I have a theory about the curse in Genesis.  Here’s the passage:

KEY SCRIPTURE:
To Adam [the Creator] said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:17-19).

Think it through with me as I try to squeeze a lot of theology, philosophy, and sociology into a short space. One of the most significant aspects of man’s fall into sin was our Creator’s curse. Because we know that God works out all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose, and because we know He loves the creature made in His image, we can believe this curse had an ultimately beneficial purpose and was an act of tough love.

It is pretty obvious that while the curse made a great impact on the natural order, nature itself did not sin. Man is fallen, not nature. Nature is cursed, but it is cursed to discipline sinful man.  God sent him out of the Garden where the living was easy and life perpetual into the wider world which would now resist his efforts to wrest it to his own glory, selfishly hoard it, and destroy its fruitfulness. Sinful, self-centered man having perpetual life and easy access to all the fruit of the earth was a disaster in the making; so God did two other things to protect His creation from the evil of sinful man: He closed the Garden and prevented re-entry with His armed angelic host, and He took away our access to the tree of life: daily sustenance that would give mankind unending life (and which, praise God, we will once again have access to according to the last chapter of the Bible) .

Here’s my theory: God said we will make our living by hard labor being reminded of our sin by facing a natural world that would in many ways be hostile to us; and we said “No way.” So immediately we put our creative powers to work to make “labor-saving” and “time saving” devices. The rest is history, as they say.

We have saved so much labor by our cleverness that we’re now destroying the earth with it:  Creating chemicals that are a lethal influence in our environment; burning fossil fuels to run our powerful engines each doing the work of hundreds or thousands of people and fouling our air, fishing out our oceans, and wiping out our forests; creating huge machines that do the “gardening” for us and turning them over to irresponsible corporations motivated primarily by monetary profit, while we cocoon ourselves in our cities with purblind eyes that do not bother to see what is happening to our soil; making appliances that keep families out of the kitchen and keep us from working side by side with those we love to make our meals and wash our dishes. We leave these wonderful kitchens, where family life was once centered, and take our children to restaurant chains the purpose of which is to make money for stock holders and which waste millions of pounds of food and paper every day (not to mention the growing evidence that most of that food is not good food).

And what have we done with the labor and time saved? Where to find clues: Facebook, sports, entertainment, TV, video gaming, perpetual travel, shopping temples, and . . . .

I’m going to leave that there for now—just to keep your mental gears in motion. I’d love to have many readers of WOC take up this idea and start a good discussion on this post in the comments box. Do you think that we have become a fat and loveless culture in part because we have spurned the love of our Creator, who was wise enough to know that our avaricious nature needed the discipline of the curse that we have worked so hard to overturn?

Few people fail to be touched by a stunning photo of natural beauty or a gripping verbal description of natural events.  But that’s not enough for our souls.  To allow creation’s meaning to touch us deeply, we must experience it. Wild nature highlights our finitude, vulnerability, and our utter and complete dependence upon the creating and sustaining power of God. He becomes large; we become small.  In places where we more or less “run the show,” that order is reversed.  We are often creatures with swollen heads and shrunken hearts.

John Calvin called the natural world the “theater of God’s glory,” but it is even more than a theater; it’s a cathedral.  And awareness of the sacredness of God’s handiwork occurs only when we enter it with the right spirit.  The word “cathedral” comes from the Latin term for “chair”: cathedra.  Traditionally a cathedral is the sacred place where a church bishop has his chair of authority—his throne.  While human church leaders should have always kept us mindful of our stewardship role in the created order, too often the trappings, traditions, and troubles of men hinder our capacity to hear the “still, small voice” of God in our church buildings.

For that reason, it’s important for us to preserve and treasure the cathedral of the wild where we see that God, the ultimate authority, is clearly on the throne and where His wordless revelation can still be clearly seen and understood (Romans 1:20).  When truly attentive people enter the wild, they immediately recognize the signs that this is holy ground—a place where to them a flaming autumn maple is no less evidence of God’s miracle-working power and presence than the burning bush was to Moses.

Also important is for us to recognize that in the wilderness sanctuary we’re not alone in the impulse to worship.  God’s other creatures worship there as well.  As the prophets Isaiah and David remind us, all created things in their own nature respond to God—even trees, rivers, and mountains. (Isa. 55:12; Psa. 98:8)  This amazing truth from the Old Testament is echoed in the Revelation where all God’s creatures are seen as worshiping the One who died in order that the cosmos may be redeemed: “Every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, I heard saying: ‘Blessing and honor and glory and power be to Him who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb [Jesus Christ], forever and ever!’” (Rev. 5:13)

Let this wonderful hymn, penned by the psalmist some three thousand years ago, resound in your heart whenever you worship in creation’s cathedral:

KEY SCRIPTURE:
Praise the Lord from the heavens; praise Him in the heights! Praise Him, all His angels; praise Him, all His hosts! Praise Him, sun and moon; praise Him, all you stars of light! Praise Him, you heavens of heavens, and you waters above the heavens! Let them praise the name of the Lord, for He commanded and they were created. He also established them forever and ever; He made a decree which shall not pass away. Praise the Lord from the earth, you great sea creatures and all the depths; fire and hail, snow and clouds; stormy wind, fulfilling His word; mountains and all hills; fruitful trees and all cedars; beasts and all cattle; creeping things and flying fowl; kings of the earth and all peoples; princes and all judges of the earth; both young men and maidens; old men and children. Let them praise the name of the Lord, for His name alone is exalted; His glory is above the earth and heaven (Psalm 148:1-13).

