Creation Restored
Creation Restored
Excerpted from “A Heavenly Pattern for Our Earthly Life” Sermon #1778
The annual sermon of the Baptist Missionary Society
Preached on Wednesday morning, April 30, 1884, at Exeter Hall
We live under the Curse, and so does the whole creation we inhabit. But through the ultimate outworking of Christ’s redemptive work, God has a grand design to restore this Earth, not just to what it once was, but to something far greater still.
Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Matthew 6:10
If the prayer of our text had not been dictated by the Lord Jesus himself, we might think it too bold. Can it ever be that this Earth, a mere drop in a bucket, should touch the great sea of life and light above and not be lost in it? Can it remain Earth and yet be made like Heaven? Will it not lose its individuality in the process?
This Earth is subject to vanity, dimmed with ignorance, defiled with sin, furrowed with sorrow. Can holiness dwell in it as in Heaven? Our divine Instructor would not teach us to pray for impossibilities. He puts such petitions into our mouths as can be heard and answered.
Yet certainly this is a great prayer. It has the hue of the infinite about it. Has not this poor planet drifted too far away to be reduced to order and made to keep rank with Heaven? Can your will, O God, be done on Earth as it is in Heaven?
It can be, and it must be, for a prayer wrought in the soul by the Holy Spirit is ever the shadow of a coming blessing, and he who taught us to pray after this manner did not mock us with vain words. It is a brave prayer, which only Heaven-born faith can utter, yet it is not the offspring of presumption, for presumption never longs for the will of the Lord to be perfectly performed.
That our present obedience to God should be like that of holy ones above is not a strained and fanatical notion. It is not far-fetched, for Earth and Heaven were called into being by the same Creator.
The empire of the Maker comprehends the upper and the lower regions. “The heavens are the LORD’s heavens” (Psalm 115:16), and “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof” (Psalm 24:1). He sustains all things by the word of his power both in Heaven above and in the Earth beneath.
If Earth were of the devil and Heaven were of God, and two self-existent powers were contending for the mastery, we might question whether Earth would ever be as pure as Heaven. But we expect to see the dragon cast out from Earth as well as Heaven.
Why shouldn’t every part of the great Creator’s handiwork become equally radiant with his glory? He who made can remake. The curse which fell upon the ground was not eternal; thorns and thistles pass away. God will bless the Earth for Christ’s sake even as once he cursed it for man’s sake.
“Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). It was so once. Perfect obedience to the heavenly upon this Earth will only be a return to the good old times which ended at the gate of Eden. There was a day when no gulf was dug between Earth and Heaven; there was scarcely a boundary line, for the God of Heaven walked in Paradise with Adam. All things on Earth were then pure and true and happy. It was the Garden of the Lord.
Alas, the trail of the serpent has now defiled everything.
The Lord is King, and he has never left the throne. As it was in the beginning so shall it be yet again. History shall, in God’s providence, repeat itself. The temple of the Lord shall be among men, and the Lord God shall dwell among them. “Truth shall spring out of the earth; and righteousness shall look down from heaven” (Psalm 85:11, KJV).
“Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” It will be so at the last.
This much, however, seems plain—there is to be “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). This creation which now “has been groaning . . . in the pains of childbirth” (Romans 8:22), in sympathy with man, is to be brought forth from its bondage into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
Spurgeon says, “God will bless the Earth for Christ’s sake even as once he cursed it for man’s sake.” God has never given up on his original creation. Yet somehow we’ve managed to overlook an entire biblical vocabulary that makes this point clear: Reconcile. Redeem. Restore. Recover. Return. Renew. Regenerate. Resurrect. Each of these biblical words begins with the re- prefix, suggesting a return to an original condition that was ruined or lost. Redemption means to buy back what was formerly owned. Similarly, reconciliation means the restoration or reestablishment of a prior friendship or union.
These words emphasize that God always sees us in light of what he intended us to be, and he always seeks to restore us to that design. Likewise, he sees the Earth in terms of what he intended it to be, and he seeks to restore it to its original design.
It’s impossible to understand the ministry of Christ without the larger view of redemption’s sweeping salvage plan.
Religion professor Albert Wolters says it is “particularly striking that all of Jesus’ miracles (with the one exception of the cursing of the fig tree) are miracles of restoration—restoration to health, restoration to life, restoration to freedom from demonic possession. Jesus’ miracles provide us with a sample of the meaning of redemption: a freeing of creation from the shackles of sin and evil and a reinstatement of creaturely living as intended by God.”a
God placed mankind on Earth to fill it, rule it, and develop it to God’s glory. But that plan has never been fulfilled. Should we therefore conclude that God’s plan was ill conceived, thwarted, or abandoned? No. These conclusions do not fit the character of an all-knowing, all-wise, sovereign God.
In Creation Regained, Wolters writes, “[God] hangs on to his fallen original creation and salvages it. He refuses to abandon the work of his hands—in fact, he sacrifices his own Son to save his original project. Humankind, which has botched its original mandate and the whole creation along with it, is given another chance in Christ; we are reinstated as God’s managers on earth. The original good creation is to be restored.”b
God hasn’t changed his mind; he hasn’t fallen back to Plan B or abandoned what he originally intended for us at the creation of the world. When Christ says, “Take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world” (Matthew 25:34, NIV), it’s as if he’s saying, “This is what I wanted for you all along. This is what I went to the Cross for and defeated death to give you. Take it, rule it, exercise dominion over it, enjoy it. And in doing so, share my happiness.”
God doesn’t throw away his handiwork and start from scratch—instead, he uses the same canvas to repair and make more beautiful the painting marred by the vandal. God makes an even greater masterpiece out of what his enemy sought to destroy. And for that, we will worship and praise him for all eternity!
a Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 62.
b Ibid., 58.
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