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And so, God, it is our joy to come before You in a posture of

humility and expectancy and invite You to open up Your Word and

open up Your world that we might have eyes to see.

We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

 

 

Last week I had the opportunity to stand in front of three original Rembrandt self-portraits at the Cincinnati Art Museum. It was amazing. Through his artistic wizardry, Rembrandt brought us face to face with himself: his curly hair, his portly body, his beefy nose, his wry smile, his grave and thoughtful eyes. The more you study the canvas, the more you come to know the man himself. You sense his self-possession and ambition, his longing for the things of heaven and his delight with the things of earth, his sadness with life and his love for it all the same.

 

When you look at a Rembrandt, you see the artist himself.

 

You and I walk across the canvas of a Rembrandt every day.

 

In his letter to the Roman church, Paul writes, “Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly understood from what has been made.”

 

That’s the NIV version of Romans Chapter 1 verse 20.

 

I like how the Weymouth translation captures this verse even more. It says, “From the very creation of the world, His invisible perfection—namely His eternal power and divine nature—have been rendered intelligible and clearly visible by His works, so that these men are without excuse.”

 

It is clear as you turn the pages of your Bible from the first couple of pages on into the rest of the story, that the main subjects of Scripture are God, the creator, and man, the crown of his creation.

 

But there is another subject that is an important focus especially of Genesis Chapter one: it is the setting in which creator and creature—God and humanity—relate, and it resurfaces as a significant subject of Scripture often along the way. And that is creation, the natural order, the heavens and the earth.

 

According to the Bible, the pages of Scripture are not the only place where God has revealed himself. As Thomas Dubay says, “Creation is a book proclaiming the Creator.” God has revealed himself both through nature and Scripture, through what Francis Bacon called “the book of God’s words and the book of God’s works.”

 

Psalm 19 is a psalm that is about God revealing himself to humanity. The second half of this psalm describes how God has revealed himself faithfully, authoritatively, through the pages of Scripture. But the first half of the psalm talks about how God has revealed himself faithfully, authoritatively, through creation.

Psalm 19 verses 1 and 2 say:

 

The heavens declare the glory of God;

The skies proclaim his handiwork.

Day after day they pour forth speech;

Night after night they display knowledge.

 

We are often fooled by the familiarity and the simplicity of the universe around us. But under its veil of simplicity hides a work of art of inconceivable intricacy and complexity and design: a work of art that makes God known. Consider the following:

 

An atom is mostly empty space. If the nuclei of atoms could be packed against each other into a lump just a centimeter in diameter, it would weigh 133 million tons.

 

15 million bacteria can make their home in a single drop of water.

 

Cells are the smallest unit of life in our bodies. Each of us has between 50 and 100 trillion cells: they haven’t quite finished counting! Every cell is like a tiny city: with a flexible wall with millions of openings, highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction from the cell wall into the interior, transportation systems, manufacturing systems, energy processing systems, and in the center coiled chains of DNA molecules, each one containing more information than all thirty volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And all of this in something that’s far too small for any of us ever to see, and yet, complex and infinitesimal as these cells are, each one of them is capable of completely replicating itself in all of its complexity in a matter of just a few hours. That’s like New York City rebuilding New York City.

 

A midge can beat its wings 133,000 times in a single minute.

 

A peregrine falcon can spot a pigeon from a distance of more than five miles.

 

Millions of bats can evacuate a cave in the dark at the same time without a single collision night after night.

 

An elephant has over 40,000 muscles just in its trunk. That means that it has the ability not only to rip down an entire tree, but to pick up a single leaf.

 

Blackpoll warblers migrate from Alaska to South America, including a nonstop flight across 2,200 miles of ocean that takes 36 hours of uninterrupted flapping. During the entire flight, they beat their wings 600 to 800 times a minute. Their hearts beat 800 times a minute. And like all songbirds, they orient themselves using the sun and landmarks by day and by using the stars at night, and when the stars or the landmarks or the sun are obscured, they have an internal magnetic compass by which they navigate. The can also predict the weather and refuse to take off if they know that they will fly into a storm.

 

Advanced as we human beings are, we are incapable of even approaching what God has made. As Science Digest reported, “No camera can match the miniature perfection of the human eye. No motor can compare to the silent efficient power of a muscle. No sonar device can compete with the ultrasound echo of a bat or a dolphin. No building material can mimic the stability of a tree or the elasticity of an artery.”

