The Biblical worldview begins with Creation, not with Jesus. We often make Jesus the leading salvo of our Gospel presentation, but there is no context for redemption in Christ apart from the foundational reality of creation and Creator. When Paul addressed the pagan idolaters in Athens, he began his sermon by talking about creation and Creator (See Acts 17.22-31). With the rising secularism of our own times, it would be wise to learn from Paul’s approach in Athens when sharing the Biblical message.
God has made a covenant with creation, to uphold it until His purpose is complete. God’s faithfulness to His covenant with creation is the backdrop for all His dealings with mankind (Jer. 33.20-21; 25-26). This means that we can trust God.
Creation and Sovereignty
Something that we must avoid from the outset is the unbiblical view called Deism. This is the belief that the universe is like a giant machine that runs by itself according to natural laws while the Creator is uninvolved and perhaps even uninterested in what He made.
The Biblical view is that the God who made the world is also keeping it in order (2 Pet. 3.5, 7). We live in God’s world, which must submit to His sovereign decrees (Psa. 95.3-5; 148.8; 119.91). Theologically speaking, the concept of creation and sovereignty go together and cannot be separated. God’s care for the world He made has also been described as His providence.
To say that God is Creator is to say that God is sovereign over what He made. In fact, the created world was created, at least in part, to be a stage or a theater for God’s sovereignty to be put on display. The Bible hints at the fact that more than just human eyes are watching what God is doing in the world. God’s work is being done “on earth as it is in Heaven.”
Creation and Law
Scripture uses the term “law” to connect God’s creative will and His sovereign will (Psa. 33.9). Law is not just the specific commandments that God has revealed but is a much broader concept that concerns all of God’s sovereign will for the world and His purpose for human life in it. Creation is governed and administered by the law of God. God is redeeming His fallen creation by grace, but He is upholding creation, even in its fallen state, by His law.
The Bible also connects God’s law and God’s word (Psa. 148.8; 33.6; 2 Pet. 3.5; Heb. 11.3). God created the world with just a word of command, and God’s word also upholds the world (Psa. 147.18; 148.8; Heb. 1.3). The most important connection between God’s word and creation is Christ Himself (John 1.3; Col. 1.16; Heb. 1.2; 2.10). The Son of God is also upholding the created order with just His word (Col. 1.16-17; Heb. 1.2-3).
The law of God works in the following two ways: 1. Directly, through God’s intervention, and 2. Indirectly, through human involvement (Al Wolters). In the natural world, God’s law is direct. God tells the earth to rotate on its axis, for example, and it does so. If God were to suddenly cease to uphold the natural world everything would return to a state of darkness and chaos. God’s law works indirectly in the world of human society. Human beings have been called upon to work with God in the realm of human affairs and the development of culture and society. So, there are laws that govern the world of nature and there are laws that also govern the world of human interactions.
There is an order in Creation that God ordained, and that God maintains. This created order is good for mankind. We are not to reject things that God created and that remains good and blessed (1 Tim. 4.3-4). For example, marriage and human government are both institutions created by God which are good for mankind (Rom. 13.1-2; 1 Pet. 2.13). Instead of seeing God’s law as a means of enjoying life and blessing, we tend to see God as an unnecessary restriction of our freedom and progress.
The laws of nature can easily be seen in operation. The law of God in the realm of human society is not so neat and tidy. The earth spins on its axis in obedience to the law of God. The natural world never ceases to obey the will of its Creator. But human beings are a different kind of creature. Mankind has been given the responsibility of executing God’s will and He holds us accountable for doing so. Unlike the earth, mankind can choose to ignore and to disobey the law of God. In Western thought, there is a great gulf of separation between the natural law and the social law of God. But the Bible does not separate these categories. The same God who orders creation also orders human life.
At times God intervened directly in human affairs and gave specific commands to specific people. There were also times when God circumvented the normal, natural laws in order to produce a miraculous sign. But God was always consistent with His own nature and character so that we can trust Him to be good, righteous, and faithful all the time.
