Moses took us back to the beginning of all that we see, all that we call the universe. He took us back before the stars and moon were, before space was and before time was, and said, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). So Moses said that the One who calls us to Himself has a right to do so because He antedates time, He transcends space, He fills His universe and He is God. . . . David, in Psalms 103, showed that this God is not only a God who makes mountains, hills, rivers and streams, who rides upon the wings of the clouds, but He loves His people. "For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him" (v. 11). "But from everlasting to everlasting the Lord's love is with those who fear him, and his righteousness with their children's children--with those who keep his covenant and remember to obey his precepts" (vv. 17-18). David tried to impart the incommunicable, tried to tell what cannot be told of the wonder of God.

A.W. Tozer's materials are a mainstay in Evangelical churches in our day and he is one of the most quoted authors. He was a prophet in his day and his writings are even more influential in our day. One of his books: The Pursuit of God, has had over 1 million copies sold world-wide.

Morning and Evening with A.W. Tozer

The Wonder of God

Whither shall I go from thy spirit" or whither shall I flee from thy presence" Psalms 139:7 In all Christian teaching certain basic truths are found, hidden at times, and rather assumed than asserted, but necessary to all truth as the primary colors are found inane necessary to the finished painting. Such a truth is the divine immanence. God dwells in His creation and is everywhere indivisibly present in all His works. This is boldly taught by prophet and apostle and is accepted by Christian theology generally. That is, it appears in the books, but for some reason it has not sunk into the average Christian's heart so as to become a part of his believing self. Christian teachers shy away from its full implications, and, if they mention it at all, mute it down till it has little meaning. I would guess the reason for this to be the fear of being charged with pantheism; but the doctrine of the divine Presence is definitely not pantheism. Pantheism's error is too palpable to deceive anyone. It is that God is the sum of all created things. Nature and God are one, so that whoever touches a leaf or a stone touches God. That is of course to degrade the glory of the incorruptible Deity and, in an effort to make all things divine, banish all divinity from the world entirely. The truth is that while God dwells in His world He is separated from it by a gulf forever impassable. However closely He may be identified with the work of His hands They are and must eternally be other than He, and He is and must be antecedent to and independent of them. He is transcendent above all His works even while He is immanent within them. What now does the divine immanence mean in direct Christian experience" It means simply that God is here. Wherever we are, God is here. There is no place, there can be no place, where He is not. Ten million intelligences standing at as many points in space and separated by incomprehensible distances can each one say with equal truth, God is here. No point is nearer to God than any other point. It is exactly as near to God from any place as it is from any other place. No one is in mere distance any further from or any nearer to God than any other person is. These are truths believed by every instructed Christian. It remains for us to think on them and pray over them until they begin to glow within us. `In the beginning God.' (Genesis 1:1) Not matter, for matter is not self-causing. It requires an antecedent cause, and God is that Cause. Not law, for law is but a name for the course which all creation follows. That course had to be planned,and the Planner is God. Not mind, for mind also is a created thing and must have a Creator back of it. In the beginning God, the uncaused Cause of matter, mind and law. There we must begin. Adam sinned and, in his panic, frantically tried to do the impossible: he tried to hide from the Presence of God. David also must have had wild thoughts of trying to escape from the Presence, for he wrote, `Whither shall I go from thy Spirit" or whither shall I flee from thy presence"' (Psalms 139:7) Then he proceeded through one of his most beautiful psalms to celebrate the glory of the divine immanence. `If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.' (Psalms 139:8-10) And he knew that God's being and God's seeing are the same, that the seeing Presence had been with him even before he was born, watching the mystery of unfolding life. Solomon exclaimed, `But will God indeed dwell on the earth" behold the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee: how much less this house which I have builded.' (1 Kings 8:27) Paul assured the Athenians that `God is not far from any one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.' (Acts 17:27-28) If God is present at every point in space, if we cannot go where He is not, cannot even conceive of a place where He is not, why then has not that Presence become the one universally celebrated fact of the world" The patriarch Jacob, `in the waste howling wilderness,' gave the answer to that question. He saw a vision of God and cried out in wonder, `Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.' (Genesis 28:16) Jacob had never been for one small division of a moment outside the circle of that all-pervading Presence. But he knew it not. That was his trouble, and it is ours. Men do not know that God is here. What a difference it would make if they knew. The Presence and the manifestation of the Presence are not the same. There can be the one without the other. God is here when we are wholly unaware of it. He is manifest only when and as we are aware of His Presence. On our part there must be surrender to the Spirit of God, for His work it is to show us the Father and the Son. If we co-operate with Him in loving obedience God will manifest Himself to us, and that manifestation will be the difference between a nominal Christian life and a life radiant with the light of His face. Always, everywhere God is present, and always He seeks to discover [uncover] Himself. To each one he would reveal not only that He is, but what He is as well. He did not have to be persuaded to discover Himself to Moses. `And the Lord descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord.' He not only made a verbal proclamation of His nature but He revealed His very Self to Moses so that the skin of Moses' face shone with the supernatural light. It will be a great moment for some of us when we begin to believe that God's promise of self-revelation is literally true: that He promised much, but promised no more than He intends to fulfill. Our pursuit of God is successful just because He is forever seeking to manifest Himself to us. the revelation of God to any man is not God coming from a distance upon a time to pay a brief and momentous visit to the man's soul. Thus to think of it is to misunderstand it all. The approach of God to the soul or of the soul to God is not to be thought of in spatial terms at all. There is no idea of physical distance involved in the concept. It is not a matter of miles but of experience. To speak of being near to or far from God is to use language in a sense always understood when applied to our ordinary human relationships. A man may say, `I feel that my son is coming nearer to me as he gets older,' and yet that son has lived by his father's side since he was born and