[Part 1 of 4:]
The material creation is a fundamental of our worth.
Three Scripture passages summarize for us the Christian understanding of the worth of people: “Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). “For every creature of God is good” (1 Tim. 4:4). “What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him? For You have made him a little lower than the angels, and You have crowned him with glory and honor. You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen—even the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea that pass through the paths of the seas” (Psa. 8:4-8).
The Bible makes it clear that the infinite God willed to create the earth and willed to make a finite creature in His image to have dominion over it as His steward. Both the earth and the creature made to rule over it were declared by God to be good—in fact, very good. This Christian understanding of mankind’s original material perfection is rare among the religions. Many of the ancient religions, and modern Hinduism, consider the material world as something negative---or at the least something to be escaped from. The philosophy behind the original Hindu practice of yoga was the necessity of “escaping” from the material body and blending in some ethereal, spiritual way with the Universal All, which transcends the material. How different that is from the Christian understanding that the “All” is personal, and in Him we have our origin. Further, this Person actually took on the material form of a man, died in the material form of a man, rose again in the material form of a man, ascended to heaven in the material form of a man, will one day come back in the material form of a man, and reign forever in the material form of man as the sovereign over material human beings that He has taken into His family as children of God! That's materialism in its true Christian form.
The familiar Calvinist doctrine of “total depravity” has often clouded the fact that while man in his fallen state is totally incapable of attaining personal salvation and is spiritually dead in “trespasses and sin,” the material form of man is the very good creation of God. God’s ultimate plan is not that man’s body be discarded, but that it be redeemed—that it will become just like the body of the risen Jesus Christ: “For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body, according to the working by which He is able even to subdue all things to Himself” (Phil. 3:20-21). “So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption” (1 Cor. 15:42). There's no truth I know of available to humankind that provides more hope than that.
It’s hard for people to attain true humility even if we see ourselves as depraved wretches (thinking of the hymn "Amazing Grace" Yolanda Adams and Hayley Westenra on YouTube). Harder yet is the better path to humility: seeing ourselves as the crown of creation, made in the image of God, esteemed by God, and the reason for the broken heart and atoning death of Christ. That God would love sinful and fallen mankind so much as to send His Son in the material form of a human being to die for us in order to be reconciled both body and soul to Himself is the essence of the gospel we are called to share. As C. Steven Evans put it in Despair: A Moment Or a Way of Life? “Man is someone worth loving; he is in fact loved by a supremely worthy Being. The true meaning of being a person is to love—and to be loved.”
[Part 2 next week: "The Material Creation is a Fundamental of Our Worship"]
Dean Ohlman is the host of RBC Ministries website: "The Wonder of Creation." You can read more of Dean's writing at the RBC site: http://www.wonderofcreation.org/
