01 Friday Mar 2013
Posted in Creation, Thanksgiving, Worship
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God created us and built us for a relationship with him. We belong to him, and we owe him gratitude for every breath, every moment, everything. Because humans were built to live for him (to worship), we will always try to worship something – if not God, we will choose some other object of ultimate devotion to give our lives meaning.
- Tim Keller
27 Friday Jul 2012
Posted in Creation, Heaven, Restoration, Worship
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Psalm 96:12-13 says, ‘All the trees of the forest will sing for joy; they will sing before the Lord, for he comes, he comes to judge the earth.’ Isaiah 55:12 says, ‘The mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.’
If you put seeds into a pot of soil and then put it away in the dark, away from the sun, the seeds go into dormancy. They can’t grow to their potential. But if you bring the pot with seeds into the presence of the sun, all that has been locked within them bursts forth. The Bible says that everything in this world – not just we human beings but even the plants, the trees, the rocks – is dormant. These things are just shadows of what they have been, would be, and will be in the presence of their Creator. When the Lamb of God presides over the final feast and the presence of God covers the earth again, the trees and the hills will clap and dance, so alive will they be. And if trees and hills will be able to clap and dance in the future kingdom, picture what you and I will be able to do.
- Tim Keller
21 Wednesday Mar 2012
Posted in Beauty, Creation, Stewardship, The Bible
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It is easy to read the first chapters of Genesis with the questions of our time: ‘How long ago did this happen?’ ‘Is this history or myth?’ ‘How does this square with modern views of science and evolution?’ etc. These are important questions, and we can probably learn some things from Genesis that are relevant to them. But we don’t learn much from a text if we ask questions that it was not written to answer.
Genesis is about deeper issues than biological origins. It is answering questions like: ‘What are human beings?’ ‘What are we here for?’ ‘What is our relationship to nature and to the world?’ Essentially, Genesis 1 is not about the ‘how’ of creation but rather about the ‘why.’
The word ‘God’ appears 30 times in the first chapter of Genesis. God overwhelms the text; he dominates and overshadows everything. Nothing happens unless he makes it happen. Nothing is created except by him. There is nothing in existence that does not owe its existence to him. We see immediately that the extreme repetition is a way of saying, ‘Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made’ (John 1:3).
And, we see that everything God makes is ‘good.’ Everything he touches is pleasing, joy producing, wholesome. There is a wonder and awe about the richness of the world. It ‘teems’ with life.
Notice that the overall effect of the highly patterned, repetitive text is to demonstrate that the world is made in an extremely orderly, purposeful way. There was ‘evening and morning’ not just once — but regularly, faithfully, continually. What we have here is a cosmos, not a chaos. And because God created everything, nothing is outside of his control, or outside of his rightful authority. The animals, plants, and even the mountains and seas are all part of a choir of praise to the glory of God. This is said explicitly in Psalm 19 and Psalm 150.
Notice too that only we are described as made ‘in the image’ of God. It is clear that we have a closer relationship to God than any other creature. We were made by God to be in relationship with him and to rule the world on his behalf. God gives us the task of subduing the earth and ruling over creation as his representative. Note too that it is only after the creation of human beings that the world is declared for the first time to be ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31).
- Tim Keller
02 Friday Mar 2012
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The Bible describes the making of the world not only as the building of a house, but also as the weaving of a garment. God turned a chaos into a cosmos, and also turned a tangle into a tapestry. Woven garments were long in the making and valuable in ancient times, and therefore they were an apt metaphor for the wonder and character of the material world. The sea (Psalms 104:6), the clouds (Job 38:9), the lights of the sky (Psalms 104:1), and all the forces of nature (Psalms 102:26) are called garments that God has woven and now wears.
As a result, the world is not like a lava cone, the product of powerful random eruptions, but rather like a fabric. Woven cloth consists of innumerable threads interlaced with one another. Even more than the architectural image, the fabric metaphor conveys the importance of relationship. If you throw thousands of pieces of thread onto a table, no fabric results. The threads must be rightly and intimately related to one another in literally a million ways. Each thread must go over, under, around, and through the others at thousands of points. Only then do you get a fabric that is beautiful and strong, that covers, fits, holds, shelters, and delights.
God created all things to be in a beautiful, harmonious, interdependent, knitted, webbed relationship to one another. Just as rightly related physical elements form a cosmos or a tapestry, so rightly related human being form a community. This interwovenness is what the Bible calls shalom, or harmonious peace.
- Tim Keller