has never been away from home more than a day or so in his entire life. What then can the father mean" Obviously he is speaking of experiece. He means that the boy is coming to know him more intimately and with deeper understanding, that the barriers of thought and feeling between the two are disappearing, that father and son are becoming more closely united in mind and heart. So when we sing, `Draw me nearer, nearer, blessed Lord,' we are not thinking of the nearness of place, but of the nearness of relationship. It is for increasing degrees of awareness that we pray, for a more perfect consciousness of the divine Presence. We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts. Why do some persons `find' God in a way that others do not" Why does God manifest His Presence to some and let multitudes of others struggle along in the half-light of imperfect Christian experience" Of course the will of God is the same for all. He has no favorites within His household. All He has ever done for any of His children He will do for all of His children. The difference lies not with God but with us. Pick at random a score of great saints whose lives and testimonies are widely known. Let them be Bible characters or well known Christians of post-Biblical times. You will be struck instantly with the fact that the saints were not alike. Sometimes the unlikenesses were so great as to be positively glaring. How different for example was Moses from Isaiah; how different was Elijah from David; how unlike each other were John and Paul, St. Francis and Luther, Finney and Thomas Kempis. The differences are as wide as human life itself: differences of race, nationality, education, temperament, habit and personal qualities. Yet they all walked, each in his day, upon a high road of spiritual living far above the common way. Their differences must have been incidental and in the eyes of God of no significance. In some vital quality they must have been alike. What was it" I venture to suggest that the one vital quality which they had in common was spirital receptivity. Something in them was open to heaven, something which urged them Godward. Without attempting anything like a profound analysis I shall say simply that they had spiritual awareness and that they went on to cultivate it until it became the biggest thing in their lives. They differed from the average person in that when they felt the inward longing they did something about it. They acquired the lifelong habit of spiritual response. They were not disobedient to the heavenly vision. As David put it neatly, `When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek.' (Psalms 27:8) As with everything good in human life, back of this receptivity is God. The sovereignty of God is here, and is felt even by those who have not placed particular stress upon it theologically. The pious Michael Angelo confessed this in a sonnet: My unassisted heart is barren clay,That of its native self can nothing feed:Of good and pious works Thou art the seed,That quickens only where Thou sayest it may:Unless Thou show to us Thine own true wayNo man can find it: Father! Thou must lead. These words will repay study as the deep and serious testimony of a great Christian. Important as it is that we recognize God working in us, I would yet warn against a too-great preoccupation with the thought. It is a sure road to sterile passivity. God will not hold us responsible to understand the mysteries of election, predestination and the divine sovereignty. The best and safest way to deal with these truths is to raise our eyes to God and in deepest reverence say, `O Lord, Thou knowest.' Those things belong to the deep and mysterious Profound of God's omniscience. Prying into them may make theologians, but it will never make saints. Receptivity is not a single thing; it is a compound rather, a blending of several elements within the soul. It is an affinity for, a bent toward, a sympathetic response to, a desire to have. From this it may be gathered that it can be present in degrees, that we may have little or more or less, depending upon the individual. It may be increased by exercise or destroyed by neglect. It is not a sovereign and irresistible force which comes upon us as a seizure from above. It is a gift of God, indeed, but one which must be recognized and cultivated as any other gift if it is to realize the purpose for which it was given. Failure to see this is the cause of a very serious breakdown in modern evangelicalism. The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. We now demand glamour and fast flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar. The tragic results of this spirit are all about us. Shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit: these and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul. For this great sickness that is upon us no one person is responsible, and no Christian is wholly free from blame.We have all contributed, directly or indirectly, to this sad state of affairs. We have been too blind to see, or too timid to speak out, or too self-satisfied to desire anything better than the poor average diet with which others appear satisfied. To put it differently, we have accepted one another's notions, copied one another's lives and made one another's experiences the model for our own. And for a generation the trend has been downward. Now we have reached a low place of sand and burnt wire grass and, worst of all, we have made the Word of Truth conform to our experience and accepted this low plane as the very pasture of the blessed. It will require a determined heart and more than a little courage to wrench ourselves loose from the grip of our times and return to Biblical ways. But it can be done. Every now and then in the past Christians have had to do it. History has recorded several large- scale returns led by such men as St. Francis, Martin Luther and George Fox. Unfortunately there seems to be no Luther or Fox on the horizon at present. Whether or not another such return maybe expected before the coming of Christ is a question upon which Christians are not fully agreed, but that is not of too great importance to us now. What God in His sovereignty may yet do on a world-scale I do not claim to know: but what He will do for the plain man or woman who seeks His face I believe I do know and can tell others. Let any man turn to God in earnest, let him begin to exercise himself unto godliness, let him seek to develop his powers of spiritual receptivity by trust and obedience and humility, and the results will exceed anything he may have hoped in his leaner and weaker days. Any man who by repentance and a sincere return to God will break himself out of the mold in which he has been held, and will go to the Bible itself for his spiritual standards, will be delighted with what he finds there. Let us say it again: The Universal Presence is a fact. God is here. The whole universe is alive with His life. And He is no strange or foreign God, but the familiar Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whose love has for these thousands of years enfolded the sinful race of men. And always He is trying to get our attention, to reveal Himself to us, to communicate with us. We have within us the ability to know Him if we will but respond to His overtures. (And this we call pursuing God!) We will know Him in increasing degree as our receptivity becomes more perfect by faith and love and practice. O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here and I knew it not. I have been blind to Thy Presence. Open my eyes that I may behold Thee in and around me. For Christ's sake. Amen.

