In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah, the LORD moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and to put it in writing:

“This is what Cyrus king of Persia says:

” ‘The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Anyone of his people among you—may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of the LORD, the God of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem. And the people of any place where survivors may now be living are to provide him with silver and gold, with goods and livestock, and with freewill offerings for the temple of God in Jerusalem.’ “ (Ezra 1:1-4)     [Photo source]

In this fascinating historical account from the Hebrew Scriptures, Cyrus, a pagan king, heard the command of God and obeyed by releasing the captive Judeans to return, according to the prophecy of Jeremiah, and rebuild the temple and eventually resettle their homeland.  Dr. Richard Wright, emeritus professor of biology from Gordon College, coined the term “the Cyrus Principle” to indicate the process by which God often uses unbelievers to accomplish His purposes.  In his book Biology Through the Eyes of Faith, he speaks of this principle in reference to the many non-Christians who have worked diligently to preserve the wonder and integrity of God’s creation and have in essence done what God’s children could have and should have at least been actively involved in.

A prime example of this is the church’s almost universal hostile reaction to the protestation of “hippiedom” during the late sixties directed toward construction, mining, industrial, and agricultural operations that were polluting our waterways—such pollution eventually becoming so great that flammables on the surface of Ohio’s Cuyahoga River actually caught fire in 1969.  The very next year Tyndale House Publishers released the book written by the influential Christian pastor/theologian and pop philosopher Francis Schaeffer, aptly titled Pollution and the Death of Man in which he sided with the hippies and pointed out that the church was both complicit in its lack of care for God’s good creation and negligent in its teaching on the theology of nature.

These protests along with mounting evidence that we were killing the life of our rivers and lakes resulted in our Federal clean water acts of 1972, 1977, and 1987.  A visible and financially beneficial result of such protection for many major cities is that many of our urban rivers now provide great sport fishing and safe water recreation.  I recall as a kid in the fifties that our local Grand River was not grand: it was mostly an industrial, agricultural, and sewage drain that sent huge plumes of crud out into Lake Michigan immediately adjacent to a major swimming beach.  Today anglers fish below the high-rise buildings downtown and land large salmon and steelhead.

[Photo source]

I love seeing that and knowing how much cleaner the river is; but I have to confess that for the first three decades of my adult life (sixties through the eighties) I was, as a political and social conservative, opposed to nearly all environmental regulation and scoffed at the claims of environmental scientists.  And though I was greatly influenced by Schaeffer’s earlier works, I refused to read his book on the Christian view of ecology.  That changed in 1989—a story I will tell later this week.

Now I am ashamed of both my attitude and my behavior and am glad God moved many “Cyrus’s” to do the work that I could have and should have been actively involved in.  I wonder how different things would be today with the Body of Christ if we had given heed to Francis Schaeffer:

On the basis of the fact that there is going to be total redemption in the future, not only of man but of all creation, the Christian who believes the Bible should be the man who—with God’s help and in the power of the Holy Spirit—is treating nature now in the direction of the way nature will be then.  It will not now be perfect, but it must be substantial, or we have missed our calling.  God’s calling to the Christian now, and to the Christian community, in the area of nature—just as it is in the area of personal Christian living in true spirituality—is that we should exhibit a substantial healing here and now between man and nature and nature and itself, as far as Christians can bring it to pass.

[Photo source]

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn; To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified. (Isaiah 61:1-3)

I don’t remember many sermons from my teen years, but I do recall the first time I heard one based on this picturesque prophecy from Isaiah.  “Beauty for ashes” was the theme, and it was about how God will take the negative things in life and turn them into something of beauty.  That, in fact, was what God seemed to do with the modern wilderness prophet John Muir.

