The Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he placed the man he had made. The Lord God made all sorts of trees grow up from the ground—trees that were beautiful and that produced delicious fruit (Genesis 2:8-9).

I keep coming back to this passage in my contemplation of the wonder of creation because it seems so fundamental to a biblical theology of nature.  To help me think about the meaning of nature, I’ve been plodding through the first book of Alister McGrath’s Scientific Theology: Nature. And I mean plodding! Whew, it’s heavy.  Which I suppose you’d expect from a former professor of historical theology at Oxford.  I’ve used the New Living Translation version of this Scripture because it sets out so plainly the fact that the first thing said about the trees of the Garden of Eden is that they were beautiful.

In this passage beauty comes before utility (usefulness). Now it’s risky to draw set theological principles merely from order of appearance, so I’d be reluctant to say that the Bible indicates that the beauty of God’s creation is more important than its usefulness.  After all, if the created things were not useful, Adam would not have survived!  But just the fact that the concept of beauty comes right in on the heels  of God’s declaring the creation “very good” (Genesis 1:31) means to me that as creatures made in God’s image, something resonates within our souls when we come into the presence of something beautiful.  So for one attuned to God, the first experience of Yosemite or Yellowstone would likely cause us to pause and reflect, “This is awesomely beautiful,” and not muse, “Wow, think of how much energy we could generate by putting a dam here or building some geothermal power plants here.”

There’s a sense in which the counter-play between beauty and utility seems to reflect our human spiritual and material natures.  We have both natures and we need to be sensitive to both.  And guiding us in our sensitivity is the reality that the material things we must use are also the handiwork of God and they have inherent goodness.  Maintaining the goodness and beauty of material things as we use them ought to be one of our principle aims as His stewards.  Think of a lovingly prepared and beautifully presented Thanksgiving meal in comparison to a chicken bucket from Colonel Sanders!

On the subject of beauty McGrath quotes both Augustine and C. S. Lewis (about a 1600-year spread there!)  Augustine believed that there was “a natural progression from an admiration of the beautiful things of the world to the worship of the One who created these things, and whose beauty was reflected in them.”

What is beauty?  What is it that charms us and attracts us to the things that we love?  It must be the grace and loveliness which is inherent in Him; otherwise they would in no way draw us to them.

McGrath points out  that Lewis “affirms the existence of beauty within the created order, while simultaneously stressing that beauty is intended to lead the beholder to the origins and ground of that created beauty in the Creator.”  I particularly appreciate the quotation of Bonaventure:

The creatures of the world lead the souls of the wise and contemplative to the eternal God, since they are shadows, echoes, and pictures. . . of the productive, exemplary, and order-inducing art [of the Creator].  They are set before us in order that we might know God . . . .  Every creature is by its very nature a kind of depiction and likeness of that eternal wisdom.

So my conclusion is that exposing ourselves to and being sensitive to the beauty of the creation is in large part a spiritual endeavor that will draw us toward our Creator.  It’s a spiritually fruitful practice that we moderns perform much too rarely.  Lewis, however, reminds us in The Weight of Glory to understand that beautiful things are merely hints of what is to come:

[Beautiful things] are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of the worshippers.  For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of the flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.

We are promised in the Word that one day that flower, that tune, and that news will be a reality.  In the meanwhile these awesome hints fill us with hope (Romans 8:18-23).

This is how God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that His Christ would suffer. Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that He may send the Christ, who has been appointed for you—even Jesus. He must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything, as He promised long ago through His holy prophets (Acts 3:18-21).

In [Jesus Christ] we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that He lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. And He made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment—to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ (Ephesians 1:7-10).

Years ago I saw a placard that really made me chuckle: “When you’re up to your neck in alligators, it’s hard to keep in mind that your original purpose was to clear the swamp!” Day-to-day routines with all their details will often keep us from thinking not only about our temporary purposes but our permanent purposes as well.

