Matins Devotion: February 20, 2026

Genesis 2:4-25

If you listen to supposed biblical “scholars,” they’ll tell you that the author of Genesis 1 must have been different from the author of Genesis 2. These must be two different creation myths assembled together. And their reasoning is because the tone of these creation accounts is so radically different. In Genesis 1, God is speaking and things are erupting into existence. Light is bursting into being, the massive swaths of dry land are emerging from the sea. Trees are bursting forth from the ground and fruit is bursting forth from those trees. In Genesis 1, God seems like He’s standing at a distance, lobbing His explosive words like bombs into the primordial soup.

But in Genesis 2, God gets up close. All the boom-bang-explosions of chapter one are gone. There’s a quiet serenity to it all. God meticulously crafts Adam and breathes life into Him. He has tender compassion for Adam, and laments His incompleteness the way a loving earthly father would lament the sorrows of his child. God delicately crafts a helper fitting for the first man from Adam’s own rib. So, you see, the supposed scholars explain, these must be two different creation myths because in the first, God is powerful and transcendent and in the second, He is tender and near.

Well, no, these aren’t different accounts. They just describe two different but equally real aspects of who God is. Your God is both the God of power and might and explosions and the God of compassion and closeness. The God who rattled the foundations of everything to bring the universe into existence did this because of His tender love for you, His child. And that’s still who that God is today, something the supposed “scholars” can’t see because of their pride and unbelief.

When you were a sinner, lost and condemned, the God who can melt the heavens and the earth with His breath gave you the final breath of His Son. He gave you His blood, His forgiveness, His salvation. Through the mercy of Christ, your God got close to you, right up beside you, and made you His own. The God who put Adam to sleep in the garden has sworn to wake you from the sleep of death. When He does, you will see that He most certainly is the God of fire and explosions as He melts this world and brings about the new heavens and the new earth. And you will see that He is also the God of tender compassion as He takes you into His eternal embrace and never lets you go.