 [Photos from Wikimedia Commons]

Today’s post, by WOC associate J. R. Hudberg appears on the Ambling page.  J. R. reflects on the joy of fishing and delighting in the wonderful varieties of creatures that share God’s world with us.  You can can go directly to the post by clicking on this link: Ambling.

I’m enjoying a new book on our relationship to the natural world: Living With Other Creatures: Green Exegesis and Theology by Richard Bauckham.  Bauckham, an evangelical Cambridge theologian, is a fellow in the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.  Here are some of his thoughts on nature and worship (pp. 12-13) ["Bedtime Prayers" by Mike Ivey Right click to see it larger]:

“Arguably, the most profound and life-changing way in which we can recover our place in the world as creatures alongside our fellow-creatures is through the theme of the worship that all creation offers to God.  There are many passages in the Psalms (e.g. Ps. 19:1-3; 97:6; 98:7-8; and especially 148) that depict all God’s creatures worshipping Him, and the theme is taken up in the New Testament too (Phil. 2:10; Rev. 5:13).

“According to the Bible, all creatures, animate and inanimate, worship God.  This is not, as modern Biblical interpreters have sometimes supposed, merely a poetic fancy or some kind of animism that endows the all creatures with consciousness.  The creation worships God just by being itself, as God made it, existing for God’s glory.  Only humans desist from worshipping God; other creatures, without having to think about it, do so all the time.  A lily does not need to do anything.  Simply by being and growing it praises God.  It is distinctively human to bring praise to conscious expression in words, but the creatures remind us that this distinctively human form of praise is worthless unless, like them, we also live our whole lives to the glory of God. . . .

“This idea of worshipping our Creator along with all the other creatures really has nothing in common with nature worship, of which some modern Christians seem to be pathologically afraid.  It is true that in the biblical tradition nature has been de-divinized.  It is not divine, but God’s creation.  But that does not make it nothing more than material for human use.  Nature has been reduced to stuff that we can do with as we wish, not by the Bible, but by the modern age, with its rejection of God and its instrumentalizing of nature.

“The Bible has de-divinized nature, but it has not de-sacralized nature.  Nature remains sacred in the sense that it belongs to God, exists for the glory of God, even reflects the glory of God, as humans also do.  The respect, even the reverence, that other creatures inspire in us is just as it should be.  It leads us not to worship creation (something that is scarcely a serious danger in the contemporary western world) but to worship with creation.  According to chapter 5 of the book of Revelation, the goal of God’s creative and redemptive work is achieved when every creature in heaven, on earth, under the earth, and in the sea joins in a harmony of praise to God and the Lamb’:

KEY SCRIPTURE:
I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!” (Revelation 5:13).

We just escaped a major snowfall a couple days ago. So here we are on December 1, having had no measurable snow. Yesterday was cold, but sunny, and I was able to collect some rose hips and spruce boughs for Christmas decorating without having to wear boots. But I’m looking forward to snow and the transformation of our drab landscape that it makes. Typically our early snowfalls are of the mesmerizing sort where the flakes are big, heavy, and wet. You just can’t keep your eyes off the apparition of heavenly down filling the air, and covering the earth with icy light.

It was during just one of those snowfalls several years ago that a thought suddenly overwhelmed me: materiality is the miracle. What I was blessed to understand is that we are living in a miracle.  If God, who is spirit, created everything we experience and continues to create and sustain it, as the Bible tells us, then the ultimate reality that makes our existence possible is the spiritual realm, which we cannot see.  The material world that we do see—feel, hear, smell, and taste—is God’s persistent miracle.  Hence for a man, a material being, to ask if miracles are possible is really ludicrous.  Our senses are the material gift of our Creator that allows us to know in a limited way just one small part of a reality so far beyond comprehension that our reactions to it must chiefly be humility and wonder. [For a greater, grander statement about this, read C. S. Lewis' book Miracles.]

KEY SCRIPTURE:
[Give] joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:12-17).

It’s this truth that is the motivation for this Wonder of Creation website and the chief reason we don’t get into the debate on how or how long ago God created the material world.  For more than forty years I argued and debated and debated and argued—mostly with other Christians—about what the Genesis account of creation was telling us about the scientific manner of God’s creation work.  I was convinced, of course, that when the arrogant and self-centered ungodly person denies the Creator but is awestruck by His cosmos, he is led, as Paul tells us in Romans 1, into idolatry—to worshiping the creation instead of the Creator.  What I didn’t see, however, is that when the Christian pretends that he knows how and how long ago our Creator did it, he too is proud and can easily fall into a sort of “righteous idolatry” of the material world. Our Creator’s science textbook is larger and more complex than the cosmos!

Frankly, I believe if anyone, Christian or non-Christian, ever claims he knows anything more than an inkling about God’s creation miracle, he ends by adding speculation to ignorance and calling it knowledge. For that reason I’m not much interested anymore in the “Great Creation Debate.”  I’m just going to be content to merely celebrate the miracle and wonder of His Creation—and follow William Blake’s advice:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

 [Paintings by William Blake]