"Does God make junk?” A question I often pose when talking with my daughters...
It goes like this. Daughter says so-and-so said so-and-so is ugly — my response, "does God make junk?" In saying this, we are freed to ignore the opinions of man and instead concern ourselves with God's thoughts and who he is — the creator. It brings the truth that He is near and active, not a God that once created the world and has resigned but rather our God who is still tending to his creation.
I hate to demote your lofty opinion of yourself but you are part of His creation like the birds in flight. True, God’s creation was a gift to us but we are tasked to work in God’s image and to exercise dominion over the fish of the sea and everything that creeps upon the earth (Genesis 1:26). But notice that work first begins with faithfully representing God.
Consider this from English Theologian John Stott:
"God the Creator is lord of his creation. He has not abdicated his throne. He rules what he has made. No Christian can have a mechanistic view of nature. The universe is not a machine which operates by inflexible laws, nor has God made laws to which he is himself now a slave ... He is living and active in his universe …"
United States author Wendell Berry writes:
“The ecological teaching of the Bible is simply inescapable: God made the world because He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it. It is His world; He has never relinquished title to it. And He has never revoked the conditions, bearing on His gift to us of the use of it, that oblige us to take excellent care of it.”
I ask you and myself:
How would you change the way you think about nature if you pictured God himself tending to its care?
How has your view of “exercise dominion over the earth" put yourself in God’s rightful throne and made God a slave?
How has your consumption of nature deprived others of His good gift to us all?
Does "love your neighbor" mean the neighbor 50 years from today?
Its difficult not to prescribe ways for all of us to change but lets get into a rhythm of gratitude for the world created for us and next time you want to say a disparaging comment about something in nature as ugly and horrible — does God make junk?
By: Elder Michael Schafer
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