For many of us, our daily lives involve us in primarily artificial things. We eat food bought from a store or restaurant, much of which is processed and artificial. We travel around on artificially straight roads made by machines, by means of vehicles whose speeds and environments are similarly artificial. We spend hours watching or reading things artificially presented to us, mediated through screens whose hardware and software are produced in one sort of factory or another. We are habituated to believe and feel that our whole world, anything good and worthwhile, is an artifact of human creation.
Of course, “artifice” is not necessarily bad. Human writing, a loaf of bread, and painting are all “artificial” because they are made by human beings. But there is a “threshold of artificiality” beyond which more negative effects start to accrue. Perhaps the worst effect is our increasing difficulty of seeing that God is the Maker and Giver of all things.
How can we see God as the generous Giver of all good things if all we daily use has man as its maker?
The Needless Giver
When we confess the Apostle’s Creed, we begin by declaring, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” We know from the Bible that the things God has made declare that they are his creations. But the rich bounty of our world doesn’t merely tell us that God is its Maker (though it certainly does that). The Scriptures and the world also declare that God is creation’s perfectly good Giver.
That creation is not God is not a throwaway sentiment; it tells us something very important. This fact reminds us that God does not need creatures for him to be God, to be the perfect holy Trinity. It also reminds us that our whole existence is dependent upon his willed generosity: God’s fullness doesn’t “overflow” involuntarily but rather willingly creates life where once it was not. He happily wills to give life and being to all. Yet, in creating, God does not become less himself, nor, on the other hand, does he gain anything. He remains infinitely, perfectly himself. Thus, our existence is utterly gift, and God’s act of giving life to creatures is an act of love.
Creation bears the imprint of God, its Maker. Creation, in its finite way, is rich (1 Timothy 6:17), beautiful (Ecclesiastes 3:11), and good (Genesis 1:31). As Rich Mullins sings in “The Color Green,” the very greenness of winter wheat calls us to praise God for all his tenderness in the works of his hands. While God alone has infinite life in and of himself, parts of his finite creation are, if kept intact and used properly, essentially “inexhaustible” in their very limits. In its annual cycle of birth, life-giving, death, and rebirth, a well-cultivated garden can bear witness that God is “the Lord and Giver of life.”
If God is Good and creatures are by analogy good, then both God and creatures are worthy of our delight and enjoyment, each in their own measure. By God’s righteous creating, creatures have a proper order in which they exist: a way of being themselves in harmony with everything else. This harmony is marred by the fall, sin having brought disorder into the world. However, sin has not annihilated created things or their goodness. Even sin and injustice bear a negative witness to the original order that once was (and will be again one day). In our age, part of the work of the Holy Spirit is to renew our minds and hearts that we might see and know rightly the true relation that creatures have to their perfect Creator and come to know and love him in Jesus Christ (Hebrews 11:3; 2 Corinthians 4:1–6).
Well-Loved Gifts
We human beings are given life “in the image of God.” In this similarity to our Maker, we are given “dominion” over other created things (Genesis 1:26–27). Yet how are we to exercise this under-lordship? At least one way seems clear: Since we are made in the image of the Lord and Giver of life, the Maker of a home for us in which creatures can live and flourish, then we should find ways of acting that are analogously life-giving so that creatures flourish in their proper place. These ways would honor the things given to us as God has given them, treating them with knowing admiration and fitting gratitude toward God (Psalm 92:4).
But even more, these life-giving ways would honor the Giver who gave us these specific things to know, love, delight in, and use. He himself delights in them (Genesis 1:31; Zephaniah 3:17). The psalmist calls upon the Lord to rejoice in the works of the Lord (Psalm 104:31), and those works include his gifts of rain and spring water (104:10–13) and the grass and other plants that grow as a result of that water (104:14). The psalm reflects upon the feeding of the plants, the birds, the beasts, the fish: The Lord God feeds them all so that they live.
This litany of the Lord’s works then includes, as a consequence of God’s gifts, the human works of bread and wine (104:14–15). Now, it seems to me that if these man-made works are going to glorify the Lord who gave us the whole ecosystem that produces wheat and grapes (including the animals who spread their seeds and fertilize their soils), then our making and use of bread and wine should be good in as many ways as possible. The bread should be good bread, the wine good wine, their natural life-giving properties not destroyed but enhanced by our actions upon them, and the least damage to other creatures done in our use of them.
Ideally, in our making and using, our human life would be nourished as well as the life of the other creatures upon whom our lives depend. Surely, if the grass that becomes our bread is also grown by God to feed the livestock (Psalm 104:14; Genesis 1:28–30), then part of our God-honoring use of grass includes not destroying it for future generations — of human beings and of other creatures. If we could learn to enjoy God’s creatures and to steward them according to, rather than contrary to, their own natures, working with the grain of their God-given fecundity, we’d begin to see more clearly how they — and we — reflect the infinite and infinitely inexhaustible life of the triune God.
Our Grateful Delight
The same Paul who tells us that God gives us all things richly to enjoy (1 Timothy 6:17) also tells us that gratitude to God the Giver is one of the most effective ways to prevent idolatry, the sin that forgets God’s generosity and wickedly puts a creature in God’s place (Romans 1:20–23). If we can discipline our minds to give thanks to God for the particular gifts of water, sun, grass, fruit, of neighbor, self, body, soul — things that God absolutely did not need to make! — then a loving delight in and use of those gifts will come from that gratitude. More importantly, that gentle and delighted gratitude in God’s gifts will glorify God, the good and perfect Giver of all things.
