Finding Christ in Nature

There is something that comes to me after spending some quiet time just contemplating the woods and sky outside my living room window. I can be in a state of anxiety or negativity and just staring out the window at the direct creation of God can transport me to a different state of mind and heart. As I watch the branches newly budded with spring leaves sway in the wind the circumstantial fears I may be struggling with at the moment begin to fade as I am caught up in the profound sublimity of a natural world that is so much larger than I.

It is important to sometimes look at things that dwarf our individual perspectives.

Some Christians, the author included, have looked down their noses at people who call being out in nature their way of “going to church”. It is certainly true that going fishing on Sunday mornings is not a good habit for believers to get into. We need to be in church corporately worshipping our Lord, hearing His word, and ministering to his people. But the truth is that sometimes we can effectively come into contact with the God of the Bible by entering into meditation on the natural realm He has created and called good. This is not the contemplation of the Pantheist I speak of but the contemplation of a God both in nature and beyond nature. This seems to me a bit of a paradox. He is separate from nature but it is still redolent of Him. It carries the fragrance of His eternality.

For me the trees, sky, wind and sunlight point me towards the divine because they have been created by the divine, and somehow impregnated by the divine as well. When I gaze in wonder at a certain kind of natural scene (like the one outside my window) I know that the comfort I begin to feel is from knowing that God has created the scene, sustains the scene and in some sense reveals the mystery of Himself and my own existence in the scene. At moments the profoundness of it all calls up a yearning in me that is one of the best things I have ever known in my earthly life. I believe this is because it points me beyond my earthly life. I feel as if I have touched, or been touched by, the transcendent.

I have gotten the impression that some of the more radical Puritans of centuries ago actually disliked nature. They seemed to consider the wilderness to be a place of spiritual darkness and danger that needed to be quickly razed and turned into city or farmland, something under the control of mankind. Their idea of nature was that it was a place of disorder that only existed to be subjugated and tamed by us. You can still see this, I believe, in those contemporary believers who warn us about the dangers of loving nature. They believe we are always on the edge of some kind of Pantheistic idolatry when we are seeking spiritual succor in forests and seas and mountains.

I disagree.

I know that God created nature and that nature is separate and subservient to Him. I know also that some day nature as we know it will burn-up along with the rest of the present heavens and earth. It is not literally eternal in its present form. It is temporal and subject to imperfection and decay. I do not expect to worship it or any other created thing. But I refuse to assume that it is not a kind of portal to God. It is most certainly not the bridge to God that Jesus Christ is, God forbid such a terrible heresy, but in it we catch sublime glimpses of Him. His handiwork points us towards His mind and heart. How could it not since God’s mind and heart are where His natural creation ultimately originates from. In looking intently at the creation we gain deep insight, although perhaps on a non-verbal level, into the ultimate beauty and wisdom and goodness of the Creator.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay one of the most tonic results of fixing my eyes and my heart on natural things is simply to find perspective on my problems and on my smallness in relation to both the created universe and, perhaps more importantly, to the One who made it. It helps me find some semblance of humility, which is no small trick for a 21st century, affluent Western male.

Just for that effect alone I am thankful for Christ, through Whom we know “all things were made that have been made”; so deep contemplation of that view outside my window brings me into a state of mind and heart that is pleasing to my Lord and Savior. Could it be He willed me to find both that state and Himself in the contemplating? I believe it is so.