Starting the New Year off

It generally is a helpful thing to start a day off well (though it’s not determinative of how a day goes, it tends to influence it). The same holds true for a new year. This year I’m going back to a familiar plan to engage with Scripture: the M’Cheyne Reading plan. It is not an unambitious plan (and I would encourage to look at all the plans linked on our website so that you can have some guidance as to how you read God’s Word this year), but I’ve found it to be one that I enjoy. Part of that enjoyment is aided by using two resources from D.A. Carson. He has written two companion devotionals that I’ve benefited from throughout the years.

Today as he commented on the first reading from Genesis 1 he made this application from the doctrine of creation:

“One of the most important entailments of the doctrine of creation is this: it grounds all human responsibility. The theme repeatedly recurs in the Bible, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by implication. To take but one example, John’s gospel opens by declaring that everything that was created came into being by the agency of God’s “Word,” the Word that became flesh in Jesus Christ (John 1:2–3, 14). But this observation sets the stage for a devastating indictment: when this Word came into the world, and even though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him (John 1:10). God made us to “image” himself; he made us for his own glory. For us to imagine ourselves autonomous is, far from being a measure of our maturity, the supreme mark of our rebellion, the flag of our suppression of the truth (Rom. 1).” (D. A. Carson, For the Love of God: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God’s Word., vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1998), 27.)

We are not autonomous beings. We are meant, we were created and designed, to be dependent on our Creator. We thrive when we take refuge in the Lord. We find ourselves in great trouble (sin, misery, anxiety, distress, etc.) when we seek to live life apart from God. Let 2026 (and the rest of our lives) be those of humble dependence upon the God who waits to be gracious to us and who exalts himself to show mercy to his people (see Isaiah 30:18).