Tuesday 14 Oct 2014

October 14: Genesis 8:15-22

Key Verse: Genesis 8:22
‘As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.’

Devotion:
This is one of those verses that sticks in your mind after you have read it, not because we have always had harvests, hot, cold, summer, winter, day and night, but because it is from God and it is a promise that we will continue on until He deems it necessary to stop the life cycle once again. Many people read this and take it as a statement from God saying that there will never be an end to the world; that is not what God is saying. What He is saying is that whilst He wants the earth to continue, it will continue on in the same cycle of events.

The earth will continue spinning, it will continue to give us day and night as it spins, it will continue to give us summer and winter as it wobbles on its axis… and how does it do that in the middle of space? God is the one who knows how it does that and He is not going to explain every detail to us because we simply don’t need to know it! It does not mean that there will never be droughts and floods… of course they will still come and go and we will still have to fight against them. In fact as we destroy more of the world and the environment we will get to see more famine and destruction instead of less.

This is the way that man goes about things – destroying as he goes, making nothing of the amazing creation God gave us. Man continues to break things and to upset God in what he does. God knew that when He made this promise too. God knew we were going to mess things up yet again and that we would have to get Him to bail us out when we do; but he still made the promise! What love is that!

I can’t imagine what the earth would have looked like before the flood and immediately after it as well. But we see some pretty amazing scenery in the natural world which allows us to imagine what things could have been like many years ago. The earth has changed dramatically over time and will continue to do so as we make and break so many things – but God is the one keeping it spinning and wobbling in space to give us day, night, summer and winter and time to grow and harvest crops.

Points to Ponder:
Do you help with harvesting things?

Will you help grow Christians?