In the Pursuit of God - The Universal Presence

If we separate the first four words of Genesis 1:1 from the rest of the verse, they form a sort of motto for all of life. They say, "God first."We find this motto suggested in the first commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." No one and nothing must take the place of the true and living God.We find it taught in the story of Elijah and the widow who had only enough flour and oil left to make one final loaf for her son and herself (1 Kings 17:12). Surprisingly Elijah said, "Make me a little loaf first." Though this might sound like gross selfishness, it wasn't. Elijah was a representative of God. He was saying, "Just put God first and your supply of the necessities of life will never fail."The Lord Jesus taught the same thing centuries later on the Mount when He said, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you" (Matthew 6:33). The central priority of life is the kingdom of God and His righteousness.Again the Savior asserted His prior claim in Luke 14:26, "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Christ must have first place.But how do we put God first? We have our family to care for. We have our secular employment to think of. We have a multitude of duties crying out for our time and resources. We put God first by loving Him with a love beside which all other loves are hatred in comparison. By using all material things as a trust from Him, holding onto only those things which can be used in connection with His kingdom. By giving top priority to matters of eternal consequences, remembering that even good things are sometimes enemies of the best.Man's best interests lie in a right relationship with God. The right relationship is when God is given first place. Even when man puts God first, he will have some problems, but he will find fulfilment in life. But when he puts God second, he will have nothing but problems - and a miserable existence.

With reverence, humor and skill, William MacDonald wove a daily devotional tapestry that challenges the reader to think deeply and Biblically, and apply God's Word to their lives.

