How many are your works, LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures (Psalm 104:24).

What if I told you that by this time next year, after some pleasant classroom experiences, you would have far greater knowledge of God, of His awesome power, and of His role as Creator and Sustainer of the cosmos? You would not be required to pay any tuition for this course. Textbooks, if required, would be relatively inexpensive—if you don’t already have them. The class schedule is entirely yours to decide, and your family could join you.

Now add to those enticements significant freedom from the following pressures, frustrations, and distractions:

1.  personal multipliers of power (vehicles, appliances,
power tools, electricity, and so forth)
2. markets and marketers
3. external temptations
4. skewed values
5. lying words
6.too many voices to attend to
7. too many people to relate to
8. racial, ethnic, and gender tensions
9. personal deception and pretense (masks)
10.  meaningless entertainment
11. an overload of news (information)
12. an overabundance of technologies
13. extraneous noise
14. the need to talk incessantly
15. constant time pressure
16. any sense that what’s happening around you
has to be under your control

Does that sound too good to be true? It’s not! All of this is available to you when you take regular wilderness “classroom” breaks.  The more excursions into wild places the richer the education and the greater the relief.

I’m convinced that the attributes of nature offered in my last post, that provide evidence of God’s “eternal power” and “divine nature” (what compels us to worship) ultimately provide us with stronger faith and greater appreciation of the fact that He is sovereign.  Further they help to develop within us a confidence that since he is the source of life, the designer of the DNA that defines what our individual bodies will be like and the holder of that master plan, he should have no difficulty at all in reforming our bodies and returning our souls to them in the great resurrection.

Greater appreciation for the natural world and better knowledge of the natural world help us to value it more and make us more keen on protecting it from abuse and frivolous use. I don’t think that most moderns have a clue how much we are missing by not becoming more intimate with His creation. Poor health, distraction, alienation, boredom, spiritual ennui and captivity to technology are what we inherit by not being attuned to the creation. [Click on Joshua Tree NP photos to see them larger]

Friends and family sometimes chuckle when they are with me outdoors because I am into botany, ornithology, zoology, ecology, geology, astronomy, entomology, geography (plants, birds, animals, natural interactions, rocks, stars and planets, bugs, land forms and use). Everything “out there” has come to fascinate me; so I find it hard to know what to pay attention to! The reason, in part, is that I don’t want to miss being touched, like the poets of old, by the lessons learned from God’s other book—lessons like William Cullen Bryant learned as he mused on a lone waterfowl that caught his eye as it was plying its way through the sky:

Thou’rt gone, the abyss of heaven
Hath swallowed up thy form; yet, on my heart
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.

He, who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky
thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.

God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth. But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse. What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn’t treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives. They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand (Romans 1:18-20 in Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase The Message)

Cat's Eye Nebula, Hubble image

For years I referenced Romans 1:20 without “taking a long and thoughtful look at what God created,” what the King James Version calls the “invisible things of him from the creation of the world [that] are clearly seen.”  So several years ago I decided to study the created world to see if I could discover with the human senses attributes of the natural world that demonstrate concepts that would strike the human mind and reveal God’s eternal power and the mystery of his divine being, an expression that means that the attributes of the creation will compel us to worship—and humans will worship either the Creator or the creation.   If one is tempted to think that humanists do not worship, consider the godlike creative power they grant to Mathematics, the Laws of Physics, and Evolution and the “temples” to each they have erected on virtually every secular university campus.

Below is the list to which I keep finding attributes to add.  Perhaps you might take a long and thoughtful look at what God created over the next few days and see if you can add to this list.  Use the comments link to add your own discoveries.

Aspects of the natural world that demonstrate our Creator’s “eternal power and divine nature.”

1. Mysterious light and matter
(which still defy human definition and understanding)
2. Seemingly endless time
(no clearly apparent beginning or end)
3. Seemingly endless space
(eternality seen in the microcosm and macrocosm)
4. Preservation of energy
(the inexplicable laws of thermodynamics)
5. Astronomical extravagance and magnitude
(“Billions and billions” according to Carl Sagan, who never appeared to see the Creator)
6. Wonderful life
(inexplicable in its essence and origin—and known on earth alone)
7. Fearsome, but essential, death
(which is marvelously linked to life)
8. Profound mystery
(aspects that are beyond human understanding)
9. Abiding orderliness
(out of what seems chaotic)
10. Mathematical precision
(to the point of being beautiful and elegant)
11. Unfailing regularity
(making the creation mostly predictable)
12. Sabbath peace
(the balance of rest with activity)
13. Inexplicable love
(warming the human soul)
14. Revitalizing stillness
(calming and healing the human soul)
15. Remarkable harmony
(comforting the human soul)
16. Unfathomable complexity
(defying human simplification)
17. Awesome power
(far exceeding our own)
18. Incredibly informed design
(absolutely beyond human duplication)
19. Virtually endless variety
(unbelievable biodiversity)
20. Amazing adaptability
(micro-evolutionary change)
21. Overwhelming beauty
(thrilling the heart and soul)
22. Extravagant fruitfulness
(offering people more than enough)
23. Sacrificial nurture
(parents willing to die for their young)
24. Abundant joy
(the celebration of life even by animals)
25. Limitless sensory stimulation
(providing “candy” for all our senses)
26. Complex interrelationships
(life depends upon community)
27. Impressive resourcefulness
(animals confounding human attempts to restrict them)
28. Exceptional efficiency
(nature’s economy unrivaled by human effort)
29. Waste-less recycling
(nature providing the “gold standard” for human effort)
30. Dedicated perseverance
(animals putting people to shame)
31. Natural models for human work and leisure
(structures fundamental for human creativity)
32. Animal fear of people
(grieving the human soul)
33. Creation in agony—groaning
(awaiting the end of the curse and the rule of the loving Creator Jesus, and the children of God)
34. The image of God: mankind
(An unbridgeable gap between people and the other created things—people alone having the capacity for creative thinking and behavior, abstract reasoning, and symbolic language—and having innate morality and the instinct to worship)

