Creation Demands a Creator

Our world is such a beautifully broken place. Regardless of where we live, beauty is all around us, and the fingerprints of God are evident. I grew up in Texas, where it’s generally hot and flat, but beauty is in so many of its regions. East Texas is treed and lovely, huge tranquil lakes can be found throughout, and the hill country is a gem in the central part of the state.

God called my husband and me to Colorado in 2012, ultimately to plant a church. I don’t even have adequate vocabulary for the beauty that surrounds us here. A half-hour drive west puts us right in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. They are stunning.

God’s Creative Restraint

As I’ve grown in my faith, I’ve learned more about what a creative God we have. I grew up with minimal emphasis on the arts, but I have since realized that God cares just as much about the arts as he does about wisdom and knowledge. This makes me fall in love with him even more.

My favorite characteristic related to God’s creativity is his restraint. He could have out-created us. He could have created everything that’s possible to create. But he didn’t. He stopped before creating the wheel, the car, electricity, or coffee. He created a creation that could continue creating!

If your faith is focused on learning and studying, that’s good. God wants us to do that. But I encourage you to consider whether you find God in his creation. Do you take time to enjoy his creation? Do you take time to create? This enjoyment and creating can look so different depending on your passions and talents.

I find God when I write. I find him when I’m in nature. I find him when I play guitar and learn new chords and new songs with which to worship him. I find him when I make a blanket for a baby and embroider a monogram while praying for God’s hand on the baby’s life.

God’s Revelation Through Creation

 In addition to God’s gift to us of creation itself and allowing us room to continue creating, God also gifted us with the revelation of himself through his creation. You may associate the word revelation with the last book of the Bible, but revelation is simply the way God reveals himself to humans. He does this in many ways, but one of them is through general revelation.

Have you ever wondered how it’s fair for people who don’t have access to the Bible or to Christians to be held accountable to know and serve God? In his grace, God proves his existence in various ways, and a significant one is through the general revelation of his creation. It’s a general revelation (as opposed to a special revelation) simply because it’s available to all humanity.

The sending church for our church plant did a series this summer on the topic of general revelation, and my husband contributed a sermon on the general revelation of creation. He spoke about how thousands of scientific facts help evidence a creator. For instance, the precise amount of salt in the oceans allows life to exist. If it were off by 0.5 percent either direction, we’d have no life on earth. The twenty-three-degree tilt of the earth on its axis is the exact angle that allows us to live here. If it were off two degrees in either direction, we’d have no life on earth. If the sun were one million miles closer or farther away, you guessed it: no life on earth.

Creation demands a creator. God is lovingly telling us he exists via the world he made, with the desire of drawing all mankind to himself. Then, as if that weren’t gift enough, he invites us to enjoy his creation and to create further and make it even better.

Our Responsibility

As these thoughts have occurred to me, I’ve been trying to figure out how to apply them to my life. To start, it’s critical that we care for the world our loving creator made. I grew up believing we’d either leave this place or God would just remake it. I literally thought it didn’t matter if I recycled or took care of the earth, so it wasn’t a priority for me. What a slap in the face this attitude was to God! We could definitely do better, but my husband and I now do our part to limit our negative impact on God’s creation out of love and respect for him.

We also have a responsibility to enjoy the creation. Beauty in creation is somewhere near you. Some of us may have to look harder to find it, but we are to enjoy it. God modeled rest in the creation story, and it wasn’t because he was tired. It was because he values rest. If you’re so busy that you don’t have time to enjoy creation, I encourage you to submit your calendar to God and ask him where you need to make changes.

We must also reference creation with those who don’t believe. It’s one way God’s trying to reach people, and we can join him in helping others see more clearly the demand for a creator. I listed just a few facts that show the precision in creation, but there are so many more. We have a responsibility to share the love of God with others, and his creation is included in the charge.

It can be easy to focus on some of the stories in the Bible and see God’s love and grace come through, but remember that they’re just as evident in his creation as they are in the words on the pages of the Word he gave us. His pursuit of us is overwhelming, and we are so blessed to get to be part of his world.

Amy Wiebe is a Jesus follower, wife, mom of three, church planter, finance director, and lover of sarcasm and deep conversation with friends. She also loves camping, rafting, skiing, sewing, and having people over. Amy blogs with her husband at fringechurch.com.

Photograph © Alexander Ramsey, used with permission