I’m a pretty busy guy……for my age. I do a lot of things. I make things. This summer, I am learning how to make wooden buckets. For better or worse, I take some pride in what I have built, directly or indirectly, over the years. I say, “I did that.” We, mankind writ large, are busy too. We have built large cities. We have gone to the moon. For better or worse, we, too, are proud of what we have built. We tend to look at our surroundings with pride, and we say, “We did that.”
Today is beginning, as most of my days do, with some quiet time……time for prayer and meditation. BTW……I highly recommend it. It’s a little past 5 am. I am sitting on the back porch watching the day begin. There are trees: oak, walnut, sassafras, maple, and dozens more that I cannot even name. There is grass, a sky full of stars, a few patchy clouds, and more bugs, birds, and critters than I can count.
If I am being honest, I look out at all of this life unfolding before me and I realize something sobering:
I didn’t do that. You didn’t do that. We didn’t do that.
If I compiled a list of the most important and most treasured things in my world and wrote it down in two columns, the list might look like this:
“I did that”
My house and the stuff in it
My job
My hobbies
“I didn’t do that”
My wife
My sons
My granddaughters
The plants and animals in my yard
The sun, moon, and stars
The food I eat
The water I drink
The air I breathe
You get the point.
I exist in an amazing universe. The vast majority of this universe, the most important parts of it, are things that “I didn’t do”. At best, I am an innocent bystander. At worst, I am an interloper………a latecomer who has usurped a world that I did not create.
And yet, I am proud.
How do I reconcile my pride as a human being with a world, the largest and most important parts of which I did not create?
How do I deal with the column titled, “I didn’t do that.”
There are two possibilities:
This awesome world was created by someone else.
This awesome world just happened…….accidentally.
We cannot know with absolute certainty which of these possibilities is true. In either case, we have no justification for our pride. I have no justification for my pride.
But, there is another, more important, level to this dichotomy. This is the question of “who is in charge here.”
If there is an external creator, then it’s his world…..he is in charge.
If the universe just happened, accidentally, then there is nobody in charge. In practice, the world, which we call “our world,” is governed by a committee………a committee of 8 or 9 billion people, each with their own agenda.
And that is where human governance stands today. About half of us accept the concept of a creator, at least intellectually…….a creator who has expectations…….a creator who is in charge…….a creator who is sovereign. The other half accepts the concept of the “universal accident” and governance by committee. The result of this is that, we govern by committee. We may give the creationists seats on the committee. But, we are slowly, but surely, marginalizing them. We call this “separation of church and state”. This idea has become a pillar of global governance.
Creation has been effectively run out of our government. It is being run out of our schools. It is being run out of commerce. When was the last time you heard a Christmas carol or watched a Christmas themed show…….that had anything to do with Christ? I effect, our government, acting on our corporate behalf, has told our creator……”you have no place here”, ……..”we will run things as we see fit.”
This trend toward anti-creationism is a long-term trend. I do not see it reversing in the foreseeable future.
I wonder how God feels about it.
I wonder what God will do about it.
As for me…..I will enjoy the trees, grass and stars.
And I will remind myself:
I didn’t do that.
And I will praise the creator…….my creator…….the guy who actually did all of this.
In the beginning, God created…..
Genesis 1:1, ESV