Engage God Through All of Creation

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made.
John 1:1–3

I’ve never been much of an empirical thinker. While I was growing up, the languages of physics, chemistry, and biology didn’t come naturally to me. Like many non-scientist types I completed the requisite high school science courses with average marks and bid the topic farewell. Apart from a tangential brush with physics in an undergraduate structural engineering course, I got along without science just fine.

But then things changed. After a dramatic spiritual awakening I decided to switch careers, study theology, and become a preacher. At first, my lack of scientific proficiency wasn’t a problem—my text, after all, was the Bible, and my tools were ancient languages, systematic theology, and church history. But, a few years into my new calling, I woke up to a very old truth (the seeds of which had been hiding in my church denomination’s theological tradition for centuries). It was the idea that God speaks through the creation:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Gen 1:1

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
Ps. 19:1–4

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities— his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.
Rom. 1:20

According to the apostle Paul, God can be clearly seen through what has been made. The universe reveals God’s invisible qualities. God spoke through creation long before speaking through the Bible.

This is what Christians throughout history have believed about divine revelation—that God speaks through two books—the Bible and creation. Each is a means through which God can be known and experienced. Both Scripture and God’s creation are authoritative texts.

Science unpacks God’s creation words.

When I was a teenager, I had to memorize a portion of the sixteenth-century Belgic Confession (addressing “The Means by Which We Know God”) for a catechism class:

We know God by two means:

First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: God’s eternal power and divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.  All these things are enough to convict humans and to leave them without excuse.

Second, God makes himself known to us more clearly by his holy and divine Word, as much as we need in this life, for God’s glory and for our salvation (Guido de Bres, Belgic Confession, Article 2).

For a person of faith, these two books connect synergistically. When we know God (more clearly) through the written Word, we can know God (more clearly) through creational Words.

I can’t recall ever hearing a message when I was growing up about God’s revelation through a knee, a tree, or a giant squid. Not once did I hear a sermon on the wildness of wolverines or the unique qualities of ice. When a preacher did mention creation, the reference was illustrative. I didn’t hear that the very physical nature of creation could teach us something about the very nature of God. Of course, there were references to beauty and complexity in the cosmos, but I never heard anything about the physical nature of mountains, immune systems, or gravitational waves saying something about what God is like.

I would have remembered a sermon like that. As I never heard one, I never imagined preaching one myself—until I got a letter from Vancouver’s Regent College inviting me to participate in a John Templeton Foundation grant aimed at helping pastors explore the intersection of faith and science. Their letter stated that God speaks through two books and where those two books appeared to be in conflict, one of the books was not being properly read. I immediately accepted their invitation.

While the two-book idea had already taken significant root in my faith life by that point (leading me to preach dozens of sermons on God’s revelation through music, film, art, sports, politics, and current events), I had never applied it to the sphere of science. Yet, if God speaks through the creation, how could we ever understand this physical text apart from the gift of science?

Science unpacks God’s creation words. Scientists are made in the image of an empirical God. All physical reality has its genesis in God’s imagination. God was the first physicist, chemist, and biologist. According to the Bible, Jesus was the means through which God made all things (John 1:1–3; Col. 1:15–17; Heb. 1:2). Jesus mediated both creation and salvation. The cosmos reflects Christ’s world-arranging wisdom.

Science points to, reflects, and illuminates the mind of Christ. Even as the person and work of Jesus are mysteriously veiled in the Bible’s Old Testament, the person and work of Jesus are also mysteriously veiled in the fabric of creation.

This mysterious connection makes me wonder if there is a deeper truth at play: Could it be that God has always meant for these two books to be read together, in concert with one another, co-illuminating each other—the Bible shining light on creation and creation bringing deeper understanding to the Scriptures?

Is God’s revelation this all-encompassing?

Creation reveals things about the nature of God. God speaks through the cosmos. Creation is God’s first book. To read it we need science. Science is not the enemy of the Christian faith; it’s an ally!

Jesus and the Natural World

Jesus referenced creation in many of His parables and teachings. He taught that the kingdom of God is like a seed, yeast, salt, birds, flowers, and the expanding nature of fermenting grapes. Jesus called Himself the light of the world, the true vine, a cornerstone, the root, and the bright and morning star. Often Jesus used nature to nudge His followers toward spiritual understanding, suggesting they consider the grass of the field, the solidity of rock, the shrewdness of snakes, the innocence of doves, the humility of a child, the technique of hens gathering their chicks, the germination of wheat kernels, the way the wind blows, the constancy of the sun, and the indiscriminate nature of rain.

