Nature Is A Good Name For An Effect Whose Cause Is God
Two of my boyhood heroes were Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. I learned some years after my conversion that both frontiersmen had personal encounters with God at revival campmeetings. Churches then were made of rough timber and the men themselves were as rough as the wilderness that they helped to tame.
Having been brought up in a non-Christian home I had my first encounter with God through nature. “He who forms the mountains, who creates the wind, and who reveals his thoughts to mankind, who turns dawn to darkness, and treads on the heights of the earth— the Lord God Almighty is his name.”
I was excited to read that Davy Crockett broke out in a paean of praise as he too saw the handiwork of God in nature. We read: “Just beyond the grove there was another expanse of treeless prairie, so rich, so beautiful, so brilliant with flowers, that even Colonel Crockett, all unaccustomed as he was to the devotional mood, reined in his horse, and gazing entranced upon the landscape, exclaimed, ‘O God, what a world of beauty hast Thou made for man! And yet how poorly does he requite Thee for it! He does not even repay Thee with gratitude.”
Sometimes you just need a quiet place to clear your head, to renew your soul and the beauty of nature helps you do just that. Its silence causes you to worship, its power reminds you of your human frailty, its beauty soothes and heals your shattered nerves and reminds you that the best is yet to be. Life without God is nature without trees, trees without fruit, gardens without flowers, flowers without blossoms, the day without golden sunshine and the night without the pale moonlight.
In contrast to the above I also read this week about biochemist Steven Benner at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Florence, Italy. He believes that there is increasing evidence that life began on Mars and was brought to Earth on a meteorite. (I hearastronomer Carl Sagan in the static background) He believes that some three billion years ago when the earth was a gooky mess made up of some organic primordial soup, nature needed “a little help” to make things happen. Brenner believes such help came from Mars, a planet which, unlike earth, may have had a supply of oxidized molybdenum. When the Martian-oxidized molybdenum was inserted into the gooky mess of our planet it might have helped these building blocks make “the leap to life.”
Now that’s a giant leap of faith into the dark that I am not willing to take. It’s a lot simpler to believe what the Holy Spirit wrote in Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Radical -speculators, pseudo-intellectuals with their junk science like Benner have far too many conjectures to please me. Words like, “maybe,” “possible,” “could be,” “we think,” and “might have;” are no more than utopian-wishful-thinking. Give me no guess for my dying pillow.
Now I know science doesn’t like to deal with spiritual things because they can’t be measured, or repeated in a laboratory setting. That is probably a good thing. But it sure doesn’t fill your heart with gratitude nor inspire you to worship God. I like the theology of frontiersman Davy Crockett much better than the cultic-science that such men peddle.
Isaiah 65: 17-25 reminds us that one day nature is going to put on a new suit of cloths and we will have even more reason to praise the handiwork of God.
“See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy. I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people; the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more. “Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years; the one who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere child the one who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed. They will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat. For as the days of a tree, so will be the days of my people; my chosen ones will long enjoy the work of their hands”. They will not labor in vain, nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune; for they will be a people blessed by the Lord, they and their descendants with them. Before they call I will answer; while they are still speaking I will hear. The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, and dust will be the serpent’s food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain,” says the Lord.”
The Best Is Yet To Be For The Child Of God.
Pastor Bryant