As a further exercise, try to think of examples of these attributes you are familiar with in the creation.

Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land (Isaiah 5:8).

George MacDonald wrote a novel in 1886 that became very meaningful for me.  The book’s title was What’s Mine Is Mine with a major theme being the true meaning of land and of money.  The Americanized version of it was republished on its 100th anniversary by Bethany House with the title The Highlander’s Last Song [Bethany House is no longer in existence.] My reading of the novel in 1990 became a profoundly spiritual experience—actually leading me to my avocation, and now vocation, as writer and teacher on creation care.

The two main characters are brothers who are at different stages in their faith.  Ian, the younger, understands better the transcendent side of faith and seeks to wean Alister away from the love of possessing property.  While this pertained in part to Scottish clan property, Ian’s concern also included the wild moors and highlands that Alister, the last leader of the family clan, cherished.  Listen in on their hillside discussion:

Ian speaks:

“Did you ever think of the origin of the word ‘avarice’? I think it comes from the same root as the verb ‘have.’ It is the desire to call THINGS ours—the desire of company which is not of our kind. We call the holding in the hand, or house, or pocket, or purse, or the power ‘having.’ But things can never be ‘had.’ ‘Having’ is but an illusion with regard to things. It is only what we can ‘be with’ that we really possess. A love can never be lost; it is a true possession. But who can take his diamond ring, or his piece of land, into the life beyond? These are not possessions. Thus, only love and only God can be ours perfectly. Nothing called property can be ours at all.”“I know all that—with my head, at least,” said Alister; “but I am not sure how you apply that to me.”

“I know all that—with my head, at least,” said Alister; “but I am not sure how you apply that to me.”

“Do you not see that the love of our mother earth is meant to be but a beginning; and that such love as yours for the land belongs to that love of things which must perish? I say there is a better way of loving the ground on which we were born than to love it so that the loss of it would cause us torture.”

Alister listened as to a prophecy of evil. . . .  “Don’t be upset with me!” cried Alister, “I want to think and do what is right.  But you cannot know how I feel or you would spare me.  I love the very stones and clods of the land!  The place is to me as Jerusalem to the Jews.

“They loved the land as THEIRS,” said Ian; “and have lost it!  I am only afraid that your love for the soil will get all the way into your soul.  We are here but pilgrims and strangers.  God did not make the world to be dwelt in, but journeyed through.  We must not love it as He did not mean we should.  If we do, He may have great trouble and we must hurt before we are set free from that misplaced love. . . .  If He had to take from you everything in order to give you what He had for you, He would take everything from you. . . .  All is man’s only because it is God’s.  The true possession of anything is to see and feel in it what God made it for, and the uplifting of the soul by that knowledge is the joy of true having. . . .  We must never fear the will of God, Alister.  We are not right with Him until we can pray heartily ‘Thy will be done’!—heartily, not in sad submission.  When we wish what He does not wish, we are not only against Him, but against our real selves.  Only the will of God is desirable.  Nothing else will satisfy us, no matter how it seems that other things can.”

I find that it is all too easy, as an advocate for creation stewardship, to make Alister’s mistake of loving the creation perhaps more than the Creator.  George MacDonald is a great mentor on this for me because he fought the same tendency.  I especially appreciate this statement: “The true possession of anything is to see and feel in it what God made it for, and the uplifting of the soul by that knowledge is the joy of true having.”

If those who complain about the government’s denying them their “private property rights” actually were about seeing and feeling in their property what God made it for, I would be far more sympathetic with them.  I wonder if even one Christian property owner in a thousand understands that property responsibilities come before property rights.  Nor do most live as though they really believe that God is the owner of all property anyway.  If all property owners recognized their role as stewards of God’s land, they could not help but place their responsibilities before their rights. [See the article "Principles of Land Ownership and Development for Christians.]

As to Ian’s comment on our being pilgrims and stranger just journeying through, I don’t believe he was demeaning the value of earthly property, but pointing out that until the coming again of Jesus, all land passes from one landholder to the next.  You can’t keep land; you can only bequeath it.  It will perpetually pass from one potential steward to another until it is incorporated in the end within a paradise greater than Eden.

In the meanwhile, the earth suffers under the “ownership” of those who really do not appear to grasp the meaning of nor experience the joy of true ownership: to be soul-blessed because we see and feel in it what God made it for.

[Cartoon source]

This is what the LORD says: “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool.  Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be?” (Isaiah 66:).