Creation and Wisdom
Modern man is rather unique in separating the realm of nature and of mankind. The ancient worldviews all held that there was a natural law that governed all human affairs. The whole burden of ancient wisdom, or philosophy, was to discover the direction in which the grain of the universe was running and go with it. This same kind of thinking is seen in Biblical Wisdom literature, but with the one, true God of Israel as the proper object of worship and obedience (Psa. 147.15-20).
In the Old Testament, the law of God in creation is associated with wisdom. “Wisdom is ethical conformity to God’s creation” (James Fleming). On one hand, is the law of God woven into creation. On the other hand, there is our need for wisdom or conformity to that Divine Order (Prov. 1.22-23; 8.4; 22-23; 27-30; 9.6). The wisdom of God in Creation is available and knowable. All our scientific knowledge of the natural world is made available to us by the Creator and is the basis for human society and civilization. Even our knowledge of agriculture is something that God teaches through the wisdom in creation (Isa. 28.23-29). Discerning this wisdom takes time and reflection as well as teamwork with others.
The wisdom of God in His special revelation of Scripture can help us understand the general revelation in nature. John Calvin compared Scripture with a pair of glasses that bring the world into proper focus. Scripture is a light to our path (Psa. 119.105). We might think of Scripture as a verbal explanation from the engineer who had designed a complex piece of machinery.
Creation and Mankind
Humans serve God in a unique way by ruling over creation. The Divine image in mankind is linked to our dominion over the creation. The ruling task is that of cultivation, like a farmer or a gardener. This is a communal undertaking as we image God corporately and not just individually. This cultural development is illustrated in its beginning phases in the Genesis account of creation (Gen. 2.4-4.26).
History is the development of man’s dominion over the creation. God does not support mankind’s wanton destruction of creation. We must acknowledge God’s covenantal relationship to the earth and our accountability to God. We are God’s caretakers. We are free to use and to develop but not to destroy nature. Mankind will be held accountable in the end for the stewardship of the world (Matt. 25.14-30). There will be a Day of universal accountability for how we handled God’s stuff. We are merely managers. Everything belongs to God and nothing really belongs to us. We are never free to just live for ourselves, independently from the Creator, though this kind of autonomy is the cornerstone of the modern, secular worldview.
The Creation is revelatory (Psa. 19.1-4) and this “general revelation” is available to everyone (Acts 14.17). Fallen man chooses not to acknowledge this revelation (Rom. 1.18-20), but we cannot escape the moral order God created, which continually presses its demands upon us through the universal witness of conscience (Rom. 2.14-15). Though man is fallen and worships idols rather than the Creator, the law and revelation of God woven into the created order presses in upon the mind of men everywhere and makes them accountable.
While God upholds the Creation, He has given over the care of it into the hands of human beings. God put an image of Himself on earth to care for and develop the Creation. The cultural evolution of Creation is the task of civilization given specifically into the hands of mankind (Gen. 1.28; Psa. 8.6). After God created the world the stage was set, and the drama of human history began. The history of civilization is the opening of the possibilities and the potentialities of creation. The man was placed in the Garden of Eden to care for it (Gen. 2.15).
This was the beginning of human society and civilization in which creation would be developed and cultivated. People would participate with God in the flowering of creation. History is the story of this development. Mankind’s management of the world was always God’s plan. The creation was supposed to grow and mature into something under mankind’s management. This meant that some type of cultural evolution would be required. Eden did not represent the final stage of God’s creation, but only the beginning of the world. Even the New Creation that is envisioned at the end of the Bible will not be a return to Eden but will somehow encompass all of mankind’s cultural achievements, minus the curse of sin and death (Rev. 21-22). In the New Creation, human life will be like the butterfly that develops out of the pupa (Herman Bavinck). Human history began in a garden, but it will end in a city (Al Wolters).
