Reading Time: 3 minutes

In 1958, the quirky little party game Mad Libs was introduced to the American public. The premise was simple, each page of the booklet contained a short story in which several words had been removed and replaced with blanks. Beneath the blanks were the type of words, ie, noun, verb, adjective, etc, that were meant to fill them. The holder of the Mad Libs booklet would ask another, or perhaps an entire room of people, who were completely ignorant of the story’s context, to provide random words to fill the blanks. Once all the blanks were filled the story would be read. I can remember doing this with friends as a kid and laughing so hard tears would run down my face. Why was this so funny? Incongruity. When something is suddenly “out-of-place” it strikes us as funny. Because each final Mad Libs story was rife with obviously incongruous words, the result was always hilarious. But in order for there to be an incongruity, there must first be congruity, an established norm from which other things are out of synch.

Recently I began reading The Belgic Confession, a series of doctrinal statements, comprised of 37 articles, dating back to 1559. I was immediately struck by the second article, the first part of which states, “We know God by two means: First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: God’s eternal power and divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.” This is teaching that nature is saying something, that it isn’t a random bramble of incongruous elements thrown together, but is revealing something we are meant to understand. The naturalness of nature, in other words, is only natural because the supernatural God makes it so, and all its parts, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God. 

But of course, this is how we would expect to find things, right? If in the beginning, before all time and matter, there was the Word, why shouldn’t we discover meaning in all that this Word creates and upholds? One mark of an excellent communicator is that there are no wasted words, no “throw-away” lines to stuff the word count of his writings, each sentence is a necessary element of the thought he seeks to share. Why would we think it would be any different in the things this Word has made? “Word”, as most English versions translate logos in John1:1, is a rather misleading way to transfer the idea contained within the Greek. “Speech in progress”, “meaning”, “reason” might convey the idea better. “Word” feels so isolated and stationary, like assembled letters on a Scrabble board, dislocated from any concept of intended meaning. But this Word is active, always communicating clearly through the things which He has made.

Perhaps this is the reason why health officials have long-since understood that extended time in the great outdoors has a calming and refreshing effect, reducing some of the most tenacious human ailments, such as hypertension and anxiety. There’s a graciousness in nature that soothes the troubled heart. Time spent strolling through its “pages” is clarifying. Could it not be that the message of His eternal power and divinity, so clearly declared among the forests, fields, and streams, and recognized beneath the sprawling heavens and noble mountains reminds us of our tininess in the face of it all, and especially before our Creator? And there is no language where this message can’t be heard.

But because nature is a document, written by the trinitarian and holy God, with a definite message and morality sustaining every atom, there is also the potential for painful incongruity baked into reality by the simple presence of our fallenness. Each person is a walking contradiction, bearing the image of God yet so full of incongruous thoughts and actions. Creation isn’t malleable to the context we bring; we are the incongruous ones, like random words, out of synch with the sentences our God has written. And just as clowns are only funny in the circus and somehow creepy everywhere else, so our incongruity with creation’s thoughts isn’t like the game of Mad Libs in the least. When our response to nature’s declaration is a thankless attempt to suppress its clear intention, it is anything but humorous, it’s an ugly incoherence that rubs a callous on our souls.

Then what’s to be our reaction to the contents of this book? Humility and thankfulness. This is the harmony to creation’s song. Each pondered paragraph is meant to lead us to our God in thankful wonder. So get outside today and walk among the chapters all around you. Then open His other Book that reveals the Author in a finer point, and shows Him entering the story He’s been telling, as a Man most incongruous to every other one, and then laying down His life to wipe away their incongruity.