The Marvel of Creation
Pondering the marvels of the Creation story afresh today… When we think about God creating the heavens and the earth, it’s easy to picture a white-haired sage in a robe sitting down at a drafting table to plan the internal workings of a star like some empyrean architect, or opening a thick, tattered, leather-bound journal and sketching out a myriad of species of flora and fauna. But this is to humanize God, to see Him in our own image rather than the omnipotent, omniscient, totally-and-completely-other Being that He is.
Could God have done those things, just for the fun of it? Yeah, sure. He’s God.
Did he need to do those things? Absolutely not. He’s God.
When human beings create, we have to work things out. Painters start with rough sketches; architects begin with blueprints; musicians craft lyrics and chord sequences; chefs experiment; knitters use patterns; toddlers abandon their boring sheets of paper in favor of their preferred canvas: the kitchen wall. I’ll bring it closer to home: Writers may plan a story with outlines, or notes in a notebook, or they may just have an idea in their head and go with it (wait, where did the idea come from to begin with?). But they never know every word (unfortunately). They may know the beginning and the ending, but the bits in the middle need teasing out. There’s research and brainstorming and thesauruses involved. Sometimes the process chugs right along. Other times it comes to a halt and you wait, and wait, and wait for fresh inspiration.
But not God.
Scripture tells us when God created the sun and the moon and the stars, He had only to speak a word and they sprang into being. Just like that. No trial and error, no writer’s block, no rough draft. Perfection, right from the very start. This is what it is to be an omnipotent (all-powerful) Creator.
And when God envisioned giraffes and honeybees and oaks and the water molecule, He didn’t have to experiment to get it just right. He didn’t need to discover the best way for birds to learn how to fly (although getting the boot from a nest fifty feet off the ground seems a tad risky). He didn’t have to explore the various combinations of affectionate and indifferent in order to create the perfect blend of cuddly frustration that is the house cat. God doesn’t learn; He just knows. This is what it is to be an omniscient (all-knowing) Creator.
God is infinite, therefore His knowledge is infinite. The whole of Creation—from atoms to anglerfish to the Andromeda galaxy—was there in His mind and always has been. He spoke, and it was.
(Except centipedes … those things are straight from Hell.)
How incomprehensibly awesome to realize that the world in which we live, the grass on the ground, the air in our lungs, the very molecules of matter itself were crafted—and are held together even now—by words. Divine words.
But there is one thing God did not create merely by speaking.
In Genesis when God finished uttering the universe into existence, He turned His focus from the celestial bodies, from the mountains and seas and plains, from the swarms and herds to one tiny creature: man. Could God have said the word and Adam would have simply appeared? Yes, He could have. But for this, God does something unbelievable. He steps down into the very Creation He has just made and forms the man out of the dust of the earth. God, the all-powerful, all-knowing Creator of the universe gets His hands dirty. Then, as if that isn’t incredible enough, God breathes into Adam His very own breath—He gives His life so that we might have ours.
Why?
Because of all the things God made, only one of them bears His image: mankind. You have the fingerprints of God worked into the very fiber of your being the way a potter’s fingers mold and shape the clay upon the wheel. God got close, personal, dirt-under-the-fingernails intimate when He created us. I say “us” because it wasn’t just Adam God was creating that day in the Garden.
If God is all-knowing, then He knew you. And me. And our parents. And that one annoying co-worker. He knew us all just like He knew the rest of Creation—from incomprehensible eternity past. If you’ve ever wondered if you “existed” before you were born, the answer is you existed in the mind of God. He has always known about you. And when He formed Adam from the particles of soil—every cell and strand of DNA—you were there as well.
The information to create you was contained within our first father’s DNA, and God knew that someday, thousands and thousands of years in the future, after Adam and Eve got busy “being fruitful and multiplying,” two of their descendants would come together and the combination of their DNA would produce little old you with all of your quirks, talents, triumphs and flaws. Or, as Oliver Cromwell put it, “Warts and all.”
But even this isn’t the most jaw-dropping marvel of Creation.
The disciple John calls Jesus “the Word,” and says rather poetically at the beginning of his gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made,” (John 1:–3). Consider for a moment that as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit embarked upon this endeavor called Creation, He knew it would inevitably become broken.
Before God created the angels, He knew some of them would rebel against Him. Before God created Adam and Eve, He knew they would believe the Serpent’s lie. Before God created the earth and everything in it, He knew His Creation would suffer disease and famine and grief and pain and war and death. But let’s go a bit deeper. Before God created men, He knew some of them would not only reject but mock, torture, and ultimately kill His Son. Before God created trees, He knew Jesus would be nailed to one to die a slow, agonizing death. Did He know which kind of tree? Did He know the very place it would grow, the very day it would be cut down and fashioned for this terrible purpose?
Yes, He did.
But if God knew all these things, it begs the question: Why bother creating anything at all? Wouldn’t it have been better for the Trinity to just carry on in perfect harmony without all the heartache? And now that we’re thinking about it, wouldn’t it have been better for us? I mean, this whole “living” thing ain’t exactly a picnic. What was God thinking? The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in reference to Creation, comically states it “made a lot of people very angry and is being widely regarded as a bad move.” Maybe you can relate.
But if we’re going to ask why God created us when He knew we would suffer and eventually die, then we have to turn the spotlight on ourselves as well. Why do we bring children into a world of pain and illness and conflict? Why do we love someone when the one we love could potentially break our hearts? Why do we create art or write stories or knit itchy socks that it’s quite possible no one will like? Why do we fight cancer and hunger and injustice when everybody is just going to die anyway?
Because the truth of the matter is that life and love are things worth having … despite the suffering.
We know this in our bones. We crave it. We long for something more, something better than this broken life. We seek it in all kinds of stupid and shortsighted ways. But the problem we keep running into is that from the beginning we were destined for eternity. We were created for perfection. Man was never meant to die; sin entered into God’s good Creation and ripped it apart at the seams. But in case you’re wondering, God knew about that, too.
And so—just like young lovers who marry despite the fact that someday they may have trouble paying the bills, or one or both of them may end up with love handles; and just like parents who have a child despite the fact that their son or daughter may get sick, or hurt, or even leave this life before they do—God created. Could He have lived in perfection for the rest of eternity without you?
Yes, of course.
…but He didn’t want to.
Even though God knew it would cost Him His Son, even though He knew Jesus would suffer pain and grief and rejection and exhaustion and hunger, He looked at you and He looked at the suffering and said, “It’s worth it.” This is the marvel of Creation: that God gave His life—in other words, God, an eternal and all-powerful Being who did not ever have to experience suffering or death, suffered and died—so that we could have life, too. That His love for the world was so real and so deep that He gave us His Son in order to be able to shower us with His pure, perfect, soul-satisfying love for ever and ever, life without end.
This is the marvel of Creation: that we exist, that we exist for God, and that we will one day exist eternally in a perfect world free from pain, sorrow, suffering and death forever because God thought we were worth it.