(upbeat music) - Here's an interestingly put question from a podcast listener who writes in to ask this. Pastor John, how does our delight in God fuel or provide a stable foundation for our delight in the good gifts of creation? - I was surprised by this question. I will try to say something about it with the help of C.S.

Lewis in just a minute, but I was surprised because usually the question goes the other way around. How can our delight in creation fuel our delight in God so that it doesn't become idolatry? I mean, that seems to be the kind of concern that a lot of people have is I love stuff so much.

I love pizza and I love friendship and I love nature. How can that feed my delight in God without becoming, but that's not the question here. So I had to kind of redo my brain and say, okay, this is good. I don't usually ask this kind of question. It is interesting.

The question is how does our delight in God fuel or provide a stable foundation for our delight in creation? So I'll try to take the question seriously as it stands. Here's the main thing. Believing in God and delighting in God for himself is the only way to protect nature, all the good things God has made, from being God.

Without belief in God and delight in God as our supreme treasure, we have to treat nature as self-existent. If there's no God, nature is self-existent, big bang or whatever you want to call it. And we are all wired to worship what is self-existent, especially if it is as glorious as the universe.

But the moment we turn nature into a God, we lose it. We lose nature for what it really is. It was not made to be worshiped. Nature will lure us, then cheat us, if we try to make her absolute. She's a creature and all her true, amazing, scintillating, stunning glory is the glory of a God-designed creature.

Now, no one has said this better, as far as I know, than C.S. Lewis. So let me read, last thing I'm gonna do, just read a section from his book, "The Miracles." I'm quoting it from my book. This is the most recent book I wrote, "Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully." And I'm quoting it because I leave out some things and it helps collapse it down.

And I'm reading from page 139 in that book where I was blown away by what Lewis says. So here's a chunk of one of the greatest writers and apologists in the 20th century, C.S. Lewis. He says this. "The Englishness of English is audible only to those who know some other language as well.

In the same way, and for the same reason, only super naturalists really see nature. You must go a little way from her and then turn around and look back. And then at last, the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of nature's current.

To treat her as God or as everything is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her. Come out, look back, then you will see this astonishing cataract of bears, babies, bananas, this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, and oranges, and cancers, canaries, fleas, gases, tornadoes, and toads. How could you have ever thought this was ultimate reality?

How could you ever have thought that it was merely a stage set for the moral drama of men and women? She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her. The theologians tell us that she, like ourselves, is to be redeemed. The vanity to which she was subjected was her disease, not her essence.

She will be cured, but cured in character, not tamed, heaven forbid, not sterilized. We shall still be able to recognize our old enemy, friend, playfellow, foster mother, so perfected as to be not less, but more herself, and that will be a merry meeting. (laughs) I just love Lewis, don't you?

- Oh, my yes. - Nobody writes like Lewis. So, in other words, the full God-intended beauty and wonder and delight that we are to have in creation is possible only for those who don't make a God out of creation, but have a superior delight in the maker of creation.

Unless creation mediates to us God's wonder through its wonder, we have not yet tasted its true and full wonder. That's the pleasure only those can have who know and delight in God through Christ above all things. - Amen, thank you, Pastor John. And again, that beautiful Lewis quote can be found in Pastor John's new book, "Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully," a wonderful book in its own right, if I can say that.

Well, there, I just said it. It's one of my favorite books of 2014, and you can download the entire book right now free of charge from our website, DesiringGod.org. Go there, click on the Books tab at the top of the page and look for the title, "Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully." But don't thank me.

We make our books available online for free because we have some incredible financial donors supporting this ministry. Well, it's not easy to get Pastor John to talk about the book of Ecclesiastes. Tomorrow, I'll do my best to change that. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John Podcast.

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