Variety

Variety is one of the most celebrated attributes of the earth. We celebrate the variety found in landforms, water bodies, weather, kinds of living things, cultures, languages, planets and the stars. In the first two chapters of Genesis, God makes 11 references to the creation of different “kinds” of creatures alone. He also makes reference to the creation of variety in the heavenly bodies and the earth, sky, and waters. As such, I think it is safe to say that variety was and still is a dominant and intentional feature of creation.

I think you can also go deeper with this idea of variety as well. To have different kinds of anything, you need order. At its core, God brought order out of the chaos through His creation. Just prior to the creation, we are told that the earth was “formless and empty, (and) darkness was over the surface of the deep”(Gen 1:2). Ultimately through the creation process, this formlessness, emptiness, and darkness was changed to a world of light, teeming with a great variety of living things. It became a world of complex order and beauty.

The concept of variety in creation matches up well with the teeming quality of creation, mentioned in a previous post. Variety results in complex interactions between all those different kinds of things. Take for example the mountain goat. Mountain goats interact with many kinds of rock structures, a wide range of weather, many hundreds of wild plants species, hundreds of other wildlife species, and human beings. The interactions of a mountain goat with its environment are safely a thousands of time more complex than described here. However, my point is that a creation, diverse in both living and non-living things is mind bogglingly complex.

As mentioned, I think God created these attributes in a deliberate way, for His glory. As such, they are worthy of thanksgiving. As stewards of everything God has put under our power, that diversity and complexity is also worthy of stewardship. Stewardship of the diversity and complexity of creation is much easier said than done. Almost everything we do as human beings reduces complexity. Just look at your lawn, or a corn feild, or a parking lot. These things are valuable for our survival and comfort, yet they replaced something that was a million times more complex, such as all the communities living things (insects, plants, animals and all their interactions) that God put in that place. Even our super computers pale in comparison to the complexity in one blade of grass. We have the ability to create supercomputers, but lack the ability to recreate a blade of grass from its elements, and thats even with abundant examples that we can take apart and examine. If we cannot replicate even one part of one of the most common and simple forms of life on the face of the planet, just how great is God by comparison to us? There is no comparison, and that is why he is worthy of praise.