And Heaven and Nature Sing
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Can you believe it’s almost Christmas? The day and the season have come to mean so many different things to different people, but for those who follow Jesus, it’s the day we’ve chosen to celebrate His birth. The day when we celebrate the “incarnation”—the Lord and King spoken of in the Hebrew Scriptures and in our Christmas carols, coming to dwell with His Image-bearers as one of us.
“Joy to the world! The Lord is come; Let Earth receive her King; Let every heart prepare Him room…”. The carol is sung with such joy because it’s announcing the astoundingly good news that this promised King has come—come to separate Light from darkness again, come to bring rescue and freedom to the captives, come to bring healing and wholeness to the hearts, minds, souls, and spirits of the broken, come to bring a revelation and reinterpretation of the true Image of our Creator God, come to show humanity what it means to “rule and reign” as a true Image-bearer and to enable us to walk with Him in that purpose.
This announcement is good news for all of humanity, but it goes even further than that. The final line in our carol says, “and heaven and nature sing…”. To understand the meaning of this phrase, we need to return to that symbolic Genesis creation story again.
Remember, the story began by describing how the Creator Spirit brought His good creation into being and chose His Image-bearing human creatures to watch over it, to help it flourish, to care for it and for each other on His behalf and in His power and authority—intimately connected to Him in a loving, relational, partnership. The heavenly, spiritual dimension united in harmony with the earthly, natural world.
As the story continued though, we watched humanity lose faith in their Creator and put their trust elsewhere. Consequently, the spirit of the Image-bearers became disconnected from the Life-giving Spirit of their Creator, and their minds, hearts, and souls became blinded and afflicted by darkness. Their inability to see or hear their Creator clearly caused them to reflect a distorted Image into the world and led to violence, captivity, injustice, destruction, and death.
No longer whole and complete without His Spirit, humanity was unable to walk in their intended, God-given, purpose—to be the Image-bearing creatures through whom the Creator Spirit would rule and reign with love, value, and care for His creation.
But, as we talked about last week, throughout the Hebrew story, there had always been a promise of rescue from the chaos and darkness, a promise of healing for the Image-bearers, a promise of redemption and restoration for all of creation, a promise that “heaven and nature” would eventually “sing” together in harmony again.
The Hebrew prophets spoke of this time, when the Lord God would act through His Messiah—His chosen “Anointed One”—to fulfill His promise to bring God’s Kingdom and His rule and reign “on Earth as it is in Heaven”.
The prophet Isaiah was one who looked ahead to this coming event. He said things like this:
“This is what the LORD says: … See, I will create new heavens and a new earth.”. (Isaiah 65:8, 17 NIV)
“Sing, starry sky and every constellation, for what the Eternal has done. Shout for joy, dark soil underfoot and deep caverns below; Erupt in joyful songs, mountains and forests, and every tree in them! Sing joyfully, for the Eternal One has rescued Jacob, His people; The splendor of God will be revealed in Israel. (Isaiah 44:23 VOICE)
“The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat…They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:6, 9 NIV)
Now, I know what you’re thinking. The wolf and the lamb are certainly not living together in harmony, and humanity causes harm and destruction to each other and the earth every day. Another of our Christmas carols, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” puts it this way: “And in despair I bowed my head: ‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said, ‘For hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth good will to men.’”
What’s going on? If Jesus is the fulfillment of the story, the joyful good news in our Christmas carols, why are things still such a mess?
The disciples of Jesus were asking themselves the same questions. After walking with Him for over three years and believing that He was this promised “Messiah” spoken of in their Scriptures, the promised King who had come to rescue them and usher in this new creation on earth, they watched as He was arrested, tried, crucified, and killed by the very powers they thought He was going to rescue them from. And the story could have ended there, except—it didn’t… Something amazing happened that not only changed the course of the disciples’ lives, but changed the course of creation itself. The carol continues, “Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: ‘God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, With peace on earth, good will to men.’”
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves in the story. We’ll come back to these important ideas in the coming weeks. For now, let’s return to our Christmas carol. “Joy to the world! The Lord is come; Let Earth receive her King; Let every heart prepare Him room; And heaven and nature sing…”. Those who followed Jesus in the first century, as well as those who trust His words today, believe this joyful good news is true. They believe that with the birth of Jesus, and through what He accomplished, the world has indeed become a different place. Heaven and earth, the spiritual and the natural, have been reunited and intertwined in the person of Jesus Himself, so that now, anyone who will hear His words and believe the Creator Spirit who sent Him (John 5:24) can participate with Him in this Heaven-and-Earth partnership. As the Apostle Paul writes, “When anyone lives in Christ, the new creation has come. The old is gone! The new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17 NIRV)
This brings us to another word commonly heard in our Christmas carols: “hope”. The word means, “the confident expectation of good”. Heaven and nature can sing because of the hope found in Jesus. The confident expectation that the Creator’s promise of new creation—His Kingdom come on Earth as it is in Heaven—has indeed been launched in Jesus, “the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15); that its seed is continuing to grow today; and that although all is not yet put right, heaven and nature will eventually sing together in harmony again in the future.
Because of Jesus, humanity can choose to walk with their Creator in their intended kingdom purpose right now, in this world, in loving relationship and partnership with Him; allowing His Spirit to work through them to love, value, and care for each other and for His creation.
“Joy to the world! The Lord is come; Let Earth receive her King; Let every heart prepare Him room; And heaven and nature sing…”
Merry Christmas!