In the Beginning

Anew year has just begun. What will this year bring us? All events that are uncertain now will soon become known. However, also in this year, sorrow, grief, and plagues will be the portion of us as human beings.

Has it always been this way? Was this world created to be a spectacle of so much misery and so many temptations? Let God’s Word direct us to another beginning, a beginning of which we can read that it was very good. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). It was not because of God’s work that there is so much distress in this world, for His work was perfect. Sin destroyed God’s superb work of creation and made everything come under the curse, so that, because of sin, the whole Creation groans under the burden of God’s anger and displeasure.

It is the beginning of a new year, which is numbered according to Christ’s coming on earth. That fact is connected to the beginning which God once gave to the world. God did not want to relinquish His Creation to sin and the curse forever. He will, according to His good pleasure, look in mercy at lost ones and at a lost world, so that His Church is gathered. A new heaven and earth will be prepared for her where it will be seen that all that God has made is very good.

God is still busy performing that work, and this work will also continue in this year. This year will also be “the year of our Lord.” There are many uncertainties, temptations, difficulties, anxieties, and other troubles, but there is also expectation when we look at those words, “the year of our Lord,” and when we may know that our times are in the hand of Him who is at God’s right hand, executing God’s good pleasure. God is working through the work of His Son to make good again that which He in the beginning made very good, for mercy will renew what sin ruined.

Is there also a new beginning for you? Not the beginning of a new year or of all sorts of good intentions, but the new beginning of God’s grace. You, too, were once created very good, but a new beginning must be made. That is not your beginning again, but it is God’s beginning in you. There is an “in the beginning” in Genesis 1, but there is also an “in the beginning” under a new dispensation.

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