Sermon quotes on creation
Douglas Adams
In the beginning, the universe was created. This has been widely regarded as a bad move. (for contrast, and humor)
Lady Nancy Astor
The first time Adam had a chance, he laid the blame on a woman. (for humor)
Augustine of Hippo
Thou hast created us for Thyself, and our heart is not quiet until it rests in Thee.
Wendell Berry
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
John Calvin
There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.
Quoted in William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (Oxford, 1988), pages 134-135.
George Washington Carver
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting system, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.
Joe Doyle
In the beginning there was nothing and God said, “let there be light.” There was still nothing, but you could see it better.
T. S. Eliot
A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God.
Christianity and Culture, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014, p.57.
Daniel Fuller
Just because creation gives God great delight, we cannot say that He is worshipping it; rather, He is worshipping Himself as He sees His goodness bringing such blessing to people that they give their heartfelt thanks and praise to Him for the benefits He imparts.
Anthony Hoekema
Because of man’s fall into sin, a curse was pronounced over the creation. God now sent His Son into this world to redeem that creation from the results of sin. The work of Christ, therefore, is not just to save certain individuals, not even to save an innumerable throng of blood-bought people. The total work of Christ is nothing less than to redeem the entire creation from the effects of sin. That purpose will not be accomplished until God has ushered in the new earth, until Paradise Lost become Paradise Regained.
Martin Luther
Now if I believe in God’s Son and remember that He became man, all creatures will appear a hundred times more beautiful to me than before. Then I will properly appreciate the sun, the moon, the stars, trees, apples, as I reflect that he is Lord over all things. …God writes the Gospel, not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.
Martin Luther
For God is wholly present in all creation, in every corner, he is behind you and before you. Do you think he is sleeping on a pillow in heaven? He is watching over you and protecting you.
Mother Teresa
God is the Friend of Silence. See How Nature … Trees, Flowers, Grass… Grow in Silence.
William Penn
It would go a long way to caution and direct people in their use of the world that they would better studied and known in the creation of it. For how could man find the confidence to abuse it, while they should see the Great Creator stare them in the face, in all and every part thereof?
Fruits of Solitude
Pablo Picasso
Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.
Robert Silvestri
Being omniscient, God knew Murphy’s Law. On the Eighth day of creation, God said, “Okay Murphy, take over.” (for humor)
Sam Storms
Creation in its totality exists as a means to the fulfillment of some specific purpose that terminates on and for the sake of Jesus Christ.
The Attributes of God
Arnold J. Toynbee
History is a vision of God’s creation on the move.
A Study of History: Abridgement of, Oxford University Press, 1987, p.390.
Thomas Traherne
O how do Your affections extend like the sunbeams unto all stars in heaven and to all the kingdoms in the world. Yours at once enlighten both hemispheres; quicken us with life, enable us to digest the nourishment of our Souls, cause us to see the greatness of our nature, the Love of God, and the joys of heaven; melt us into tears, comfort, and enflame us, and do all in a celestial manner; that the Sun can do in a terrene and earthly. O let me so long eye You, till I be turned into You, and look upon me till You are formed in me, that I may be a mirror of your brightness, a habitation of Your love, and a temple of your glory. That all your Saints might live in me, and I in them; enjoying all their felicities, joys, and treasures.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
The meaning of creation remains unexplainable so long as the veil covers the eternal Image.This life would be nothing but destiny, this time only sorrow, all love but decay, if the pulse of Being did not throb in the eternal, triune Life.
Kurt Vonnegut
The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
Albert Wolters
The whole course of history [is] a movement from a garden to a city, and it fundamentally affirms that movement … Redemption in Jesus Christ reaches just as far as the fall. The horizon of creation is at the same time the horizon of sin and of salvation. To conceive of either the fall or Christ’s deliverance as encompassing less than the whole of creation is to compromise the biblical teaching of the radical nature of the fall and the cosmic scope of redemption.
Francis Collins
We have this very solid conclusion that the universe had an origin, the Big Bang. Fifteen billion years ago, the universe began with an unimaginably bright flash of energy from an infinitesimally small point. That implies that before that, there was nothing. I can’t imagine how nature, in this case the universe, could have created itself. And the very fact that the universe had a beginning implies that someone was able to begin it. And it seems to me that had to be outside of nature.
Article: Steve Paulson, “The Believer,” Salon (Accessed April 19, 2021)
Francis Collins
When you look from the perspective of a scientist at the universe, it looks as if it knew we were coming. There are 15 constants—the gravitational constant, various constants about the strong and weak nuclear force, etc.—that have precise values. If any one of those constants was off by even one part in a million, or in some cases, by one part in a million million, the universe could not have actually come to the point where we see it. Matter would not have been able to coalesce, there would have been no galaxy, stars, planets or people.
Article: Steve Paulson, “The Believer,” Salon (Accessed April 19, 2021)
Stephen Hawking
The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.
Quoted in I.G. Barbour, When Science Meets Religion, HarperCollins.
Stephen Hawking
It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.
Freeman Dyson
The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.
Quoted in John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Principle, Oxford University Press, 1988.
Jonathan Edwards
The creation of the world seems to have been especially for this end, that the eternal Son of God might obtain a spouse towards whom he might fully exercise the infinite benevolence of his nature, and to whom he might, as it were, open and pour forth all that immense fountain of condescension, love, and grace that was in his heart.
“The Church’s Marriage To Her Sons, And To Her God,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 25, Sermons and Discourses 1743-1758. Ed. Wilson H. Kimnach (WJE Online Vol. 25), 187.
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
Everything in the universe is all jumbled together. So God begins to do some creative separating: he separates light from darkness, day from night, water from land, the sea creatures from the land cruisers. God orders things into place by sorting and separating them. At the same time God binds things together: he binds humans to the rest of creation as stewards and caretakers of it, to himself as bearers of his image, and to each other as perfect complements—a matched pair of male and female persons who fit together and whose fitting harmony itself images God.
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, Eerdmans Publishing Company
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.
Augustine of Hippo
I asked the earth, I asked the sea and the deeps, among the living animals, the things that creep. I asked the winds that blow, I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars and to all things that stand at the doors of my flesh. My question was the gaze I turned to them. Their answer was their beauty.
Confessions 10.6
William P. Brown
[In comparison to ANE creation myths] God creates by word rather than sword.
The Seven Pillars of Creation, Oxford University Press, 2010, p.44.
Liuan Huska
Theologian Terence Fretheim points out that God called creation “good”—that is, beautiful, praiseworthy, purposeful—but not “perfect,” which would mean without flaw, complete, without a chance for things to go awry.
Taken from Hurting Yet Whole: Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness by Liuan Huska. Copyright (c) 2020 by Liuan Huska. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com. Source material from Terence Fretheim, Creation Untamed: The Bible, God, and Natural Disasters (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 13-15.
Dorothy Sayers
We are thus considering the temporal universe as one of those great serial works of which installments appear from time to time, all related to a central idea whose completeness is not yet manifest to the reader.
The Mind of the Maker
Julian of Norwich
And in this vision, he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my mind’s eye it was as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought, ‘What can this be?’ And the answer came to me, ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly disappear. And the answer in my mind was, ‘It lasts and will last forever because God loves it; and in the same everything exists through the love of God.’
In this little thing I saw three attributes: the first is that God made it, the second is that he loves it, the third is that God cares for it. But what does this mean to me? Truly, the maker, the lover, the carer; for until I become one substance with him, I can never have love, rest or true bliss; that is to say, until I am so bound to him that there may be no created thing between my God and me.
Revelations of Divine Love, in Devotional Classics, ed. Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 68–69.
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