 

And the brain is the most complex machine by far in the entire universe. It has over a trillion nerve cells, each of those with up to 150,000 connections. If every person on the planet simultaneously made 200,000 phone calls, that would be the same total number of connections made in a single human brain in a single day.

 

The universe itself is a finely calibrated structure designed to sustain life. If there were only a slight rise or fall in the amount of oxygen in our atmosphere, we would all die. If we were slightly closer to or slightly farther from the sun, there would be no liquid water—only vapor if we were closer and ice if we were further—and life would not be possible. If the rate of the universe’s expansion were slightly lower or slightly higher, the universe could never have formed as it has. And these are just three of dozens and dozens of finely tuned aspects of our universe, any one of which, if slightly altered, would have prevented life altogether.

 

Our sun is producing power that is equivalent to one hundred billion hydrogen bombs exploding every second and it has enough fuel to continue to do so for another 5 or 6 billion years. Over a million planets the size of the earth could fit into the sphere of the sun. It would take a jet flying five hundred miles an hour over a month just to fly from the surface of the sun to its center.

 

And the brightest star, Eta Carinae, is 6.5 million times brighter than our sun. The closest star to us, Alpha Centauri, is four light years away. That means the amount of distance that you would go if you were going the speed of light—which goes around the earth 7.5 times in one second—if you were going the speed of light for four years. If you were back in that jet going 500 miles an hour, it would take 5.5 million years to fly from here just to the closest star which is just four light years away. We are in a universe that is approximately 14 billion light years across.

 

There are about 50 billion galaxies like the Milky Way in the universe, and each one of them is made up of between 2 and 4 billion stars. If there is an average of about ten thousand grains of sand in a single handful of sand, then there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all of the beaches in all of the earth.

 

Jackson Pollock said, “Every good painter paints what he is.”

 

Creation is a painting through which God paints what He is, a way that God reveals Himself to us.

 

So how is it that God’s invisible perfections—namely His eternal power and His divine nature—have been rendered intelligible and clearly visible through the pages of nature’s book?

 

Let’s explore the first chapter of Genesis and see what Genesis 1 reveals about what creation reveals about God’s nature and character. Page 1 in your pew Bible.

 

First, and the most obvious of all, creation reflects in its origin and in its ongoing existence the power of our creator.

 

Paul talks about that: His eternal power is revealed in creation.

 

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

 

The heavens and the earth is a merism which means it’s communicating everything that has ever been made: the whole cosmos, the entire universe.

 

The Hebrew word here for create is bara. Bara is a word that emphasizes the artist’s total freedom and unlimited power: what He conceives in His mind is what becomes the exact reality effortlessly merely because He wills it and speaks it so. This is a verb that is never once used to describe the creative work of a human being, but only to describe the creative work of God because we human beings can only be creative. We can never be original.

 

So this is a word that emphasizes giving order.

 

In the beginning, not so much God made the heavens and the earth, but God designed the heavens and the earth overcoming tohu and bohu: formlessness and emptiness, confusion and chaos, the spastic, plastic, elastic chaotic expression of matter out of control.

 

God orders and gathers together in a way that hints, I think powerfully in a way that we don’t often see, of God’s redemptive work—of restoring order to chaos—yet to come in Christ.

 

Having created matter, God tames it and brings it to heel at His side pressing it into obedient service of His purposes making everything just right, setting it up to function just perfectly within His perfect purposes.

 

So, in doing so—in creating all things with this beautiful design, he demonstrates his power and sovereignty over everything. But God not only created everything from nothing—an unfathomable expression of God’s power; we just cannot grasp that, but everything is sustained by God moment by moment.

 

And this is also spelled out in the text, but we don’t catch this:

 

Verse 22: God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number….”

 

Verse 28: God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number;”

 

The word for bless is the Hebrew word barach. You hear how similar that is to the Hebrew word for create, bara, the Hebrew word for bless, barach? The person who composed this, inspired by God to write these inspired words, intentionally put these two words side by side. The word barach, blessing, means the continuation of God’s work of creation. When it’s used to describe something that God does, this doesn’t mean that God is just giving a parting greeting or trying to think of something to say when somebody sneezes. God bless you!

It’s so much more than that. This pictures something much, much more active and dynamic and powerful going on in creation. It means that actively and continually God is bringing about what He has desired and what He has purposed and what He has promised will come into being.

