Those who live in the great and beautiful state of Alaska have a daily exposure to some of the greatest and most epic geography on earth. Everyday on my short commute to work, the rugged Chugach mountains tower over me just mere miles from away. At this time in the year, the birch trees are beginning to turn shades of amber and gold, created broad ribbons and bands of yellow which contrast with the faithful greens of white spruce. Lower brush and foliage across the hillsides turn a deep maroon adding depth to the scene, and in a matter of weeks the peaks of the mountains will be dusted with snow. It’s an amazing time to live in Alaska.

Of course, we say that while at the same time smiling through slightly gritted teeth as we swallow hard and say goodbye to the short-lived summer, which seems to have left even faster than it arrived a few months short months ago. It’s the life cycle of our state and we each come to accept it in our own way and in our own time. Or else we get out of Dodge as fast and as earliest as life will allow. But those are the exceptions. Ask most residents of this great state, and they will earnestly tell you they feel lucky just to be here let alone call this place home.

Now, as Christians living in Alaska, we have gallery seats for witnessing something far more significant than just something “beautiful” or “epic” or “majestic,” or whatever other adjectives we can think of to describe this place, and there are many. No, for us it’s more than just those things. Because we know that as we use those wholly-appropriate words to describe the sights our eyes observe, we know that these words actually point past the scenery itself and say something about the One who designed and created this tapestry of colors and textures. We know that creation testifies to the invisible attributes of God. When we look at these things using spiritual eyes (cf. 2 Cor. 4:6), we see, as the apostle Paul asserted, “His eternal power and divine nature.” We know that Alaska looks epic and grand and majestic and beautiful because our God is epic and grand and majestic and beautiful. Our world influences how we think about God, just as how we think about God (based on what He has told us about Himself in Scripture) influences how we think about our world.

I’m willing to bet, though, that although we may come to a variety of correct conclusions about the nature and attributes of God based on our observation of the world around us, we probably don’t see everything about God that creation proclaims. I use that language intentionally, because nature truly is proclaiming something about God. That’s David’s point in Psalm 19 when he says that the heavens “are telling” of God’s glory, and the sky “is declaring” His handiwork (v. 1). He talks about a continual pouring forth of speech and revealing of knowledge going on day and night (v. 2). Creation really is speaking to us, though not in audible words (v. 3).

So what are we missing? What is the creation saying to us about God that even we who have spiritual eyes and are capable of seeing spiritual things (where those who are unbelievers, though they have eyes, do not see; cf. 2 Cor. 4:4–5; Matt. 6:22–23) too often do not recognize? I’d like to submit that in addition to seeing God’s power and glory and majesty and beauty on display, we should also recognize His holiness, His wrath, His mercy, and His faithfulness. Let me explain why.

Back in Genesis 6, mankind had become so corrupt that God described humanity in rather shocking language: “Then Yahweh saw that the evil of man was great on the earth, an that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5). We like to think about people as “basically good,” but in reality this is what humanity was like. They were evil to the core and it resulted in violence and wickedness.

God decided to judge mankind because of their wickedness. It would be a judgment of epic magnitude. The entire creation would be judged. Every living thing on the earth would be judged, not just human beings. Man had rebelled against his Creator and his treachery had resulted in corruption of the whole creation. Everything was affected, not just people. And so God was going to wipe out everything.

Except that God had also made a promise. He had told the original man and woman that despite their sin, he was going to provide a redeemer for them—someone who would come from the woman who would crush the serpent’s head and accomplish ultimate victory for God on behalf of humanity (Gen. 3:15). This “seed of the woman” would be the hope to which all the godly and faithful who would ever live would wait for with wonder and excitement.

So because of this promise, God showed untold grace and kindness to one man and his family. Noah found favor with God. He was a righteous man—the only righteous man at that time, really. He wasn’t righteous in a moral sense that he had never sinned. But he was righteous in that he walked by faith and lived out that faith through a life of upright actions that demonstrated that he trusted in God. That’s how it’s always been. “The righteous will live by his faith,” Habakkuk wrote (Hab. 2:4), and that’s why Noah could be called “a righteous man” and “blameless among those in his generation” (Gen. 6:9).

