CREATE!

By Cameron Warren

Create! I hope you don’t glaze over the word. It’s not a perfunctory title, taking up space above the real bread and butter. I didn’t write the word, “Create.” I wrote the biblically-supported, joy-bringing, God-enjoying command, “Create!” A single word can be very important. Crime novelist Elmore Leonard famously said, “Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” (For context, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is just shy of 77,000 words.) Exclamation points should be like brick walls, stopping us dead in our tracks, causing us to reread, reflect, and consider. The act of creation is recorded in the very first sentence of scripture. We worship a creative God who creates ex nihilo—out of nothing. Genesis informs us this same God who created the heavenly hosts created us, and He clearly instilled in us an echo of His own creative nature. One of Man’s first tasks (to name God’s creatures) is a creative one. Man cannot create ex nihilo like God; rather, he forms sub-creations using that which God has already created and called “good.” Our little sub-creations ought to serve as worshipful reminders of our God’s character, echoing just a fraction of what Daniel Loizeaux categorizes as God’s artistic perfection, diversity, profusion, and inventiveness. 

WHAT DOES GOD’S CREATION TELL US ABOUT HIMSELF?

God didn’t need to make stars. Have you ever considered this? There are so many stars out there, so what if God eliminated a few hundred billion? Doesn’t sound like a big deal to me. God didn’t need to make food taste good. God didn’t need to make multiple colors. We could still understand the gospel message if all food tasted like raw broccoli and everything was light tan. But God didn’t do that. God made a world that ought to make us explode in worship and joy.

We only know what inventiveness looks like because God exemplifies it everywhere we look. God’s goodness in creation is not limited to the aesthetic; rather, it is profoundly diverse and expansive in its reach. Creative cooks make delicious food. Creative artists make beautiful paintings. Creative writers craft compelling stories. Creative sewing people (better than “sewers”) create warm, visually-appealing garments. Creative builders build awe-inspiring structures, and the list goes on and on. Our God made food to have different flavors, the world to have different colors, and words to be arranged in all sorts of wonderful ways. David uses all of Psalm 8 to reflect on both the power of God—in creating the vast universe—and the love of God that He cares for little dust-creatures on a seemingly insignificant planet in a seemingly insignificant galaxy. If Genesis one and two isn’t enough to convince us that God’s creation is good, then remember the words of Paul in 1 Timothy 4: 1-5 when he says,

“But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, by means of the hypocrisy of liars seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron, who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods which God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude; for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer.”

Paul insists that, indeed, all that God has created (including food and marriage) are holy and good things as declared by scripture. It is proper to enjoy the gifts of creation in worshipful thanksgiving as God has intended us to receive them. And not only does He let us receive these created gifts, but He allows us to actively participate in the act of creation, thus using our sub-creations to direct praise and awe to God as the ultimate creator.

WHY SHOULD WE CREATE?

The first reason that comes to mind is a simple one. We should create stuff because God gave us imaginations for that very purpose. Creating is not just a blithe means of passing the time. C.S. Lewis said, “The greatest poems have been made by men who indeed valued something else much more than poetry.” Writing for writing’s sake is called bad writing. It’s flat and trite. Christian creators can acknowledge there is something outside of ourselves (namely God Himself) that gives purpose and direction to our little sub-creations. In his book, Echoes of Eden, Jerram Barrs says, “We exercise dominion by ‘making things’ with our hands, minds, and imaginations.” While Jesus worked as a carpenter, He was still fully pleasing to God, creating stools, and feeding troughs, and tables. There is also an evangelistic facet of creation. The book Crime and Punishment is just one created work to catch my eye recently. In it, Dostoyevsky challenges many of the new ideas coming out of the Enlightenment era—ideas that would later form the foundation for Nietzsche's philosophical concept, Übermensch, which is the belief that the “new man” creates his own morality after the death of God. Crime and Punishment follows one of these new men after he commits an egregious double homicide and suffers from the guilt of breaking God’s law. Think now, Dostoyevsky could have written an essay on Romans 1, explaining how the law of God is written on every human heart and how even non-believers can know something like a double homicide is objectively evil. Instead, he created a work of fiction that displays the jewel-like truth recorded in Romans 1 by which both believers and non-believers have eagerly engaged for decades. All sub-creations have an evangelistic side. 

Lastly, creation can be a service. My grandma LOVED her sewing machine. She created a lot of things on that little machine. Things like pillow cases, quilts, and hot pads. For her, the act of creation via her sewing machine was intimately linked to an others-mindedness. What can I make that someone in my family might need or appreciate and be thankful for? My wife does the same thing and I love it. Rachel can create a meal for friends just as joyfully as she can arrange a flower bouquet or quilt a baby blanket. Her sub-creations reflect the good gifts given to us by our good God. He gives us gifts that make our lives easier or more exciting and gifts that make us pour out our praise in humble thanksgiving. But He has not limited this function to Himself alone. He has enabled us to use our creativity to echo His good purposes and to serve those around us. One of our friends drew us a beautiful picture of our house. Now, she happens to be a very talented visual artist, but it is still a simple thing. Though, it is more than just a little picture. It is a reminder of the creativity God has instilled in His Church. Let us use our imaginations to bless one another, to turn one another toward God in humble thanksgiving, and to show a lost world the beauty and power of the Gospel to transform the lives and hearts of sinners. Remember C.S Lewis’s reminder: Each creator ought to value God above their creative medium. So, yeah, Create! But let us start by loving our creator God.