I love art, especially landscapes and portraits of beautiful animals. And I like detail when the artist spends time to place minute details into his paintings. But as spectacular and beautiful as paintings are, they are inert, just dead images painted on a lifeless canvas. Leaves don’t wave in the breeze, eyes do not shift, animals do not move on a canvas.
I’m saddened by the presumption of our culture that nothing was purposely created. In this view, everything that exists just slowly evolved without any design or designer. Their argument is that there is no intelligent God hovering above the universe. Everything just happened by blind chance occurring so incredibly slowly that a person could not observe any new species taking shape unless he were patient enough to stare at them for millions of years. Impossible!
Don’t these people realize they’re robbing God of the credit for the beautiful things He has created?
An Unseen Nature
I’m convinced that God really does exist. He’s not a physical being like we are, but His unseen nature has brought all living beings into existence. Consider a beautiful tree. God starts with nothing and gradually builds up a full-grown tree. From a seed, the tree gets larger and exhibits fantastic details as the cells and tissues grow. Finally, the tree is mature, but it doesn’t end there. The tree is able to reproduce and generate more of its kind.
The same with animals: nothing is more awesome than to see a large group of animals, all virtually identical, alive and moving about, intermingling with other members of their species. Think of a gang of elk, huge, each one weighing around 700 pounds, with antlers spreading four feet from end to end with seven points on each side.
Then there is nature’s variety. I’m amazed at the incredible variation of one species compared to another: butterflies, for example. Butterflies display intricate and colorful patterns on their wings. I don’t see how these variations could arise solely by random mutations. There is no survival value in one pattern versus another pattern. I think the idea that God deliberately designed butterflies to be beautiful is a better and more logical reason to explain why butterflies are beautiful than by way of purposeless evolution or the doctrine of survival of the fittest.
The Exceptional Beauty of God’s Art
An exercise of imagination will help support my point. Mentally pick a scenic spot in the Black Hills in South Dakota. Search for a good vantage point from where you can mentally “see” a large panorama of verdant valleys and meadows nearby with huge rocky cliffs and meandering rivers. In the distance you can see mountains mixed in with more valleys and streams.
To your right, you can envision heavily forested hills sweeping down into valleys, less heavily forested, containing rivers with grassland embankments. To the left, you can see rocky cliffs with a lot of exposed rock and river-watered ground. The sun is shining in a cloudy blue sky overhead to your left casting shadows of clouds that creep across the meadows, moving forward and rearward as they drift over the uneven land.
The Canvas of Nature
It’s a beautiful landscape, one that would make any artist proud, but consider the detail. If you look closely enough, you can see that every leaf is a real leaf and not a smudge of paint. In this work of art that God has prepared, you can see all the detail you want. You see not only the individual leaves but also that they are moving due to a gentle breeze blowing through the trees. Scattered everywhere, you see spots of color, which at closer look, turn out to be birds and butterflies positioned all over the trees wherever they can find food.
Then, from the right, in the distance, you see a gang of about forty elk slowly making their way across the meadow, all having identical reddish-colored sides and backs with buff-colored rumps. Some are males with huge antlers; most are female with no antlers. You notice some motion on their bodies that turn out on closer look to be magpies eating ticks and other pests that are troublesome to the elk.
Tiny thirteen-striped ground squirrels can be seen all over the grassy meadow. Chipmunks, another small member of the squirrel family, can be seen scurrying in the wooded areas. Butterflies, along with the moths and other flying insects are flitting among the branches of most trees.
Finally, far off to the right, camped on a shady wooded area, you see a tribe of about fifty Plains Indians, their teepees still emitting smoke from morning fires, all the Indians attired in buckskin, some with attractive headdresses made of eagle feathers.
The Masterpiece of God’s Creation
These humans are the masterpieces of God’s creation. The masterpiece comes in many subgroups, but all of them belong to what we call the species of man. They come in different skin colors, speak different languages, are clothed in different ways, have achieved different levels of culture, toolmaking, art, music, etc. When they arrive in the next life, however, they will all love God and serve Him to the utmost of their ability.
Some are more intelligent than others, but in God’s heavenly kingdom, there is an exchange of information from one person to another. Everything everyone says to each other is absolutely true. There is no such thing in heaven as a deliberate lie. Everybody there is supremely loving and generous with each other. Life is a huge adventure for everybody. In our present world, all humans experience death, but in the next life, there is no death, no injuries, no accidents, no bullying, nothing but love and trust and happiness for all.
Getting back to the Plains Indians, when they were in this world, their lives had changed when they captured horses that had escaped from the Spanish. The horse changed Indian life dramatically. No longer required to hunt dangerous buffalo on foot, the horse gave hunters mobility and close-up seats from which to shoot arrows. This was the beginning of a golden age of plenty for the Plains Indians, but it only lasted about sixty years.
The Indians resented the intrusion of white pioneers wanting to travel through and settle on Indian lands, and there was so much fighting between the two that American war policy reverted to mass killing of buffalo to starve the Indians into submission. By 1880, buffalo almost went extinct, and the Plains Indians entered into the most sorrowful existence they ever had, facing starvation. We humans have good reason to regret some of the things we have done to each other.
I have seen modern Indian powwows where Indians dress in traditional garb with plenty of feathers for decoration and bells to jingle as their feet move. Those rhythmic dances by young braves are beautiful to watch. These dances bring nostalgia to dancers and spectators alike, when one understands the trauma these people experienced in their hopeless struggle with Americans wanting a new home in the West.
Getting To Know These People Better
I hope I make it into heaven. Among the many things I hope to involve myself with will be to get to know and make friends with members of the Plains Indians and spend some time camping out with them in the great outdoors so close to nature. That would have been a fantastic adventure for me as a child, and I’m sure I will enjoy it in paradise. The Book of Revelation speaks of a “new heavens and a new earth” (Rev 21:1) that all the redeemed will share, even if we can’t quite understand what that is.
How much land will Indian tribes require to lead the hunter-gatherer lives many tribes expect in the heavenly kingdom? There are about eight billion human beings alive today on earth. Adding all human beings that previously lived on earth might swell that number tenfold. It’s hard to imagine that many people living on a single planet, even in the afterlife, but anything is possible with God.
Scientists make a big point about billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars in the present universe and many of the stars containing planets. They think these planets are all wasted because there are so few humans alive in the universe. That is one of their many reasons for not believing the Gospel, they claim.
Once again, they overlook the intelligence of the good God and supreme Artist who created everything with so much forethought and beauty. I don’t see any reason why God would not adapt sufficient planets with ideal conditions for human habitation throughout the universe whether they, in their mortal lives, lived in crowded cities or as hunter-gathers in the great outdoors. So the Indians, the bush people, the hunter-gatherers, the pastoral: all the tribes of humans could have as much space as any of them desire.
Why Do We Go Out Of Our Way to Insult God
Why is it that so many scientists who are undoubtedly smarter than most of us and certainly better educated than us go out of their way to deny God credit for the beauty He has introduced everywhere in nature? Surely they don’t claim themselves to be more intelligent and more artistic than God.
Lay it at the feet of the devil. He goes around like a roaring lion seeking anyone proud enough to consider himself smart, and the devil transforms that pride into something so overblown that these people fall into the most egregious errors concerning God, relegating God to myth and superstition, arguing that God did not create this marvelous world and, some of them, that God does not even exist.
I think the Divine Artist deserves better than that.
