Attenborough and an Inglorious Creation

The universe speaks out the glory of God. We found the Psalmist saying this as we continued in our Christmas series ‘Glory‘ this week, and he’s not alone in his declaration. Scripture is full of pointers to the revealed glory of God in Creation; David tells us to ‘look up’ to see God’s glory in the heavens – the stars and galaxies – in Psalm 14. Elsewhere we are told to ‘look around’ at God’s control over and provision for all the earth as evidence of his glory (Psalm 104). Genesis invites us to ‘look at each other’ to see the image of God in created human beings (Genesis 1:27), and Solomon states that when we ‘look within’ we find a longing for something more than all the temporal things that surround us – a desire to see the glory of God (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

This crescendo of creation is, according to Paul in Romans 1:20, the clear display of the glory of God, leaving us without excuse for missing it.

But is Creation really all that glorious? Some time ago I saw an interview with David Attenborough in which he raised exactly this question:

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In pointing to Creation to show God’s glory, Christians only point to the beautiful things and forget about all the ugliness in the world, Attenborough posits.

Natural disasters.

The possible ugliness of human nature.

A Creation that seems to war against itself.

What is the answer to this objection? How can we see the glory of God in the midst of such horror? In truth, it is on this very point that we see the glory of the incarnation; God becoming flesh in Jesus, whose birth we celebrate at Christmas each year.

We live in a fallen world, stained and broken under the weight of sin. We surely do catch glimpses of God’s glory here and there in the world, but it is often alongside the shadow of an ugly world; Creation groans, as Paul says (Romans 8:22).

So how does the incarnation deal with this?

Just as Creation groans in its brokeness, Christ groaned with it.

In the incarnation, Jesus the glorious Creator, took on the ingloriousness of this world. He became flesh like us. He got tired, hungry and worn out. It’s certainly not implausible to say that he must have fallen ill at times. He experienced the pain of seeing loved ones suffer and face death. He experienced the brokeness of this world first hand, even to the point of his own torture and death.

However, it’s not just  that Jesus shares in our brokeness. Through his death and resurrection the  redemption of Creation is promised with his return. Paul shows us this in Romans chapter 8:

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.                         Romans 8:20-21

There will be a day when Jesus returns to restore Creation to perfection. Now we see glimpses of his glory; then we will be dazzled.

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To listen to or download the accompanying sermon for this post, click here. For the full series, click here.