Earth Crammed with Heaven: God’s Glorious Works by John Stonestreet and Shane Morris via Christian Headlines
We think it’s time to call Christians back to a bigger, older, and more thrilling way of seeing our world—of seeing Earth as crammed with heaven, because it is.
Among all the memorable moments in C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, one of my favorites comes near the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Caspian and his crew land on an island inhabited by a retired star named Ramandu. True to form, young Eustace Scrubb puts his foot in his mouth: “In our world,” he says, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
Ramandu the star correct him: “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” In this exchange, as he does so often in the Narnia series, Lewis brilliantly communicates a truth often forgotten, especially in a “secular age” like ours: There’s more to the world around us than its material stuff. Much more. Meaning, revelation, and mind are behind everything we see because it was all made by God for His glory. There are no “ordinary things”—certainly not in the sense that materialists imagine.
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John Calvin put it this way: “There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.” Whenever Christians have taken a cue from Holy Scripture, they have taught that human beings and the entire created order “declare the glory of God.” When we quote this wonderful Pslam, we mean more than creation is evidence for God’s existence (though we certainly believe that).
What we mean is that creation, itself, is alive and infused with meaning. Just as human beings are not merely the dust we’re made of but images of our Creator, every star, every flower, and every grain of sand is also charged with divine truth. None of it is there by accident but exists to instruct us and to impel us to worship! Every earthly beauty is a reflection of a heavenly reality.
