let me provide three areas for further consideration.
First, this first creation story should deeply influence the way we view God. God is the one holy and transcendent God, completely distinct from all else that exists; God is the almighty and omnipotent God, all-powerful, able to do anything he wills to do. These truths call us away from any form of idolatry: not just bowing down to idols of wood or stone, but—much more deeply—thinking or acting in any way that displaces God from his rightful place. God is the ultimate source of our life and all that we have. God alone provides purpose to our existence, and all of humanity’s deepest desires are only fulfilled in God. God is the only one outside of our most dire situations, the only one powerful enough to meet our most difficult challenges, and thus the only one who can deliver us from our most desperate predicaments. No humanly crafted ideology or entity or resource can fill these roles—neither capitalism nor communism, neither democracy nor dictatorship, neither nation-state nor natural strength, neither wealth nor wisdom—only God the Creator.
To bring this close to home, we should ask ourselves some hard questions. What do we look to as the source of our life and the good things we enjoy? Where do we turn when we lack those good things? What is it that defines our purpose for being, for us as individuals or for our faith communities? What is it that gives meaning to our life, to our work, to our rest and recreation? When we face our most difficult problems and most dire situations, where do we go for help? Is it some human resource such as money, or knowledge, or physical strength? Is it some human system or institution like capitalism or democracy, or any government? Or is it a human being, perhaps a close friend or parent or spouse? Certainly the holy and almighty God can work through things and people to meet us in each of these ways, but as Christians our first and final answer to these questions should be God our Creator.
Second, this first creation story should profoundly shape the way we think about the natural world. Nature is not merely “nature,” a rather neutral term; it is in fact “creation.” It is not a phenomenon brought about by random, impersonal forces and therefore without any ultimate significance. It is not a resource to be used up or exploited to fulfill humanity’s never-ending desires. It is not a hostile force that must be aggressively tamed in order to build a comfortable dwelling place for humanity. It is not a temporary shelter for humanity to be discarded for something better down the road. All of these perspectives on the natural world can be found in Christian thinking, but all badly miss the reality of “nature” as God’s creation, which he has affirmed as “very good.” The created order is God’s sacred temple, beautifully and fittingly made by God to be the place where God meets with humanity, where God dwells with his human family. It is therefore a reflection of God’s glory, God’s eternal power and divine nature (see Psalm 19:1–4; Isaiah 66:1–2; Romans 1:20), and so to be treasured by humanity, God’s royal representatives on the earth.
This thought does, then, speak to the modern question of evolution and Christian faith, though perhaps not as directly or extensively as some might like. If we are going to allow Scripture to shape our understanding of God as Creator and the natural world as God’s creation, we cannot have a purely naturalistic approach to the origins of the universe, the earth, and life on earth. That God—the holy and almighty and loving and faithful God—“created the heavens and the earth” means that we must not think of all things coming about through merely arbitrary forces or purely natural processes. Creation proceeds from God—from the will of God, from the heart of God—and thus is radiant with divine significance. While some may wish to say more than this about God’s role in the process and timing of creation, as Christians we certainly cannot say less.
All this points to another, very practical application of this perspective on the natural world as God’s creation: the importance of what has been called “creation care.” Many Christians are skeptical of environmentalism, some seeing in this a flawed theology that attributes too much significance to nature or even “divinizes” nature. But this criticism is entirely unfounded: no biblical text so clearly differentiates between the transcendent God and the created world as Genesis 1 does, yet no text so clearly emphasizes the “very good”-ness of creation and human responsibility within God’s creation as Genesis 1 does. Caring for creation in “environmentally friendly” or ecologically sensitive ways is not somehow sub-Christian; it is in fact a profoundly Christian thing to do, taking seriously the very purpose for which God created humanity in his image. Christians should be at the forefront of such efforts, not because we share in some flawed theology but because our own Christian theology—our own inspired Scripture—calls us to this task of creation care.
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