Hovering just above the waters, the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the deep. His voice echoing out across the inky darkness bellowing with a mighty roar; Let there be Light. Like a flash, light shot out of the darkness with a brilliant display of illuminating color and darkness fled to furthest reaches of the eternal void. God saw that it was good.

Speaking to the waters once more, He cast them up and down creating a span between calling the waters above the Heavens and the waters below the Earth and so it was the second day.

Turning His eyes once more to the waters below He commanded the waters to be gathered to one place and for dryness to appear, the waters below He now called seas and He saw that is was so.  As each work began to shape beneath His creative hand He saw that it was good and He was pleased.

His eyes wandering lovingly over His newly created world, He watched with delight as the birds soared high above the trees while the rabbits scuttled across the valley floors. He watched joyfully as the trees danced with the motion of the wind and the waves roared with the sound of the oceans. Yes indeed it was good.

Reaching down once more from the eternal, His hands began to stir in the dust while humming a melody achingly sweet, He began to shape what would be His greatest work yet. He would form something very special to His heart. Something that would dress this beautiful world and keep it. Something that would be made in His very own image. A mirror reflection of who He is. He would call this something man. When He was finished He would breathe into this man His very own breath and thus this man would become a living soul. He would be the highest of all His creation, he would have a heart to feel and a mind to think, he would have choices and feel emotions. Yes, he would be special.

Just as He had chosen to do, God finished His work, set the man He had made in a special garden and breathed in his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.

Later He would create for the man a companion, a compliment, an echo of his own heart. He created a woman from deep within the man, a bone of his own bone. As man was a perfect likeness of Creator God, woman was the reflected likeness of man, thus the crowning achievement of God’s highest creation. In the union of the man and the woman God had given man the ability to reproduce after his kind just as He had done for all of His other creation. God was well pleased and so it was good~

God then rested from all of His labor and beheld all of His creation and declared it to be good, very good indeed…

So it was the beginning of time and the beginning of the audacity of God.

God only had one rule, one instruction, of that tree you shall not eat…

For a time and space harmony lived within the created order and all was good. God visited often with the man and his wife until one day upon entering the realm of time chaos met with order and fear trembled upon the edges of the unknown. Hovering like an unseen shadow was a familiar foe, darkness had crept slowly forward to the realm of time. Inking its way across the schism that God had commanded it to go to, darkness was coming and soon the beautiful created order would unravel at the seams.

Calling to the man, He found him hiding and knowing all things, knew that He would have to remove him from the garden. No longer would man enjoy the fruit of his labor in peace. He would work, labor and toil all by the sweat of his brow. The woman would only be saved in childbearing because she was deceived first. The enemy who had deceived her would one day be crushed by the heel of the woman’s seed. How the Creator’s heart broke.

Driving man from the garden, man began his journey for the first time knowing sorrow, pain and fear. The woman now would experience pain in child-birth. They would both know the pain of loss, of suffering, of pain, of hunger, of death, and God’s heart broke.

Rapidly things begin to erode, the man and his wife lost a child at the hands of another child. The first human blood spilled came at the hands of their son.

The rapid decline of man and the rapid rise of sin was breathtaking and within a thousand years God wished He had never created man at all.

Deciding to destroy man completely looking down He found a man who was righteous. So He gave Him instructions on how to survive, how to choose the animals to take with him and then gave Him a message of Repentance. With many years to accomplish it, He watched it all unfold and in the end, still only the man, his wife and his sons with their wives survived.

So in God’s audacity He started over with the creation again….

History always seems to repeat itself and this time was no different. No sooner had they gotten off the boat. Two of the man’s sons committed sins against their own father.

Now, we fast forward to another man and the world populated once more. The world entirely run over by Godless people. Many idol worshippers. People passing their children through fires, offering them as sacrifices to false gods. Eating and drinking things offered to idols, sometimes even their own children. Perversion and immorality in the open markets. No mention of the True Creator. No mention of His name whatsoever. Every man doing whatever he pleased.

You find one man who found favor with the God of Creation, but who also had a barren wife. Having compassion on the man and his wife He gave them a son through a miraculous way. The woman bore the child when she was old. The creator had said the promise would come through this child and a lineage and race of people would be born out His loins. That out of His loins would one day come the Redeemer. God had said that day in the garden that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent.

So it was and God saw it was good.

The next few thousands of years we have seen the birth of the nation Israel all coming through the loins of Abraham.

We have seen the rise and fall of many nations who chose to walk after other god’s, who have shaken their fist to the skies at the one who had the audacity to create them. There have been wars, famines, pestilences and disasters, lives lost in unimaginable ways, all horrific in their own way.

