The word that makes separation

Manasseh and the light switch

At this week’s parashah I thought of how I tried to explain the days of creation to my youngest son, Manasseh. We often did little things alongside to make clear what belonged to which day: crafts, looking together at the animals, the birds, the trees, and mixing water and sand to see how they separate again. Precisely then you begin to see the pattern that recurs in those days: God begins by making separation, by making things clear.

At one point we played a game. We stood in a room we could close up completely, pitch dark, and then Manasseh was allowed to turn on the light. He found it so wonderful that we did it, I think, a hundred times. Again and again, to pause over the fact that God made the light. For a child afraid of the dark that is a great thing: there can be light. And honestly, I never outgrew it. When you see the sun rise and the light very slowly breaks through and the darkness disappears — that is magnificent. And even a small light in the dark, far off, you can see standing there. “Let there be light” is no small beginning.

In the beginning He spoke

For so everything begins: with a voice. Not with a bang or a battle of gods, but: “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and at once “and God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” The verb bara, to create, the Bible uses only for what God does; and the way He does it is by speaking. He does not wrestle with a stubborn matter — He says it, and it is. And then He keeps doing the same thing: He makes separation. Between light and darkness, between the waters above and below, between sea and land. For God, creating is ordering: making room in which life can grow. And note one detail: in Genesis 1 it is always God who sees that it was good. Man does not yet determine that.

The Spirit over the emptiness

Before anything is ordered, there stands a striking sentence. “And the earth was without form, and void” — tohu va-vohu — “and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” That first emptiness is not evil; the old commentators compare it to clay on the wheel before the potter gives it form — raw, unshaped, waiting. And the decisive thing is: creation does not get going because matter orders itself, but because the Ruach Elohim, the Spirit of God, broods over the water, and God speaks His Word. Only then come light, separation, life. That is a pattern to hold on to: out of an empty, formless state life comes when the Spirit moves over it and the Word sounds.

When the clock is wound back

And precisely that pattern returns later in Scripture — but reversed. Jeremiah sees in a vision the consequences of sin and faithlessness: “I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form, and void; and the heavens, and they had no light.” He uses literally the words of Genesis 1: tohu va-vohu. And Isaiah does the same about judgment: the line of confusion, the stones of emptiness. It is as though the creation clock is wound back: the light gone, the land depopulated, the order dismantled. Sin creates nothing new; it is parasitic, it breaks down what God had made good and full. Isaiah adds the opposite: God did not create the earth a waste, but formed it to be inhabited (45:18).

One thing I want to keep precise here. The emptiness that sin brings has its own words in Hebrew — hevel (breath, fleetingness), shav (emptiness, falsehood), awen (iniquity), riq (in vain) — and these are linguistically not the same words as tohu and bohu. So we must not pretend it is one word. But thematically and theologically they do meet, precisely at this point: that the prophets use the language of the primordial emptiness to say where sin ends up. The difference remains beautiful: the emptiness of Genesis 1:2 is an open emptiness, waiting for God’s filling Word; the emptiness of sin is a devastating emptiness, the falling-apart of what was already good and full.

Two questions

And then comes the break. The serpent casts suspicion on God’s boundary: “hath God really said?” — as though that one tree proves God is holding something back. And there stands something you must set beside Genesis 1: “the woman saw that the tree was good.” In Genesis 1 it was God who saw that it was good; now man sets himself up as his own supreme judge and decides for himself what is good, apart from God’s word. That is the heart of the fall: not that man wanted too little, but that he wanted it apart from the Giver — autonomy, wanting to be his own law. And what then breaks, you hear in two questions that keep sounding through all of Scripture. To Adam: “where are you?” — the broken bond with the Creator. And soon to Cain: “where is your brother?” — the broken bond with the neighbour. Those two questions mirror each other, and we stand between them every day.

Sin lies at the door

For in Cain that grasp turns deadly. God warns him with words that are almost literally the words spoken earlier to Eve: “sin lies like a predator at the door, and its desire is toward you, but you must rule over it.” Rule — timshal-bo. It is no optional wish; it is a command, and an active posture: watch, rise up against the drive that lies in wait for you. But when Cain meets his brother in the field, it turns around: he does not rule over sin, sin rules over him. And that his brother’s name is precisely Hevel — breath, frailty, fleetingness — only makes it sharper: the defenceless, the frail one dies. Even the text holds something back: it says “and Cain spoke to his brother Abel,” but what he said we are not told — the old versions fill it in with “let us go into the field,” but the Hebrew text is silent, as though to say: whatever he said, it was only a pretext to lure him away, far from the witnesses. And then the innocent blood cries out from the ground. God is just; He hears when the innocent dies.

