Let there be...

Everything apart from God, begins with creation. There is no other way for any item to be in existence apart from through creation. The manner of creation may vary from item to item, and the immediate creator may vary as well but creation is a universal experience. Nothing (again apart from God) escapes being created.  It is bizarre and troubling to me that a world that owes itself to creation would not place a much higher value upon creativity. After all we were made in the image of God who himself was a creator.

By saying God is a creator it does not simply mean that God created something, instead it is part of who he is. As Plantinga points out in Chapter 2 of Engaging God's World, "Creation is neither a necessity, nor an accident." God very intentionally created the world because it was an outflowing of who he was as Plantinga says, "Creation is an act of imaginative love." All of creation that we can see points to the joy of it's creator in making it. The very vastness and the great and incomprehensible diversity indicate a God who delights in creating more and more. That is the creation we are a part of and in fact which God has put us in charge of.

In the January Series Andy Crouch talked about how to bear God's image is to desire to create. Far to often we look at the world that has been given to us and instead of bearing the image we are marked with well, we abuse the world. Creation should be natural to us, an act that is a fitting outpouring of our humanity just as it was a natural outpouring of God's divinity. We need to try to return to that creative spirit. God has even provided us the resources, the whole world is ours to use, but we are supposed to use it to create and expand the horizons of the possible, rather than misuse and abuse it by seeking our own personal gain and pleasure.

To be a creative bearer of God's image means not only creating new things but creating new bonds and relationships. God is a relational triune God with each part delighting in the other in the mysteriously  wonderful dance of perichoresis. In creating us in his image God has invited us to join the dance both with him and with the church, his bride. How churlish it would be to refuse a dance with the maker of the universe, our, perfect-in-every-way, husband.

Another aspect that struck me about both Plantinga's book and Andy Crouch's talk was the concept of dominion of the world, as not an instance of us having power over the world but us being able to empower the world. So often we get the idea that power means to command and that to have dominion over something means to order it around. In reality having dominion over the earth "is never 'lording over'; it's more like 'lording under'". It is stewardship not conquest points out Plantinga. Crouch in his lecture pointed out that even in the creation process there was not a command. God did not directly order things, there was no struggle to impose anything. God simply said "Let there be..." It is such a relaxed and free phrase. It implies a desire for something more rather than a task or duty to make. As the image bearers of a creator God let us also approach our creative impulses not as duty to harness the world and force it's resource into new shapes and forms but rather to seek for the freedom and expansion of creation by saying "let there be..."