It was through Noah and his immediately family—his wife and three sons and their wives—that humanity would be saved, life would be preserved, and the divine promise of the coming “seed of the woman” would continue unabated. Noah followed God’s instructions precisely. He build a massive ark which would serve as the rescue vehicle for himself and his family and all the creatures that God would supernaturally bring to him. And when the time came, they entered the ark in faith and God closed it behind them.

Then it rained.

The water came from everywhere. The “floodgates of the sky” opened and poured down rain. But more significantly, “all the fountains of the great deep” (Gen. 7:13) opened up in great fissures of subterranean water. The language of the text is unambiguous. It was the single most devastating event ever to have happened on this planet. The fissures which had opened resulted in massive tectonic activity. Layers of sediment were laid down in a matter of days. People and animals drowned or were encased in mud and rock. Mountains eroded while new ranges were formed as massive plates collided against each other. The entire topography of the land was forever changed.

It would be almost a year later that Noah and his family could leave the ark, even after it had come to rest somewhere in the Ararat mountains. The world that Noah saw as he exited the ark was a completely different place. Whatever the world was like before, it was different now. The geography had changed. The climate had changed. Everything that had once lived was now dead and buried in layers sediment that now covered the continents of the earth.

What would a man like Noah conclude as he stepped off the ark for the first time after living on that boat for an entire year? Would he curse God and wish to die? Would he mourn all the people who had been killed and look at God as a horrible, moral monster?

Actually, neither of those things describes Noah. Rather, as soon as he exited the ark with his family and with all the animals that had accompanied them on their ride across the floodwaters (which had had fed and watered and cleaned up after for an entire year!), he immediately build an altar. Now, there’s only one thing an altar is used for—worship. That’s what was on Noah’s mind. He had just come off an ark that had saved him and his family from the God’s wrath. It wasn’t a floating prison. It was a lifeboat (cf. 1 Pet. 3:20). And the first inclination of his heart was to worship the God who had showed him such grace and mercy.

So Noah took one of every clean animal and bird (remember, while he preserved two of every other kind of animal, Noah brought seven of every kind of clean animal just for this occasion), and he offered these animals on the altar as a burnt offering to God. That is, these offerings were in response to what God has done. They signified he worshipper’s complete dedication to God and his desire to seek Gods acceptance. And that’s exactly what he got. The text says that God “smelled the soothing aroma,” which is to say that God accepted the sacrifices on behalf of Noah and his family. And in response, He made another promise: “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth; and I will never again strike down every living thing as I have done” (Gen. 8:21).

There are several important points to be made about this promise. First, note that God made it despite the fact that He clearly acknowledged that nothing had changed in the basic moral disposition of humanity. In other words, the flood did not change man’s hearts in the least. All the wicked people of the earth had been killed in the flood and all who were left was Noah, whom the text had specifically said was a “righteous” and “blameless” man, and Noah’s family who presumably walked in the same faith as their patriarchal example. Connect the dots and God is actually saying something about Noah. He’s saying that although Noah himself was upright and blameless, he still carried sin in his heart which he had passed down to his children and that sin nature meant that mankind was still corrupt as ever. And that corruption would show up in the lifetime of Noah and his sons as the youngest would become the patriarch of an entire genealogy of humanity who would come under God’s curse for immorality (cf. Gen. 9:18–27).

All that is to say that God is making a promise that’s not based on anything man has done or would do. In fact, He’s making a promise in spite of the fact that man is just as sinful as he always was. That’s the first point to be made about this promise.

