Guippetto

Creation, one has to believe, must be a plenty cool thing. The angels, I’m sure, took their seats with a level of anticipation we can only imagine, as they waited for the curtain to go up. God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.” Oh His stars that must have been something. The radiance broke forth, and the heavenly chorus sang. Glory!

Because we are still modernists, even in this postmodern age, we tend to see the glory of creation in the design stage. We think the universe a staggering marvel of engineering. We think that after the angels saw the light, that God took a time out to explain the wave properties and the particle properties, and how He balanced them in an almost incarnational way, (Jesus is, after all, the light of the world.) Like a scientist explaining an experiment, like a detective explaining a crime, God dispassionately explained His secret blueprints. We think too that this is God’s pleasure in the creation, that He is tickled pink with His own elegance.

This is all well and good. The universe is quite a harmonious complexity of a watch, and our Lord quite the skilled Watchmaker. The universe, however, I believe, in the end is not so much an astounding machine as it is a way yonder too much fun toy. It is God’s own toy, and His delight in it is like that of a child. The trees in the fields clap their hands not as solemn applause, but as giddy frolic. The seas roar not like a lion, but like the crowd at the football game. The mountains melt not because of a consuming fire, but from the very looseness of joy. And snow, then there is snow, an extravagant array of tiny ice sculptures coming together to form a falling curtain on the earth. No machine could ever do that. A toy, on the other hand, a globe sized snow globe, that’s something God could not only make, but could play with for months on end.

Creation reflects the Creator. Its playfulness is His playfulness. And in the end, for His grand finale, He makes of us, stringed Calvinist puppets that we are, into real boys.