Truths to Live By - One Day at a Time

"In the beginning God - " (Genesis 1:1)

God never leaves Himself without a witness. In the darkest days, a voice sounds out for Him in clear, articulate tones. Often in the most unusual circumstances, He raises up some unexpected confessor to speak His Name boldly.In the days before the flood, the earth was gripped by violence and immorality. But Noah was there to take a valiant stand for the Lord.It seemed to Elijah that all Israel had sunk in idolatry, but God had 7000 men that had not bowed to Baal.In the midst of spiritual deadness and moral decline John Hus, Martin Luther and John Knox stepped forth on the stage of history to defend the cause of the Most High.More recently, God was acknowledged when the telegraph was discovered. The first message to be transmitted was "What hath God wrought!"When Apollo 8 was returning to the earth after the first manned flight to the moon, on Christmas Eve, 1968, three astronauts took turns reading from Genesis 1:1-10, then concluded, "And from the crew of Apollo 8 we close with…God bless you, all of you on the good earth."In spite of the enraged protests of infidels, the United States Postal Service issued an Apollo 8 stamp with words from Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning…"The currency of the United States bears the motto "In God we trust."The calendar abbreviation A.D. reminds us that this is the year of our Lord (Anno Domini).Is it a coincidence that the stellar heavens feature a virgin, a man-child, a serpent and a cross - all important participants in the drama of redemption? Is it the Gospel in the stars?Even atheists sometimes slip by acknowledging the Lord. An atheistic ruler said at a summit meeting in Austria in 1979, "God will not forgive us if we fail."There is a certain moral imperative in the universe that our God be publicly acknowledged. When the disciples praised the Lord Jesus as the King that had come in the Name of the Lord, the Pharisees demanded that Christ rebuke them. But He said to them, "I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out" (Lu. 19:40).We need not fear that God's name will ever be unsung or His honor neglected. At the very time when men pronounce Him dead, He will raise up some witness to confound His enemies and comfort His friends.

"I have reserved to myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee to the image of Baal." (Romans 11:4)

For Reading and Meditation:      Isaiah 42:1-9What is the first thing we learn about God as we open up the Scriptures? It is His might and omnipotence. The Bible never argues that there is a God; everywhere it assumes and asserts the fact. Majestically the opening verse of Scripture says: "In the beginning God " Its paramount concern is not to persuade us that God is, but to tell us who God is and what He does. The first thing we see Him do in the Scriptures is to act creatively. I love the story concerning a group of researchers who set out to discover what really happened when the earth was created. They spent months gathering information and feeding data into a computer. Finally they hit the printout key and waited. Soon a message appeared with these words: "See Genesis 1:1. " Many think the only reference to God's creative act is the one which appears in the first two chapters of Genesis, but the truth is woven inextricably into the very texture of both the Old and the New Testament. One example of this is found in our text for today. We cannot have a right conception of God or contemplate Him correctly unless we think of Him as all-powerful. He who cannot do what He wills and pleases cannot be God. As God has a will to do good, so He has the necessary power to execute that will. Who can look upward to the midnight sky, behold its wonders and not exclaim: "Of what were these mighty orbs formed?" A great and powerful God brought them into being simply by saying: "Let them be." This kind of God can have my heart anytime.Father, I sense that the more enlightened my understanding the more my soul responds to that enlightenment with thanksgiving, adoration, and praise. Enlighten me still more, dear Father. In Jesus' Name I pray. Amen.<div class="tl-lightgrey mt20 pt20 flexbox-row-wrap jc-around"><div><div class="fs-17 fg-mustard bold center-it">AdditionalVerses</div><ul style="margin-top:0px"><li>Acts 14:8-15</li><li>Nehemiah 9:5-6</li><li>Psalm 102:25</li><li>Hebrews 11:3</li></ul></div>

<div><div class="fs-17 fg-mustard bold center-it">Questions to Consider</div><ul style="margin-top:0px"><li>What did Paul and Barnabas declare?</li><li>How do we understand that God formed the universe?</li></ul></div></div>

Let a little light into your soul every day with this wonderful devotional from English pastor Selwyn Hughes.

Every Day Light with Selwyn Hughes

" he who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth " (v. 5)

