The Gospel Through Nature

When first composing this piece, I considered titling it "The Gospel of Nature."  But I want to be clear from the beginning: If the Gospel is defined as the Good News about the offer of salvation from sin and death, by grace through faith in the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, there is no gospel apart from that which is revealed in God's Word, the Bible.  

The Bible, God's inspired Word, is his Special Revelation to us: words written by humans, through the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit, with the purpose of giving the clear message of salvation to the world.  Without the words of God and the work of Jesus as revealed to us in Scripture, there is no knowing of our need for repentance and God's amazing grace.

In this way, there is no additional or alternative "gospel" taught to us only through nature.  No "gospel" of living good, kind lives; no "gospel" of spiritual experiences on mountaintops or worshipping only while alone among the trees.  No "natural theology" alone will restore us to right relationship with God, our Creator, Sustainer and Savior.

But, the Good News about Jesus' redemptive work and the character of God as revealed to us in the Bible is absolutely corroborated by the natural world through General Revelation, the revealing of God's character and human nature to all people through Creation.  

That is what I mean by writing of the Gospel through nature.

"God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars."  -Martin Luther

While I don't believe that Martin Luther's quote above is perfectly theologically sound, I think the sentiment he is expressing is on the right track.  We must have the Bible, God's Special Revelation to his beloved creatures, to rightly understand the Gospel.  

That we are sinners in need of salvation by grace given by a loving, self-sacrificing God is not inherently apparent in trees and clouds.  But, that we are lovingly created by an infinitely wise and good God is; that something in the world is broken and not as it should be definitely is; and that this creator-savior God delights in exquisite beauty and abundant, orderly, thriving, joyful life certainly is as well.    

In the middle of the first century, the apostle Paul wrote at the beginning of his letter to the church in Rome: "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse."  (Romans 1:18-20 NIV, emphasis my own)

What we as humans need to know about God in order to begin to seek him and believe in him is clearly on display for all to see in the natural world, and has been as long has humans have been breathing oxygen on this planet.  

Every human being ever to have lived has seen, heard and felt God's eternal power and divine nature through the created world, understanding something of his immensity and power and otherness - and something of our own smallness and frailty - from our experiences with nature.  Some just choose to ignore it.

Suppressing this hard-wired knowledge and the evidence of God's nature that Paul tells us can be clearly seen and understood in nature leads to God's justified wrath and right judgment on those who reject him.  (He is, after all, the creator, and he alone is the one who has the right to decide what is best for his creation.)

Paul goes on to describe what happens to those who ignore these clear signs of God's existence revealed in nature:

"For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.  Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.  Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.  They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator - who is forever praised. Amen."  (Romans 1:21-25 NIV)

Yes, it sounds harsh.  But it's really very tragic: Human beings are missing the ultimate good purpose they were created for and settling for a counterfeit, to their own destruction.

But you might protest, claiming this is just so unfair.  How are people supposed to understand all of this just from nature? 

Put simply, we're not.  

We're supposed to be drawn in by nature and learn from nature, but that's just the beginning.  From there, we are invited to seek God and find him, revealed much more fully in the pages of Scripture.  Then we are called to yield to him. 

The Gospel is revealed to us in full through Scripture, but we are prepared to receive it, at least in part, through nature.

How does nature prepare us to receive the Gospel?

First, I would argue that all of creation screams that there is a Creator, an intelligent, powerful being behind it all.  

Nature is immeasurably vast, mind-bogglingly ancient, infinitely intricate and heart-achingly beautiful.  So too must its creator be.  

All of creation points to a source, an origin, some uncreated creator and uncaused cause.  A piece of art requires an artist.  Music demands a musician.  Complex machines must have a maker.  Consider the human body, the eye, the structure of cells, even the most primitive organism in nature: These pieces of art, these little machines, all demand a creator.

The first step is to acknowledge that God, specifically the Creator God of the Bible, exists.

Second, creation teaches us that we were created to live in harmony with this God, enjoying the goodness of working and worshipping in his presence.  I believe that the deep yearning we feel in nature to connect with something greater than ourselves points to this truth.  

We don't need to connect with the earth itself, but rather the Creator of the earth.  

Whether you feel this tug at your soul while cultivating your backyard garden, hiking in the mountains, farming, watching the birds or enjoying the sound of wind in the trees in a city park, this is what you're acknowledging: Human beings were created for the purpose of enjoying God in his beautiful creation.  From those very first two people, who were placed in the Garden to work and rest and tend it, as priests in a holy temple, humanity's calling has always been to live near God amidst his beautiful creation. 

