In Genesis 2:1, Moses says that God finished creating the heavens and the earth and all their host. Literally, it says that God finished making heaven and earth and all their armies. In other words, the whole created order, the entire universe with all its myriad creatures and materials is a military force. And clearly, it is God’s army. Martin Luther noticed this and said this army fights for us in our war against evil and sin.
On the one hand, this means that those who say there is no God, those who deny that we are created do so not merely in defiance of God, but they also do so in defiance of all of creation. All of creation fights against them. They are at war with God and at war with all that He has made. This highlights the fact that unbelief is fundamentally a moral problem and not an intellectual one. The problem is not that they don’t have enough information. The problem is that they refuse to surrender to Christ.
But there’s an application for Christians too. For even after we have surrendered to Jesus, we are still tempted to try to keep things from Him. We pretend that there are some things He doesn’t know about. But that’s just not true. He already knows it all. He’s been there with you the whole time, and He is not ashamed of you. In fact, He’s been there fighting for you, delivering you, cheering you on as you struggle against sin. And the whole universe is His military force. He fights for you in the sunrise, and He fights for you in the sunset. He fights for you in the rain and the dew. He fights for you in the symphony and the combustible engine. He fights for you in the billions of stars and plankton, and in the laughter and the tears. He cheers you on from the slopes of the mountains and the surging waves of the sea. The whole universe is His army, His host proclaiming His love, His mercy, His grace. The whole universe fights for Him, and this means that the whole universe fights for you, as you fight the world, the flesh, and the devil.
In a moment, we will sing from Colossians that through Jesus, God is pleased to reconcile all things on earth and in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross. Because of the blood of Jesus, shed on the cross, God’s victory is sure and therefore, so is yours.
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