruitful and lifegiving, have you opened up those parts of your life to God? We saw back in Genesis how God needs to create space to fill it with life and fruitfulness. If God is to change us, we need to make room. Are there parts of your life that you’ve filled and left no room for God in? Is there pain and disorder in your life that you’re keeping God away from?
If so I invite you to make space, to allow him in. As we prepare to head into the wilderness of Lent open up the wilderness parts of your life to him. Only when we let him in can he bring the healing and wholeness that we need. It isn’t to say he will put everything how we’d want it to be, and it’s not to say that if we live perfectly we’ll never suffer, and that if we suffer it’s because we’ve sinned. Chaos and confusion still abound in our world, all does not work as it should. But we are to live as people who know the God who brings order to chaos, and life to emptiness. And as we do he will bring healing and peace, life and hope, where now there is emptiness and despair.
Tohu va bohu will not get the last word. For we believe in the God who created all things, who brought order and life to the chaos and emptiness. Who sustains all things, who is committed to his creation, committed to you, to the point that he sent his Son to die that all could be redeemed and transformed. And this same God is making all things new. You don’t need to make meaning, create your identity or search for hope. God has given it all. The question is, will we receive it, and take it to heart?
Amen.