Four Weeks of Wonder: Week One
“Heaven is my throne, and the earth my footstool. Could you build me a temple as good as that? …My hands have made both heaven and earth; they and everything in them are mine.”
Isaiah 66:1-2, NLT
In the spirit of Christmas, 20 The Countdown Magazine has themed the month of December a month of “wonder.” Our team has created a devotional each week of the month in which we will study a short passage of Scripture and uncover the wonder of God to honor the upcoming celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ!
The passage from Isaiah, shown above, inspires us to remember the majesty of God through his creation of our world. At first glance it can seem aggressive, but it’s important to remember that God existed before anything else in all creation did, and he formed everything from nothing. If there’s one character in the Bible that learned this lesson the hard way, it’s Job.
Thought to be the oldest book in the Bible, the book of Job details the extreme wealth, prosperity, and upstanding of a man named Job. He had ten children, seven of whom were sons; he had thousands of animals and was called “the greatest man among all the people of the East” (Job 1:3). In the first chapter, we see a conversation between God and Satan about testing Job’s faith. God allows Satan to take everything from Job but his life, trusting that Job’s faith would not falter. He lost his entire family, everything he owned, and became very ill.
For almost 35 chapters, Job and his friends discuss how to continue having faith in God after losing so much and they complain, losing sight of God’s truth through the situation at hand. We should pause here to say that anyone who has ever lost someone or something they loved has felt the same struggle that Job did! It’s because we’re human that we only see what is in front of us, but sometimes God needs to get our attention to correct us:
“Then the Lord answered Job from the whirlwind:
‘Who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorant words?
…Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me,
if you know so much.
Who determined its dimensions and stretched out the
surveying line?
What supports its foundations, and who laid its
cornerstone as the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?”
– Isaiah 38: 1-2, 4-7 NLT
When we think of how God created our universe before there was anything else in the void, we think of something beautiful and inexplicable — something our human brains can’t really begin to even process. That is the very definition of “wonder”!
Wonder tells us to enjoy what we see even when we cannot understand what we’re seeing, and most importantly, wonder tells us that we were never meant to have all the answers. When it comes to the Christmas season, our team chose the theme “wonder” because the birth of a baby boy who would come to save all of humanity seems… unimaginable. Celebrating the birth of Jesus means starting at the beginning of creation. It’s seeing the seed before its sprouted, and knowing that one day it would grow into the tree upon which Jesus was crucified for us all.
In the first passage from Isaiah, we see God ask “Could you build a temple as good as that?” Of course our answer is a resounding no, because who could match the awe of God? But the real temple that God is after cannot be constructed like the Old Testament temples. Rather, the temple he desires most is our heart. God sent his only Son to die for us because it was the only way that the Creator could enjoy his Creation forever. Our free will allows us to deny God, but in sending Jesus to us, he is asking us to take his outstretched hand, wanting to give us every good thing that he intended for us all along.
His plan from the beginning was to bring us to him. And when he breathed life into dust and created mankind, he said, “It is good.” And our eyes opened to his wonder.
Every week in the month of December, we’ll explore another aspect of “Wonder” through Scripture! Sign up for our e-newsletter to get all the news and this devotional delivered right to your inbox.