God can be clearly seen through what has been made.

On first reading, many of these nature references could be taken as mere figures of speech, but, if Jesus really is the one through whom all things were made, perhaps there is also a deeper meaning. When Jesus told His followers to “learn this lesson from the fig tree” (Matt. 24:32), was He cognizant of all the biological wisdom that went into conceiving that tree in the first place?

In the gospel of John, we read that Jesus clearly knew where He came from (John 13:3). At one point He prayed, “Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed” (John 17:5). Later He prayed, “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world” (John 17:24). Jesus clearly recalled the pre-creation glory He shared with the Father. His miracles imply an ongoing connection to His pre-incarnate power. If Jesus could recall His pre-creation glory in these ways, could He also recall all that He knew about the nature of a world that was made through Him? Was Jesus aware of the particle/wave nature of light when He said He was the light of the world?

Since Jesus knew that creation was made through Him, He would have known that “light” was made through Him, which gives His words a deeper meaning. Beyond being a good analogy, light is a good part of God’s creation, made to operate in a certain way, and reflective of God’s thinking and being. Of all created things, Jesus equated Himself with light.

No matter how specifically Jesus in His self-limiting omniscience (see Matt. 24:36) understood the scientific nature of light, His Father (whose will Jesus followed unerringly) certainly did. When Jesus called Himself the light of the world, God the Father knew all that there is to know about the science behind light.

The Father, who knows Jesus best, has a full knowledge of creation. For us to know more about Jesus, we need to know more about creation. Science helps us get there.

The Spirit who turns people’s faces to God is the same Spirit who hovered over the face of the unformed cosmos. The Spirit who inspired the Bible is the same Spirit who brought light to the universe.

If we want to know the mind of Christ, we need to gain a deeper understanding of the physical nature of light (and of all creation). We need to read biblical creation references with the Author’s omniscience and original intent in mind.

To do that we need science.

A Prophetic Imagination

Through the prophet Isaiah, God says,

“See, the former things have taken place,
and new things I declare;
before they spring into being
I announce them to you.” . . .

“I am doing a new thing!” . . .

“From now on I will tell you of new things,
of hidden things unknown to you.
They are created now, and not long ago;
you have not heard of them before today.
So you cannot say,
‘Yes, I knew of them.’”
Isa. 42:9; 43:19; 48:7

Even as Isaiah’s contemporaries had trouble imagining what God had in store with the coming of Jesus, we are stretched to think that the Jesus we know through the Gospels can also be known through creation.

Theologian Walter Brueggemann writes, “If there is any point at which most of us are manifestly co-opted [by the commonly accepted view of reality], it is in this way. We do not believe that there will be newness but only that there will be merely a moving of the pieces into new patterns” (Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 23)

God can and will do something new. We need to trust and believe that God can be known through creation in concert with the Bible in an authoritative, epiphany inducing, life-transforming, all-things-filling way.

Like Brueggemann, we need to ask “not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable” (Ibid., 44).

Lectio Scentia: The Spiritual Discipline of Scientific Knowing

In his classic book Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster defines a spiritual discipline as a means through which ordinary people can enter into a deeper experience with God. At its core, a discipline is a spiritual practice where “the inner attitude of the heart is far more crucial than the mechanics” (Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, 3). In order to effectively engage God through a spiritual discipline there must be a “longing after God” (Ibid., 2)—a deep desire to know, understand, and experience God more.

What’s true for the classical disciplines is also true for the discipline of scientific knowing. To know God through science, we need to want to know God through science. This desire, of course, is also a created thing—authored by a God who wants to be known through all things. To help make this happen, God created a compulsion in us to want God so deeply, so often, and by whatever means available that it would take something like revelation through creation to make it happen. To help us engage the fullness of God, we’ve been given a huge revelatory book—creation.

To engage creation, we need to acknowledge that it speaks a different language than the Bible speaks—a seemingly infinite number of languages involving color, sound, complexity, scale, order, chaos, beauty, time, feeling, element, animal, and more. God uses all these languages to reveal Himself in a more all-encompassing way.

Christ speaks through the parable of creation so that, through everything, we can attend to Him and hear His voice (if we have eyes, ears, and hearts to see).

The question is do you want this?

Do you want to know God in this kind of creation-attentive way?

This question is crucial because a more fulsome experience of God can only come about through a more fulsome commitment on your part.

And where do you find the heart for that?

You ask for it.