Creation is Good
The Creation was declared by God to be good and we should not take a dim view of the material world because God does not. As C.S. Lewis said, “you do not want to be more spiritual than God.” The ancient heresy of Gnosticism once threatened to take the Biblical view of creation from the early Church, and remnants of Gnostic thinking cling to us today. One of the great errors of nearly every unbiblical worldview is that they tend to single out one aspect of creation and make that the scapegoat for all of humanity’s woes (Al Wolters). We want to shift the blame for our problems to something in creation, which is tantamount to blaming God (Al Wolters).
Creation is a cause for joy and celebration in both mankind and the natural world, which is often personified as praising and obeying the Creator (Psa. 104.24; 139.14). God is worthy to be praised for what He has made. In fact, we need no other reason to praise, worship, and obey Him (Jer. 10.1-16). The creation was meant to give glory to the Creator (Isa. 45.18).
The position of creation towards the Creator is one of complete dependence (Psa. 119.89-91). The fact that we are creatures calls us to humility before God who is the source of everything in the world that is good.
Creation and our Work
We need to revisit a point made earlier in this lesson and find some personal application. I am indebted to Tim Keller and his book Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work for the following insights.
The Protestant Reformation brought a new focus on the importance of so-called secular work. The Reformers began to point out that all work is just as much a calling as being a priest of a monk. The Lutheran tradition has continued to teach that God uses our work to care for the world. People are acting as the hands of God when they do various kinds of work. The Calvinist tradition emphasized that our work is a way of creating a culture that glorifies God and provides for human flourishing. Writers like Abraham Kuyper believed that faithful work comes from operating out of a Christian worldview.
God’s original act of creation is described in Genesis as work. God was doing work at the end of which He rested. God then put the man and the woman in charge of caring for creation and developing its potential (Gen. 2.1-3, 15). There was work before the Fall and the entrance of the curse of sin and death. Work was not itself a curse, though the curse of sin would have an impact on work, along with everything else in creation.
A careful study of the Genesis creation account will show how unique it really is and how it differs greatly from all the other pagan mythologies about creation. According to pagan myths, the world was created as a result of warring deities. The Genesis account reveals the world was made by a loving Craftsman, who had no rivals, and who took pleasure in what He made. The Greek philosophers viewed the early world as a paradise in which both men and the gods did not have to do any work. But this clearly differs from the Genesis account where both men and God had work.
The work of God is shared by mankind under God’s provision and guidance. Human beings were created to work rather than to be idle. A sense of dignity and worth is attached to our work. We cannot live fulfilled lives with having meaningful work, along with times of rest. Work is not to be avoided. We serve God and we serve others through our work. Again, this differs from the ancient pagan view of work. The Greeks thought of physical work as demeaning. The philosophers sought to be as far removed as possible from physical things to engage in the “spiritual” life of contemplation, like the gods themselves. This idea continued through the Middle Ages with the separation of spiritual, sacred work, and secular work. Even in modern times, people tend to divide work into physical and mental, with the more physical trades taking a back seat to the more important work of the mind. There is no such distinction and division of work taught in the Bible.
Work reflects the Divine image in us. Animals live according to their instincts, but mankind was given a special mission and a unique job in creation. All kinds of work are necessary for human flourishing and that means all kinds of work have worth and dignity. When God Himself came into the world in human flesh, He was a carpenter!
According to the Biblical worldview, the physical world matters a great deal and is blessed by God. The idea that being truly spiritual means being removed from physical things is a pagan idea. The doctrine of Creation harmonizes with the doctrine of Incarnation, where God Himself enters the world that He created in order to redeem it. A Christian worldview acknowledged that the material world is good. When we work, we are partnering with God in the care and development of creation. That means every kind of work may be done for the glory of God and as an act of worship and service to mankind. Obviously, there are some activities that are against the law of God and destructive to both the creation and human life. But unless we are engaged in wickedness, we can take pleasure in our work.
Work is an act of cultivating God’s good creation. God put human beings in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it. Mankind was given this mandate. The act of civilization was a Divine command. God still owns the world, but He has given it to mankind to care for and to develop. We take what God has made, since we are not capable of making something from nothing like He is, and we form or rearrange it to create something more than what was there before. The world has potential that mankind must develop through work. All work is another act of creation.
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