by John Roberts
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A Picture Book
“Dad, can we read “Go Dog Go ” tonight?” I must have read this book well over a hundred times to my little boy. He knew the words as well as I. Sometimes we would try to go as fast as we could, back and forth, each saying every other word to see how far into the book we could go before jumbling it all up in a big bundle of goofy laughter. He knew all of the pictures – lots of dogs, and birds, and trees and things. Picture books – what child is not first introduced to books and reading with one, two, or three words on a page, and a big drawing of an animal doing something simple? This is milk, not solid food. It is sweet, easy, and satisfying. For a child it is the manner by which a printed word gathers more meaning, how the word for water becomes understood as water, rock as rock, and light as light.
In a sense, God has provided us a picture book that helps us to understand his printed Word. When you open your Bible you don’t immediately see pictures. Look more closely, though, and you will find words like lightning, fire, wind, seeds, flowers, trees, and birds embedded everywhere in its passages. These are all things of nature – common things, familiar things. God created nature to be all around us. To live on earth means that you are immersed in nature. Perhaps as a child you climbed a tree, hid behind the trunk of a tree, or rolled in a pile of tree leaves. Now when you read the word tree, your mind provides you with understanding based on a lifetime of memory-enriched mental images of a tree. You can picture a tree and also understand many of the complex qualities of trees, like strength, durability, or vitality.
He is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yield fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. (Psalms 1:3)
In a child’s first picture book the picture was printed across the page to bring more meaning and understanding to the written word. In the Bible, it is the printed word that gains fuller meaning and understanding through a connection to its real image and natural properties. Through God’s great created tableau of nature we are able to understand more of the deep meaning, the invisible qualities, the poetry behind words in the Bible.
“God is the Rock” (Deuteronomy 32:4).
“God is light” (1John 1:5)
Rock and light – these are more than words in a sentence. They are power-packed pictures on a page. Because of their connection to creation and our familiarity with the things in nature, what we can comprehend is not just light or a rock. From these words we are better able to understand the complexity of spiritual things and the hidden things in God’s Word
These men…are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted – twice dead. (Jude 12)
In God’s picture book, nature helps bring forth understanding, and thus, nature helps the Father teach his children the meaning behind his written Word – milk becomes solid spiritual food. God uses our familiarity of things in nature to help communicate his messages across social, cultural, or intellectual boundaries, to both the young and old in Christ, and even to the places where Christ is not yet preached.
Going Where the Bible Isn’t
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, ...(Rom 1:20).
The Bible, as a pathway to understanding God, is not available to everyone. In the words of the Gideons (www.gideons.org) “millions of people are living their lives with no access to the Scriptures.” However, from what has been made – nature, God provides a pathway to understanding, that is available to anyone.
Poets, artists, musicians, writers, through all time, have recognized and proclaimed that from the experience of nature comes recognition of God.
“Nature is a greater and more perfect art, the art of God.” Henry Thoreau
“Bless Thee, O Lord, for the living arc of the sky over me this morning.” Carl Sandburg
“O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountains’ majesty, Above the fruited plain, America, America, God shed his grace on thee…”
Katherine Lee Bates
Even if the proclamation is not of God but of a “higher-power;” or if it is the simplest of exclamations, a “wow” from an ordinary person who sees beauty in the setting of the sun, it is important to recognize each of these connections for what they are. They are recognitions that through nature all humans can begin to comprehend the existence of God. For many, however, what is understood about God through nature goes much further than the “wow” that comes from seeing its beauty or power.
“God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all. All are expressions of …Love.” John Muir
Nature serves to “plant the seed” of faith in God, it makes awareness of God more accessible to anyone anywhere on earth.
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world. (Psalm 19:1-4)
God has created nature everywhere. There is no place on earth that nature is not. By what we eat and drink, and by every breath we take, God has made our bodies dependant on nature – his nature. While all that He has created often goes unseen, nature is an ever-present link to God. For Christian or non-christian, nature may serve to discipline us, humble us, lift us up with glorious beauty, or fill us with love, but always it is an ever-present pathway towards God.
Bringing the Bible to the Here and Now
The stories of the Bible and the life of Jesus happened in a place and time that is unfamiliar to many people. Compare your home, where you live right now, to 2,000 years ago in the deserts of the Middle East. Again, water, wind, rock; many things in nature are as equally understandable in Biblical stories as they are to you where you live right now. However, if all around your house are northern white cedars instead of the cedars of Lebanon, or there are fields of corn instead of groves of olive or fig trees, if there are no wild lions that live where you live, does this effect the living connections between you and God – how you daily feel the presence of God, how you may listen for direction from God, how you may be comforted by God’s presence? Biblically there is no doubt, God is here and now, Christ is alive, and the Holy Spirit is with us. Yet for those (probably all of us) who have even small notions that Biblical passages are most relevant to an old and far away place, nature can help to erase such modern-life gaps in spiritual confidence.
Through him all things were made;
without him nothing was made that has been made. (John 1:3)
He does make all the things that we know as nature, including your corn, your trees, and any animal, perhaps even coyotes, that howl in the night near you. The shrubs in your yard and the birds that feed from you backyard feeder are just as much God’s creation as anything of nature mentioned in the Bible. His creation is also here and now. Nature can serve to bring the Biblical stories and God more fully out of the deserts of the past and into the here and now of living daily with Christ.
…for every animal of the forest is mine,
and the cattle on a thousand hills.
I know every bird in the mountains,
and the creatures of the field are mine. (Psalm 50:10-11)
If a person walks along and happens to kick a fancy watch on a chain, he will stop to pick it up and recognize that it has a maker and value. If instead of a fine watch, that person were to kick up a small stone, would there be any recognition of value or of God, its maker ? In itself, the stone, or all things in nature, have no spiritual significance. It is a sin to worship nature , yet it is perhaps foolish to ignore something that God did create . It is all around us, omnipresent and essential to our present life on this earth. Pay attention to that which God has created and you may find that it is a living connection to our living God that adds richness and meaning to his written Word. The Bible and creation are intertwined tools – gifts from God to serve, along with his Holy Spirit, to teach us, rebuke us, and build us up in faith and love. Nature helps connect our lives to Christ.
“We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him (Matthew 2:2).
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[1] Philip Dey Eastman, Go Dog Do (New York: Random House Books, 1961
[2] Gerald L. Schroeder, The Science of God (New York: Free Press, 1997)
[3] Job 31:26-28, Exodus 20:3-4
[4] Job 12: 7-10