 

This is not the God of deism who winds up the universe and then strolls away from it distracted by other things. Instead, God is in a posture of ongoing moment by moment creative work and care, sustaining and participating in all that He has made at all moments in time.

 

This comes through in Acts Chapter 17 verse 25:

 

He himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.

 

Colossians 1:17 says the same thing speaking of the Son and his creative work alongside the Father:

 

In him all things hold together.

 

A personal God who created all things from nothing, and who in love sustains all things to keep them from falling back into nothingness.

 

Now, this is a worldview that stood starkly at odds with the primary creation myths of the day: either that creation came about as a result of an afterthought in a messy battle between the gods, or that various parts of creation such as the sun and the moon and the sea were distinct, divine beings in and of themselves.

 

But Genesis Chapter 1 presents a worldview that also stands starkly at odds with the primary creation myths of our day. And there are two that prevail today: creation is goo, and creation is God.

 

Creation is goo:

This is the modern, western, scientific Materialist view that says all that there is is an accident of time plus matter plus energy plus chance.

This approach devalues creation as a mere junk pile to be exploited.

 

The other view that competes with it is Creation is God:

This is the ancient, eastern, mystical monist view that has crept into our spirituality in this western world that says that all that is is one with God, and all that is is somehow God itself. So the nature and the supernatural are not distinct realms but are somehow all part of one another. There is some sense in which matter is divine and to be revered. Well, this places too high a value on creation as a God that is to be worshipped.

 

Instead Genesis Chapter 1 says, “No, Creation is a Gift:”

I Timothy Chapter 6 verse 17: “God richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment” and is to be received as a gift. It isn’t a trash pile of random matter,

but nor is it to be confused with the giver. It isn’t the living being and it certainly isn’t God. It is God’s, G-O-D-apostrophe-S. Belonging to Him and trusted to us in love.

 

So His creating and sustaining the universe revealed God’s unparalleled majesty—his uber-power, his unique capacity to bring matter into being from nothing and to prevent it from reverting back into nothing. And all of that is just an expression of the power of God in creation.

 

But it isn’t only His power that is revealed in creation.

 

Paul says, “Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and His  divine nature—have been clearly understood and rendered intelligible.”

 

There are at least three ways in which we see in creation aspects of the nature of the God revealed.

 

First, creation reveals in its purposeful order the wisdom of its creator.

 

We saw two weeks ago how amazingly crafted the creation account and creation itself is as time and space are reclaimed from chaos and given order and substance:

 

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep…. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

 

And on and on and on it goes as chaos is replaced by order and occupants as both time and space are given shape.

 

There are three physical realms—the sky, the land, and the sea, and there are seven temporal realms—the seven days of the week—into which now all of time and all of space are now ordered. On top of that, among its occupants, we are told again and again and again in the Genesis Chapter 1 account, that God is careful to create distinct species with distinct and resilient characteristics that differentiate them from the millions of other species.

 

Now, think about if God wanted to be economical in the way that He made creation, He could have created one plant that came in small, large and extra-large and one animal that came in small, large and extra-large and set them loose on the world.

 

When you realize that’s what God could have done, it makes you appreciate what God actually did do. Verse 21:

 

God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.

 

God made the wild animals [verse 25] according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds.

 

Order and species unfolding following God’s master design. And God’s evaluation? He steps back often during creation and evaluates the work that He’s done. And he says as He does in verse 10:

 

God saw that it was good.

 

The great artist, the great architect, steps back and admires his handiwork. He declares his satisfaction with his design and with his execution of his design: “It is good.”

 

Now often the word tob, the Hebrew word for good refers to a suitedness. It’s talking about something that is fitting, something that is just as it should be: for example, a word that perfectly suits an occasion, a piece of fruit that is perfect for eating, a bit of advice that is perfect for a particular situation.

 

David is described as a good musician, in this sense, when we’re told that his music is the perfect thing to soothe Saul’s anxious flights of temper in I Samuel 16:16.

 

I saw a billboard last week that said, “Fort Scott, Ohio: A Master-planned Community.” The implication is a single design by a single architect who provides a comprehensive vision for the whole and makes it orderly and coherent and beautiful; what is literally true—the billboard that could be over all of the universe: The Universe. A Master-Planned Community.

 

Now, the application, the implication for us, in the face of such a stunning display of the brilliance and wisdom of the master designer is that if this is a demonstration of the wisdom of God in what He has made—what He has revealed, then we can trust God with what He has not yet revealed but is actively creating and sustaining.

