(avg. read time: 2–4 mins.)
As something of a follow-up to my recent series, I would like to share an adapted version of something I wrote years ago about the complexity of creation’s testimony and speech concerning God. It is one of the rare cases that you will see me write something along the lines of what is commonly considered “devotional.” It represents a coalescence of two divergent meditations from two divergent texts.
The first came in response to a tragedy. On April 17, 2013, a fertilizer plant exploded in West, Texas, a small town (roughly the size of my hometown, Fritch) located around fifteen miles from where I lived (Hillsboro) while going to seminary. Indeed, the shock of the blast shook my house, though I did not know it was from an explosion at the time. That night and the next day as I thought about the people of West and the long, tough process of recovery ahead of them, one of my favorite passages of the New Testament came to mind. That passage was Rom 8:18–27, specifically vv. 22–23 and 26–27. There Paul references the hope of believers and its relationship to the present time. The present time is one of suffering for the whole of creation and for the believers who are part of it. We stand between the time of Jesus’s First Coming with the inauguration of the age to come with it (especially in the resurrection) and the time of Jesus’s Second Coming with the consummation of the new creation. The new creation has begun in the children of God, but because it has only begun the children and creation continue to groan in labor pains until the new creation comes to fruition. Indeed, the suffering of this time is the pain of labor. In a sense, the suffering of the present time witnesses to that hope. The people of West, particularly my brothers and sisters there, joined the dark chorus of inarticulate groaning, sighs too deep for words, waiting for that day of renewal and redemption even as they struggle in the process of rebuilding.
On the other hand, on April 19 of that year, I was continuing a practice I began on April 1 (the day after Easter) of reading and praying through the Psalms. On that day, it was Ps 19. The first four verses of that Psalm in particular are rather popular. Here, the creation testifies to God’s glory through its very existence as God’s handiwork. The heavens and the earth have no language and their voices are not heard, yet they still speak (somewhat similar to the sighs referenced in Rom 8) and their testimony reverberates throughout all of creation. While in Rom 8 the testimony of creation is at best a negative witness—testifying to what is not yet here—in Ps 19 the testimony of creation is clearly positive—testifying to what is true about God (which Paul notes elsewhere in Romans in 1:20).
It may seem that these two notions are contradictory, but I think the divergence actually functions to express a deeply biblical truth which is also echoed in discipleship. The creation witnesses because of God’s past action and present action, yet it also groans waiting eagerly for the future action of God and in that groaning it provides a further witness to the faithfulness of God. There is something of the already/not yet tension here, especially since the time of Jesus. In the same way—as suggested by Rom 8—disciples of Jesus are to live in a state of witnessing and groaning. They witness to the past action of God by continuously telling the story (particularly, the scriptural story) and to the present action both in the act of telling and in the act of embodying the story. At the same time, they groan in suffering and in that groaning testify to the faithfulness of God by crying out to him for the consummation of his faithfulness. As this chapter (and others such as ch. 6 of the same letter) indicates, believers participate in the life of Jesus, including his suffering. In thus participating, they too will participate in his resurrection (cf. Phil 3:10–11). It is especially in times like this one when the children should recall their hope and their vocation and look to Jesus for both.