We human beings have been created "in the image of God." This famous phrase appears first in the account of creation in Genesis 1, clearly at its climax. The account tells us of rhythmic busts of work in which God creates vegetation, birds, fish, and livestock "according to their kinds." Then, in describing the event of the sixth day, the account shifts into a majestic first-person plural, a cohortative. "Let us create," says God. The narrative signals us that something weighty is about to be created--something created not according to its kind, but almost according to God's kind. It's not as if God procreates as the birds and fish do. And yet at the end of the [creation] week God does create entities that are impressively like himself, a pair of persons who can live in society and who can use their gift to cause others to flourish.

Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion. . . . " So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; mail and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over . . . every living thing that moves upon the earth."

This is the place in the story where activist Christians take a cue to go to work. There's so much to do in the world--so much caretaking and earthkeeping, so much filling and multiplying, so much culture to create. And . . . we'll have occasion to think of wonderful ways for human beings to fill the earth with the fruit of their creativity--wonderful ways to get busy.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Living and Learning

At the center of the universe, self-giving love is the dynamic currency of the trinitarian life of God. The persons within God exalt each other, commune with each other, defer to one another. Each person, so to speak, makes room for the other two. I know it sounds a little strange, but we might almost say that the persons within God show each other divine hospitality. After all, John's Gospel tells us that the Father is "in" the Son and that the Son is "in" the Father, and that each loves and glorifies the other. The fathers of the Greek church called this interchange the mystery of perichoresis and added in the Holy Spirit--the Spirit of both the Father and the Son. When early Greek Christians spoke of perichoresis in God, they meant that each divine person harbors the others at the center of his being. In a constant movement of overture and acceptance, each person envelops and encircles the others.

Supposing that hospitality means to make room for others and then to help them flourish in the room you have made, I think we could say that hospitality thrives within the triune life of God and then spreads wonderfully to the creatures of God. The one who spreads it is a mediator, a person who "works in the middle." We ordinarily think of Jesus Christ as the mediator of salvation, but I think we can see now that those mysterious places in the New Testament that speak of creation happening "through Christ" reveal that the agent of redemption is also the agent of creation. Christ is the person designated to work in the middle both times.

The Scriptures do not explain how Christ mediates at Creation, or exactly why, but they do give us hints. They say, for example, that Christ is not only the Son of God but also the "wisdom of God" and the "word of God." These metaphors suggest that the work of Jesus Christ represents the intelligence and expressiveness of the triune God. According to God's intelligence, the way to thrive is to help others to thrive; the way to flourish is to cause others to flourish; the way to fulfill yourself is to spend yourself. Jesus himself tried to get this lesson across to his disciples by washing their feet, hoping to ignite a little of the Trinitarian life in them. The idea is that if--in a band of disciples, in a family, in a college--people encourage each other, pour out interest and goodwill upon each other, favor each other with blessings customized to fit the other person's need, what transpires is a lovely burst of shalom.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning and Living

How does the smallest grain of dust exist? How did nothing become Something? One grain of dust should cause us to fall to our knees in wonder. And yet God gives us much more than a handful of dust. He gives us a leaf! We should fall to our knees in thanksgiving at the gift of a leaf! And yet, when I look out of the window, I see a forest of trees, a tsunami of green that towers over me! And that tidal wave of wonder is made of millions of leaves. Only one would be enough – and yet I have been given a gift of millions, all of which can be seen every day from my office window. I am truly a millionaire! 

Above the trees, I see rolling clouds and a blue sky, and above them is the sun, by the light of which I see everything. And yet there is a light in me that is mightier than the sun. This can be seen from the fact that I can see the sun but the sun cannot see me. The sun is massive and mighty and has a physical power that is awe-inspiring but it is an inanimate object. It has no eyes or heart or mind. I am a soul, made in the image of the One who made me, who can look up at the sun and the moon and the stars, and the trees and my neighbours, and, like the One who made me, can see that they are good.

