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OUR DISTORTED WORLD
The next time you have a chance to get out and appreciate the beauty of
God=s
"good" creation, take a few minutes to remind yourself how easy it is
for people to get confused about what God is like when looking at nature.
People tend to think of this world as a nurturing place which has brought
us into being. We hear so much
about living in harmony with the land and the earth being our mother. Our world is a place of
beauty, fruitful harvests and great multitudes of creatures, but this
is beauty in the midst of vast areas of barren rock, desert sand and perpetual
ice. Nature, as we know it, is
bountiful, but it sustains itself at great cost to its members. To a spectator
the food chain is a self-sustaining balance.
To a participant the food chain is cause for continual anxiety about
their own safety. Much of the wondrous abundance of creatures spend each
day in a life and death struggle fleeing from one another, while trying to get
enough food to survive.
We live in a fallen world. Each
person and animal will one day physically perish.
Even though this is the way the world is today, we need not assume that
this was the way that it was meant to be. Yet,
when someone dies of old age we say they "died of natural causes".
The Bible does not teach that death was present as a part of the
"good" creation in Eden. Nature
has been drastically changed. An
accurate view of nature, as it existed prior to the Fall and its curse,
would not require us to think that way.
On a recent nature program on PBS, it was stated: "The hawk is not
cruel. It is simply getting
nourishment the only way that nature has provided for it."
This claim ignores the fact that Genesis 1:30 tells us in the beginning
God gave the beasts of the earth every green plant as their food.
Before believing this modern view point, consider that Romans 6 tells
us that Jesus came to conquer sin and death.
If these things had been part of the original good creation, he would not
have needed to conquer them. The
presence of predators in the land is a manifestation of the fallen world.
It is not the hawk that is cruel, it is Satan.
The deformed and defaced creation, what we call "nature,"
provides a distorted picture of what "good" is.
It casts a shadow upon the image of God in creation, so that we see
his character less clearly. The
creation, as God's handiwork, is one of his expressions of himself to us.
The curse=s distortions to the creation have wrongly implied that the blame
for suffering should actually rest upon God.
If the good creation, which God made and placed in Eden, caused him to be
praised, then the destruction of these things have the potential to prevent him
from being praised. This would
appear to have been one of Satan's motives in defacing the creation.
When man yielded to temptation in Eden, one result of his Fall was the
curse upon the creation. In this way, Satan defaced the good creation with thorns,
decay and deterioration as well as sickness, suffering and death.
An example of Satan's motives might be found in a friend's story of
buying a house. They purchased a
house in a foreclosure auction, but at the time of the closing the former
owner had not yet left. The former
owner was enraged at having his dream house taken away from him, so he did what
harm he "legally" could before being forced to leave.
He kept the new owners out as long as he could before the authorities
would have removed him. In that
period he stole fixtures, hauled away an outbuilding and left a multitude of
filth behind. If he had been able
to get away with it, he probably would have leveled the house and contaminated
the property. Why?
Because he felt he had been wronged by the system and was venting his
anger.
Can you see Satan in this image? Satan
questioned whether God was in fact greater than he was, presuming to be an
equal. His boast was, "I will
make myself like the Most High."
(Isaiah 14:14) His punishment for this rebellion appears to be occurring in
stages. Satan, like the evicted
homeowner, had the opportunity to express his anger at the system's
"unfairness" from his point of view.
Since that time, he has been doing as much damage as he could.
By causing the creation to become deformed in the Fall, Satan has impaired
the creation's capacity to display God's character. Remember that Jesus warned that Satan was a liar, a deceiver.
Because of this we need to be reminded that our understanding of God's
character must be based on what He has told us in the Bible, not just what we
see in nature. By Maurice Hamel 9A&14C122900 www.healingtheland.org |