The World Is Awake

What we're blind to is waiting to lift us up.

As a thinker, I’ve noticed that some truths become buildings on the landscape of your life: they make a home inside you, and they remain. You get older and (God willing) wiser, and yet these buildings stand as testaments to the power and stability of truth. One of my favorite buildings—think of it as a glorious old barn full of hay bales and happy birds—is this: the world is awake. We are constantly moving through a place that is moving us. We are standing on soil that speaks, before trees that talk, beneath a sky that sings (Isa. 6:3; Ps. 96:12; Ps. 19:1-4; Rom. 1:20). I don’t mean that the world is animate or that everything is divine or inhabited by its own self-sustaining spirit. I mean something much more than that. I mean that the triune God talks through the things he has made. God presents his extraordinary self through the ordinary world.

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Intrigued by that idea? Learn more in . . .

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No Cold Neutrality

In our time, we battle the effects of what Charles Taylor called disenchantment. He defines its opposite, enchantment, as a pre-Enlightenment assumption that the world around us is full of meaning and spiritual forces that can affect us in powerful ways. He says, “the enchanted world . . . is the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces which our ancestors lived in” (A Secular Age, 26). In that world, he describes people as “porous” (see my article, “Praise God We’re Porous”). By that, he means we were sponge-like: our minds/spirits were filled with holes through which the powers of the enchanted world could enter. People in the enchanted world were more easily affected by the spiritual forces they believed were all around them.

Contrast that with today’s assumption in the modern West: the world is a purely material, neutral environment. It is disenchanted. It’s a place where we create (rather than receive) our own meanings and purposes based on . . . well, whatever we like. For many people today, the world is a cold (impersonal) neutral playground. It is neither good nor evil, neither a blessing nor a curse. It’s just there.

What the enchanted age understood is something still at the heart of Christianity: the world is not a neutral, dead material space. It is a place shot through with revelations of the personal God who created, upholds, and redeems it. The world does not “speak” in the way that Scripture does, but it does communicate the character of the God who made it.

The heavens declare the glory of God,
    and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
² Day to day pours out speech,
    and night to night reveals knowledge.
³ There is no speech, nor are there words,
    whose voice is not heard.
⁴ Their voice goes out through all the earth,
    and their words to the end of the world. (Ps. 19:1-4)

His invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. (Rom. 1:20)

One theologian called creation “the voicings of God” (N.D. Wilson, Notes from a Tilt-a-Whirl, 98). I love that phrase. We are surrounded by divine voicings. And if we ignore them, we wilt like flowers beneath a brow-beating sun. That’s what Charles Taylor found when reporting on how people are fairing in our “secular age.” What happens when people treat the world as disenchanted, as a cold, neutral material space? They feel empty and disconnected, which he calls a sense of “non-resonance.”

The sense of emptiness, or non-resonance . . . . can come in the feeling that the quotidian is emptied of deeper resonance, is dry, flat; the things which surround us are dead, ugly, empty; and the way we organize them, shape them, arrange them, in order to live has no meaning, beauty, depth, sense. There can be a kind of “nausee” before this meaningless world. (A Secular Age, 308)

We shouldn’t be so surprised. If, in our minds and hearts, we extract the personal, meaningful, God-testifying nature of reality, then we’re left with something empty, something hollow that can only echo a hollowness inside us. The world is awake. If we choose to be asleep, we miss a whole lot.

A Testifying Terrain

Here’s how I put it in Finding God in the Ordinary.

Do not mistake the sunlight for sunlight, or the trees for trees. Do not mistake wind for wind, or sound for sound. Do not mistake the ordinary for the ordinary. In this world, there is no such thing as the ordinary. God is present here. Everywhere we look are testaments to divine presence. God is the light behind the light, the one who burns and shines in self-communion. He is the wind behind the wind, the one who moves the world. He is the sound behind the sound, the one who speaks from eternity past. Our world is an animated echo of the Trinity. Everywhere is Father, Son, and Spirit. That is no ordinary world. 

Everywhere there are testaments to divine presence. The question isn’t ever whether God is present with us, for Paul tells us he is always near (Acts 17:27). The question is whether we will have the eyes to see him. But that, as it turns out, is not a matter of perception; it’s a matter of the heart.

Seeing with the Heart

Our hearts determine what we see. This sounds strange, but it comes up in Scripture repeatedly. One of God’s famous judgments on his rebellious people follows this through.

And he said, “Go, and say to this people:

“‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand;
keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’
¹⁰ Make the heart of this people dull,
    and their ears heavy,
    and blind their eyes;
lest they see with their eyes,
    and hear with their ears,
and understand with their hearts,
    and turn and be healed.” (Isa. 6:9-10)

Seeing is not purely physical. God’s judgment in this passage reveals that his truth—God’s clear revelation and his holy call on our lives—can be right in front of us. And we don’t see it. Why? Because we think we can see, but we’re really blind.

Isn’t it interesting that in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus uses the same Greek word, tuphlos, to describe both the physically blind and the spiritually blind? In Matthew 23, Jesus calls the scribes and Pharisees “blind guides” (v. 16, 24). He also calls them “blind fools” (v. 17). The same Greek word, tuphlos, is used throughout the chapter. And the same word is used in Jesus’s healing of men who are physically blind (9:27–28; 12:22; 15:30–31; 20:30; 21:14). Blindness, according to Christ, is more than optics. There is a heart dimension to all that we see.

Truly seeing God reflected in the world around us takes more than mere vision; it takes faith. Belief in the person and character of God unlocks the doors of our spiritual perception so that we can find God in the ordinary.

That’s great news. Most of us waltz through the day with the quiet illusion that we’re alone, that it’s “just us.” But Scripture, thank God, reveals it’s never just us. God is here, and he is speaking. He is revealing himself in the things around us if we have the heart-vision to see it. If you want that kind of vision, ask the Spirit. He’s the one who searches the deep things of God and brings them before his people (1 Cor. 2:10).

The world is awake, my friends. By God’s grace on a daily basis, we can be, too. What we see will be ceaseless testaments to the glory, power, kindness, and gratitude of the God who is always giving himself away.