Muir House, Martinez, CA

John’s stern and dour father, Daniel, had, among other things and with threat of the rod, compelled his kids to memorize the New Testament and many passages from the Old Testament. Daniel’s fondness for Scripture and meanness toward his children created great discord in their hearts, and John sought to escape as soon as he was old enough.  For the rest of his days, as far as we know, church and formal expressions of the Christian faith were not a part of his life.  But the Scriptures never left him. Nor did his understanding of God’s love expressed in nature.

For the past year I’ve been reading a lot of Muir’s writings—and have come to understand why his works remain popular even after a hundred years.  Besides his elegant prose, analogies, terms, and phrases from the Bible pop up all over in his books.  This Isaiah passage came up in his book The Mountains of California. He was describing the volcano blasted region around Mt. Lassen in Northern California, one of my favorite places.  After commenting on the impact of more recent eruptions on the land surrounding this still active volcano, he spoke of the areas long untouched by lava and ash, which were again vibrant with life:

Less recent craters in great numbers roughen the adjacent region; some of them with lakes in their throats, others overgrown with trees and flowers, Nature in these old hearths and firesides having literally given beauty for ashes.

His use of the term was in fact a continuation of the metaphors used by the Isaiah—the prophet going on to define Israel’s divine purpose:  “that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that He might be glorified.”

It may well be this passage that motivated John Muir himself to glorify the Creator in his life and writings and to, in essence, become the prophet of natural beauty.  The glacier-fed big trees of the Sierra—that I recently saw once again—seemed to overfill his soul with delight, as did the fresher forests of Alaska:

Look at that now! Why, it looks as if these giants of God’s great army had just now marched into their stations; every one placed just right, just right!  What landscape gardening! What a scheme of things!  And to think that [God] should plan to bring us feckless creatures here at the right moment, and then flash such glories at us!  Man. We’re not worthy of such honor!  “Praise God from whom all blessing flow”! [Note that every sentence ends with an exclamation mark.]

Photo source: Cornforth Images

Amen, John!

Watch a YouTube version of the Doxology (“Old Hundredth”)

Photos of the Muir house from my recent trip to California.  Trees among the cinders from a visit to Lava Beds National Monument

The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into  their own.  The world of creation cannot as yet see reality, not because it chooses to be blind, but because in God’s purpose it has been so limited—yet it has been given hope.  And the hope is that in the end the whole of created life will be rescued from the tyranny of change and decay, and have its share in that magnificent liberty which can only belong to the children of God.  It is plain to anyone with eyes to see that at the present time all created life groans in a sort of universal travail. (Romans 8:18-22 in the J. B. Phillips paraphrase)

Mist-shrouded sequoia

Two weeks ago I was experiencing the wonders of the west slope of the Sierra Nevada—in particular the northern Sequoia groves of California’s Calaveras Big Trees State Park.  It was one of those changeable days common in November when the clouds don’t seem to know what to do: break, drop rain, throw sleet, or just sock everything in.  The moisture the clouds left, however, deepened all the changing colors and flung through the air a host of rich fragrances from both the forest floor and the surrounding sequoias and the sugar and ponderosa pines.  Distant vistas were afforded only when the clouds whimsically decided to break.

The rich and pleasant fragrances reminded me of an excerpt from a book by George MacDonald.  I had already been touched in my soul for years by the sensory delights of the piney woods when I came across MacDonald’s novel The Musician’s Quest about a man drawn by nature to nature’s God.  Robert Falconer, the main character, an agnostic who had been constantly repulsed by spiritually stagnant and/or phony church people, was out on a walk pondering whether God was truly there when “a gentle wind, laden with pine odors from the sun-heated trees behind him, flapped its tight wing in his face.”  This scent and all nature around him soon became a divine messenger:

Strange as it may sound to those who have never thought of such things except in connection with Sundays and Bibles and churches and sermons, that which was now working in Falconer’s mind was the first dull movement of the greatest need that the human heart possesses—the need of God.  There must be truth in the scent of that pinewood; someone must mean it. There must be a glory in those heavens that depends not upon our imagination; some power greater than they must dwell in them.  Some spirit must move in that wind that haunts us with a kind of human sorrow; some soul must look up to us from the eye of that starry flower.  Little did Robert think that such was his need—that his soul was searching after the One whose form was constantly presented to him, but as constantly obscured by the words without knowledge spoken in the religious assemblies of the land.  Little did he realize that he was longing without knowing it on Saturday for that from which on Sunday he would be repelled, again without knowing it.

