Contemplative Bible Reading

Genesis 9:1-2 (New International Version)

¹ Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. ² The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands.

The title is something that adults always told me when I was a kid.

Don’t worry about mice, rats, snakes, dogs, and so on. You are bigger than them.

And of course,

They are more afraid of you than you are of them.

All those adults were right. They were probably right from years of observation, but now I see that they were right from the words of God.

One of my grandmothers put cotton in her ears at night as she was afraid that ants would crawl into her while she slept. Alfred Hitchcock made a movie “The Birds” where birds stopped being afraid of people. Terrible things, simply terrible.

Verse 2 tells me that the creatures of the land and the see will fear me, fear mankind. This is the way God created the situation.

God thank you for your creation. You thought things through when you did this. You are marvelous, wonderful, magnificent.