The Maker of Mysteries: Creation, Certainty and the Posture of Faith.
The temptation in Eden reminds us that the lure of certainty and of possessing knowledge on our own terms can become a desire to stand beyond the limits God has given us. What if Adam and Eve had resisted the need to resolve what the serpent placed before them and instead remained anchored to what God had already made clear? Faith asks something similar of us: to allow the unanswered simply to ‘be’ without letting it displace what has been revealed. There is hope in that posture, an expectation that there is more to His Story
During my twenties, I lived on Darby Street in Cooks Hill, in an apartment above a swimwear shop with Gloria Jean’s outside my window. I would walk from the movement, colour and aromas of the street down towards the beach, stop at the white-painted fence posts holding back the coastal flora and lean there looking out across the ocean. I would count the ships on the horizon until I arrived at the same number three times. I needed to know.
Lingering there, mesmerised by the vastness and unfathomable volume of the ocean, my mind stopped compulsively rehearsing conversations before they had even happened. The ocean offered no answers and that felt strangely comforting. It meant that God, source of the earth’s mysteries, was and is and always would be much more ‘muchier’ than the anxieties that held me captive at the centre of my own universe.
In one sense, I should have known this already. At university, studying Early Modern European History, I learned about the astronomers and physicists of the Scientific Revolution and the shift from a geocentric to heliocentric understanding of the universe. I knew that humanity had once imagined the earth at the centre of all things, only to discover that we orbit something greater. But knowing something intellectually and experiencing its truth are different things. Standing before the ocean, I felt the difference.
Perhaps faith requires a similar reorientation. God is not an accessory to our story; we are part of His. Creation turns our gaze away from ourselves and our desire to know and towards the Maker of the mysteries, the One from whom all good things flow.
That is part of the beauty of Genesis for me. It places humanity within an ordered creation rather than at its centre. The creation account moves from formlessness towards form, from emptiness towards abundance and ultimately towards the garden: a place of relationship between God, humanity and the world He has made. We are made in the image of God and deeply loved, yet we remain creatures before the Creator.
Creation proclaims a majesty beyond us. We do not need to master everything we cannot explain in order to stand before it with awe. There will always be things we do not fully understand this side of Heaven. I am less interested in forcing certainty where Scripture leaves questions open than in holding firmly to what it makes clear. God is Creator. Humanity bears His image. Our hope is found in Christ.
Christ at the centre is where what matters most becomes clear. I want to know Him and follow Him faithfully, allowing His Word to shape the ins and outs and comings and goings of an ordinary life: the way I teach, the way I love and the way I move through the world. I’m not convinced there is much to be gained from trying to settle every question about creation. The desire to know can easily become a desire to master what may, in the end, be a call to humility.
