Creation: the key to understanding our world

Archbishop Peter Jensen | 28 November 2006

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Human beings are immensely clever at making things. Nothing on this planet comes remotely near our capacity as inventors, engineers, artists, cooks, architects and builders.

These skills can certainly feed our self-esteem as a human race. How difficult, then, is it to cope with the idea that we are ourselves creatures, that we have been made.

It means that we have a Creator, that we rely on him for all things, and that he may treat us as he wills. It means that we owe him our worship or service. Most people do not find this a welcome idea, even though it is clear that when we create anything it is with already existing materials.

The great Creator of the universe has created from nothing at all. He stands as the Other. We prefer to think of ourselves as being the Masters of the world.

When we consider the works of human hands we are often amazed at the brain from which it has proceeded. The more beautiful or intricate or clever it is the more we think that this reflects well on its creator.

When we think of the masterpiece which is his world, we are even more amazed at the power, majesty and wisdom of the one who has made all things. We should worship him, but humans avoid the consequences of this insight.

We complain about the world. It is true, we say, that the world is very wonderful. But it also shows signs of being a place of pain and suffering and of poor design. After all, why was the fly invented? What about animal and human cruelty?

It is interesting that this is sometimes advanced as though it immediately refutes the biblical faith. On the contrary, the very opening pages of the Bible face this issue front-on. It is the very presupposition of the Bible and its story of creation and salvation.

Having established with great clarity that there is one transcendent Creator and Ruler over all things, and having likewise established the unique place given to human beings within the scheme of things, the Bible immediately relates the history of the fall of Man

This rebellion against God has seen us cast into a world suitable not for the innocent but for guilty creatures to live in. According to the Bible there is an underlying connection between the state of the world and our determination to make ourselves Masters of the universe.

When some great natural disaster takes place, we often see people raising this as a reason why there can be no God. But the Bible places us historically in a continuum of such events and tells us specifically that they will be part of the nature of this world and human and animal experience until God acts to bring in his kingdom. If we are surprised or worried by these events it must be because we do not see the world as the Bible sees it.

That is why it is important to recognise that in the biblical accounts of the fall we are dealing with historical events. Evil was not written into the structure of the universe. It is not as though God found it an unavoidable part of his creative task. He will vanquish it at the end. It often occurs to me that if we had not rejected God’s Lordship at the beginning, this world and our experience of it would have been very different.

God had created us to rule the world under him. We could have learned to live with the world instead of against it. All sorts of things such as overpopulation and building housing where it is unwise and the exploitation of non-renewable resources would have been avoided by a morally good creature. When we criticise God’s creation we must remember that we do so from a perspective thoroughly warped by human sin.

The second consequence of our rejection of God is that we turn the full force of our worshipping nature onto beings which are not gods. We cannot help worshipping – we were created to worship God. Denying ourselves this natural expression of our human nature we invent spurious gods, whether blind forces which we imagine can explain the universe, or spiritual beings which we invent and portray as idols, or even more crassly simply money and material possessions by which we think that we can rule the world and make it do our will. In the end, we exploit the world, war on each other, worship our own beauty, fulfil our evil desires and act out the part of fallen monarchs. As the great French thinker Pascal once said, ‘We are the glory and the shame of the universe’.

The situation of our race is deeply tragic in the classical sense of a catastrophe which occurs through some fault in the character of a great person. Instead of leading the world in its thanksgiving to the God who created it, we have turned in on ourselves and are wrecking the creation as well as our own lives.

The first call of God upon us is for repentance, which means acknowledging God for who he is, the Creator of all things, and acknowledging our own humble position as those who have been created. That and only that is the path of true wisdom for us.

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