PCEA

The Spirit in animate nature

We finished our last article by saying that the Spirit of God still operates in the Creation. He is still working. If we now turn aside from the material universe to consider animate nature we discover that it is the Spirit of God who quickens into life.

The quickening touch

The gulf between inert, or “dead” matter and animate nature is immense, and only God can bridge it. The Spirit of God it is who has the quickening touch that brings the life-principle that shows itself in animate nature, plant and animal. Man cannot bring into existence a daisy, any more than he can a mouse or an elephant! He cannot cross the gulf that separates the dead from the living: only God can do that.

And so we see that the Spirit of God passes across the three great divides that run through the universe, from inert matter to plant life, from plant life to conscious life as in animals, and from conscious life to self-conscious life as in man. The Bible shows us that man was a new departure in the Spirit’s operation, in creating a life endowed with rational, moral and spiritual consciousness. The divine declaration: “Let us make man in our image” shows that man was an immediate creation of God, and not a development of existing created forms. It is the contemplation of this that made Job exclaim: “The Spirit of the Lord has made me, and the breath of the Almighty has given me life” (Job 33:4).

Sustained moment by moment

Animate nature is sustained moment by moment by the quickening energy of the Spirit of God. When that energy is withdrawn, animate nature goes back into the dust from which it came. The Psalmist recognised this when he exclaimed: “Thou sendest thy Spirit and they are created; thou taketh away their breath and they die” (Ps. 104:30). You remember that Paul, too, when speaking to the Athenians on Mars’ Hill, spoke of the living God as the One “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:25).

Is not animate nature, with all its wealth of life, a wonderful reflection of the many-sidedness of the life of God? A great saint of the past, Dr. John Duncan, was once crossing a lonely moor with a companion when he saw a very beautiful flower half hid in a cranny. He looked up to the heavens and said: “My, but He has taste!” Did not Jesus ask us to “consider the lilies of the field, how they grow” (Matt. 6:28). The loveliness of God is reflected in the beauty of His handiwork, and we are blind indeed if we do not notice it.