INTRODUCTION:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:43-48).
QUOTE: “The Glory of God is a person fully alive.” (Irenaeus (130-202AD) was a church leader in Galatia and one of the fathers of the ancient church. He was a student of Polycarp, who was a disciple of the Apostle John.
OUTLINE FOR TODAY:
1. An Overview of “Common Grace”
2. God Creates and Runs the World
3. The Natural World is God’s Workshop, Laboratory
4. God Commands to “Observe” the Natural Order
5. How the Christian Should Respond to “Common Grace.”
COMMON GRACE AND THE GLORY OF GOD
I. AN OVERVIEW OF “COMMON GRACE”
QUESTION: What is your understanding of “Common Grace?”
“Divine love is indiscriminate, shown equally to good men and bad. The theologians (following Calvin) call this God’s ‘common grace. It is not ‘saving grace,’ enabling sinners to repent, believe and be saved; but grace shown to all mankind, the penitent and the impenitent, believers and unbelievers. This common grace of God is expressed, then, not in the gift of salvation but in the gifts of creation, and in the blessings of rain and sunshine, without which we could not eat and life on the planet could not continue.” (Stott, 120)
“Common Grace curbs the destructive power of sin, maintaining in measure the moral order of the universe, thus making an orderly life possible. It distributes in varying degrees gifts and talents among men, promotes the development of science and art, and showers untold blessings upon the children of men” (Berkhof, Pg. 434 quoted in Wikipedia).
Four Specific Blessings of Common Grace:
(1) Providential Restraint of Sin, e.g. civil government, see Romans 13
(2) Man’s Conscience, the law of God written in our hearts, cf. Romans 2:14- 15 and the fact that humans still retain a semblance of the image of God, cf. Gen. 9:6, I Cor. 11:7
(3) Providential Blessings to Mankind, e.g. human medical and
technical advancements through the unredeemed
(4) Providential Care in Creation – God ‘upholds the universe by the
word of his power’ (Heb. 1:2-3, John 1:1-4), sunshine, rain, seasons etc.
“Yet he has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.” (Acts 14:17)
“The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food at the proper time. You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing” (Psalm 145:15-16).
“The LORD is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made” (Psalm 145:9)
TABLE ACTIVITY: List your favorite athlete, poet, actor, writer.
TABLE ACTIVITY: What blessings of common grace do I usually thank God for? What blessings should I start including?
II. GOD CREATED AND RUNS THE WORLD
He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
Note that Jesus says it is God’s sun and God causes it to rise; that God sends the rain.
Jesus knew the laws that govern the shining of the sun and falling of the rain for he is omniscient. Yet he believed in the immediate presence and working of his Father. In Christ’s philosophy the Father is everywhere present working all things.
ILL: “One expert said that there are more than thirty separate physical or cosmological parameters that require precise calibration in order to produce a life-sustaining universe . . . .
The fine tuning of the universe, the cosmological construct has conservatively been estimated to be at least one part in a hundred million billion billion billion billion. That would be a ten followed by 53 zeroes. That’s inconceivably precise.” (Case for Creator, 132, 133)
BIBLE READING BASED ON PSALM 104
“You blanketed earth with ocean,
covered the mountains with deep waters;
Mountains pushed up, valleys spread out
in the places you assigned them.
You set boundaries between earth and sea;
You started the springs and rivers,
sent them flowing among the hills.
You water the mountains from your heavenly cisterns;
earth is supplied with plenty of water.
You make grass grow for the livestock,
hay for the animals that plow the ground.
God’s trees are well-watered— the Lebanon cedars he planted.
When it’s dark and night takes over,
all the forest creatures come out.
The young lions roar for their prey,
clamoring to God for their supper.
All the creatures look expectantly to you
to give them their meals on time.
You come, and they gather around;
you open your hand and they eat from it.
If you turned your back, they’d die in a minute—
Take back your Spirit and they die, revert to original mud;
Send out your Spirit and they spring to life—
the whole countryside in bloom and blossom.
What a wildly wonderful world, God!
You made it all, with Wisdom at your side,
made earth overflow with your wonderful creations.”
QUESTION: Can you think of any other places in the Bible that speak of God creating, ordering, running the world?
