www.oliviamooreart.com Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
Let’s consider another story. A very true story. It goes like this.
God created the heavens and the earth. He created out of nothing, indeed, solely by and through his Word, his Logos. And he sustains the world and all its elements by the power of his Word. Everything that is is held together by the will of God expressed through the Logos.
Every molecule, every atom, every proton, and every quark vibrates to a melody being played by God. And he made all things good.
God is not hiding in the gaps. God is not far away, a 14-billion light-year distant deity. God is present in everything. All the time. Every where. The Ancient of Days is the Lord of Today.
(Psa 118:24 ESV) 24 This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.
The world is suffused with his presence. And we, the believers, are his witnesses, called to testify to this truth.
God is therefore present not only in the beauty and the transcendent but also in the ugly and the revolting. He is there because he wants to be there. He is there because the only path to knowing is love. And God loves the Creation — even the broken parts. Especially the broken parts.
And, yes, the Creation is broken. Badly. God made a perfect world, but it collapsed in rebellion against his will. It was not made to withstand rejection of its Maker, and so it shudders and fractures, and terrible, sad things happen to God’s perfect world — a world now far from perfect but not far from He Who Is Perfect.
God created man and woman to be his images in his Cosmic Temple, to show all who God is and what God is like — to be light in darkness on God’s behalf. To separate the light from the darkness. And yet we preferred to hide in the darkness from God.
We are broken, cracked images of God. His image is still impressed upon us, but it’s askew. Not quite right. And sometimes we look to be the very opposite of God.
And so God sent his Word to us to call us back into his image. And God sent his Spirit — the hovering bird that oversaw Creation — he placed him in our hearts so that we’d become New Creations — restored and repaired, like God again.
God so desperately wants us restored that he had to learn how to overcome sin, how to deal with hunger, how to resist lust, how to suffer the pain of being an utterly broken human. All so he could give us what he’d learned. He went first so that we might follow.
And when we follow, we learn to know as he knows — by loving. There is no knowledge outside of love. There is no truth revealed to those who hate. The world was created from its very foundations to be adored, and only those who love can comprehend it as it truly is. Love comes by the Spirit, who comes from God.
We cannot know our fellow man without first loving him. In love, we can see God’s lovely image within him. Even the most detestable among us retains something of his Maker — or else he’d be too ugly to be seen at all.
With the eyes of love, we can see the world for what it is — beautiful and lovely, sad and corrupt, pregnant with expectation that one day man will be restored to Eden and the true beauty of the Cosmos will be revealed to loving eyes.
Everything that happens points toward the Conclusion of All Things. The world is winding down. Time is running out. And man is being drawn into union with his Maker, the created with the Creator.
As we follow the Word to his cross, becoming like God in our willingness to serve, submit, surrender, and even suffer for those who do not deserve it, the Telos of all things comes near because we draw near to God.
Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world … That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God’s new world, which he has thrown open before us.
N. T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense
If we are even to glimpse this new world, let alone enter it, we will need a different kind of knowing, a knowing which involves us in new ways, an epistemology which draws out from us not just the cool appraisal of detached quasi-scientific research, but the whole-person engagement and involvement for which the best shorthand is ‘love’.
My sense from talking to some scientific colleagues is that, though it’s hard to describe, something like this is already at work when the scientist devotes him- or herself to the subject-matter so that the birth of new hypotheses seems to come about, not so much through an abstract brain (a computer made of meat?) crunching data from elsewhere, but more of a soft and mysterious symbiosis of knower and known, of lover and beloved.
N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope
This is a better story. This is true.
Great post! I wonder if when we say God created creation out of nothing we aren’t sometimes missing the fact that He may not have used matter while He did use Himself. I’m not saying that is what is meant in the post. I’m just relating the temptation to become a deist in the process of forgetting the true relationship of God to His creation. Far different than an author or artists to his creation, God made us to be one with Him. I think the post does a great job of relating how intertwined God is to us and the rest of creation. It seems as the clock winds down it goes quicker.