Creation: God's Microphone

Silence is golden until you want to say something. This is a typical feeling for me in the middle of a van with three children and two adults. The three children are usually lobbying for opportunities to say stuff so that they can be heard and the two adults are almost as often trying to quiet them down, so that they can enjoy their own conversation with each other. Silence is more appreciated than it used to be, but it is still an endangered pastime in my world. Part of the reason for this, as Sam mentioned on Sunday evening in his sermon and Josh alluded to in his blog, is that we don’t want to hear; we only want to be hear
d. And thus this is the issue in our world: our brokenness causes us to create unnecessary noise that drowns out God’s voice to us through his creation.

This is why we are periodically astounded by the interruption of the noise by random changes in our life. For example, when we moved to the Gulf Coast fourteen months ago from Atlanta, one of the first things we noticed was extraordinary about this area was that we were able to see a myriad of stars at night. This never occurred to us as a problem in Atlanta, because we were so near the smog and pollution of the city that our inability to see or hear was blind (or deaf to continue our analogy) to us. In fact, the noise pollution itself was noticeably absent from our new atmosphere, since we were used to hearing planes circle the air 24/7 at the world’s busiest airport right up the road. This newfound discovery, however, of our atmosphere was at first breathtaking. It was not like we had never seen a star before, but rather that it had been a while since we had noticed.

No wonder the Psalmist writes in the Nineteenth Psalm: “The Heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.” (Psalm 19:1-4) It is almost as if God is trying to say something to us through his creation. The creation is one of the media by which he communicates with humanity about his glory. The Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans with regards to this and puts it this way: “For what can be known about God is plain to those who suppress the truth (my paraphrase), because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

With reference to our discussion, I think what Paul is saying is that God is plainly communicating to us some measure of his glory, but some of us are failing to hear him, i.e. we are “suppressing the truth”. More importantly, it means that we are willingly tuning him out. What is not to be missed about this, though, is the fact that those in this passage turn away from the one creating to the creation itself. The creation points to something greater, but how we listen to the creation indicates our esteem for the Creator. The fact that we listen at all says that we are in tune to the world around us and are therefore in tune with God. The whole creation is crying out (groaning together in the pains of childbirth) in many respects and I think this reflects its brokenness, but also its longing for God’s glory to free it from its decay. This decay is seen in various ways through various ecological crises, global warming, poverty and famine, slavery, and other human suffering.

So, for us, it is challenging to be reminded that our noises of apathy, busyness, and self-absorption drown out creation’s beauty as well as its deepest needs. The other night I was lying in bed trying to go to sleep at about 1 AM and I heard this scratching sound against the door of our garage. So, I got up and went to go check on things and I discovered that our cat Fluffy was not just scratching the door frantically, but he was moving around like he had gone insane. Then I quickly realized that he had no food or water, because apparently my oldest daughter had forgotten to feed him. So, I fed him and I watched him eat for a few moments, and then I started to go, and he started to act frantic again (as most animals do when I leave their presence), so I took a few more moments and realized that more than resources he needed my attention. And this otherwise frustrating moment of noise had brought me to the silence of stopping what I wanted to do for what God’s creation was trying to tell me. And for a few moments it was nice to enjoy my cat, and I was reminded of that scripture that says, “Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast”, not so I could revel in my righteousness, but be reminded that God speaks in the minutiae of his creation if we take the time to turn down the volume of our life. If we do, we might just hear the glory of God in our pet, in a beautiful sunset, in stars we didn’t know were there, or perhaps in a group of birds or flowers Jesus told us to observe.

posted by Jason G