Lord of All Creation

A moment ago, a hummingbird sipped nectar from an upturned crimson star outside my window. My cat is sitting on the back porch, and even though I can't see him right now, I know he is watching the other cat that is prowling in our backyard. He and I both have our eyes on nature this morning.

For I have chosen no particular song, but rather a subject, about which to write: God's revelation through creation. It seems that since I read a few pages on the subject in Charles Ryrie's Basic Theology that I've heard and sang half a dozen songs about the glory of the Lord and His creation.

I confess it's not something about which I've actively thought much, but I know that when I look out and see the bright magenta of a crepe myrtle against the dark evergreen, and the sunlight dappled through the Georgia pine, or when I see a squirel scuttle across the phone lines, spinning his tail like he's winding up to smack one out of the park, I get happy. In fact, I get a little blessed, and that's what I think Creation is supposed to do for a person.

As Ryrie points out, creation itself is not alone to bring about salvation - only the very specific revelation about the atoning death of Christ is sufficient for that. A person can't get saved by looking at crepe myrtle, but they can get inspired. Something in their heart dilates, and that dilation, I think, is an expansion that gets a heart ready to receive something really big - the awesome revelation of Christ.

On another point, Ryrie points out that creation itself helps to support the argument that there is an eternal creator, which in turn can lead individuals to believe Him by faith. He points more to the complexity of nature than to the beauty of it as a useful proof. From the little I know about science, the beauty that emerges from the complexity of biology is wondrous to me, so I think we're really talking about the same thing from different angles of experience and knowledge.

Creation has been pouring forth speech about the Lord's majesty since before there was writing, before there was math, before there was science. And certainly before there was a formalized cosmology that explained God out of all existence. I have a book sitting next to me on my desk called One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought. The book by Ernst Mayr, published in 1991, won the Phi Beta Kappa award for science. I haven't read it and may not, but I picked it up because it was free and I was intrigued by the title: One Long Argument. What intrigues me is that Darwin's argument, and of course not Darwin alone (and surely I misunderstand or underestimate Darwin and surely, given the wealth of information available and the poverty of my reading on the subject, I am unitiated in such things) but his ideas, in effect, are an argument that invalidates one of the proofs of the argument for an eternal Creator.

It seems like a morbid and defeatist note on which to end, but let me frame it this way: I had never until this morning really thought about how Darwin could affects one's very heart and soul - stealing those rapturous, blessed moments that nature provides, that dilate the soul and prepare me for what I could not naturally understand. Even as a non-scientist, I am affected and a little stirred up by this.