The permanent purpose of the follower of Christ is related to the fundamental biblical/Christian worldview regarding material existence.  True Christianity holds that there are two realms: the supernatural (spiritual, metaphysical) and the natural (material, physical).  The supernatural world in the form of God (who is Spirit) is eternally existent.  By His Word God formed the natural world, which exists for His pleasure and according to His will and would cease to exist at the word of His command.

This natural world has been graced by the material form of God in Jesus who came to the earth the first time in order to redeem fallen mankind, the one creature made in the likeness of God, but fallen in sin.  After making atonement for our sin, Jesus, the Son ascended to be with God the Father.  But He will come again to fully restore, refresh, and reunify the earth.  This is necessary because God cursed the earth in order to discipline sinful humanity [see passages above]. Further, the earth has been unwisely damaged by the hand of sinful man.  As a result, at the consummation of all things those who have destroyed the earth will themselves be destroyed (Revelation 11:18).  From this we can know that God holds the earth dear.

The triune God loves the material world that He made (all Persons of the Trinity intimately involved in its creation and its continuation).  And Jesus, who in a transformed material body ascended to heaven, will come again in His material body.  When He does He will bring heaven to earth, and those who have placed their trust in Him will attain their own transformed (incorruptible) material bodies and live a material life on an earth that will once again provide perpetual existence in part because access to the Tree of Life, which access was denied at the time of the curse, will again be available to us (Revelation 2:7 and 22:1-3). So God is not concerned only about our spiritual natures; He’s also concerned about our material natures.

What does this mean to those who consider the Bible to be God’s Word and are committed to Christ, the living Word?  I believe that we will honor the natural, material creation as a precious gift out of which we are made and of which we will continue to be made perpetually.  We will not accept New Age and neo-pagan views that advocate the worship of the creation and deny the personhood of God, our Maker and Sustainer.  Nor will we accept the Platonic and Eastern religious views that consider the material world as something negative that needs to be escaped from.

And we will continue to learn from it and about it, because in so doing we gain more understanding about the eternal creative power, divine nature, intelligence, and loving and sustaining influence of Christ the Creator.

“Our God is an awesome God”—and His creation is an awesome creation.

[Photos: Desert wildflowers I photographed last week.  Click on the photos to see them in larger size.  Then click on the return arrow  -DO]

The Lord said to Job] “Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place, that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it? The earth takes shape like clay under a seal; its features stand out like those of a garment. The wicked are denied their light, and their upraised arm is broken [Job 38:12-15].

I was having coffee with my friend Jack this morning, and he told me about taking a cruise through the Alaskan fjords.  One day he was up early and taking in the awe-inspiring view of mountains beginning to stand out in the early morning sun—like folds of a garment.  While he was taking in the beauty of it all, he overheard a conversation between two men nearby.  One of their comments stunned him:  “What in the world is the value of this land; you could never really do anything with it.”

One would hope that Jack’s inner thought would be common to most of us: “Thank God that mankind can’t do anything with it!”  Sometimes I think we’d all like to see God break a few upraised arms of men.

China's Three Gorges Dam

Every generation seems to have what I call a “pride of the present”: we tend to believe that our thinking is sounder and our worldview more informed than the previous one—perhaps even all previous generations.  This is especially apparent in regard to the natural world—which modern science and technology believes it has virtually mastered.  Because nature has been our easy provider, willing patient, and sometimes cadaver for so long, we have tended to lose respect for it.  And what we no longer respect, we can easily come to abuse.

I feel we modern followers of Christ have also become somewhat blind followers of technology and have adopted the same utilitarian view toward God’s good creation that we see in much of science and industry.  This utilitarian approach, however, is really the child of the humanistic “Enlightenment” and the subsequent Industrial Revolution, not of a true understanding of the theology of nature.

