The Problem of Creation (Part 4)

Every good narrative has tension—a problem that must be resolved. Do you know why? I think it’s because the Story, God’s Story of Creation, has a problem in it, a tension that needs to be resolved. The problem is not with God or his work in creation. The problem is you and me and our sinful rebellion against the God who made us.

Genesis 3 introduces this problem to the plot. The rest of the Bible traces out its development. Over and over again God is merciful toward the people he’s created, and over and over again, they respond with rebellion. It’s not just the story of the Bible; it’s the story of our lives.

CREATION FRUSTRATED IN ITS PURPOSE

If we’re to understand the story of creation, we need to understand the effect our rebellion has had upon it. To begin with, because of sin, creation is frustrated in its purpose to display God’s glory.

Paul puts it this way in Romans 8: "The creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it."

Who subjected creation? God did. In response to Adam and Eve’s sin, creation would no longer be the pure stage of God’s glory. Instead, creation would be both the context of our judgment and at times an agent of God’s wrath against us. Far from being an ever-expanding garden of Eden, the world became a place of weeds and thorns, toil and frustration. As God said to Adam, "Cursed is the ground because of you." And let’s make no mistake; it became a hate-hate relationship.

On the one hand, designed for our joyful and abundant provision, creation now yields its treasures stubbornly and meagerly. On the other hand, created to cultivate and guard creation, we now spend our energies exploiting it and are complicit in its degradation and destruction. While God’s power is still displayed in nature, nature itself is oft encountered as a natural disaster or in unforgiving indifference, leaving countless millions struggling to scratch out a living in their own inhospitable corner of the planet. Though there are some concerned to steward creation, too often that stewardship is motivated not by the worship of God, but the worship of nature.

What all of this tells us is that, despite all the good and right efforts of science and politics to ameliorate human suffering, despite all the good and right efforts of industry to develop and utilize resources, until God removes his curse, there will be no heaven on earth.

CREATION SUBJECTED TO DEATH

But God’s curse on creation goes beyond frustrating its purpose. Because of sin, creation has also been subjected to death.

Nowhere does the Bible suggest that God created all life to be immortal. In fact, the presumption of Genesis 1 and 2 is that he did not. However, the Bible does clearly suggest that God created human beings to live forever. It also clearly says that death entered in later as judgment for our sin. God warned Adam that if he disobeyed, "he would surely die."

And that is precisely the sentence God passed: "For dust you are, and to dust you will return" (Gen 3:19). Paul put it this way: "Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin…in this way death came to all men, because all sinned" (Rom 5:12).

Pursuing our own glory rather than God’s, what we received was the ignominy of a hole in the ground.

This world is not the way it’s supposed to be. God created it to be a place of joy; we know it to be a source of constant frustration. God created it to be a habitat of life; we know it to be a crucible of death. God created it to be our home; we know it to be our graveyard.

We are dead spiritually, and we’re going to die physically. There’s nothing we can do to change that. And we have no one to blame but ourselves.

THE CREATOR DIES

End of story? Not quite. If that were it, then, as Peggy Lee used to sing, we might as well break out the booze and have a ball. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. But there is one other effect the problem of sin has had on creation. Because of sin, the creator died.

Every great story has an amazing, unexpected twist in the plot that no one was looking for. Again, that’s because the Story did it first. Against all hope and defying all expectations, Jesus, the creator of the universe, took on human flesh, lived a human life without sin, and then died on a Roman cross.

Why did he do it? He did it to demonstrate his love for sinners like you and me, to pay a debt that he did not owe and that we could never repay. After all, how can any of us ever make amends for our rebellion against an infinitely holy, infinitely good God? We don’t have a good excuse, and we can’t undo what we’ve already done. So, in love, Jesus the creator assumed my nature and my guilt, and he paid the debt for his people.

"But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom 5:8).

In Colossians 1, right after proclaiming Christ as the supreme creator of everything, Paul explains why the Son of God became a man.

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation, if you continue in your faith (Col 1:19-23).

The good news of the gospel is that the one who made us, who is justly angry at us, has also demonstrated his love for us. On the cross, the creator of life, the One who has life in and of himself, laid his life down so that sinners like us might find life once again, as we repent of our sin and trust in Christ’s sacrificial death and resurrection.

This is the amazing, unexpected twist in the story. You and I couldn’t have invented it if we tried. But we can trust in him, and once again be caught up in God’s love story of creation.