"The whole Earth is full of His glory." -Isaiah 6:3
I am simply in awe of how powerful and creative God is. In the ravine next to the house in which we used to live, I was struck by the vast beauty of nature: rabbits hopping around, large and ageless trees towering above my head, a trickling stream coursing its way over conveniently-placed slate. And that is only three creations!
Flowers knowing when to bloom, volcanoes slowly building themselves up over millions of years until an archipelago forms, chimpanzees knowing which land is theirs and where the next tribe over starts, the circulatory system of humans, forest self-maintenance, the list goes on and on.
In the movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Gene Wilder leads his guests into a room in which everything is edible, and he sings to them that, “If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it.” But this is just a room that Dahl created on a typewriter that Wolper later turned into a reality; God has created every single thing on this Earth, from towering sequoias, to human intelligence, to mighty oceans, to the smallest of bees and flowers. If you want to view paradise, just look around and you will see it everywhere.
How can you not be amazed when you look at nature? When you find out how the endocrine system functions? Or the fact that my endocrine system messed up to the point where my pancreas stopped working, yet through modern medicine, I am still alive twelve years later? Wake up and smell the roses! They smell incredible! Because God wanted it so.
God decided one day that He wanted to create light, and so it was. He decided that He wanted to create a world with water and land, and so it was. He decided that plants and animals should roam the lands, swim the seas, and fly the skies He had created, and so it was. But was that enough for Him? No; who was going to reign over all of these things? So He took a little dust off the ground and there was humanity. He created us to take care of His creations, and what have we done?
Viewing the Earth as a twenty-four-hour clock, we have destroyed nearly eighty-three percent of His creations in less than two minutes (Northern Arizona University); over ten percent in the last twenty-five years (The Guardian). Not only is that not sustainable, but it is an abomination to destroy God’s inventions which He put in our care.
Within the last hundred years, our population has grown by more than two billion. And out of those billions of people, think of how diverse they are- just one of God’s millions of creatures, and Europe alone has several languages, dozens of ethnicities, and hundreds of historical backgrounds, and God created them all.
Even the things that Humankind has created were only possible because of the knowledge and gifts He endowed us with. In a sense, God created fire, the wheel, the cotton-gin, the food processor, the iPod, aquarium gravel, cement, low-flow toilets; you name it, He made it. The Bible, the Quaran, the Origin of Species, The Declaration of Independence, Catcher in the Rye, and even this article you are reading right now only exist because of God.
The most important thing to take from all of this is that He has given all of this to us, asking only that we love one another.
