Gideon Strauss has a wonderful way of articulating biblical truth. He is the Executive Director of the Max De Pree Center for Leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary. He was formerly the head of the Center for Public Justice and editor of Comment Magazine for Cardus.
Here he provides insight into three stages of human history.
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Wonder
The Word and the Spirit of God open our eyes to the wonder of the world God made… Creation is not just nature, but encompasses the God-ordained structure of all of human life and all the things in the world…
With eyes of wonder we can see the diversity and complexity of creation accurately and correctly… We begin to discern the pattern of God’s creation, and begin to learn the wisdom of caring for things as they are, neither neglecting nor exploiting their structured possibilities, but rather disclosing their meaning as creatures made and loved by God.
Heartbreak
Our dulled tastes, our self-interested arguments, the entanglement of our identity with our consumption, our failures to cultivate expertise, our subtle slights of others and our seeking after status at the cost of justice… all of life (has) fallen away from enjoyment of the good and obscuring the wonder evoked by a good creation.
With broken hearts we confess our own complicity in the vandalizing of God’s good and peaceable order. We admit to our own idolatrous love of God’s creatures and their diverse qualities: power and fame, sex and wealth, nature and community not least among these. We confess that we seek to shape things into forms foreign to their created purposes, and that we through lack of imagination and enterprise allow things to lie undiscovered and unenjoyed.
As thoroughly as God’s good design suffuses all that is not God, so thoroughly does human evil mar all things… The Word and the Spirit of God open our eyes to the heartbreak suffered by the world God made, and mindful of God’s pain we find our own hearts broken.
Hope
We…yearn for the full recovery of the peace of God, desire the complete restoration of the reign of God, and await the fulfillment of the promises of God.
Our hearts burning with hope, we rejoice in the good news of the cross and resurrection of Christ and the promise of forgiveness and of the resurrection of our bodies and the reconciliation of all things with God. We celebrate the good things, great and small, that are foretastes of the coming kingdom.
As wide as the sorrows of humanity, as deep as the rifts between human and human, as high as the walls that prevent all God’s creatures from fulfilling their intended purposes, so wide and deep and high reaches the redemptive work of God in Christ.
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This is excepted from 2010 Comment Manifesto: Wonder, Heartbreak and Hope.
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