Dr. Rodney Plunket

"All Things Bright and Beautiful"

a topical sermon on giving thanks for God’s creation
November 29, 1998

Mrs Cecil Frances Alexander lived in Ireland in the 1800’s. She was married to the Primate of All Ireland; that is, she was married to the highest ranking bishop of the Anglican church in Ireland. But I suspect that few remember her for the influential man to whom she was married. I suspect, instead, that she is most remembered for the hymns she wrote, hymns for children. She said that "her hymns were usually written for her Sunday School class and were nearly all read over to her small scholars before being published" (F. A. Jones, Famous Hymns and their Authors, 280). Two of her hymns are in our songbook. One of them is "Jesus Calls Us" which was written in 1852, but I want to focus upon the one written in 1848; it is based on the verse in Gn 1 which says, "God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good" (Gn 1:31). Please take your songbook and turn to #85 and look at the words of this hymn by Mrs C. F. Alexander. [Read from photocopy].

This hymn’s simple message seems to me to point the way toward the attitude that Christians should have toward all that God has made. We must not worship creation; that is idolatry. But it is equally inappropriate to feel that true spirituality causes us to rise above the physical world––to rise above it and view it disdainfully. A person with either of these views could not truly appreciate the view expressed in the simple song which Mrs Alexander wrote for children.

When God saw that creation "was very good", I believe that what we are to realize is that God enjoyed it. He was glad He made it. He felt good about the result of His labors.

Sometimes people misread a later chapter in Genesis. They read Gn 3 with its report of human sin and the consequences of sin, and they think that creation was completely ruined and that none of the goodness which God initially saw remained after that sin.

I believe that such a view is erroneous. If you pay close attention to Gn 1 you will see that everything which Gn 1 specifically refers to is still true after Gn 3; in fact, it is still true today. We still have light and day & night. We still have sky, dry land, and seas. We still have vegetation. We still have the sun, the moon, and the stars. We still have birds, great sea creatures, fish, and land animals. Yes, sin’s entry into the world was like the introduction of a pollutant into a pristine pool; but the goodness which God first saw, although tainted, has not been annihilated. And on this, the first Sunday after Thanksgiving, I want to thank God for the goodness of His creation; and I want us to recreate the attitude expressed by the simple children’s hymn written one hundred and fifty years ago by Cecil Frances  Alexander. I want us to reflect on the many things which God has made and in worship say, "How great is God Almighty, who has made all things well".

The evangelical Christian writer, Tony Campolo, has written a book entitled How to Rescue the Earth without Worshipping Nature. In the early pages of that book Campolo reports,

Studies show that the more zealously committed people become to evangelical churches, the less concerned they are about the horrible things that are happening to the environment. We "Bible-believing, born-again, Spirit-filled Christians", more than any others, seem to have turned deaf ears to the pleas to save God’s creation from what has to be called sinful exploitation (p 3).

And my experience confirms what Campolo reports. I have preached several sermons here at Broadway which have challenged established ways of viewing lots of things. But the sermons I have received the most criticism for are the ones in which I have argued that Christians must care for creation and must be sensitive to the pain which humans inflict upon it. Some even thought that I was being misled by a lot of liberal, tree-hugging, non-Christian writers whom people assumed I had read. But the writer who had the most impact upon my view of environmental issues was the late Francis Schaeffer and his little book, Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology. Schaeffer was a conservative Christian writer who profoundly affected many Christian thinkers. He was certainly not a liberal, tree-hugging non-Christian. What I learned from Schaeffer was that we who know and love the God who made all that is must be the most careful about how we treat God’s creation. Again, let me say that we must never worship creation; but we must value it as something that God made, as something He entrusted to our care.

And let me warn against an attitude that is easy to adopt. We live in a time when many of those who stridently voice environmental concerns are also followers of the New Age Movement. We oppose that false religion, and we should, but many Christians have been deceived into thinking that to be environmentally concerned is to be a follower of the New Age Movement. Such is not the case. We must not be indifferent toward God’s creation just because the followers of a false religion value that creation on false grounds. Campolo says it well when he writes, "I am worried that our indifference to the destruction of God’s creation will allow a bunch of New Age gurus to hijack a movement that should be ours" (p 5).

Now let’s go to Scripture. I will not even attempt to point out all that Scripture says with regard to the value of creation in the eyes of God. I want, in fact, to focus upon only two items that are rarely noted. First, I want to notice the usage of a Greek word in the NT, a Greek word generally translated as "world". Second, I want to focus upon a relevant passage in Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome.

Let’s look first at the Greek word commonly brought into English as "world". That word is kosmos. In Greek it begins with a letter that looks like a "K", but it is the word from which we get our English word "cosmos" which begins with a "C". This Greek word is found 186 times in the NT, and Hermann Sasse in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament provides the NT’s definition of this term when he writes that this word "is not just the universe as the sum of all created things. It is also the world which is now estranged from its Creator and Lord" (3:885). Sasse highlights two elements of this word’s meaning in the NT. This word refers to "the sum of all created things" and it refers to "the world which is now estranged from its Creator and Lord".