No one can deny they are senseless and hard to understand. No one can deny they haven’t questioned the heavens as to why He hasn’t stopped the senseless madness long before now.

We have also seen the mercy of the Creator as He continually called for them to repent and turn from their evil ways. We have seen nations completely destroyed because of sin and we have seen nations repent and the Creator spare them in His mercy.

We also cannot deny the continual calling of the Creator, we see the evidence of His limitless mercy throughout the pages of scripture.

Yet, here we are today screaming yet again, how dare He allow innocent babies to be slaughtered, raped and aborted. How dare He allow innocent children and women and men to die every single day of starvation. How dare He allow countless children to be abused by parents, family members, clergymen or trusted authorities. How dare He. Who does He think He is?

How dare His audacity to give me a book and expect me to follow His standard of living, His moral code. How dare He create a perfect sustainable world and then expect me not to taste the fruit if I want to. I have the right to live by my own standards, my own set of rules, my own moral code.

So the fabric of the creative order continues to rip and tear and the darkness continues to spread and the once brilliant light is slowly drowning in the inky black void once more.

We riot in the public squares, we burn bibles in the streets, urinate on them, profane the name of God with blasphemies. Every vile and evil imagination of our heart we do, because after all He owes us right?

We have our own standards right? Our moral standard is above the Creator’s right? I mean who is He? We don’t believe He exist yet we hate Him. We don’t believe His book is true, but we don’t want it to exist. We don’t believe your religion is real, yet you are infidels.

So who is this audacious God?

Who is He really?

I will tell you who He is.

This is who He really is.

The Creator/Jesus is the one who looked out across all of His creation, so heartbroken over the lost fellowship with us that He made a diligent search of all the earth to see if there was anyone who could bridge that gap between the two.

Thousands of years had produced at least a few men worthy to lead His people, but there was only one that had come close to being a substitute. Even he had failed to obey.

So because there was no one else who could redeem the man He had created, no one else to restore the divine order. He Himself stood up from the eternal. Took off the robe of deity, clothed Himself in His own creation and came and dwelt among us, not as royalty, not as deity, but as flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone.

The divine Creator came down, allowed us to do all the horrible atrocities we scream at Him constantly day after day. In return, He healed our blind eyes, made our crippled legs walk again, gave us food in the desert places. Cured our leprous bodies, raised our dead children. Cast demons out of our sons and daughters.

Then in a cruel sense of reward we repaid Him by turning  Him over to Romans where He took our beatings, took our revilings, let us mock Him, let us scourge Him, let us spit on Him, let us rebuke Him, let us curse Him to His face and He never once opened His mouth.

Then in the ultimate act of audacity, the Creator that had never known sin became our sin and as the last nail was driven into place and the cross dropped harshly into the very dust from which man came forth all of heaven held their breath to see what would happen next.

In a voice He cried “It is finished” and all of the creative order responded as the sky screamed in rage and the earth shook on its foundations.  The wrath of His Father was laid on Him thus fulfilling the words of God in the garden, satan’s head indeed had now been crushed.

Man’s guilty price of sin has been completely paid in full. Rising triumphantly over sin He offers redemption through His blood the forgiveness of sin.

All we have to do is agree with God that we are sinners. He forever sealed the perfected order of the creation once more. He forever reclaimed the man He created.

Man has to recognize that he is wretched and that his soul is steeped in the sin nature brought upon us all by the first created man and his wife. Then recognize that the same God who created the heavens and the earth paid the price to restore man back to Himself.

Man has to agree with God that He is a sinner and needs a Savior. You must be born again.

To me God’s audacity is the greatest love story ever written. The truest form of love we will ever find. No other religion in the world has a story of redemption, love and restoration. No other religion offers you a means to have a relationship with your Creator.

Oh the audacity of God. How dare He create a beautiful, perfect world. Then make one request, that you not eat from one tree out of millions. For from that one-act of disobedience sin has reigned since then. Death, destruction and disease has covered the entire world and darkness is once again moving across the deep.

Finally, to further show His audacity He sent us Himself veiled in His own creation and let us beat Him up until we crucified Him, so that He could redeem what we lost to begin with by tasting that one piece of fruit. He forever reversed the chaos back into the perfect creative order placing the sin nature under His feet, crushing the head of the serpent.

Once again He calls for you… Oh man/woman where are you?

Aren’t you thankful for the Audacity of the Creator? I am so grateful for the audacity of God, so humbled that in His audacity He saved a wretch like me and then seated me with Himself in the heavenly places~

I’m hid with Christ! Shawn