God Delights – in Creation
God Delights – in Creation.
“Yahweh Lord takes pleasure in all He has made!” (Ps. 104:31).
An artist with high standards always delights in his/her masterpiece. A composer always takes great pleasure in his/her best piece of music. An architect is profoundly pleased when the finished product is every bit as excellent as what was in his/her imagination. An author is delighted when his/her written piece exceeded expectations. God created an astounding universe, so complex and beautiful that it is world’s away from human comprehension. And what did Creator God do after His six days of creative work? “Then God looked over all He had made, and He saw that it was very good!” (Genesis 1:31). The Lord took stock of His creation, and was supremely pleased with His handiwork. He took great pleasure in looking it all over when finished. He delighted in the finished product of His efforts. God didn’t say “good enough,” He didn’t even say “good” when He was completed with creation. God said, “Very Good!” In fact, He was so completely satisfied with His creation that He took the next day off to celebrate it.
Many have said that the cosmos is God’s playground. It certainly looks it when God took delightful pleasure with Job when He recounted various aspects of His creation in Job 38-41. God was obviously pleased with His handiwork as He celebrates the cornerstone of the earth, its foundations, and when the morning stars sang together and the angels shouted for joy. Those were precious memories for God as He recounted the initial stages of His creative work.
Job was in awe as God delighted in the boundaries of the seas, and the rising of the dawn. He took pleasure in the origins of light and the hidden storehouse of snow and hail. God was pleased by the source of the east wind, the path of lightning, the tender grass springing up in the parched ground after a satisfying rain.
Job was suitably silenced as God delighted in the movement of the stars and planets, the path of the constellations through the seasons. God celebrated the hunting skill of the lioness, the birthing of wild goats and deer. God took pleasure as He talked about the freedom of the wild donkey and the wild ox.
But God wasn’t done with marveling with joy at some of His creatures. He was pleased at the antics of the ostrich, the strength and courage of the horse. God celebrated the soaring hawk, the majesty of the eagle. God even mentioned some mysterious creatures call the Behemoth and the Leviathan, which could be ancient and powerful monsters of the deep.
Job must have been convinced… God loves his creation, He delights in it, He celebrates it. And there is nothing that could match God’s power and skill and creative genius, an incomparable genius beyond all human genius. God’s creativity is the source of man’s creativity, and comes from a whole different place, an eternal place, a perfect place. God’s creativity is perfectly genius. The fact is that the Lord indeed takes eternal pleasure in all his works. As Augustine said in his Confessions, “The life of God is simultaneously work and rest, because all God does, working and resting, He does with the majestic ease of play.”
There is an overpowering sense of delight in the Trinitarian act of creation as described in Proverbs 8:30-31. “I was the architect at His side. I was His constant delight, rejoicing always in His presence; and how happy I was with the world He created; how I rejoiced with the human family.”
Most of the time the way to dive into a mystery is through the imagination. And creation certainly has an element of mystery to it. Here’s a delightful take on creation from the imagination of Anglican priest Robert Farrar Capon: “Let me tell you why God made the world. One afternoon, before anything was made, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost sat around in the unity of their Godhead discussing one of the Father’s fixations. From all eternity, it seems He had had this thing about being. He would keep thinking up all kinds of unnecessary things – new ways of being and new kinds of beings to be. And as they talked, God the Son suddenly said, ‘Really, this is absolutely great stuff. Why don’t I go out and mix us up a batch?’ And God the Holy Ghost said, ‘Terrific, I’ll help you.’ So they all pitched in, and after supper that night, the Son and the Holy Ghost put on this tremendous show of being for the Father. It was full of water and light and frogs; pinecones kept dropping all over the place and crazy fish swam around in the wineglasses. There were mushrooms and grapes, horse radishes and tigers – and men and women everywhere to taste them, to juggle them, to join them and to love them. And God the Father looked at the whole wild party and He said, ‘Wonderful! Just what I had in mind!’ So they laughed for ages and ages, saying things like how great it was for beings to be, and how clever of the Father to think of the idea, and how kind of the Son to go to all that trouble putting it together, and how considerate of the Spirit to spend so much time directing and choreographing… (continued)… Creation is the result of a Trinitarian bash, a divine party, a game of delight. The world is a whole barrelful of the apples of His eye, constantly juggled, relished and exchanged by the Persons of the Trinity. No wonder we love circuses, games and magic; they prove we are in the image of God. The delight of God is the deepest root of the being of everything.” (The Third Peacock, by Robert Farrar Capon, 1971).