I want us now to look at a few NT usages of this word, but first please take your Bibles and turn to Jn 1:1-3b and follow along as I read.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

Many of you are familiar with this passage. It refers to Jesus as "the Word" who was essential to the creation of everything that has been made. Here we do not have the word ko/smoß, but look down further in Jn 1; look at v 10. There we read about Jesus that "He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him". The word translated "world" here is the word ko/smoß. Here we have it said that the world (the kosmos) came into being through Jesus. It seems to me that Jn 1 is using the word kosmos in v 10 to refer to the ‘everything that has come into being’ in v 3. In other words, kosmos in Jn 1:10 is the shorter way of referring to all of creation, a point that Hermann Sasse also makes in the relevant article in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (3:884). The point I want to make is that John seems to me to begin his Gospel using the word kosmos to refer to the whole of creation, the whole of creation which was brought into being by the Word who is Jesus.

Now take your Bibles and turn to Jn 3. Look at vv 16-17 and follow along as I read. Notice the word, "world". Back of that word is the same Greek word to which I have already referred, the word kosmos. Listen to Jn 3:16-17.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

God sent Jesus because He loved the kosmos and not just because he loved human beings who live in that kosmos. God sent Jesus because He wanted to save the kosmos. Yes, the salvation has to be directed toward human beings because we are the ones who infected and continue to infect this kosmos with sin. We are the ones who need to hear and accept the Gospel of Jesus in order for the kosmos to be saved.

Please look with me at one more usage of this term, kosmos. Please turn to Rev 11:15. In that verse John is seeing a vision of the heavenly announcement which will come in the future when the rule of God is complete. Listen to John’s description of that announcement. Rev 11:15 says,

Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever."

Hear what is being said. The heavenly voices refer to this kosmos that includes everything that God has created, this kosmos that has been estranged from God; the heavenly voices refer to that kosmos and tell us that there will be a time in the future when that kosmos will be fully reconciled to God and will actually become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah. God saw that the kosmos was "very good" back in Gn 1. He is not about to allow Satan to win the victory over the goodness that God created. It will once again be God’s. It will once again be very good and unspoiled by sin. The power of God’s redemption will see to that.

Now please turn to Rm 8 and follow along as I read vv 18-23. Paul says,

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

In Rev 11:15, John prepares us for a future time when the kingdom of the kosmos will become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. Here Paul prepares us for that same time with different language. Paul refers to that time as the time when the creation "will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God".

I know that 2 Pe 3:10 says that "the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up". But I believe we must interpret that passage in a way that makes sense with these other passages, and Paul in v 15 of Rm 8 says, "the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God". To say that "the freedom of the glory of the children of God" into which creation "will be set free" is the same as a fiery destruction is absurd. Paul says that creation is going to receive a wonderful blessing that is somehow comparable to the blessing Christians will receive when Christ returns. Paul’s view combined with John’s view causes me to believe that 2 Pe 3:10 is referring to the radical purification which will take place immediately after Christ returns. But just as new, spiritual, immortal bodies will arise from graves into which physical, mortal bodies were laid; so will a new heavens and a new earth arise from that old heavens and old earth; and in that new heavens and new earth decay and death will be no more and creation will no longer groan as a result of human sin. God will redeem the kosmos which all those millennia ago He saw and saw to be very good. It will be a new kosmos. It will be a liberated kosmos. But it will have a connection with the old kosmos, a connection no more mysterious than the connection between our resurrection bodies and the bodies we now possess.

What does all of this have to do with our view of creation today? When we learn that God loves creation as Jn 3:16 says He does, and when we learn that God wants to save creation as Jn 3:17 says He does, and when we learn that the groans of creation were heard by the inspired ears of the apostle Paul––then surely we realize that creation is valued by our God. He values it so much that He will one day make it His kingdom and the kingdom of His Christ. Since God so values creation how can we claim to have taken on His heart if we are unconcerned about the extinction of something that He has made.

I have not the relevant skills to know how to address expertly the environmental issues of our day. I often read both sides on an issue and find myself confused about how we should proceed. But, even though that troubles me, it troubles me far more when I hear believers who do not care about environmental issues and who think it insignificant when some form of God-created life ceases to exist. God made it. He made it all, and He liked it. He left it for us to look after. And those of us who love God will want to take good care of it because by preserving it in all its rich diversity we allow future generations to look at it and worship the God who made it and be able to sing the little song which declares "How great is God Almighty, Who has made all things well".

Let me close with a simple illustration. [Hold up dishcloth]. Look at this dishcloth. It is a handknitted dishcloth. My family has several of them. My mother started making them and giving them to us years ago. Every year she would make us one or two more because we told her what good dishcloths they were and how much we enjoyed having them. As you know, my mother died earlier this year. She will not be making us any more dishcloths. Having them and using them is one of those neat connections to my mother. She would want us to keep using them, and we will. But we use them carefully. We prize them, because we prize the one who made them. Because we love my mother, we value what she made.

That is the attitude that we should have with regard to what God has made. We prize creation because we love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And on this the first Sunday after Thanksgiving, we praise God and thank Him for making "all things well".

If you need to be brought home to this God who made you and will remake you into the person you were created to be, if you need to come to God now, please come forward as we stand and sing.

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