Marge and I just got back from a great church service—and a great message on the reason Christians believe that Jesus is the only way to peace with God.  That truth, of course, is based on John 14:6: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

The Gospel, we know, is that this way was made possible through Jesus’ death on the cross in order that sin would be atoned for and its negative effects on the earth ultimately reversed.  And His subsequent resurrection both affirmed and demonstrated our ultimate victory over death.  The pastor began his message with a story about his college days when he was able to share his faith with two Muslim friends.  It was a stirring and powerful message.

I believe, though, that one aspect of our “apologetic” for the faith that we often fail to offer when asked why we believe Jesus is the “only way” is the fact the comes from the context of John 14: that Jesus is actually God in the flesh (a truth profoundly exclaimed in John 1, Colossians 1, and Hebrews 1).  This means, then, what one of my old favorite spiritual songs proclaims (“Down From His Glory” to the tune of the old opera song “O Solo Mio”): “The great Creator became my Savior, and all God’s fullness dwelleth in Him.”

The apologetic question that comes from this is, “How could it be possible to be made right with our Creator unless we follow the way the Creator offers us?”  Jesus was not just another prophet; He was God in the flesh (“I am in the Father and the Father is in me,” said Jesus).  Adherents to a faith that does not claim Jesus as the way are rejecting the only way God has provided.  How can you be made right with God the Father if you do not go through God the Son who then sends God the Holy Spirit to dwell in us and empower us?

Christians throughout the centuries have voiced this biblical affirmation of hope for every man and woman.  However, many of us have missed the implication of Jesus’ defeat of sin on the cross for the rest of the creation.  On the cross Jesus wore a crown of thorns.  Thorns are the symbol of the curse that was placed on the natural world to discipline a sinful, disobedient, and rebellious humanity.  Jesus’ suffering, then, was also effective in procuring the end of the curse.  Revelation 22:3 tells us that there will be no more curse.  So the creation itself shares the hope we have for ultimate redemption, reconciliation, and reunification.

The ultimate meaning of this truth is that we really have more affinity with the creation (nature) than we do with rebellious humanity and the sinful world system that will be destroyed—destroyed in part so that harmony would return between us and God and between us and the creation.  Francis Schaeffer made this clear in his seminal book on the Christian view of ecology: Pollution and the Death of Man.

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.

In Novum Organon Francis Bacon wrote this: “Man by the Fall fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over nature.  Both of these losses, however, even in this life, can in some part be repaired; the former by religion and faith, the later by the arts and sciences.”  It is a tragedy that the Church, including the orthodox, evangelical Church, has not always remembered that.  Here, in this present life, it is possible for the Christian to have some share, through sciences and the arts, in returning nature to its proper place.

It is this affirmation that made me see the light about the importance of our relationship to the natural world and the fact that there is more to the “wonder of creation” than what it tells us about its Creator: the creation shares with us the same hope of redemption that will come about when Jesus returns.  This kinship with the natural world, then, should cause us grief over its suffering and compel us to do what we can to, as Schaeffer says, return “nature to its proper place.”

That’s the biblical understanding that stands as the foundation of this website.

See you outdoors!

Dean