For Reading and Meditation:      Genesis 1:1-12We focus on what without doubt is the most noble and loftiest of themes - the nature and character of God. I have noticed that Christians, generally speaking, seem to be preoccupied with knowing more about themselves rather than knowing more about God. Ask any Christian bookshop manager: "What are the best-selling books?" Not those that unfold for us the nature of God, but those that direct us toward such things as how to get a better self-image, how to manage money, how to find inner healing, how to get more excitement out of life, and so on. Not that these subjects are unimportant, but they are explored in a self-absorbed way that gives the idea that the most important thing in life is knowing ourselves better. It isn't. The most important thing in life is knowing God better. John Lancaster, a minister in Cardiff, South Wales, in an article entitled "Where on earth is God?" asks the question: "Given a choice between attending a seminar, say, on the 'Glory of God in Isaiah' and one on 'The Christian and Sex,' to which would you go?" He makes the point also that though the Church often answers the questions that people are asking, the real problem may be that people are not asking the right questions. In today's Church we are far too man-centered, and not God-centered. It is not by accident, I believe, that the Bible opens with the thunderous acclaim: "In the beginning God " I tell you with all the conviction of which I am capable - if God is not our primary focus, then everything else will soon get out of focus.O Father, from this day help me determine to make You my primary focus. And give me the grace and strength to maintain it, through all the vicissitudes and uncertainties of the days ahead. In Jesus' Name I pray. Amen.<div class="tl-lightgrey mt20 pt20 flexbox-row-wrap jc-around"><div><div class="fs-17 fg-mustard bold center-it">AdditionalVerses</div><ul style="margin-top:0px"><li>John 1:1-5</li><li>Colossians 1:15-20</li><li>Hebrews 12:2</li><li>Revelation 1:8</li></ul></div>

<div><div class="fs-17 fg-mustard bold center-it">Questions to Consider</div><ul style="margin-top:0px"><li>What did the Lord declare to John the revelator?</li><li>What did the apostle John declare?</li></ul></div></div>

"In the beginning God " (v. 1)

For Reading and Meditation:      Isaiah 55:1-13After seeing in Genesis 1 that God is all-powerful, the next thing we observe about God is that He is personal.But what does it mean to be a person? What predicates personality? The best definition of personality I know is the one given to me by the tutor who taught me theology: "To be a person we have to be able to think, to reason, to feel, to judge, to choose and to communicate in words that constitute a language." Richard Swinburne, a theologian, observes that people use language not only to communicate and for private thought, but to argue, to raise a consideration, to object to another. Unlike animals which show evidence only of wanting food and drink, people can want not to want something, like a fasting man, for example, wanting not to want food. Now with that in mind - that one of the constituents of personality is the ability to think and speak - read the first chapter of Genesis once again. Notice how many times the words appear: "God said." Count them. God is portrayed to us as a speaking God, and speech being one of the constituent parts of personality this proves that the Deity is a personal Being. We are not long into Genesis before we are brought face to face with the fact that there is more to God than mere power; the Almighty is a Person. This means, among other things, that the Almighty cannot be studied from a "safe" distance. Because He is a Person He is someone who wants and waits to be "known."Loving heavenly Father, how thankful I am that You made me like Yourself - to know and be known. May my strongest desire be to know You, not merely to know myself. For it is only when I know You that I can most truly know myself. Amen.<div class="tl-lightgrey mt20 pt20 flexbox-row-wrap jc-around"><div><div class="fs-17 fg-mustard bold center-it">AdditionalVerses</div><ul style="margin-top:0px"><li>Genesis 1:1-31</li><li>Job 33:13-14</li><li>1 Kings 19:12</li><li>Ezekiel 43:2</li></ul></div>

<div><div class="fs-17 fg-mustard bold center-it">Questions to Consider</div><ul style="margin-top:0px"><li>How many times does it say 'God said'?</li><li>How did Ezekiel describe God's voice?</li></ul></div></div>

" so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (v. 9)

<h3>The Beginning</h3>1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. </list1></hang2>

Genesis 1:1

In the beginning<cr>1</cr> God created<cr>2</cr> the heavens<cr>3</cr> and the earth.<cr>4</cr> </list1></hang2>

 1 In the beginning   God created   the heavens   and the earth.  

From Wikipedia: 

The New International Version (NIV) is an English translation of the Bible first published in 1978 by Biblica (formerly the International Bible Society). The NIV was published to meet the need for a modern translation done by Bible scholars using the earliest, highest quality manuscripts available. Of equal importance was that the Bible be expressed in broadly understood modern English.

The NIV is published by Zondervan in the United States and Hodder & Stoughton in the UK. The NIV was updated in 1984 and 2011 and has become one of the most popular and best-selling modern translations.

OT: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia; additional sources;
NT: UBS Greek New Testament; Novum Testamentum Graece; additional sources;

New International Version

 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. </list1></hang2>

 In the beginning   God created   the heavens   and the earth.  

Bible Verse of the Day

September 24, 2019

Genesis 1:1 NIV

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