How many are touched by nature’s God in this way?  And how many of us are insensitive to it as we carry on from week to week in churches that may be repelling such susceptible souls by our collective insensitivities to the awesome wonders of the creation that surround us.  I often feel that the parts of the creation that were not made in the Creator’s image are sometimes better witnesses than we who are.  This should not be.

Sequoia planted by Muir

The truth of this was carried out to its fullest and most dramatic sense in the life of John Muir whose hyper-religious and mean-spirited father consistently failed to demonstrate the love, goodness, and grace of Jesus Christ to his three children.  It took a life-long sojourn in the Sierra for John to, in part, recover from this spiritual deprivation.  In the rocks, trees, and creatures of the wild—even in the sequoia groves of Calaveras County—his searching soul found at least God’s compassion for His creation.  There he christened the world’s largest living creature “Lord Sequoia.”

I hope that eventually his searching soul came to understand that Lord Sequoia was the handiwork of our Lord, Savior, and Creator: Jesus Christ.  I hope too that each of us who do know Christ will come to see and appreciate the love that the Lord has for His creation.  Francis Schaeffer asked a poignant question of us church people:  “If I love the lover, I love what the lover has made….  If I don’t love what the lover has made, do I really love the lover at all?”

The LORD is good to all;
he has compassion on all he has made.

All you have made will praise you, O LORD;
your saints will extol you.

They will tell of the glory of your kingdom
and speak of your might,

so that all men may know of your mighty acts
and the glorious splendor of your kingdom.

Psalm 145:9-12

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands (Isaiah 55:12).  Then the trees of the forest will sing for joy before the LORD; For He is coming to judge the earth (1 Chronicles 16:33).

In a Lebanon cedar

I have to confess that I’m a tree hugger of the first degree.  Trees give me joy.  And since the writer of Genesis noted that the first thing evident about the trees in the Garden of Eden is that they were beautiful, I feel my delight in trees is biblically justified (Genesis 2:9).  In fact, after humans, trees are among the most mentioned living creatures in the Bible. 

[This and many other biblically significant matters regarding trees are examined in two RBC resources: the Discovery Series booklet “Celebrating the Wonder of a Tree” and the Day of Discovery four-part series on “The Wonder of a Tree.”]

Eucalyptus curves

So it was with great joy that I had the opportunity a little over a week ago to get a major “tree fix” in visiting California’s Bay Area and Sacramento, places where our family lived from 1975 to 1982 while I served as administrator with two Christian schools.  While visiting with friends in both areas I got to see once again the big trees that so impressed me when we lived there: the towering coast redwoods, the massive sequoias of the Sierra, the impressive sugar pine, and the introduced “big tree” of Australia, the eucalyptus.

My friend Maynard Wright chauffeured me to Calaveras Big Trees State Park, not too far from Angel’s Camp, the town made famous by Mark Twain in his story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”  I had not been there since our two oldest boys, Greg and Eric, were just starting school in the mid-seventies.  Maynard also agreed to be my “man scale” as I made photographic records of the size of the sequoias there—plus the massive stump of the Discovery Tree, the first sequoia come upon at that location by backwoods hunter August Dowd whose accounts publicized the existence of such massive trees to the rest of the nation.  A year later 5 men with auger drills took 22 days to fell the giant tree.  Eventually the stump was planned smooth to serve as a dance floor and the trunk was leveled off to make a bar and a two lane bowling alley.  To John Muir, that act was a profanation of one of God’s great creations:  “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods.  But he cannot save them from fools,” Muir said.

