Comfort Through Creation: Relating Everything to God

This post is the eightth in a series deriving from the “Comfort Through Creation” seminar that took place at Rocky Creek in March 2025. If you’d like to receive the PDF and audio version of that seminar, you may email allen@rockycreek.church.

I don’t just mean this post’s subtitle as lip service. I mean this phrase literally. Relating everything in all creation back to God, its source. All of creation—from the galaxies beyond our comprehension to subatomic quarks in our eyeballs (also beyond our comprehension)—points to God. Actually, saying it that way is almost too tame. Of course all of creation points to God. But that phrasing almost implies that God is outside of our world. It would be more correct to say that all of creation conveys God to us. That is, creation teaches us about God, makes him known, makes us in awe of him even as it makes him more “graspable.” It draws him near in our imaginations, which he already is in reality.

Get up in the morning and/or go outside in the evening. Watch the sun rise or set. And marvel that God is doing this, it is not hard for him in the slightest, and he is doing it partly so that you will be lost in amazement that this same God cares for you. “‘God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.’”

Gerald McDermott states, “[M]ost Christians have been trained not to see the meaning of the innumerable parts of this world….They have been conditioned to see beyond the earth and its heavens to a realm fundamentally removed from what they can see. They miss the glory of the Lord that is all around them….” In other words, one weakness of many Christians in the 21st century is that we look right past this world to the world to come—forgetting that this world won’t be done away with, but rather will be remade. Heaven will come down to it. In striving to be so heavenly-minded, we dismiss the signs that are here on earth that make God visible to us. Is it possible that—even though we acknowledge God and believe that he created and runs the world—we live as if the world was not “alive,” that it is set in motion by God but that God is somehow distant? That we fail to relate to the things made by God in a “sacramental” manner (i.e., experiencing through our five senses constant reminders of God’s presence with us)? Andrew Wilson helps us here. He says:

“Few of us can stand in front of the Grand Canyon or see a high-definition picture of the Horsehead Nebula without wanting to praise somebody or something for the majesty of what is before us. Some of us will suppress that urge. But those of us who don’t and allow the song of gratitude to swell within us will find ourselves concluding all sorts of things about our Maker. The God of the Sahara must be vast, boundless, and expansive. The God of quarks must have an unimaginable eye for detail. The God of wombats must have a sense of humor. Everything in creation has theological implications, and one of the joys of being human is figuring out what they are.”

In other words, it is the privilege of human beings to look at the world around us and, based on what we observe, draw inferences and analogies that point directly to God himself. Wilson again helps us make the connection:

“Things exist not for their own sakes but to draw us back to God….[T]he gifts of God in creation are like a boat which takes us back to our homeland: a means of transport which we can (and should) celebrate but never mistake for the destination itself. C.S. Lewis talks about following the sunbeams back to the sun so that we enjoy not just the object of goodness but the source of God. Creation preaches to us. The things of God reveal the God of things.”

Therefore, let’s plead with God that he would give us omnivorous attentiveness (a quote I once heard by a C.S. Lewis biographer) to see him everywhere through the things he has made. Psalm 19:1 says, “The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship.” So, let’s listen to creation proclaim and look for creation to display.