The Very Breath of God

We like to poetically say that God spoke this world into existence, that the entire act of Creation took nothing more than the mere Word of God. Except, yes...and no. It may be true that the act of creating takes nothing more than the Word of God, but that's not how it played out. 

Not when it comes to you.

Maybe God spoke and created the light. Maybe God spoke and separated the light from the darkness. Maybe God spoke and thus came the heavens and the earth, the sun and the moon, the oceans and the lands, the birds and the beasts. Maybe. I wasn't there.

But then God spoke and said, Let us make man..., and then God stooped down, drew together the dirt in His hands, and began to form a man. Not by His Word, but by His work. It's the one thing we know for sure that God formed by His own hand, rather than by His mere authority. It's the one thing we know for sure in all of Creation has God's very touch on it. 

It's why, by the way, the image of the potter and the clay is so prominent. This is how we were formed. 

But that's not all there is to us.

No, for we are told that after God had formed man in His image, after God had completed the work of His hands, likely before He had even washed the last bits of dirt and clay off His masterful hands, God bent down and breathed His very breath into man's nostrils and bestowed on this man the gift of life. 

Life...the same life that in five days prior was spoken by a Word was now shared by a breath. A breath that, for five days prior, had given itself only in Word now gave itself fully in live.

It's amazing.

There are just not words to capture what the Word could have done but chose not to do, the one moment in all Creation when God chose more than merely to speak; He chose to breathe. To breathe life into our very being.

It's a moment we relive over and over again. When a woman gives birth to a child, she does not celebrate when the doctor declares, It's a boy or it's a girl. No, she waits until she hears that first primal cry, that first breath. That's the moment right there. That's it. This very breath...this very breath of God. 

Maybe it's poetic to talk about how God spoke this world into existence, but never forget that you are more than the Word of His mouth; you are the work of His hands. And more than that, you are the very breath of God.