Hello and welcome to the Scriptures or Real podcast, the podcast where we talk about things into scriptures that just came to life to us and things that made the scriptures

real for us and how that helps us better apply things to our lives and draw power from the

scriptures. I'm your host, Kerry Mealstein, and this is one of those few podcast episodes

where it's just me talking not with any other guests or co-hosts or anything else,

and it will be a fairly short one. This is on the

creation, and we're already most of the way through the week where we study creation and

come follow me. But as I listen to different people talking about and people keep having

questions, it's just reminded me of something that I once realized that really made the scriptures

come to life for me and made a

couple of things make sense for me that I think also will encounter a couple of these symbols

a number of times in the Old Testament. So I thought that I would just go through this quickly. So

it starts with this. In the ancient Near East, they did not think of creation as being ex-Neillow or out of

nothing. Creation was the organization of materials that already existed. And they had symbols for this.

So really, the contrast or the tension in ancient Near Eastern thinking is between unorganized and organized

materials, which is often phrased as chaos and order. All right. So out of chaotic materials,

things were organized and became order. All right. So before that, everything was unorganized. And the symbol for that is water. Water is the perfect symbol for unorganized material. When you think about water, it takes any shape. Now, we're thinking about water the way they would have experienced. And I'm not taking about molecular level, which has a shape, right? But water can take any shape. If you put it in a round bucket, it's round, put it in a square container, it's square, it doesn't have a shape of its own. It's just water. It's just chaos.

And it can be chaotic. It can bring about destruction. It can do all sorts of havoc. And it doesn't

have a structure or an order of its own. It can go anywhere and be almost anything.

So this was the great symbol for pre-organization or organized material for the ancient Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, all over the ancient Near East.

And that's worth thinking about and understanding.

So if we were going to look at the scriptures,

and I'm going to, for those of you who are viewing this,

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