I can empathize with Muir.  I believe he saw these and other wonders as Job was made to see them by God after he and his “comforters” attempted to bring the infinite Creator’s  handiwork into finite human measure—a dangerous and arrogant act that we’re all too quick to attempt.  Job’s response to God’s enumeration of the wonders of His creation was apt: “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”  [Read the entire dialog in Job 38-42.]

I wonder if in all our attempts to reduce so much of God’s creation to mere human utility we are diminishing our souls.  In writing about Muir’s spiritual understandings of the natural world , Richard Cartwright Austin said:

The sequoia is not the root of our faith, but the sequoia lays claim to our protection in Christ’s name.  Though its size and manifest beauty make it easier for us to respond, they are not the claim.  Quite simply, God made the tree and delights in it; and for this reason we are asked to bear towards the sequoia—and towards all nature—the image of God: protector, not destroyer.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  The earth was without form and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2)

I was thinking the other day about what we know from Scripture about how the Holy Spirit interacts with the natural world.  We know that from the beginning of creation that the “Spirit of God” has been present on the earth.

In the beginning the Spirit “hovered” over the waters. The Hebrew word used there appears only three times in Bible.  The context suggests that the Spirit acted in the creation like the caring and protecting eagle parent in Deuteronomy 32:11 where the word is used again: The eagle “stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions.”

We also know that the Spirit continues to act in creation by giving life: “When You [Lord] take away their breath, they die and return to the dust.  When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth” (Psalm 104:29-30)  It seems from these references that the Spirit is a “pregnant” presence vital to each new life-giving and life-affirming natural act (“pregnant” in this sense meaning “full of creative power”).

Further, dramatic appearances of the Holy Spirit are mentioned in the context of two other genesis events: the beginning of Jesus’ ministry at His baptism and the beginning of the Church at Pentecost. The human life and ministry of Christ (the incarnation of God in Jesus)  and the life and ministry of “the Body of Christ” (the incarnation of Jesus in His church) are both attended by the Holy Spirit.  The Spiritual gives birth to the material.  The Supernatural gives birth to the natural.

This is both marvelous and mysterious.  Full understanding of it is certainly well beyond me.  But I think we can at least draw this conclusion: God the Holy Spirit is all about life and breath.  It is the Spirit who gives and perpetuates the life of all creation.  Absence of the Spirit means death.

Yet here is something more personally compelling: This is the same Spirit who indwells you and me who have been rescued by God the Son—maintaining our physical life and giving us our spiritual life.  It’s my belief, therefore, that as we walk upon the face of the earth, the indwelling Spirit will move in our inner being when we observe and take part in both the birth and death of living, breathing creatures.  Perhaps that’s the reason that God attends the death even of the sparrow (Luke 12:6-7).  [This sobers me greatly when I think that God no doubt also attends the tortured life and death of His creatures in our industrialized production of meat and eggs and in our "sport" hunting---another subject for another time.]

George MacDonald is one of my favorite writers.  He was—in his writing—a mentor to C. S. Lewis.  MacDonald too wondered about the interactions of the Spirit within us and the Spirit outside us.  Here are his thoughts about that:

All about us in earth and air, wherever eye or ear can reach, there is a power ever breathing itself forth in signs.  Now it shows itself in a daisy, now in a waft of wind, a cloud, a sunset, and this power holds constant relation with the dark and silent world within us.  The same God who is in us and upon whose tree we are buds, also is all about us.  Inside the Spirit; outside the Word [Jesus, as per John 1:1].  And the two are ever trying to meet in us; and when they meet, the sign without and longing within become one.  The man no more walks in darkness, but in light, knowing where he is going.

It’s my earnest prayer that in my interactions with God’s wonderful creation I will be more and more attentive to the Spirit within and the Word without in order that I truly might know just where I am going.

[Soaring eagle photo source here.  Pentecostal dove photo source here.]

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