My wife and I recently returned from a trip out west. I finally got to fulfill a life-long dream of visiting the Grand Canyon. I had wanted to go there ever since I watched Mike Brady take his Bunch there in 1971. I’m sure I was watching re-runs, but still, my desire dates back to at least the mid-70s. It did not disappoint. It is truly something one must see to appreciate. Photos simply don’t capture the enormity of the place. I have flown over the Grand Canyon at 30,000 feet many times, noting how much it looked like a small gully after a major downpour. But standing on its cliffs, you realize how overwhelmingly big it is. You feel tiny on the edge of its plunging walls. This is, I think, its main attraction. It is why some 2.9 million people went to gaze at this gorge last year. There is something therapeutic about feeling small. It’s the earthly equivalent of looking up into the night sky and realizing the universe goes far beyond your comprehension. I believe this titanic trench is meant to make us feel small, that it’s still here to witness to something even more incomprehensible. Allow me to explain.
That the Grand Canyon is large goes without saying. Its bigness is right there in its name. 277 miles long and 18 miles wide, it’s actually larger than the state of Rhode Island! The flat mesas and the shadowy walls of sedimentary rock stretch off as far as the eye can see, hot beneath the desert sun and contrasted against the calm, unchanging blue sky above. But it’s not just long and wide, it’s deep too. It’s like standing on the edge of the Mariana Trench with all the water removed, the depths of the ocean laid bare at 7000 feet above sea level. And although the walls and floor are dotted with muted green scrub brushes, and the occasional bird flutters overhead, or a chipmunk scurries at your feet, the scene is primarily one of barrenness, death, remains. And such strange remains. Marine life fossils are scattered throughout its colorful layers, bearing testimony to its once submerged state. When and how did all this happen?
Walking along the South Rim of the Canyon, one finds brass markers embedded in the trail every so many yards, declaring the passage of another 100 million years, as you go. The point of the markers is to emphasize the massive amount of time, we are told, it took to form this spectacle. But they are deceptive declarations, meant to distract the viewer from the cataclysmic ruins that lay before us. They mean for us to see that tiny, shining, emerald river coursing through the basin below as the erosive finger that carved out this ridiculous ravine. And surely millennia must be added to that gently nibbling Colorado River if this is so. These markers make impersonal Time the mechanism that made all this, just as in Gollum’s riddle from The Hobbit:
“A thing that all things devours, birds, beasts, trees, flowers
gnaws iron, bites steel, grinds hard stone to meal
slays kings, ruins town, and beats mountain down”
Time is destructive, yes, but very, very slow, and it certainly doesn’t conjure in our minds the tumultuous cacophony that must have attended the creation of this gargantuan hole. What must that day have been like when “all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened,” (Gen. 7:11) when tectonic plates were thrust up and layer upon layer settled on the shambles?
In a sense, the Grand Canyon isn’t really part of nature, of General Revelation. General Revelation is the stuff we walk past every day, the trees and hills and grass and steams. It’s the gentle whispering of our Creator in the normalness of nature. But that’s not what we find in places like the Grand Canyon. That place is a reminder, not of the normal course of things, but of sudden judgment interjected upon a fallen world. Such are all our National Parks. They are arresting to us precisely because they are not ordinary. We don’t vacation there to see sidewalks, dandelions, and maple trees. We go there to see a lovely devastation, the remnants of a chaotic moment in time, left over for our observation after the floodwaters receded. They are placards of God’s mighty power, meant to tell us something.
The Grand Canyon is a great gulf. You can’t stand on the edge without that thought coming into your head. You can see the other side in the distance, blue and hazy, but it’s practically inaccessible. I think of the deceased rich man in Jesus’s story (Luke 16:19-31), how he looked across the great divide that stood between him and Lazarus, resting in the bosom of Abraham, and moaned. This the Canyon speaks to us. But it also speaks of salvation, for the very torrent that scraped this crevasse out of the earth also lifted Noah’s boat, preserving the tiny mustard seed remnant of mankind that has now populated all the earth. Perhaps this is why people the world over flock there; they are like salmon, returning to their birthplace. We somehow know that trench is there for us. It is a type of cross that reminds us all of both judgment and salvation.
