Each morning, we are offered the chance to rise up and worship the Creator. He is so vast and glorious, and yet he is concerned today with the smallest details of our lives. Nothing is beyond the reach of the Artist’s paintbrush. Woven into the entire fabric of divine revelation are tantalizing glimpses of an active, passionate, deeply engaged God who is creating onto his empty canvas. Creator is part his unchanging personality type. In our daily language, we must set the verb create free to soar into the present and future tenses. God creates and he is startlingly creative! Whether God is bringing his clay into existence, meticulously crafting it, pounding it down, reshaping it, waiting for it to dry, placing it in a fiery kiln or pausing to admire his handiwork, God is a creative God. Whether he is mobilizing vast armies, tearing down the walls of a city, remaining silent for awhile, or whispering to people in their dreams, God the Creator must be seen in the bigger context of the creative process. He has a work of art in mind, and his masterpiece is on the way.

Our God is the God of a new day. He puts a new song in our mouths. He gives us a new commandment. A new covenant and a New Testament. New birth and new hope. His new compassions are poured into the earth every morning and they never fail. He is the God of new wine, and the maker of a new and living way. “The old has gone; the new has come!” In the new Heavens and the new Earth, Jesus will sit on his throne and still shout, “I am making everything new!”

Let’s embrace a radical creationism that unites our theology of the Creator from the beginning of Genesis through the end of Revelation, and into the tiniest details of our lives. God doesn’t change or evolve. The Creator is the same yesterday, today and forever. We must resist the tired, old temptation to mentally squelch his creative, quickening, life giving power into the beginning of the Bible and leave it sitting there to gather dust. This kind of thinking results in an artificially formal, stiff collared, half hearted worship of a blurry, foggy, shadowy representation of some distant figment of our fantasies. 

The next time you have words with an “evolutionist,” don’t fall for the same, tired old debates. Blow his mind open with a new way to express your convictions. Explain how you see the Artist’s fingerprints everywhere around you.  You look around and explore his handiwork.  You close your eyes and feel the wind feathering your face.  Invite him to watch from the shore as the osprey swoops over the roar of the river, plunges into the waters then rises victoriously with a twisting trout in the grasp of her talons.  Each spray of white flowers in the golden grass over an alpine hillside is a demonstration of the Creator’s stunning imagination.  The newborn baby breathing her original breath is another reminder that he is the Master Artisan.  Each activated soul, awakened mind and rhythmic heart is another brush stroke in His creative process.  Rise up and embrace a living, beautiful, inspiring, breath taking, New Creationism!

By Paul Richardson April 18, 2010