Subtitle: [God's Love Displayed in the Context of Creation]
Reading: Engaging God's World (ch.2: Creation), Plantinga
There's always been something extremely fascinating about nature and creation. It's not just the biology and chemistry of it all, or the mathematical logic behind it, or even the poetic and inspiring beauty of it. It's the vast mystery of it, the huge amounts of things we simply don't know about it, the phenomenons we can't explain.
Creation is as mysterious and unknowable as it's Creator. The most exciting part is how much it reflects the God who created it.
There are so many parts to creation and to the Creator that are essential. Creation was made for us. God is so full of goodness and so full of love that He created us to spend time with, to care for (we are His children), and to love. Then, He created the earth and the universe and everything in it to fascinate us, and to teach us about Himself. What a beautiful idea, what a lovely thing, how fascinatingly humbling!
And yet how silly we are to look at creation and disregard it, or worship it, rather than thinking of the Creator of it, and what He intended by it.
Each part of creation is unique and special and different from any other created thing. Not only is each species or type or kind different from the next, but even within such, each piece is individual. There is water. But there are oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, precipitation. Within that are large oceans and smaller oceans, long rivers, short rivers, different forms of falling water such as sleet, hail, rain. And there is snow, which falls differently everywhere it falls. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, on the campus of Calvin College, outside my dorm window, there are individual snowflakes. No tiny, minuscule snowflake is the same. God put loving care into every single tiny detail. God, as Andrew so brilliantly pointed out, does not mass produce. He painstakingly structured things so intricately, so delicately, so perfectly, that even we don't know the half of it. The best part of it? It was made for us. Why? Because for some inexplicable reason, no matter how often we miss the point, He loves us.
As wonderful as your comment is, and as true, I am forced to ask; What about Plantinga? I know that it is silly, espscially after your wonderful comment, to point it out, but you never mention the actual reading once.
ReplyDeletePerhaps I didn't mention the reading specifically, but I think I described rather precisely what he talked about in chapter two. "Creation was a way for God to spend himself," the particularity of creatures and nonhuman parts of creatures, the uniqueness of it. I might have focused rather specifically on the "The Book of Creation" section, but I don't think I was inaccurate, either. Most of this was the product of outside thought not very narrowly confined to just the reading.
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