What was the Garden like?

Some thoughts generated by a sermon I heard a while ago, "Where did I come from?"

I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programs a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature, to which I reply and say, well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the almighty, always quote beautiful things, they always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses.y But I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old, and I reply and say, well presumably the god you speak about created the worm as well, and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful god with that action, and therefore it seems to me safer to show things that I know to be truth, truthful and factual, and allow people to make up their own minds about the moralities of this thing, or indeed the theology of this thing.

Sir David Attenborough, from the BBC documentary Life on Air

Interesting, eh? How much of nature is as God originally intended, and how much of it is a result of our corruption of nature, due to our part, walking away from God?

Click the post title to continue reading...It's hard one to get a hold on. Sometimes I feel that being human, and being Christian is more of a partnership with God, than in Him ruling and dictating my life.

Back to creation. In the quote above, Attenborough alludes that nature is inhernently violent. I wonder what he has seen, what ends up on the cutting room floor, that is just too much for our already violently soaked TV. I think we get glimpses of what it means to be wild from these programs, but only glimpses. Lions tear down wilderbeast, kill them, and rip them apart for food when barely dead. Fish hunt and eat other fish using all sorts of deception to ensure their own survival at the expense of another. Lizards eat birds eggs. Even mating dances may be seen as the careful coercion of the opposite sex, rather than the love based, beautiful ritual we make it into. This is not just niceness and all things soft and lovely. This is a world in which animals fight for survival. In which there is conflict, where rarely do creatures die becuase of old age.

And God created it like this. Sure, He added the butterflies and the roses (with lovely thorns too, don't forget), and they have a part to play in that wild realm, but essentially, nature is wild, and harsh, and violent. And God looked on it, and said it was good. What does that mean?

Well, that was where the original post ended. I still think the question is a good one, although I think was planning on answering it! I'll leave it open to comment.