Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
What is the greater miracle, creating something good out of nothing, or bringing something beautiful out of ugliness? We know God does both yet we seldom think about which is the more profound act. The Lord creates and the Lord redeems, and we praise Him on both counts, but I wonder if the latter action is not the more profound of the two.
The nothingness out of which God made the universe by sheer creative fiat was apparently morally neutral. In the Genesis account we have no sense of the “darkness upon the face of the deep” being darkness in the evil sense we see applied to the word later in Scripture. Deity chose to will that the void be filled by the wonders of the Heavens and the Earth, but the void apparently had neither positive nor negative value. It simply was.
Spiritual redemption, by contrast with physical creation, entails taking something wicked and making it into something good. Redemption involves the recovery of a fallen soul. “Recovery”, however, does not adequately cover the depth of divine redemption. We must also use the word “re-creation” because this is, in effect, what God does with a sinful soul. He re-creates it into something beautiful, something of eternal value. Through the blood of His Son He somehow transforms darkness, this time truly darkness in the negative definition of the term, into light. The history of the Faith is replete with accounts of men and women whose lives once reflected evil in the extreme, yet became profoundly different people after encountering and embracing the Person of Jesus Christ.
The transformation of a wicked heart may seem to pall by comparison with the establishment of the planets and stars, but I wonder if we see things rightly in this regard. As awesome as the natural creation is (and we dare not trivialize its grandeur in the least) there is something about the alteration of a soul given over to moral depravity, a soul worthy of Hell that is simply astonishing. Salvation may seem to work in the comparatively small physical arena of the human heart, but in the realm of the spirit its operation might just eclipse the creation of the largest galaxy.
We know that the physical universe is amazing, but the grace that turns moral darkness to light may be more amazing still.