Ruling from emptiness does not work

Here we must be honest, for the command “rule over sin” sounds heavy. Why do we so often fail? Because the person who has strayed from God tries to rule from his own emptiness. Cain’s envy came out of a lack: he saw his brother’s accepted offering as a threat to his own place. And an emptiness can bring forth no life. It can only maintain itself at the cost of the other — with anxious control, with envy, finally with violence. These are the Cainite mechanisms, and we know them from within. Whoever fights sin out of an inner vacuum loses, for there is nothing to live from.

The Spirit over our water

And precisely there Genesis 1 shows us the way. When the earth was without form and void, it began not because the emptiness filled itself, but because the Spirit hovered over it. So it is with the heart. Ruling over sin is no triumph of our willpower; it is the fruit of surrender — that we no longer try to fill our own emptiness with our own strength, but open it to the Spirit of the Creator. When the Holy Spirit begins to brood over our inner wasteness, there happens what Paul calls the new creation: the old is passed away, behold, all things are become new. Not we ruling from our nothingness, but He ruling over the sin that lies in wait in us; He restores the healing boundaries that sin had broken down; and the other becomes a brother again instead of a rival. That is what these days teach us: whoever would be a new creation must let God build within him.

The LORD has given

And then the haftarah, which shows exactly the counter-movement to Cain. Listen to the name alone: Jonathan — Yehonathan — means “the LORD has given.” Jonathan was Saul’s eldest son, the lawful crown prince; by human measure David was the greatest threat to his throne. He could have grown bitter, like Cain. But Jonathan chooses the other way: he lays down his own claim, gives David his robe and his weapons, and protects him at the risk of his own life. He can do this because he knows that power, calling and life are no possession to grasp, but gifts of the LORD. Whoever knows that God is the Giver need no longer crush his neighbour in order to exist himself. Cain embodies the grasping; Jonathan embodies the gift. I once heard Johan Schep say: you may choose to be part of the solution. That is what Jonathan does. At Saul’s table a place stands empty, but the covenant remains whole: “the LORD be between me and thee, and between my seed and thy seed for ever.”

The Word that makes separation

How then do we come from grasping to receiving, from emptiness to life? It begins by reading God’s Word. Hebrews says the Word of God is like a two-edged sword that divides — and that is exactly what God did in the beginning: making separation between light and darkness, between water and land, between above and below. We need that separation too. For sometimes we walk around with confused thoughts, news reports, voices saying all kinds of things, and we no longer know what is real; we can deceive ourselves and come to believe lies. But when we go back to the Word, something wonderful happens — “in the beginning was the Word,” John says. The Word is the root that carries us, the beginning from which we may live.

And then not as loose texts for each day, but rooted and bound together. Yeshua teaches us to build on the rock and not on the sand. And note the difference: sand and rock are both hard, but sand is loose — all separate grains; when the rains come, it washes apart and confusion follows. The rock is one, bound together, and stands firm. That is what we need: not loose fragments, but coherence — I call it coherence. Vision, knowledge, faith, and the right way to handle the Word, so that we can discern and withstand all that comes at us. And yes, there is much criticism of Scripture. But even if Scripture were not perfect — God is perfect, and He has chosen to speak to our hearts through this Word, as He also uses imperfect people to proclaim Him. Our trust lies not in the means, but in Him who gives and uses the means.

When the lights go out

And then the gospel carries us all the way to the end. Yeshua speaks of a day on which the reverse of Genesis 1 happens: “the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven.” Precisely the lights set on the fourth day, the lights that govern the appointed times and the new moon — those go out. It is de-creation on a cosmic scale, the clock wound back to that first darkness before the light. Whoever builds only on the lights of the sky then stands empty-handed. But note what does not go out.

Heaven and earth pass away

For in the middle of that distress Yeshua says something that binds the whole week together: “heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” Do you hear the circle? In the beginning God spoke, and heaven and earth were; at the end those same heaven and earth pass away, but the word that called them does not. The creation is perishable; the Creator’s speaking is unshakeable. So we need not totter when all around us totters — we hang not on the made, but on Him who spoke. And Yeshua adds something disarming: “but of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels, but my Father only.” That is no lack to fear. It is the same boundary as that one tree in the garden: the boundary that keeps us creatures, without the compulsion to control everything. We need not grasp the hour; we may receive the times from the hand of the Father.

Closing

So we stand at the beginning of a new year with the Scripture, and the arc spans from the first word to the last. God spoke, and there was light. Man grasped, and the emptiness came in. But the Spirit kept hovering over the water, and the Word kept sounding — and in Yeshua it became flesh and came to dwell among us, the Word that in the beginning was with God, and in which, as the parashah itself says, even in the darkest times grace is still to be found. So do tonight, before you sleep, what Manasseh did: pause over the fact that there can be light, because He spoke it. Let the Spirit move over your own emptiness. Lay your life not on what you can grasp yourself, for that passes away, but on the word that remains. And abide in that Word — for whoever abides in it, abides, even when the lights go out.