Sunday, January 31, 2010

The Intentional Designer

When God created the heavens and the earth in their vast array, He didn't just make plants... He made flowers and fruits! He wasn't contented with making the earth look nice and flat - no, He made the majestic mountains and the stormy seas, the singing valleys and the melancholic deserts, the seething jungles and the placid grasslands.

He could have just made the earth float around the sun alone. But no, He chose to throw in 8 (or 7, if you don't count Pluto in) other very, very, very different worlds - all without life, except the little blue planet. That's lavishness for you, on a cosmic scale.

He could have just made us eat food without a sense of taste (or photosynthesise or osmosise), but He created many kinds of good food in all its panoply of delicacies.

He could have made a world without music or colour, and we probably would be none the wiser, but He gave us a world bursting with brilliant hues and shades to enchant the eye, and so many different kinds of melodies to enthrall the ear.

And He could have just given everyone a simple gospel tract telling everyone to believe and be saved. But no, He was not contented with that. He gave us nothing less than the Bible - a magnificent epic spanning 1.5K years and so many different authors, and bursting with all kinds of genres - from epics to laws, from poetry to prose, from laments to letters... we see all of humanity's creativity working hand in hand with God's creativity.

In short, God isn't contented to be a functional God, just discharging His duties. He is the God of all excellence, and He lavishes extravagantly upon all that He has done.

So that's just one aspect of our great God. Excellence to the core. He doesn't scrimp or skimp, scrape or skive, or slap or slop.

He is the Intentional Designer. Not just intelligent.

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