Creation and God's Love

Psalm 136:4-9

“to Him who alone does great wonders,
His love endures forever.
who by His understanding made the heavens,
His love endures forever.
who spread out the earth upon the waters,
His love endures forever.
who made the great lights -
His love endures forever.
the sun to govern the day,
His love endures forever.
the moon and stars to govern the night;
His love endures forever.”

              We know that creation demonstrates the creativity of the Creator, as how the glory of an artist is in his paintings. So in the same way, we see God’s amazing mind when we see the fruit of it – the work produced – the watercolour evening sky, the year-round snow-capped mountains, the vast and mighty oceans, the gargantuan Redwood trees, the animals – tiny ladybugs and humpback whales, the humans – faces with such inexplicable beauty. We understand that pretty easily, and indeed that’s pretty captivating, especially when we explore lovely nature spots. But what’s even more captivating to understand is how creation demonstrates God’s love, not just loveless creativity, to us.

              Psalm 136 led me to this topic: creation and God’s love. The refrain “His love endures forever” is well-known (thanks, Chris Tomlin!), and the lines that precede each refrain are meant to be explanations, or demonstrations, of his declaration of God’s enduring love. The first section (verses 1 to 3) talks about God’s character: His goodness and His power – the fact that He uses His power and authority for our good, explains His love. The third section (verses 10 to 25) talks about God’s past faithfulness to the Israelites – before, during and after the Exodus. That’s pretty clear: testimonies of God’s faithfulness in the past are vivid demonstrations of God’s everlasting love shown toward us. But what about the second section? It’s a couple of verses talking about God’s material creation: the sky, the oceans, the sun and moon and stars… How does God’s material creation demonstrate that “His love endures forever”?

              Too often we have forgotten how great and marvellous God’s creation is.  Imagine some alternate reality where we didn’t have this earth, and we somehow existed when there was still nothingness. We are then given an assignment to create something – anything we wanted to. Would our minds have been able to bring forth such perfect design? Mankind and animals and plants, with sun, moon and stars, land and water. Male and female, offspring brought forth by reproduction to keep species going, natural selection giving rise to stunning biodiversity, bodies with mechanisms to repair themselves by natural recovery, and natural medicines and antidotes in plants… how did God come up with all these perfect things out of nothing? He just… did it. That’s the peak of creativity, far surpassing the creativity any human could possibly have. We cannot conceive a world other than the one we have now, because that’s beyond us. Sci-fi movies are merely extrapolations of the world we already have. God’s creativity is the divine pinnacle.

Tim Keller wrote about this in The Prodigal God:

“The book of Genesis tells us that when God made this world He looked upon the physical creation and called it ‘good’. He loves and cares for the material world. The fact of Jesus’s resurrection and the promise of a new Heaven and new earth show clearly that He still cares for it. The world is not simply a theatre for individual conversion narratives, to be discarded at the end when we all go to heaven. No, the ultimate purpose of Jesus is not only individual salvation and pardon for sins but also the renewal of this world, the end of disease, poverty, injustice, violence, suffering, and death. The climax of history is not a higher form of disembodied consciousness but a feast. God made the world with all its colours, tastes, lights, sounds, with all its life-forms living in interdependent systems. It is now marred, stained, and broken, and He will not rest until He has put it right.”

              For Christians, the beauty of this world matters. The fact that God invested all His creative powers to create such a beautiful world and such amazing bodies for humans, and breathed into us a transcendent spirit, for us to live in joy… all this shows His love. It’s like an artist who put all his heart and mind to paint the very utmost best painting he could give as a gift to his lover. He could very well have simply painted some mediocre painting, which he probably would have done for someone he hated, or someone he had no feelings for. But no – because he was so in love with the woman, he painted the best he could to give to her, so she could enjoy and admire its beauty. In a far greater way, that’s what God has done for us, except that He didn’t give the world to existing men and women; He gave the world to men and women He created in the first place. He’s given us the best.

That’s the beautiful relation I see between the refrain “His love endures forever” and the list of God’s amazing creative accomplishments: God could’ve created a terrible world where there is only pain, only 2 years of life maximum for humans, NO DOGS AND PUPPIES, or an earth that degenerates very quickly… but nope, He decided to make everything perfect. Although suffering and disease came in, those are the physical symptoms of a spiritually sick world (reminding us of the ugliness of sin) – it’s not the same perfect world God created before the Fall. Despite those symptoms of sin, yet the earth is still beautiful, and there is so much to enjoy; and those symptoms should in fact make us look forward all the more to the restoration of all things in the new creation that is to come, when sin and all that it has brought will be thrown out, and God’s creation will be pure, perfect as He designed it.

Creation doesn’t only show us that God is creative & wonderful. Creation also shows us that God loves us. He redeemed us sinful people, each of us who have faith; as if that wasn’t enough, He will also restore a perfect heaven and earth for us to unite and live and feast in, to enjoy to a sweeter and purer degree than we do now this marred earth. And so in the scope of eternity, indeed His love endures forever: His creation testifies to that.