Page 123 - Through New Eyes

118 THROUGH NEW EYES
the Sermon on the Mount, giving the pattern of the Kingdom to
His disciples.
The labor of glorification takes nature and turns it into cul-
ture. Henry Van Til has written that culture “is the activity of
man as image-bearer of his Creator in forming nature to his pur-
poses .“ 1 The natural glories of the Edenic world are reworked by
man into the cultural glories of the New Jerusalem.
Since this is man’s task, to dress the Garden as well as to
guard it (Genesis 2:15), we can expect God to give direction as to
how to go about it. We find those directions in Genesis 1.

The Five-Fold Pattern of God’s Work
God could have made the world instantaneously, or He
could have done it over the course of six billion years. He could
have taken six seconds, or six millennia. The fact that He chose
to take six days is significant, for His sole revealed purpose in
doing so was to set a pattern for His image. This is stated in Ex-
odus 20:10-11, where man is told to work six days and rest on the
seventh, because that is what God did. The world was designed
for man; and God’s actions in building up the world are pro-
totypes of human actions in continuing to build up and glorify
the world, transforming the raw materials of Eden and Havilah
into the perfected beauty of New Jerusalem, from glory to glory.
Man’s work of re-creation follows the pattern of God’s original
work of creation.
God’s original creation of the heavens and the earth out of
nothing obviously cannot be imitated by man. From that point
on, however, God acted in ways that man can copy. He brought
light to darkness, gave form to the shapeless, named the un-
named, apportioned the restructured world to various king-
doms, etc. Man copies these acts of illuminating, restructuring,
naming, distributing, etc. For reasons that will become clear as
we proceed, let us synthesize the material in Genesis 1:2-2:4 into
a five-fold sequence of actions. Z
First, God took hold of the creation. I believe we can see this
expressed by the phrase “And God said .“ The Word of God is the
member of the Divine Trinity who acts in the world to restruc-
ture it according to the plan of the Father and under the hover-
ing guidance of the Spirit. We see this in Proverbs 8:30, John