Let There Be Light

Hi, friends, and welcome to today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread. I'm Kirsten Holmberg, and I titled today's reading, Let There Be Light. In my daughter's earliest days, I often named for her the things she encountered. I'd identify objects or allow her to touch something unfamiliar and say the word for her, bringing understanding and vocabulary to the vast world she was exploring. Though my husband and I might naturally have expected or hoped her first word would be mama or daddy, she surprised us with an entirely different first word.

Her small mouth murmured, dite, one day. A sweet, mispronounced echo of the word light I just shared with her. Light is one of God's first words recorded for us in the Bible. As the Spirit of God hovered over a dark, formless, and empty earth, God introduced light into his creation, saying, Let there be light in Genesis 1.3. He said the light was good, which the rest of Scripture bears out. The psalmist in Psalm 119 explains that God's words illuminate our understanding, and Jesus, in John chapter 8, refers to himself as the light of the world, the giver of the light of life. God's first utterance in the work of creation was to give light. That wasn't because he needed light to do his work. No, the light was for us. Light enables us to see him and to identify his fingerprints on the creation around us, to discern what is good from what is not, and to follow Jesus one step at a time in this vast world.

Today's Our Daily Bread devotional scripture reading is from Genesis chapter 1, verses 1 through 5. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, Let there be light. And there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day and the darkness he called night.

And there was evening, and there was morning, the first day. Let's pray. Thank you, Jesus, for being the light of life who illuminates the path for us every day. In your name we pray. Amen. Thank you for listening today. My name is Kirsten, and today's encouragement was provided by Our Daily Bread Ministries.