Quotes about Creation

You exist only because God wills that you exist.

For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, . . . everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. COLOSSIANS 1:16 (MSG)

We shape our God, and then our God shapes us.

If there is a divine being who made everything, including us, what would our experiences with this being look like? The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. We are dealing with somebody we made up. And if we made him up, then we are in control. And so in passage after passage, we find God reminding people that he is beyond and bigger and more.

But the first Christians didn't see Jesus this way, as if God were somewhere else and then cooked up some way to solve the sin problem at the last minute by getting involved as Jesus. They believed that Jesus was somehow more, that Jesus had actually been present since before creation and had been a part of the story all along.

To make the cross of Jesus just about human salvation is to miss that God is interested in the saving of everything. Every star and rock and bird. All things.

Has God created millions of people over tens of thousands of years who are going to spend eternity in anguish? Can God do this, or even allow this, and still claim to be a loving God? Does God punish people for thousands of years with infinite, eternal torment for things they did in their few finite years of life?

Second, Jesus consistently affirmed heaven as a real place, space, and dimension of God's creation, where God's will and only God's will is done. Heaven is that realm where things are as God intends them to be.

When you say "yes" to your life and your path and your work in the world, you are entering into this mystery of creation, a mystery in which everybody starts with a blank page, and "everybody" includes you. Now, let's pause and take a breath. You've been given this gift of life. You were not given his gift or her gift. You were given your gift.

The poet wants us to know that God is looking for partners, people to help co-create the world.

This death-and-life mystery, this mechanism, this process is built into the very fabric of creation. The cells in our bodies are dying at a rate of millions a second, only to be replaced at a similar rate of millions a second. Our skin is constantly flaking off and our body is continually replacing the skin cells with new ones; we have entirely new skin every week or so.

What you do with your life is fundamentally creative work. The kind of life you lead, what you do with your time, how you spend your energies—it's all part of how you create your life.