Interestingly, two of the most significant Reformers, John Calvin and Martin Luther, had been quite successful in framing a sound biblical theology of nature in the 16th century that corrected the faulty dualistic theology of the Middle Ages that saw the material world as something low and degraded that needed to be escaped from (a view that goes all the way back to Plato and is also foundational to Eastern religions).  Their followers eventually became the champions of the “Protestant work ethic” that in part led to the Industrial Revolution and the ultimate devaluation of the creation that Calvin and Luther had helped to free from mysticism and dualism.  See the Wikipedia article about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

Calvin and Luther both had a high view of the natural world that I think we need to recapture.  I firmly believe we need to trade our pride of the present for humility and an understanding that other generations before us may have had a more biblically sound view of the creation than we do.  I go into depth on that issue in the article “Listening To the Right Voices,” which you can get to by going to the “Articles” button at the top of the page.

To whet your appetite on rethinking how Christians ought to consider the creation, let me drop in a couple quotes on this post that you can also find on this Website under “Creation Quotations”:

From Luther:
“Now if I believe in God’s Son and bear in mind that He became man, all creatures will appear a hundred times more beautiful to me than before.  Then I will properly appreciate the sun, the moon, the stars, trees, apples, pears, as I reflect that he is Lord over and the center of all things.”

From Calvin:

“In every part of the world, in heaven and on earth, he has written and as it were engraven the glory of his power, goodness and eternity…. For all creatures, from the firmament even to the center of the earth, could be witnesses and messengers of his glory to all men, drawing them on to seek him and, having found him, to do him service and honor according to the dignity of a Lord so good, so potent, so wise and everlasting….For the little singing birds sang of God, the animals acclaimed Him, the elements feared and the mountains resounded with Him, the river and springs threw glances toward Him, the grasses and the flowers smiled.”

Because of our generational pride and our loss of sensitivity to the natural world I wonder often if we can ever regain the biblical perspective these influential reformers understood.

Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.
(Luke 5:16)

I bless the camp counselor who first sent me out into “the creation” for a personal quiet time alone.  It was at Camp Michawana in west-central Michigan.  My dad was on the board of the camp.  He had been since Lance Latham, the founder of AWANA, was compelled by a Michigan state land-use policy decision to move his Chicago-based youth camping program out of Michigan to Wisconsin in 1945. The camp program was conducted for about eight weeks each summer at facilities built in the thirties by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).  It was set on the sandy shore of a shallow little lake.

The counselor believed it was beneficial for his boys to have a time of solitude and quietness with God for about a half hour each morning; so we were assigned to go into the woods to find our private spots.  The significance of his assignment is highlighted by the fact that some fifty years later, I could still take you to that spot.  Images of it remain vivid in my mind: A mossy hump at the base of a big white pine that leaned over the shore of Long Lake.  Some of the tree’s roots arched into the water where their shadows provided cover for shelter-seeking bass.  Turtles, frogs, and dragonflies were my companions as I sat there contemplating my Bible-study lesson for the day.  I realize now that the biblical principles I was consciously absorbing were virtually parallel in benefit to the spiritual values I was receiving unconsciously from being alone and receptive to the voice of God and to the influence of natural beauty.

Several years ago I picked up an old book titled Work, Play, and the Gospel, by Malcolm Spencer.  In his chapter on the beauty and life of the Spirit he speaks of the significance of natural beauty to our souls:

Grace is the word which we attach preeminently to that quality of the life of Jesus which makes us long to be like Him, and it is also the word we use to express that overflowing bounty of God which produces in man incalculable inflows of spiritual life.  We have but to awake to the beauty of things, and to believe that life is meant for discovery and reproduction of beauty, because God is like that, and from every corner of the world where beauty lurks, spiritual life and energy come flooding into our souls.

John Muir reminds us that “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.”  This is  echoed by Marya Mannes:  “The great omission in American life is solitude; not loneliness, for this is an alienation that thrives most in the midst of crowds, but that zone of time and space, free from the outside pressures, which is the incubator of the spirit.”

Take some time today to tend to your soul by experiencing solitude, quietness, and dwelling on something beautiful from the hand of our Creator, be it the African violet on the window sill, the hummingbird at the feeder, or a walk in the park.