 

In fact, you see precisely this going on in the Book of Job as Job begins to call into question God’s design of Job’s life. So God takes a stroll with him through the complex and intricate order of all of creation in Job 38, 39, 40 and 41 to remind Job of God’s trustworthiness in all areas of life.

 

“Who is this that questions my wisdom?” he says in Job 38:2. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Do you know how its dimensions were determined and who did the surveying? What supports its foundation and who laid its cornerstone as the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?”

 

He’s not putting Job down; He is giving Job perspective: reminding him of the expressions of His wisdom so that he can be moved to trust God anew.

 

Design runs through every aspect of creation and it is compelling evidence that a person of brilliance and wisdom beyond imagining lies behind this world in which we live.

 

I love this line from G. K. Chesterton who says, “One elephant having a trunk is odd; but all elephants having trunks begins to look like a plot.”

 

I recently had a chance to see a film called Purple State of Mind that captures a raw and honest conversation between a Christian and an atheist friend of his. At the end of the film, after all the filming had been done, they are walking down a city street late at night—the camera is still rolling—when a woman in front of a row house can’t help herself. She runs out to them and stops and asks if they have a camera and insists that they come into her tiny little front garden and see something. She brings them around and shows them a flower called a Night Blooming Cereus which opens one time a year, at night, for just a few hours. And there it was, open. The stunning intricacy: four inches across with what is supposed to be an absolutely unparalleled and exquisite fragrance.

 

The atheist looked at that flower and then he looked at his friend and he said, “You know, that makes me more persuaded of the truth of your position than any of the arguments that you gave me.”

 

The universe is marked everywhere by evidence of master planning.

 

Along these lines, I would highly recommend that you see the movie Expelled which is a documentary by Ben Stein about the rejection of the idea of design in the universe in the world of academia. My only caution is just to be mindful of the fact that Stein uses the same kind of slanted and one-sided persuasive tactics that documentaries from the other side use that drive me nuts! Having said that, it is fascinating and insightful and it ends with a stunning admission by Richard Dawkins who wrote The God Delusion about the obvious design that he sees in the universe.

 

So, creation reveals in its purposeful order the wisdom of God. Creation also reveals in its stunning artistry the beauty of its creator.

 

God, as we said, repeatedly looks at His creation and says, “It was good. It was good. It was good.” And then He gets to the end and it says in verse 31, “God saw all that He had made and it was very good.”

 

The Hebrew behind this sentence suggests the idea that God saw all that He made and that it’s really, I mean you’ve got to agree with me, it really, it is very good!

 

It goes beyond mere satisfaction that an architect derives from seeing a finished product. It suggests God’s enthusiasm and His delight with the beauty of what is before Him.

 

The word tob also has this sense [the word for good]: of being beautiful, delightful, desirable, exceedingly pleasant.

 

In Genesis Chapter 24 verse 16 Rebecca is described using this word tob to mean beautiful, breathtaking; she couldn’t have been more pleasing.

 

The implication here is that order compels us to trust, but beauty moves us to praise and to worship.

 

Alister McGrath in his book The Re-enchantment of Nature says, “The beauty of the world reflects the beauty of God. We are enabled to discern the hand of the creator within its beauty.”

 

In Job there’s one line that says about everything that we can see of the created world:

 

And these are but the outer fringes of His work.

 

Mary Oliver, in her book Thirst has a poem called Messenger that says this:

 

Let me keep my mind on what matters,

which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

The phoebe, the delphinium,

the sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.

Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes,

[and] a mouth with which to give shouts of joy ….

 

There’s a third aspect of the way that God reveals his nature through creation. We see in creation not only the order of God and His wisdom and the beauty of God in His artistry, but we also see in creation, in its abundance and generosity, we see the love of the creator for His creatures.

 

God describes the world as teeming with living creatures and then says, [verse 29] God says, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole of the earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours.”

 

The language is of a gift generously, joyfully, freely given in just the same sort of way that a host would turn to a guest in his home in the Middle East and say, “Everything that I have is yours.”

 

The idea of love finding expression in lavish provision is captured in a number of places in the Scripture. One of the primary ones is Psalm 104 which says:

 

He makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for man to cultivate—bringing forth food from the earth, wine that gladdens the heart of man, oil to make his face shine and bread that sustains his heart. They all [all of creation, every creature] look to you to give them their food at the proper time. When you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things.

