Currently lost in my files is a print of a painting that depicts Jesus in the arms of Mary with a small bird perched on His finger. That and this etching in which it seems that Jesus is instructing Mary on the merits of a rose were apparent artistic attempts to link Jesus the infant Savior to Jesus the loving Creator. The intent of this artwork is a good reminder for us as we consider the Christ of Christmas, God in human flesh.

Think of the earthly, material trappings that surrounded the birth of Jesus: the humble stable; the domestic animals; the shepherds sent by the angels from the fields where youthful David used to tend sheep and where Ruth, the Moabite ancestress of Jesus, caught the attention of Boaz; the glowing pointer in the heavens; and the rough linen swaddling cloth beaten from the flax stalks from the nearby hillsides. All of these give significance to the physical nature of Jesus and His birth that I feel we spiritualize far more than we should.

The creation Jesus entered is the creation He made, is the creation in which we live, is the creation John Muir​ loved, is the creation that groans under the heavy hand of sinful humanity, is the creation to which He will return, is the creation that He will redeem and reconcile to His Father, is the creation that in ways beyond imagination redeemed mankind will remain stewards of and continue to get sustenance from, and is the creation that will be blessed with the peace promised by the reign of Messiah whom we celebrate so joyously in the prophecies of Isaiah and in the music of George Frederick Handel.

Not surprisingly, it’s also the music of Handel that graces the poetry of hymn-writer Isaac Watts​ in one of Christianity’s Christmas favorites: “Joy to the World.”  In the carol we hear the prophecies of Isaiah and John of the Revelation repeated: “No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground; He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found” (Revelation 22:1-3).  Keep in mind that while we sing this carol to celebrate Jesus’ first advent, it is written about His second advent—after which the creation will once again become the “peaceable kingdom” pictured by Isaiah (chapters 11 & 65). [Wolf and lambs photo source]

May these wonderful Scripture passages grace our Christmas and rekindle not only hope for our own redemption, but also fill us with joy in recognizing that Jesus will not abandon His creation. It too has hope.  Someday, in fact, “all creatures here below” will praise their Creator and Savior along with us all!

Revelation 5:9-13 They sang a new song: “You [Jesus] are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth.” Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders. In a loud voice they sang: “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!” Then 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!”

John 1: 1-4 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  In him was life, and that life was the light of men.

Hebrews 1:1-3 In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways,  but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe.  The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.

Colossians 1:15-20   He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.  For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.  He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Romans 8:19-23   The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

So the “Good News” promises grace not only to redeemed people, but to the redeemed creation as well—the wonders of which will never cease to amaze us.

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]

According to biblical commentator, Matthew Henry, the literary quality of Psalm 104 is considered by many to exceed that of the Greek and Latin poets: “This noble poem is thought by very competent judges greatly to excel, not only for piety and devotion (that is past dispute), but for flight of fancy, brightness of ideas, surprising turns, and all the beauties and ornaments of expression, the Greek and Latin poets upon any subject of this nature.” It is commonly referred to as  the “creation psalm.”

As we continue in the theme of gratitude this Thanksgiving weekend, I thought it would be good for us, at least for a few moments, to take our minds off man-made things, sports, and entertainments to consider this awesome celebration of the creation, which gives us life and health—and give praise to the Creator of us all.  I think this is particularly fitting on this day when NASA is planning to launch its $2.5 billion, one-ton Mars Space Laboratory’s  rover “Curiosity” to see if perhaps there might be traces of water or life on our nearest fellow planet.  So far the contrast between lifeless Mars and our living planet is stark.

Psalm 104

(as paraphrased by Eugene Peterson in The Message)

O my soul, bless God! God, my God, how great you are! beautifully, gloriously robed, Dressed up in sunshine, and all heaven stretched out for your tent. You built your palace on the ocean deeps, made a chariot out of clouds and took off on wind-wings. You commandeered winds as messengers, appointed fire and flame as ambassadors. You set earth on a firm foundation so that nothing can shake it, ever.

You blanketed earth with ocean, covered the mountains with deep waters; Then you roared and the water ran away—your thunder crash put it to flight. Mountains pushed up, valleys spread out in the places you assigned them. You set boundaries between earth and sea; never again will earth be flooded.

