The Christian and Cultureনমুনা

In the beginning, God created. The very first portrait Scripture gives us of God is as Creator. Later we learn other of His attributes — Holiness, Omnipresence, Justice — but before all else He comes to us as the One who makes. He is an Artist.

His work is not merely functional; it is manifold in beauty. He could have made mountains like boxes, flowers in shades of gray, birds without song, and fruits all tasting the same. Instead He set the sky ablaze with orange and lilac at sunset, crowned the Himalayas with ice, gifted the nightingale with a tuned song, painted the shores of Fernando de Noronha in greens and blues, and gave us the sweet taste of guava alongside the bitterness of endive. This abundance discloses something of who God is.

Among all creatures, only humans received the Imago Dei — the image of God. That means we share communicable attributes with our Maker: imagination, reason, the capacity to plan and to mean. It was not a monkey that composed the Ninth Symphony or a giraffe that devised the theory of relativity. We, made in God’s image, are cultural makers by vocation.

This calling is expressed in the Cultural Mandate: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” and “The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” The word culture is kin to cultivate and to cult: to shape the world is also — rightly ordered — an act of worship. Every human task, from laboratory work to field labor to painting a canvas, belongs to this mandate.

Now pause. Go to a window and look at the sky, the trees, or the ordinary movement of life around you. Remember that all of this is sustained by God’s word. See this scene as part of the great theater of divine glory, and pray that your life and the work of your hands would reveal the beauty of the Creator.