The second step is to realize that right relationship with God is what we are designed to desire above all else.

Third, creation shows us, with startling, heart-rending clarity that all is not well in the world.  Whether your heart breaks over the devastation wrought on our planet by greedy and careless humans, or you squirm uncomfortably watching one animal devour the young of another, you feel it: Something in this world is broken.  (Aside: whether or not animal death is a product of the Fall and sin entering the world is another fascinating topic for another day.)  Pollution.  Deforestation.  Extinction.  Environmental degradation.  Habitat fragmentation.  Climate change.  

Creation shows us that we, as humans, have failed to tend and care for nature well.  Thus, we have failed to worship the Creator as we should.  

The third step is to agree that, in the words of Paul, "all [humans] have sinned and fall short of the glory of God..." (Romans 3:23 NIV)  And thus, we are deserving of just punishment.  

The magnitude and power of nature leaves us feeling small, powerless and unworthy.  We are laid bare, utterly exposed to the devastating power of a storm.  Those mighty ocean waves crashing on the shore could easily wash us away, swallowing us in their churning depths.  And that would be entirely just.  The creation we were entrusted with is in ruins - and try as we might, we just can't do enough to save it on our own.  We can never be good enough to atone for our own sins.

This is where the General Revelation of nature leaves us: with the knowledge of a good, beautiful, perfect, powerful, amazing God, who created us to worship him and with whom we desire to be in relationship, and yet who we can never reach on our own.  He is too other, too holy, too righteous, too wonderful, too far above us.  

Stretch out a hand to the stars and touch one.  Reach into the fire and take hold of a flame.  We just can't.

BUT GOD.  Two of the greatest words in the Bible.  But God, in his great grace, mercy and love for us little humans came to us to bridge the great chasm.  Jesus came into the world, fully God and fully man, to live the perfect life we can never live and die a sinner's death on a torturous Roman cross - in our place.  Our substitute.  Having taken our sins and failures and shortcomings upon himself, bearing the punishment of separation from God that we rightly deserve, he then gives us his righteousness in exchange when we turn to him in faith and surrender.  

To receive his salvation as a free gift of grace, we must agree with him that we are inadequate to ever do enough to save ourselves.  We are unable to reach his level of perfection on our own.  We are in need of his forgiveness, and his substitutionary sacrifice.  We are utterly dependent on the work Jesus did on the cross on our behalf. 

That verse I quoted above from Romans 3 wasn't the whole sentence.  The whole sentence is this: "There is no difference between Jew and Gentile [i.e. it doesn't matter one whit who you are, where you come from or what you've done or not done], for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus."  (Romans 3:22b-24 NIV) 

Every human being has sinned and is unworthy.  Yet every human being is offered the free gift of salvation by God's amazing grace when we agree with him that we are sinners in need of his forgiveness.  

To be "justified" is to be made right with God.  It is to have that mountaintop yearning, that soul-ache at nature's beauty, truly satisfied.  

It is to be brought back into that Eden-like ideal relationship with him, which we can know in part here on earth and will fully realize one day in the future when Jesus returns.  

Then, God will right all wrongs and remake his beautiful, precious creation just as it was always intended to be, free from sin and tears and pain and all the ugly, bad, seemingly hopeless things we inherently shrink from (or rise up in anger at) in this world.

In the words of the great J.R.R. Tolkien, "The birth, death and resurrection of Jesus means that one day everything sad will come untrue."

Water pollution and mass fish die-offs.  Ravaging wildfires and displaced wildlife (and people!)  Habitat loss and species extinction.  Melting ice caps and starving polar bears.  Plastic in the oceans and choking, drowning seabirds.  

All these sad things will come untrue and cease to be, because God cares for his creation and will one day renew all things.

We know he will do this, because the tomb is empty.

And we are reminded of the promise of resurrection in the sunrise that is new every morning, in fresh green life bursting from barren land every spring, and in the continuous cycle of birth, death and new life that is inherent in every ecosystem around the world. 

"Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime." -Martin Luther

No, nature doesn't tell us specifically about the Resurrection, the resurrection of Jesus.  But it certainly hints at the concept of resurrection, a physical return to life in a new body after death.  

Nature also reminds us daily of God's goodness and the promise he offers us of renewed life and abundant life here and now, lived in the glorious presence of our creator God - now and forevermore.

And that is Good News.