Hope for the earth

2. Creation and Incarnation

Peter Carruthers

The glory of God

People like nature and want to get close to it. Before Covid, every year, people in England made about 2.73 billion visits to natural environments. Covid stopped data collection, but even local observation suggests visits have increased.

If probed, people might talk about being ‘refreshed’ or ‘renewed’ by contact with nature. And this is backed up by scientific research showing how exposure to nature, like ‘green exercise’, is good for your health. For some it is close to a spiritual or religious experience.

Most of us would agree that there is more to nature than meets the eye. There is a mystery or transcendence about it. 

Psalm 19 calls this ‘the glory of God’, and asserts that creation is evidence of the existence and nature of the Creator: “the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). 

Paul puts this more theologically: “For since the creation of the world His [God’s] invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead” (Romans 1:20).

Making the connection

Contemplating creation does not, however, guarantee that the contemplator will find the Creator. They might find something else, like a chance universe, ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, a world in which only the fittest survive or something to be worshipped in itself. 

Nor does contemplating creation guarantee that the contemplator will care for it; Rachel Carson’s words quoted in the previous article are more aspirational than actual.

We need to make the connection. Psalm 19 affirms truth. But, it also arises from the writer’s personal knowledge of the Lord. He is not just making a theological point, but expressing a heartfelt reality.

This idea of making a connection between our outward observation of nature and our inner relationship with God runs through many of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems (1884-1889). While the Lord is always behind His creation, we only perceive Him at special moments of disclosure. “Tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder, his mystery must be instressed, stressed; for I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand,” he wrote in ‘Wreck of the Deutschland’.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning  (1806-1861) expresses a similar sentiment: “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees takes off his shoes, the rest sit around and pluck blackberries.”

In one of his best-known hymns, G Wade Robinson (1838-1877) describes how a relationship with Jesus opens our eyes to see His creation in a new and richer way: “Heaven above is softer blue, earth around is sweeter green, something lives in every hue, Christless eyes have never seen, birds with gladder songs o’erflow, flowers with deeper beauties shine, since I know, as now I know, I am His and He is mine.”

The Bible

Psalm 19 goes on to state that God has also revealed Himself in His word, the Bible, declaring that the “the law of the Lord is perfect” (Psalm 19: 7). Nature is not enough! And the Bible has a great deal to say about God’s relationship with His creation.

Throughout scripture, God is again and again revealed, declared and lauded as the Creator of all that is, especially as an affirmation of His power in times of crisis (Jeremiah 32:17; Acts 4:24) and in contrast to pagan polytheism (Jonah 1:9; Acts 14:15). In the story of Jonah, the heathen sailors were "exceedingly afraid" at the realisation that Jonah was at odds with this God, the “God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land” (Jonah 1:9-10).

Jonah's experience also revealed God as active in His creation, "hurling a great wind upon the sea" (1:4), "appointing a great fish" (1:17) and speaking to it (2:10), and later appointing a plant (4:6), a worm (4:7) and a sultry east wind (4:8).

‘Jonah and the big fish’, from the ‘Kennicott Bible’ (1476), Bodleian Library MS. Kennicott 1 © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

God upholds His creation. “The biblical view of God as creator includes His continuous, unbroken sustenance and renewal of the world”.¹ The Son “upholds all things by the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:3); in Him all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). Things that we might call part of the ‘natural order’ (like stars and seasons, changes in the weather, the life cycle of plants, animals and people), the Bible presents as specific works of God. 

The Bible also depicts creation as continually praising and glorifying God the Creator (especially in the Psalms, Job and Isaiah). “All your works shall praise You. O Lord”, sings the Psalmist (Psalm 145:10).

Finally, not only does the whole earth and all its creatures belong to God (Psalm 24:1; Psalm 50:10), but He is also intimately acquainted with them (Psalm 50:11; Luke 12:6-7), and cares for their needs (Psalm 104; Luke 12:24). As Psalm 145 puts it, 'His tender mercies are over all His works’ (Psalm 145:9).

Image & likeness

In the first creation account (Genesis 1:1-2:3), we read how God, after He had created the animals, created people in His image and likeness, to be ‘godlike’, and to rule over His creation as His representatives (Genesis 1:26-28). 

Like the animals we are God’s creatures. But unlike animals we are conscious of time, have the capacity for freedom, autonomy and reason and are creative. Only human beings do art for art’s sake; spiders make webs to catch flies!

If this is so, then people, made in His image, are to be like Him and watch over and care for His creation with ‘tender mercy’.

The garden

In the second creation account (Genesis 2:4-24), we read how the Lord God puts the man and woman He has created in a garden. 

In the garden, mankind is with the animals, works to tend and keep the garden, and offers worship as priests on behalf of Creation. 

‘With the animals’. God creates both animals and people from the earth, from dust, on the same day (Genesis 1:24-28; 2:19). Before Eve arrived, the animals are Adam’s companions (Genesis 2:19-20). In the story of Jonah, both people and animals are recipients of God’s judgement, are penitent, and receive His mercy. In the wilderness, Jesus was “with the wild animals” (Mark 1:13), both recapitulating Eden and anticipating the Messianic Age (Isaiah 11:6-9).

Work. In Genesis 2: 15, we see God placing the man in the garden to tend it (abad) and keep or protect (shamar) it. Abad has the idea of serving or work on behalf of another, and is used of the Levites’ service in the Tabernacle. Shamar appears at the end of the Eden account where a flaming sword is placed to guard (shamar) the tree of life. 

Worship and priesthood are less explicit in the Genesis account, but are implied in the way in which Genesis 1-3 presents the cosmos as one large temple, the Garden of Eden as the Holy of Holies and the human person as made for worship. 

These three themes provide three complementary understandings of our relationship with and responsibility for creation. We are fellow creatures with the rest of creation, but, made in God’s image, we are His viceroys, charged with stewardship of His creation, and His priests, offering worship from and on behalf of His creation. 

Jesus 

In the garden God and man work together, but the most complete expression of this co-working was when God became a man, when the eternal “Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). As Hebrews says, “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature, and He upholds the universe by the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:3).  “The One through whom the worlds were made and sustained” (Hebrews 1:2-3), becomes human and lives among people, in time and place. 

Jesus’ incarnation demonstrates the essential goodness of creation and matter, and affirms the last words of the first creation account: “God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good (Genesis 1:31).

First published in Village Link, Summer 2022

1. Milne. B. 1982. Know the truth, P 73. IVP.