Joseph Pearce, "Reasons to Be Cheerful: Living in the Best of All Impossible Worlds"

In Paradise Lost, Book IV, there's an amazing passage in which Milton describes Satan's first look at Adam and Eve in the Garden. Satan cannot speak--he is in awe as he gazes at these two creatures in all their unfallen majesty. In this scene, Milton reminds us that every human being holds a unique place of dignity among all of creation. We are created in the image of God Himself--and this makes all the difference.

     Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,
     Godlike erect, with native honour clad
     In naked majesty, seemed lords of all,
     And worthy seemed; for in their looks divine
     The image of their glorious Maker shon,
     Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure—
     Severe, but in true filial freedom placed,
     Whence true authority in men: . . .
     So hand in hand they passed, the lovliest pair
     That ever since in loves imbraces met,
     Adam the goodliest man of men since borne
     His Sons, the fairest of her Daughters Eve.
     . . . Satan, still in gaze as first he stood,
     Scarce thus at length failed speech recovered sad:—
    “O Hell! what do mine eyes with grief behold? 
     Into our room of bliss thus high advanced  
     Creatures of other mould—Earth-born perhaps,
     Not Spirits, yet to Heavenly Spirits bright
     Little inferior—whom my thoughts pursue    
     With wonder, and could love; so lively shines
     In them divine resemblance, and such grace 
     The hand that formed them on their shape hath poured."

There's so much to do in the world--so much caretaking and earthkeeping, so much filling and multiplying, so much culture to create....

But the creation story doesn't end with a work order. The first account of creation stops after a seventh day. God speaks six times on six days and then stops. God rests. But each of these days also has a night. And God rests then too! God doesn't talk all the time. God doesn't work all the time. In fact, Genesis doesn't even start with a  word. Genesis starts with the formlessness of the earth and with the Spirit of God brooding over the face of the deep. Then God speaks. You might almost say that at last God speaks. "Let there be light," says God. According to Genesis, God broke the cosmic silence with a creative word. Since then, the alternating silence and speech and silence is the rhythm of God, as old and deep in the nature of things as creation itself.

The idea right from the start is that there is a time to speak and a time to be silent, each in turn. There is a time to work and a time to rest from work, each in turn. We forget this because we live in a wired world where computers don't need to rest. But humans do. To say so, God in Genesis 1 does a remarkable thing. He creates human beings on the sixth day and then gives them the next day off. It's time for God's sabbath, which means it's also time for a human sabbath. Exodus 31:17 says that on the seventh day God rested and was refreshed. as if even God needs a break from time to time.

Perhaps we can't read that verse literally. But we can hear in it a life-giving word: our work is important, but not indispensable. Our work is important, but so is rest from work. Work is very good, but so is contemplation after work is over. And so Christians across the ages have made space in their lives to honor God's Sabbath--a space for worship, for refreshment, for the silence that comes from the very rhythm of God.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living, pp. 29-30

From Albert M. Wolters' Creation Regained:

There is . . . a crucial difference between the laws of nature and norms. In speaking of the "stormy winds that do his bidding" (Ps. 148:8), the psalmist does not ascribe responsibility to the wind. The wind cannot help but obey. But human beings do have responsibility: we are held to account for the way we execute God's commandments, and we are liable to punishment if we do not execute them all. Norms are complex. They can be violated in any number of ways, and they also leave a good deal to the resourcefulness and responsible imagination of the human being who is called to implement them. The command "Be just" must be applied to many different and complex human situations, nor is it always easy to determine in any given situation what justice requires. Yet it is our uniquely human task to put into concrete practice the requirements of the norm for justice. A falling stone has no comparable task in obeying the law of gravity, nor does an eagle in observing God's ordinances for raising its young. The stone obeys necessarily, the eagle responds instinctively, but a person must exercise personal responsibility: we are called to positivize the norm, to apply it to specific situations in our lives. All of human life, in all its vast array of cultural, societal, and personal relationships, is normed in this sense. The almighty Creator lays claim to all; the universal Sovereign lays down his laws for it all; the absolute King requires his will to be discerned in it all.

