GOD’S WORD FOR AUGUST 12 ~ ~ Job 12:7-9 ~ ~ ““But just ask the animals, and have them teach you; And the birds of the sky, and have them tell you.
Or speak to the earth, and have it teach you; And have the fish of the sea tell you.
Who among all these does not know That the hand of the Lord has done this”

Excerpts from The Power of God’s Names, by Tony Evans

(Yesterday we left off where Tony was saying this:)

Friend, whatever situation you’re facing today or whatever challenge you’re trying to overcome, I want to encourage you to remember the name ELOHIM.

The Strong One doesn’t need raw material with which to work. He doesn’t need logic or tangible solutions in order to accomplish His goal. All He needs is Himself, and all you need is faith in His name that He can do all that He purposes to do.

Too often we get hung up trying to figure out the answer to our problems. Rather than trying to visualize how God is going to straighten out your situation, tweak your trials, or fix your failures, remember His name. ELOHIM can create something out of nothing. He’s done it before, and He continues to do it to this day. After all, He created the worlds just by speaking them into existence.

God’s act of creation makes all of life religious. God invites science to study His creation in order to learn and discover more about Him (Job 121:7-9). Evolution holds that nobody plus nothing equals everything. It ultimately seeks to get rid of God. But watches have watchmakers. Paintings have painters, designs have designers, and creation has a Creator.

All that’s in the universe………beyond our sight…..and all ELOHIM did was SAY something. He merely spoke the word, and the worlds were formed. (I’m glad He didn’t shout.)

So before God shows us His gentleness, His fatherhood, or His grace, God introduces Himself to us as ELOHIM, the great and powerful. He wants to establish right from the start that he is the all-knowing, all-powerful, ever-present one.

So far we’ve focused on our understanding of the name ELOHIM in Genesis 1:1. Yet something very interesting and relevant for our everyday lives appears in verse 2: “The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.”

The Hebrew phrase translated “formless and void” is the “Tohu wabohu”. This phrase basically means, “a waste, or garbage dump.” it refers to a location that’s entirely uninhabitable, without form, and void of life.

The earth was a wasteland at this time—but we read in Isaiah that God did not create a wasteland. “Thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (He is the God who formed the earth and made it, He established it and did not create it a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited)…Isaiah 45:18.

This passage reveals that God didn’t create waste. Yet, in Genesis we read that the earth was a wasteland. So sometime between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, the earth was messed up—which is exactly what happened when Satan fell. Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 tell us that Satan rebelled against God and was kicked out of heaven to planet earth.

Thus we have emptiness and garbage on the earth because garbage has been thrown there. Satan and his demons were cast down, making the planet uninhabitable and destructive (Isaiah 14:12-17)

Satan does exactly the same thing in each of our lives through sin. He takes the beauty of God’s creation—the masterpiece of each one of us—and seeks to turn our lives into wastelands.

This is why you should remember the name ELOHIM and hold it closely to your heart. Scripture tells us that ELOHIM, in His plurality, hovered over the wasteland of life and brought order, redemption, and beauty. He created light (Gen. 1:3), and turned what had been a swampland into a separation of land from water. He made the earth livable. He came into something Satan had messed up and restored it.

One of the greatest lessons to learn about ELOHIM is that in addition to creating something out of nothing, He can take something the devil has junked up and fix it up. He can make it right again.

When Satan attempts to make your life a mess, God’s Spirit can make it beautiful again. When Satan tries to bring death where there once was life, God’s spirit can make you alive again. That alone should be enough to bring hope to the hurting. It should be enough to lift your heart into the realm of faith again.

ELOHIM is a God who can transform a mess into a miracle. He transforms darkness into light. He transforms the desolate, uninhabitable recesses of your soul into places of fertile growth.

And when he does, He wants you and me to reflect Him. Genesis 1:26 tells us one of our primary purposes:

“then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.”. An image is a mirror. In the morning when you go to the mirror, your image reflects you accurately.

When God made mankind in His image—in the image of the triune, plural ELOHIM, He commissioned mankind at a higher level than all others of His creation. The flowers were not made to be His image. The beasts were not made to be in His image, the Fish weren’t. Only humanity was given this great and awesome privilege and capacity to mirror God

Every other creation testifies of God’s majesty, but only mankind mirrors Him. You and I have been created to mirror the Divine in History. We are to mirror Him because He stamped His image on us.

Published by liveinthelightofourlord

View all posts by liveinthelightofourlord