 

When we see in the abundance and generosity of creation something of the love of God, the implication alongside our being moved by creation to trust God and to praise God, we are moved to offer back a response of love in return for love expressed by God.

 

Jonathan Edwards wrote often in his journal about the beauty of creation and once he learned to see nature as God’s expression of love, he wrote this:

 

The appearance of everything was altered. There seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast or appearance of divine glory in almost every thing. God’s excellency, His wisdom, His purity, and His love seemed to appear in every thing: in the sun, moon, and stars, in the clouds and blue sky, in the grass, flowers, trees and the water and all nature. I often used to sit and view the moon continually and in the day spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky to behold the sweet glory of God in these things and in the meantime singing forth with a low voice my contemplations of the creator and redeemer.

 

So, how can we grow in trust and in praise and in love for our creator through creation?

 

Let me just throw out some quick suggestions.

 

Read about creation in the words of those who have eyes to see. Read Pilgrim of Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, The Re-enchantment of Nature by Alister McGrath, The Evidential Power of Beauty by Thomas Dubay; read the chapter called “Ethics in Elfland” by G. K. Chesterton in his amazing book Orthodoxy; read the creation account in C. S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew; read the poetry of Mary Oliver.

 

Let those who have been given those eyes to see allow your eyes to be opened more.

 

Another thing that I would urge that you would do is to study specific aspects of creation and allow yourself to be boggled and overwhelmed by where your study takes you.

 

Here are just five suggestions:

 

Study the wonders of hummingbirds.

Study the inexplicable mysteries of one of the objects we most take for granted in our world which is one of its most amazing marvels which is water.

Study the workings and the layerings of our atmosphere.

Study the creation and functioning of a bee hive.

Study the process of human sight from when light first strikes the lens of a human eye ‘til it is fully processed in the various regions of the brain and ultimately the occipital region.

 

Third, Get outside.

 

Spend time in creation as a spiritual discipline that you value as highly as you value time in worship, time in prayer, and time studying the Scripture.

 

Go for a hike. Climb up on your roof. Lie down under the stars with a pair of binoculars. Go out in a snowstorm and go canoeing! I’ll have to tell you about that one later.

 

And, finally, join with the rest of creation in the most important thing that we are called together to do.

 

When you think about it, it’s interesting that we not only learn about God through creation, but we also learn something profoundly important about ourselves and what it is that we were designed to do. In creation, God gives us a picture of our intended role in this world. Creation not only reveals God, but it also reveals the appropriate response to God which is all of creation welling up in worship.

 

Listen to some of these words from Psalm 148 that captures this especially:

 

Praise the Lord from the heavens, from the heights above.

Praise him, all you heavenly hosts, sun and moon, and all you shining stars, you highest heaven, you waters above the skies.

Let them praise the name of the Lord, for he commanded and they were created. And praise the Lord from the earth, you great sea creatures and all ocean depths, lightning and hail, sun and clouds, stormy winds that do his bidding, mountains and hills and trees and cedars and wild animals, all of you too. Join together in lifting your voice in praising God.

 

Creation not only reveals the Creator, but directs the rest of us creatures in our most important work which is to worship the One who made us and to live our lives for Him.

 

I was especially struck by the way in which all of creation is welling up in praise at a moment when I went out for some meetings in Portland about five years ago. And one morning at about three in the morning I woke up early and hopped in the car and drove all the way out to the Pacific Ocean coast to watch the sun rise. I was so moved by what I saw as I walked through the Ecola State Park and along Indian Beach that this is what I wrote on the way back. It’s called Brazen Praise:

 

Fog each leaf and rock enfolds, enshrouds, invades

Tow’ring spruces puncture clouds with hands upraised

Waking dawn in jarring blue collides with greys

All the ocean swells, bows down, in thund’rous praise

Upthrust fists of rock jut high ‘mid roiling waves

 

To these displays

Of brazen praise

Through endless days

I’m bold to raise

my insubstantial voice of praise.

 

May God through the expression of His wisdom and His beauty and His love move us to see this created world for the gift that it is with whole new eyes.

 

Scott Freeman has given us an amazing gift that he will share with us now. It captures just a portion—just the outer fringes—of the wisdom and beauty and artistry and love of the God who fashioned us.

 

[Scott Freeman Creation Montage video shown]