Meeting Christ in Creation: Who is that Shining Through Nature?
by Ken Wilson
Began series with a look at Genesis One: A Field Guide to Nature. God as field guide who orients us to our surroundings. How nature is designed to refresh the soul. Then Jesus at Prayer in Cathedral of the Outdoors. His preference: praying outside, especially wild places. How our prayer life might benefit if we got out a little more.
Bump into quirk of modern Christianity: tendency to drive a wedge between love of nature & love of God. Modern era marked by double disconnect: us & nature and us & God. We spend less time with each. No wonder we don't appreciate how they are connected.
I've had devout believers in Jesus tell me we should be concerned about saving souls, nothing else. As if concern for God makes us less concerned for other things. The opposite: concern for God makes us care about what he cares about; enlarges our heart, doesn't shrink it.
Today, explore biblical connection between nature & nature's God. Because our love & appreciation of one is meant to enhance our love & appreciation for the other. Reconciling the two is part of what Paul calls the "renewing of our minds."
This transformation happens as we bathe our minds in God's mind.
He has a means for such washing: the words from his mind allowed access to ours. To the words then: from the heart of God to ours!
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun, which is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other;
nothing is deprived of its warmth.
The law of the LORD is perfect, refreshing the soul.
The statutes of the LORD are trustworthy, making wise the simple.-
The precepts of the LORD are right, giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the LORD are radiant, giving light to the eyes.
The fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever.
The ordinances of the LORD are sure, and all of them are righteous.
They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold;
they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the honeycomb.
By them your servant is warned; in keeping them there is great reward.
But who can discern their own errors? Forgive my hidden faults.
Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me.
Then I will be blameless, innocent of great transgression.
May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart
be pleasing in your sight,
LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer. (Psalm 19)
A form critic reads a psalm like this and sees two separate songs spliced together. But the Psalm is about one thing: God's desire to communicate by all possible means; in this case, nature & word.
Nature being God's first language. Creation as revelation.
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
Nature is talking to us in a wordless language.
Even a stone can talk, if we have ears to hear. [stethescope]
Some things have been here longer than you have.
Some things wear out more slowly than you do.
Don't be so sure of your eyes. (Some things that look solid are composed of much smaller things filled with empty space.)
Nature is God's invitation to pay attention to something other than the chatter in our heads. Which is good for our heads.
Nature invites us to listen to silence. A key to becoming a good conversationalist. Gives other person space to speak. Including God.
Nature is something we are supposed to listen to, not just walk mindlessly through. Something we are supposed to pay attention to.
Like we listen to words from God.
Because nature is a kind of word from God.
Our listening to nature helps us to hear the words of God from God:
the law of the Lord, statutes, precepts, commands, ordinances.
Heard of synesthesia? wires get crossed in the brain and you hear sights, or see sounds? (David M.: brain assigned colors to notes)
Something like this is going on in Psalm 19: wordless nature is speaking a language; words from God are tasted like honey.
The one empowers & enhances the other. The heart that listens to nature is the same heart that listens to words.
Paul also taught creation as revelation. For 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. (Ro. 1:20)
Summary of Ps. 19: Nature is a revelation of God's nature. God who is invisible, wants to reveal himself, and nature is one such revelation.
Without nature, we could put the whole idea of God to rest. The question of God wouldn't even arise. Why is there something rather than nothing? And why is the something so unpredictable, so unexpected, so "not made by human hands"? So long as nature exists, we'll be haunted by God….
This all sounds very cool, but what's it got to do with Jesus, you may ask? What's it got to do with the gospel of Jesus?
It's a question Paul also pondered. And this is what he came up with:
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. 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. (Colossians 1: 15-20)
As a Hebrew Paul already understood that creation is a visible revelation of the invisible God. Now he is able to see Christ as a visible revelation of the invisible God. How are they related?
Christ is over creation. Nature is created by him and for him.
In him it all holds together.
It's really quite a breathtaking vision of Christ. Some call this Paul's vision of the Cosmic Christ. This itinerant preacher from Nazareth is a real sleeper. This Son of the Father is also the firstborn over all creation. Over the universe, we might say. Better said, he is the uni of the universe. He is the One through whom all things are created. In him all things hold together. He unifies the universe.
You know Paul was a mystic. When he prayed, he sometimes went places. Like that time he was in what he called "the third heaven" seeing inexpressible things.
Many Christians don't like word mystic, even though Paul was one.
They don't like the word because mystics talk about being "united to all things." Sounds like new age woo-woo or mumbo jumbo.
