Perfectly Designed

The Lord sure did a good job when he created the world! It is so varied and so beautiful and so real. I have often heard people say that we were made for heaven, but I don’t think that does justice to God’s creation, nor to our relationship with it. The universe was created by God as a sort of terrarium, a perfectly designed home, for His children. He designed us for the world and the world for us. He gave us 5 distinct senses through which to perceive and enjoy the many splendored delights with which He filled the world. He gave us minds to wonder and speculate and he placed within us the ability to comprehend and appreciate the wonder of it all. We may be fit for heaven, but we are definitely fit for earth.

We were meant to enjoy God’s creation and to manage it for Him and with Him. We were designed to hypothesize and to question and to discuss these questions with Him. I’m not sure that He answered all of Adam and Eve’s questions directly. If Jesus’ interactions are any indication, He may have often answered them with another question that spurred their investigation rather than answer them straightforwardly. You see, He also created us with the capacity for growth. We obviously grow physically, but our intellectual and spiritual growth is more subtle and less apparent. Our environment contains all that we need to stimulate and encourage our growth, if God is a part of it. God is always a part of it, but we are not always aware of Him and even more rarely seek or welcome His input or perspective.

When Adam and Eve decided that they would be better off seeking knowledge apart from God, they began the idolatry that still afflicts their children today. We placed our trust first in a serpent, who cunningly encouraged us to trust in ourselves to know the best, and planted the seed of doubt about God as our father. He is the father who delights to give good gifts to His children, but we don’t believe that. Like Adam and Eve we believe that He is holding something back that is good for us. He is denying us knowledge and experience that we want or need, and so we greedily grab the fruit from the tree and eat it, only to discover that it is sweet in the mouth but poisonous.

The world that was so perfectly designed for us, and us for it, becomes not just the location but the source for our idolatry. We make life on earth or various aspects of life the center of our pursuit, the objects of our worship, rather than delighting in them as gifts from our Father that turn our hearts back to Him. It is so easy to fall into making this world our home and focus, and this is a testimony to what a great job God did in fitting us for this world. We were made for this world, but we were meant to enjoy it in relationship with God, and we are incapable of truly reveling in it apart from Him. He has given us all good things to enjoy, but instead of enjoying them rightly, we long for them, we lust for them, we make them our god.

This is obvious when it comes to sex, power, drugs, alcohol, or even food, but is less obvious in other areas. This is all complicated by the fact that we have become masters of self-deception and rationalization. We call something a virtue that is really a vice. The scriptures call this iniquity. Iniquity is a perversion of perspective; it is calling something that is bad, good, or something that is good, bad. It’s not just missing the mark, or even willfully missing the mark, the first is sin and the second is rebellion. Iniquity is deeper. It is a twisting of our perception that warps reality for us, and we no longer deal with what is actually true, but rather with our own personally or culturally defined reality.

As Christians who are striving to follow God and to work out our salvation with fear and trembling we must be on guard against our own self-deception as well as that which comes from the world around us and the devil, the old serpent. Anything that makes this present world, or anything in it, myself included, the center of the universe is wrong. I find that some of my own ministry is man centered or self centered rather than God centered. I do many things for the wrong reasons and label them as good. This doesn’t make them inherently bad, but the more I do this the farther I slip down a slippery slope. Is it bad to build schools to educate illiterate children? No. But the real question is, “Is this what God would have me do?” Anything that is not from faith is sin. When we go through life as practical atheists, with no real relationship to God, no humility or submission to Him, then we are unrepentant idolaters regardless of how much we read the scriptures or how orthodox our theology is. God, must be the center of our lives and we will be most human and alive, and most able to enjoy the world He designed for us when we are living in humble submission to Him.