The Bible speaks about God putting the rainbow in the sky, and in Matthew 6:26 Jesus says that it is God who feeds the birds of the air. In Matthew 6:30 it is the Father in heaven who clothes the grass of the fields.
“The eyes of all look to thee; and thou givest them their food in due season. Thou openest thy hand, thou satisfiest the desire of every living thing” (Psalm 145:15).
Julian of Norwich, the great English anchorite (one retired from society for religious reasons) and theologian, cited, in the manner of the prophets, these words from God: “See, I am God: see, I am in all things: see I never lift my hands off my works, nor ever shall, without end . . . How should anything be amiss?” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 280)
III. THE NATURAL ORDER IS GOD’S WORKSHOP, LABORATORY
QUESTION: Why would a person call the natural order God’s laboratory and workshop?
Spurgeon writes, “Now if men but understand nature they would know that nature is simply God’s creation, workshop, laboratory, storehouse and banqueting-hall. In nature what God has made or what God is doing is made visible before our eyes.” (Sermon on Mt. 5:45)
God, at the time of creation, liked what he accomplished and the writer of Genesis said God saw what he had made and it was very good (Gen. 1:31).
Paul writes in I Timothy, “For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving …” ( I Tim. 4:4).
It appears from the Genesis account that God delights in and takes pleasure in creation. Psalm 104:31 says, “May the Lord rejoice in His works.” Verse 24 says the earth is full of his creatures. This is our Father’s world and in one sense is his workshop, his laboratory.
ILL: While sitting below a sycamore tree near Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard quotes “Take just the top inch of soil, the world squirming right under my palms. In the top inch of forest soil, biologists found an average of 1,356 living creatures present in each square foot, including 865 mites, 265 spring tails, 22 millipedes, 19 adult beetles and various numbers of other forms … Had an estimate been made of the microscopic population, it might have ranged up to two billion bacteria and many millions of fungi, protozoa and algae – – in a mere teaspoonful of soil.” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 151)
ILL: The experimenters studied a single grass plant, winter rye. They let it grow in a greenhouse for four months; then they gingerly spirited away the soil – – under microscopes, I imagine – – and counted and measured all the roots and root hairs. In four months the plant had set forth 378 miles of roots – – that is about three miles a day – in 14 million distinct roots. This is mighty impressive, but when they get down to the root hairs, I boggle completely. In the same four months the rye plant created 14 billion root hairs, and those little strands placed end-to-end just about wouldn’t quit. In a single cubic inch of soil the length of the root hairs totaled 6000 miles. (Pilgrim, 258).
ILL: The mother octopus lays one million eggs to produce one survivor. (Soul Survivor, 233); There are 228 separate and distinct muscles in the head of an ordinary caterpillar. These things amaze us but we must keep in mind that ten percent of all known animal species in the world are parasitic insects. You have the food chain and the violence in the world of nature. It is nice to see the picture of an innocent penguin and the beauty of a seal. Yet you need to know that the seal dies if it does not eat the penguin and the lion dies if it does not eat the gazelle. So when God supplies food for the young lion he does it by permitting the death of the gazelle. (Pilgrim, 209,306)
QUESTION: If the natural world is God’s workshop how do you account for the violence of the natural world?
Dillard writes: The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”
One writer sums up the message of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”: “Pilgrim” probes the cosmic significance of the beauty and violence coexisting in the natural world.
So God’s workshop and laboratory is also a graveyard.
IV. GOD COMMANDS US TO OBSERVE THE NATURAL ORDER
Emily Dickinson (Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Though almost unknown and nearly unpublished in her own lifetime, Dickinson has since come to be regarded along with Walt Whitman as one of the two great American poets of the 19th century. Often reclusive, Dickinson lived nearly her whole life at the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts. She once wrote to a friend that “Consider the lilies of the field” is the only commandment she never broke” (Soul Survivor, 232).
Psalm 19:1-6 says, 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. The question is, “Is anyone listening?” “Is anyone observing?” “Is anyone seeing?”
An infant, once he is able to raise his head, starts gazing around. He hasn’t a clue where he is and what the world is like but he wants to find out. He is an observer, an explorer.
It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.” (Pilgrim, 28)
“The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. …. But the secret of seeing, even to the most practiced and adept, is a gift of total surprise.” (Pilgrim, 57)
“Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them. The least we can do is try to be there . . . so that creation need not play to an empty house.” (Soul Survivor, 232).