The mystical experience, according to brain specialists imaging the brain of people having them, say the part of the brain that separates the self from everything else, gets "deafferented" meaning gets less sensory input, and this creates a blurring of the boundaries between the self and everything else.
We've all felt little hints of this. Looking out on the ocean maybe, or absorbed by a sunset, and you feel a shift and you feel more connected to everything--like you're just a small part of this whole….
Paul seems to have had this kind of mystical experience as well, except his happened to him through Christ. As he let himself be united to his Lord, he experienced the reality that all things--by which he meant ALL THINGS--were created by Him and for Him
And in Him all things held together.
We could stand a little more of that couldn't we? An experience that conveys the reality that in Christ all things hold together?
Isn't that the crying-aching craving of our time? The need for what you might call COHERENCE. What holds things together?
How does a person hold together? How does a marriage hold together? A family, a church, a nation, a world?
The Second Law of Thermodynamics says all systems tend to move from an ordered to a disordered state. Left to themselves, things fall apart, fly apart, dis-integrate.
Is that going to happen to us? To me? My marriage, family, etc.?
Are we one of those systems left to itself? Alone with the Wolf called the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
Am I the Center that holds my life together? Or is there another center that as I organize my life around it, holds my life together?
[Panic attack before Arctic trip…went outside for a walk, focused not on my reeling thoughts but on the trees, birds, sky, and used this prayer from Julian of Norwich: "all shall be well, all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well tied to breath]
Paul experienced Jesus of Nazareth as the one part of his life that centered him, that could pull all the other parts of his life together.
Paul needed that. He was the kind of person who could fly off the handle. A divider kind of person. When he met Jesus he was in the process of trying to divide some believers from their lives! Separate some Christians from their heads! He was all about purification through separation, through division.
When he let Jesus into his life, he felt a center that could hold all the other parts of his life together. And this Great Divider became the Great Uniter: his life task to unite Jew and Gentile in one body!
It didn't happen all at once, he struggled against his old tendencies, but he could feel the center now, and he came to trust that the center could hold together what he couldn't.
Are you the Center of your life? Or is there a more-powerful-than-you Center that you can trust to hold things together that you can't?
When things are flying apart, do you trust the Center to hold?
For Paul, holding all things together, is the point of the gospel story.
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. (Colossians 1: 15-20)
When Jesus came to earth he came to reconcile all things.
To reconcile is to reunite things that have been separated.
Like us & nature & nature's God.
So when you hear people talk as though love for God and love for nature are at odds, understand that's not the gospel.
When you feel people bristle over someone's concern for nature as though that comes at the expense of their concern for God, understand that's not the gospel.
If you hear people pitting one over and against the other, understand that's not the gospel.
When you feel a tug in your heart to pay attention to nature, to stop and smell the roses, to enjoy the great outdoors, to care for Mother Nature….
When you feel a tug to get out of the indoors made by human hands, into the outdoors not made by human hands, that's not just nature calling, that's nature's God calling.
Close by considering one of most important words in the Bible: prominent in both testaments, earlier & the later. GLORY.
A strange word that defies definition, because it's so closely connected to God, who isn't exactly easy to nail down either.
Except to say the word seems to indicate a physical-visible phenomena. Like a brightness or a shining forth.
There are two visible-physical phenomena that seem to show or shine or bear glory quite readily. As though they are carriers of glory.
One is nature. As it says in Psalm 19: the heavens declare-display the glory of God. It's right there for all to see. God's glory displayed, which is the point of glory anyway.
So we don't have to beg God to show us his glory so much as open our eyes to see it all around us.
When the light shines though the leaves of a tree, or catches your eye in the evening, or the moon is orange on the horizon or the stars in full gear---that's a display of glory aimed at your heart.
The other bearer of glory is the human face. The face of Moses for a while there would shine with glory, so he had to cover it.
The human face has been known to shine. We talk of someone
"beaming"--what's that? Some kind of way that their face shines.
Paul talks about the glory of God shining in the face of Christ. "For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. (2 Cor. 4:6)
We don't know if Paul saw face of Christ. He was blinded by a light, heard the words of Jesus, but we don't know if he saw the face.
But he writes of a light that shines in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. A glory we don't see with our physical eyes so much as with eyes of our hearts.
The word works in our heart to shift our perspective. To open the eyes of our heart. To add faith-seeing to our sight-seeing.
Back to Pslam 19: nature & word combined. Dynamic combo when the eyes of heart are opened to glory-display of nature and when the eyes of heart opened to glory-display of Christ, the word made flesh.
It's our inheritance people. Don't let anyone divide you from it.