A long time ago, before there were mountains and prairies, oceans, and lakes—a long time ago before grass grew and crickets chirped and frogs sang, a wind from God blew over the dark, watery and formless void. The Hebrew word for wind is ruach. A ruach from God, says Genesis, swept over the face of the waters. Ruach also means breath and spirit. The breath, wind and spirit of God sweeping over the waters calls the light and all creation out of the formless void. God breathes and there is life. God’s spirit moves and there is life. God’s wind blows and there is life, there is light, there is land, there is an ordering of things—all in it’s right time and right place. God’s breath is timeless, eternal, within and all around. It blows and creates the right ordering of things.
It’s important to bring our awareness to the Hebrew understanding of God’s ruach. It’s how the tradition remembers and tells the story of God bringing order out of chaos, creating everything out of the void of nothingness. A long time passes and later, Jesus calls upon the breath of God as spirit, as the always moving, disturbing and compassionate creative presence of God—an untameable and divine expression of the holy mystery. Later, the tradition refers to the wind of God as mighty and violent. Acts says this wind filled the whole house where the followers of Jesus were staying. Whenever the tradition mentions God’s wind, breath, or spirit we might want to sit up a little taller because this is the Bible’s way of signalling that God’s creativity and ordering of things is about to blow through. Something big is in the works—something life-giving and life-changing.