Why I Believe in God--Part III

His Footprints in Creation

Donald McLeod

It is not on the physical universe only that the Creator left his footprints.  He has also left them on the story of the human race.  He is not, as Deism argued, merely a great mechanic who put the Machine together and then left it to run itself.  Nor is he an absentee landlord who left the human tenants of his estate to run it (and make a mess of it) without supervision, intervention or accountability.  The very nature of God as Life, Love and Logos rules out such an idea of his relationship with the world.  The very reason he made us was that he might love us, walk with us and keep in touch with us.  This is what we mean by divine providence.  Not only has God made us.  He keeps an eye on us, preserves us and governs us; and this providence applies on both the mega- scale and the micro.  It takes in the storms on the face of the sun, the fall of the sparrow and the beauty of the lily.  But above all it takes in God’s personal, active and intimate involvement in the history of the human race.  In the Garden of Eden, God was already on speaking terms with Adam and Eve, and they would have regarded the question whether he existed as an absurd one.  He talked with them and he walked with them.

 The Fall violently disrupted this relationship, but it didn’t end it.  On the contrary, God’s immediate response to their sin was to speak to them.  Of course, the tone had now changed.  It was admonitory, and even ominous.  They had brought a curse on the ground, and yet would remain for ever dependent on it; and to it one day they would return, ‘for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ (Gen. 3:19).  But he was still talking to them, and in them to us, and his words were not all gloom and doom.  Yes, so long as history lasted there would be enmity between the Seed of the Woman and the Seed of the Serpent, the infernal master-mind behind their sin, but in that struggle her seed would triumph, the human race would be finally redeemed, and for that redemption God himself would take full responsibility.