V. THE CHRISTIAN RESPONSE TO COMMON GRACE
Van Gogh (Vincent Willem van Gogh (March 30, 1853–July 29, 1890) was a Dutch painter, generally considered one of the greatest painters in European art history. He produced all of his work (some 900 paintings and 1100 drawings) during a period of only ten years before he succumbed to mental illness (possibly bipolar disorder) and committed suicide. (from, The world is a study that didn’t come off).
QUESTION: If God created the world and it is his laboratory, how is it that some people are convinced of God’s existence and love by observing the natural world whereas others by observing the natural world find it to be proof that God does not exist?
“The problem, as always, is that nature gives off mixed signals. Like an unruly child, the natural world both reveals and obscures God” (Soul Survivor, 233).
Or as Pascal (French mathematician and philosopher, 1623-1662) argued, God has give us just enough light so that we can understand and just enough darkness or obscurity to deny the truth.
FOR THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH
For the beauty of the earth
For the glory of the skies,
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies.
Lord of all, to Thee we raise,
This our hymn of grateful praise.
For the beauty of each hour,
Of the day and of the night,
Hill and vale, and tree and flower,
Sun and moon, and stars of light.
For the joy of ear and eye,
For the heart and mind’s delight,
For the mystic harmony
Linking sense to sound and sight.
For each perfect gift of Thine,
To our race so freely given,
Graces human and divine,
Flowers of earth and buds of Heaven.
Along with God, we rejoice in all His works.
G.K. Chesterson:
You say grace before meals. But I say grace before the play and the opera, grace before the concert and the pantomime, and grace before I open a book, grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing; and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”(J. Stott in I Timothy, 115)
A good woman said when she sought the Lord, “If he saves me he shall never hear the last of it, for I will praise him as love as ever I live, and then to all eternity.” (Spurgeon’s sermon on Mt. 5:45)
ILL: Billy Bray was born into a rough mining town in Cornwall, England in 1794. Although his family was saved, Billy showed no interest in the things of God. At 17 he ran away to Devonshire. He lived a drunken and debauched life, far from God. He married a Christian girl, but it did not slow his sinful ways. Twice he was nearly killed, once in a mine accident and again as he drunkenly rode a stolen horse. Finally a copy of John Bunyan’s “Visions of Heaven and Hell” came into his hands. Convicted and miserable, he woke one morning about 3:00 and knelt by his bedside, asking God to save his soul. Mr. Bray’s whole life was changed. He came home from work the next payday sober, having skipped his weekly trip to the bar. He gave up smoking and drinking forever when he was saved. His friends thought he would soon return to his old worldly ways, but he never did. Billy Bray became a fervent soul winner. It is said that he never met a person without inquiring as to the condition of his soul. He became a frequent speaker at meetings, urging his fellow miners and neighbors to come to Christ. Bray had a shouting religion. He said, “I lift up one foot and it says, ‘Glory!’ and I lift the other foot and it says, ‘Amen!’ and so they keep on like that all the time I’m walking.”
(Annie Dillard ends Pilgrim at Tinker Creek referring to Billy Bray ( 3 June 1794 – 25 May 1868) as a 19th century Cornish tin miner and preacher born at Twelveheads, a village in the parish of Kea, near Truro, Cornwall.)
CLASS ACTIVITY: Take a short walk saying “glory” with your left foot while reflecting on one of God’s blessing through Common Grace and saying “Amen” with the right foot. See if you can think of a blessing and say “Glory” every time our left foot hits the floor and then say “Amen.”
CONCLUSION
1. The Glory of God is a person fully alive!
2. A person fully alive is a person who observes and rejoices in all of the blessings of common grace, from the giving of rain and sunshine to all of the wonders of God’s creation. He happily says “Glory” in his heart when he reflects on God’s gifts.
3. On our death beds we should not be confessing sins or asking for God’s help or healing etc. We should be saying “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door.
4. Having come from the darkness of the womb God has permitted us to live in His workshop and laboratory. It has been semi-darkness, but still wonderful. (from Alice in Wonderland.)
5. At death we take our leave to a land where there is no more night. On leaving we should be thanking God for the privilege of having been at the party, having lived in His world.