Creation

I was talking to my dad the other day as we sat at Flame Broiler eating a healthy lunch. Being the concerned father that he is he asked how my studies were going and what I was doing in class at the moment. I told him that I'm bogged down in studying 3 different views of the timeline of creation and that to be honest I was getting a little fed up with it. I asked him if he had an opinion on the whole subject and, being that he is a Peterson of course he had an opinion. He said that he had all ways ascribed to the K.I.S.S. method of reading the Bible. He smiled and told me that stood for Keep It Simple Stupid. He said that as he’d read the Bible throughout his life he’s found this principal to be a good one and that all too often we tend to muddle things in the Bible and to confuse what it’s trying to tell us in the process of appearing to be smart. He said that although there are different views really what matters is that God did the creating and the rest will be argued until the end of time. Ultimately as we conversed and in light of my own meditations I’m inclined to agree. I remember reading the story of the creation of the world and falling into the wonder of it as I was amazed that God was so powerful he created everything around us. I remember trying to imagine what it must have looked like if I was standing at the creator’s side and marveling over each new wonder as he unveiled it. I think that God must have had a grand old time in fashioning the different animals that we see now, from the long necked giraffe to the fat hippopotamus. I was always entranced with the notion that God was so incredibly creative that he could think up a world where all those wonders exist. As I got older and began to battle with the realities of creation, I took a severe apologetic approach to the whole matter. I lost myself in trying desperately to disprove evolution and to make sure that if and when I got into debates that I would come out looking smarter than my opponent. I had statistics and witty comments to make on a wide variety of topics concerning creation and I was a force to be reckoned with. As I grew older still and entered the world of college I was again taken to a state of wonder as I examined biology, anatomy, chemistry, geology, and astronomy. The natural sciences were breathtaking and learning even more about the intricacies of the natural world renewed my high opinion of our Creator. I've kept up with science over the years and would read each new article concerning the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle and the Large Hadron Collider. I would read about science looking into the far corners of the galaxy and discovering new solar systems. I’ve always been a big science fiction fan and I love that idea that there might be something else out there, even if this is bad theology. I could've gone into a field of study that concerned the cosmos and I even went to summer space camp when I was younger, but as I matured in my faith I realized that while knowledge of creation is good, knowledge of the creator is better. Then as I went into seminary I was hoping to be wowed and amazed all over again, but something funny happened. Instead of looking at the breadth and depth of God it became an academic study of the regenerate or unregenerate Paul in Romans 7. It started becoming about who was right, Calvin or Augustine? I found myself in bitter discussion with friends about the nature and degree of predestination and what the correct hermeneutical interpretation of Luke 16 really is. And somewhere along the way God fell from the sky and from nature and landed solidly into my textbook and that’s where he stayed. It’s hard to see the forest when you’re busy cataloging and dissecting the trees. But as I looked and really thought and prayed over the passage of creation, flickers of memories came back like scenes from a movie I've lived through. I was reminded of the tears that streaked down a friend’s face as he and I sat on a rock and watched the sunrise over a valley completely uninhabited by man. I was reminded of a night in Alaska when I saw the sky shimmer an alien green as traces of the northern lights meandered across the sky. I thought of sitting on the ruins of an abbey in Whales and finding a peace there that seems to escape me in the daily rat race. I was reminded of a time where I stepped out of a hut in small village town in the middle of the Ecuadorian jungle and looked up and saw the night sky. It was bright and blazing and I felt like if I looked too hard into it I’d lose my grip on gravity and fall into an illuminated universe and go careening into the Milky Way. I looked back at those times and saw that they were good. I get it. After every day God looked on his creation and saw that it was good, and I couldn't agree with him more. I have every intention of finishing my degree and I will have a ready answer if a student asks me where I stand on the order of decrees. I’ll be able to share my opinion on the triune nature of God and I’ll be able to explain why I ascribe to the day-age view of creation. I’ll do all that and what’s more I’ll be able to tell people why I see God in his works of nature. Why I look at the ocean in its seeming infinity and the moon on its path through the sky and why I know that God must have created all of that, because when I look at it I can see that it’s good. Why I’ll be able to look at my wife knowing that God created us individually and to be together and I know that it’s good. When my father told me to keep it simple there’s a truth there that cannot be quantified or calculated, it’s the call to know what the Bible says and why it says it, without losing the wonder of why it even has to say anything at all.