ICS Daily Devotions
Recognising Our Role In God’s Creation
Gen 2:7-9a And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.
If we go through the process of how God made creation in Genesis 1-2, we will find that God Himself worked. When He made man and woman, He formed them from the dust of the earth—He literally got His hands dirty, so you could say that by doing so, He blessed manual labour.
Secondly, God’s creativity multiplied what He already made. God created the earth which includes land, air and water out of nothing. “Let there be…” and there it was, simply by the words He spoke, physical things came into existence. Then from the basic elements He created, He created even more: “Out of the ground” (Gen 2:9)—we are told God made vegetation. God’s creativity extended to making new things out of things He already created.
In fact, after He created the heaven and the earth, the earth was formless (Gen 1:2). The Hebrew word for “formless” actually includes the sense of confusion, unreality and emptiness, so in the subsequent days, He gave order, shape, diversity and variety. In the formlessness of the earth, He gave form. In the emptiness, He filled it with all kinds of living creatures, made out of the ground of the earth. In the confusion, He gave purpose, that they be fruitful and multiply.
With that, God’s creativity multiplied, filling the earth with new forms, increasing the diversity and variety in our world. He formed, He filled and He ordered. In Gen 1:28, God told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. To “subdue it” means being a good steward of the earth that He created.
God made man overseers of what He has created, and His will is that through us, humanity and all creation would flourish just as He had intended them to be. Therefore, whatever our role in life is, we need to recognise that all of us have a responsibility to see to the flourishing of the natural physical world and humanity, and we need to work at it.
Sermon Series: God At Work