You started the springs and rivers, sent them flowing among the hills. All the wild animals now drink their fill, wild donkeys quench their thirst. Along the riverbanks the birds build nests, ravens make their voices heard. You water the mountains from your heavenly cisterns; earth is supplied with plenty of water. You make grass grow for the livestock, hay for the animals that plow the ground.

Oh yes, God brings grain from the land, wine to make people happy, Their faces glowing with health, a people well-fed and hearty. God’s trees are well-watered—the Lebanon cedars he planted. Birds build their nests in those trees; look—the stork at home in the treetop. Mountain goats climb about the cliffs; badgers burrow among the rocks.

The moon keeps track of the seasons, the sun is in charge of each day. When it’s dark and night takes over, all the forest creatures come out. The young lions roar for their prey, clamoring to God for their supper. When the sun comes up, they vanish, lazily stretched out in their dens. Meanwhile, men and women go out to work, busy at their jobs until evening.

What a wildly wonderful world, God! You made it all, with Wisdom at your side, made earth overflow with your wonderful creations. Oh, look—the deep, wide sea, brimming with fish past counting, sardines and sharks and salmon. Ships plow those waters, and Leviathan, your pet dragon, romps in them. All the creatures look expectantly to you to give them their meals on time. You come, and they gather around; you open your hand and they eat from it. If you turned your back, they’d die in a minute—Take back your Spirit and they die, revert to original mud; Send out your Spirit and they spring to life—the whole countryside in bloom and blossom.

The glory of God—let it last forever! Let God enjoy his creation! He takes one look at earth and triggers an earthquake, points a finger at the mountains, and volcanoes erupt. Oh, let me sing to God all my life long, sing hymns to my God as long as I live! Oh, let my song please him; I’m so pleased to be singing to God. But clear the ground of sinners—no more godless men and women!

O my soul, bless God!

John Muir’s birthday is April 21; global Earth Day is April 22; my birthday is April 23.  John Muir celebrated a loving, earth-creating and superintending God—without Jesus.  Global Earth Day celebrants have gods of all sorts—or no God at all.  I celebrate a Creator God whose earth name is Jesus.  While I fully support the stewardship emphasis of Earth Day, my heart resonates with the emphasis of Thanksgiving: gratitude to the God who in Christ made it all. Consider this passage from the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome:

KEY SCRIPTURE:
Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles (Rom. 1:20-25).

I have often referenced the first declaration in the passage because it is a foundational scripture for Wonder of Creation.  But note this significant reason for the rejection of God in the center of the passage: “Although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him.” (Don’t you often wonder who atheists thank on Thanksgiving?).  Not giving glory to God or thanking Him for the creation, people soon become blind to God’s existence and simply end by worshiping the creation itself.

If you followed the path of the American holidays, you could see it as a path of thanksgiving: thanks for the bounty of earth from the hand of our Creator on Thanksgiving; thanks for the birth of our Creator/Savior on Christmas; thanks for our Creator’s giving us a new year with new opportunities to serve him on New Years; thanks for the substitutionary death and miraculous resurrection of our Creator/Savior on Easter; thanks for life anew from the Creator/Savior on Earth Day—celebrating with nature itself the coming “peaceable kingdom” when “all creatures here below” begin singing an eternal doxology; thanks for those who died that we might continue as a free nation on Memorial Day; thanks to our nation’s God-honoring founders for their sacrifice of life and livelihood to establish a free nation on Independence Day; and thanks to our Creator/Savior for life and health, both for us and the creation, that we can tend and care for His good earth on Labor Day.

Some of this biblical understanding and gratitude is echoed in President George Washington’s proclamation of October 3, 1789, when the first Thanksgiving Day designated by the national government of the United States of America was made official:

Thanksgiving Declaration:

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor, and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me “to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed, for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually, to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed, to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shown kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord. To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and Us, and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

Wouldn’t it be grand if all those elected by the people of the United States, who serve in the city named after George Washington, wrote this proclamation on their hearts and minds and governed with this spirit of gratitude to our Creator, whose name is Jesus?