Here’s the second: this promise is organically tied to the one that God had already made. It has to be. After all, the reason God preserved Noah and his family wasn’t just because Noah was a righteous man. It was even more before God had made a promise that He hadn’t yet fulfilled. So the promise lives on through Noah and his family. Someone would come from their progeny who would be the one to deal with the problem of sin and Satan and restore God’s creation to what it was supposed to be. And this new promise that God made was in fact a reaffirmation of that promise. God was saying that his heart, ultimately, was not to curse man. Yes, he had judged humanity in the flood. But His heart was not to judge but to bless. That was why He made the original promise in the first place, and now He was reassuring all of humanity and all of creation that His heart for mankind was to ultimately bless them and not curse them.

Then comes the third point about this promise. God ties His promise of ultimate blessing to creation itself. He inextricably links the two by promising that “while all the day of the earth remain, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” (Gen. 8:22). In other words, God reassured all of us—because this is a promise He has made to all humanity, not just Noah—that the normal cycles of life—the agricultural cycles, the cycles of the seasons, the solar cycles, etc.—none of that would go away “while the days of the earth remain.” That is to say, God promised to sustain this planet until He had brought to completion everything that He had promised for His program for humanity. The creation would act as a pledge. The sun goes down. It comes back up. God is not finished with us. The summer comes and goes. The leaves fall. The snow comes. It melts. Summer is here again. God is not finished with us. God has not abandoned His plans. He’s still working to complete what He had promised long, long ago.

This isn’t to say that this world is eternal and will never go away. It has to. It’s under a curse, after all, and it groans in anticipation of being set free from the futility it’s been subjected to because of man’s sin (cf. Rom. 8:19–22). Only after God’s program is complete will this world pass away. “The heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be found out” (2 Pet. 3:10; cf. Rev. 20:9). And this first heaven and first earth will pass away and be replaced by a renewed heaven and earth which will be perfect and complete and eternal (Rev. 21:1). It will be everything that God has been working towards since He made that first promise to the woman in the garden in Genesis 3:15.

So that brings me back to my original statement. I submitted that in addition to seeing God’s power and glory and majesty and beauty on display in the creation around us, we should also recognize His holiness, His wrath, His mercy, and His faithfulness. That’s because we who have eyes to see must recognize that the world we’re seeing is not the “very good” world of Genesis 1:31 but the cursed world that Noah stepped onto when he came out of the ark. It is a world evidencing the power of God to destroy all of humanity with water. It is a world that displays God’s holy wrath against wickedness. It’s a world that declares that God has judged man in the past and He will do it again in the future, and so run to Him while He still waits patiently for sinners to repent (cf. 2 Pet. 3:9).

And it’s also a world that screams of God’s mercy—mercy to preserve one man and his family, sinful as they still were. Merciful to land them safely on dry land after spending a year aboard a floating barge of a life raft. Merciful to accept the worship of this sinful man and to be pleased with Him so as to reassert His heart to bless and preserve and ultimately save a remnant for His glory.

And it’s a world that proclaims God’s faithfulness. Faithfulness to not go back on what He has promised. Faithfulness to build in to creation itself a daily and weekly and monthly and yearly reminder to all of us that God will never say, “I’m finished with them!” He will never go back on His word. He will always fulfill what He’s promised. The author of the epistle to the Hebrews says, “God, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us” (Heb. 6:17–18). God’s can’t lie. So He built into His own creation a demonstration of His faithfulness by locking in the seasons and the days and the years.

All this should lead to one ultimate response. It’s the response that all of us are called and ultimately created to do: worship God. Those who are spiritually blind see this universe and suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Rom. 1:18). They exchange the truth about God for a lie and worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator (cf. Rom. 1:25). But those who have eyes to see—who have spiritual vision because God has shown in our hearts the light of the gospel of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6)—we look at the creation and we see His invisible attributes and divine nature on clear display. And it should drive us to do what the spiritually blind cannot—worship God in spirit and truth. And the deeper we understand the truth of God, the greater and more profound our worship becomes. Once we see in God’s world not just His power and might and beauty and grandeur, but also His wrath and holiness and mercy and faithfulness, we gain a new intensity to our worship because our minds and hearts are more fully informed of the God who made the world, who made us, and who has condescended to us by entering into our world to die for us, that we might live with Him for eternity in a new heavens and new earth made perfect forever.