Created by God’s Hand

I realized something this morning that I had not seen quite so clearly before. It jumped out and surprised me today. I was considering that the power of God’s Word, which created the universe, is as powerful now as it was in the beginning.

When God says “Let there be … ,” molecules accumulate into matter, atoms bond together into mass, cell fuses to cell and things which were not, now exist. When the breath of His mouth rushes out to vocalize His Word, even the tiniest neutrino is ordered into lockstep with His command.

Then I started thinking about His breath. It takes breath to form a word. Have you ever been with someone whose breathing is compromised? They can’t speak easily. Breath is the transporter of words, and without breath words are imprisoned inside the mind and have no outlet.

Then I started thinking about how He breathed the breath of life into the human He created on the sixth day—the pinnacle of His creation. That led me to consider (and here is the picture that took me by surprise) that He created the human differently than the way He created everything else.

Everything else was formed by His Word, but the human was formed by His hands.

As I observed with my imagination how God shaped the human—formed him, molded and sculpted him—I was awed by the intimacy of touch that was being acted out. How God left His fingerprints and His DNA all over the human. How He took the time to tenderly create this self-expression with His own hands. Down in the dirt, one with the clay from which He sculpted. He made the human from the dust of the earth He had just created. Earthy.

Then—and now the intimacy is stunning—He breathes. He leans over this earthy man, covers the human’s mouth with His own, and breathes.

The man formed of earth is filled with the life of the heavenlies. Heaven and earth meet, and life as God intended appears. What was not, now had become. When God breathed, He breathed into the human. Not around him or over him. He breathed the Word into him.

With the fall, the man who started out earthy—all earth—was once again earthy. When Jesus, the last Adam, appeared in earth’s environment, once again heaven and earth met. When the day came for the Word to indwell mankind again, He breathed (John 20:22).

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Jennifer Kennedy Dean is executive director of The Praying Life Foundation and a respected author and speaker. She is the co-author of One Year Praying the Promises of God with Cheri Fuller. She has also authored numerous books, studies and magazine articles specializing in prayer and spiritual formation.