From Albert M. Wolters' Creation Regained:

There are two ways in which God imposes his law on the cosmos, two ways in which his will is done on earth as in heaven. He does it either directly, without mediation, or indirectly, through the involvement of human responsibility. Just as a human sovereign does certain things himself, but gives orers to his subordinates for other things, so with God himself. He put the planets in their orbits, makes the seasons come and go at the proper time, makes seeds grow and animals reproduce, but entrusts to mankind the tasks of making tools, doing justice, producing art, and pursuing scholarship. In other words, God's rule of law is immediate in the nonhuman realm but mediate in culture and society. In the human realm men and women become coworkers with God; as creatures made in God's image they too have a kind of lordship over the earth, are God's viceroys in creation.

"The world exists not for what it means, but for what it is. . . . It is a false piety that walks through creation looking only for lessons which can be applied somewhere else. . . . We were made in the image of God. We were created to delight, as He does, in the resident goodness of creation. We were not made to sit around mumbling incantations and watching our insides to see what creation will do for us."

Robert Farrar Capon, qtd. in Dreher, Crunchy Cons

"An art work has value as a creation because man is made in the image of God, and therefore man not only can love and think and feel emotion, but also has the capacity to create. Being in the image of the Creator, we are called upon to have creativity. In fact, it is part of the image of God to be creative, or to have creativity. We never find an animal, non-man, making a work of art. On the other hand, we never find men anywhere in the world or in any culture in the world who do not produce art. Creativity is a part of the distinction between man and non-man. All people are creative to some degree. Creativity is intrinsic to our mannishness."

Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible

God's creation, including the creatures in it, have meaning and importance because God made them. The world is therefore worthy of the writer's portrayal and understanding and love. The same doctrine assures Christian readers that their interest in the portrayal of human experience in literature is not frivolous but essential.

Leland Ryken, "Thinking Christianly about Literature"

The Biblical endorsement of [artistic] creativity is matched by its respect for beauty and enjoyment. When God formed paradise, the perfect human environment, he "made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food" (Genesis 2:9, ESV). God's design for human life, in other words, is aesthetic as well as utilitarian.

How can a person read literature to the glory of God? By enjoying the beauty that human creativity has produced and recognizing God as the ultimate source of this beauty and creativity. Christians do not need to defend literature, as most people have done, solely on the didactic grounds that it teaches us. Literature has a reason for being quite apart from that. In a Christian worldview, literature exists for more than our enjoyment, but not for less.

Leland Ryken, "Thinking Christianly about Literature"

A Christian view [of the arts] should stand as a corrective to the prevailing utilitarian spirit of a technological society, though in fact Christians have often perpetuated the utilitarian outlook to the disparagement of literature.

Faced with the charge of the nonusefulness of literature, Christian apologists for literature have tried to meet the argument on its own terms, showing that literature is useful after all. It teaches truth, apologists say, or it moves people to good moral behavior. While there is truth in these arguments, there is something inherently wrong with minimizing the aesthetic dimension of literature. A defense of beauty, form, and creativity can be rooted in biblical example and doctrine. . . .

God himself is a creator, and the world he created is a world that is beautiful as well as [functional]. This creative God made people in his image--that is, with a capacity for creativity and beauty. . .

The example of the Bible confirms the importance of literary form and beauty.

Leland Ryken, "Thinking Christianly about Literature"

[Tolkien's] doctrine of sub-creation [the idea that man's ability to create worlds in fantasy literature is one of the ways that man demonstrates the image of the Creator of this world] was created to explain certain features of fantasy literature, [but] it is applicable to many other genres as well. Even in the most "realistic" fiction, the writer creates a world, peoples it with characters whose actions give its history significance, and determines the rules of its nature.l And usually . . . the secondary world [created by the author] echoes the primary creation [the real world, which God created] in more ways than one. The hero, at great personal sacrifice, defeats the villain and rescues the damsel in distress, and they ride off into the sunset to live happily ever after: this basic plot we keep coming back to is salvation history writ small, as it were. As Edwards says, literature is "drawn" towards a biblical reading of life. Tolkien explains why: "We make still by the law in which we're made."

Donald T. Williams, "Christian Poetics, Past and Present"

For books are not . . . dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that should whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them . . . [Hence] as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.

John Milton