Blinded by the Sun
By Matt Hunt
Maybe you’ve experienced it. Driving along in a westerly direction on a clear day and you come over a rise and bang!!! Your hands go to the visor. Or to your face. As the sun, low in the sky, shines deep in your face, or more to the point, your eyes. Happens to me most afternoons when I drive home along Binstead Way. Even to the point where the visor is not low enough to match the lowness of the sun in the sky to block its rays. There have been days, like yesterday, when I’ve had to pull over, or go home on a different route. I wonder how many car accidents are caused by a driver being ‘blinded by the sun’.
The sun is a wonderful part of creation. Even has its own particular moment of creation in the record of creation in Genesis. It brings us great sunsets and sunrises, heat and light, and necessary vitamin D. And yet there are these moments when the sun does not ‘bless us’ but ‘curse us’. Many things in creation can be like this - think of water, so necessary and joyful, yet in a flood, dangerous and lethal.
It’s not so much that creation can be harmful. Rather these experiences remind me that God is so much bigger than me. His creation is on a greater scale than me. His work and engagement with creation far exceeds my understanding. There is a point at which we humans will not be able to ‘harness the power of the sun’. It’s power is far greater than us - just like the God who made it.
Yet I, as a human being, are the pinnacle of His creation. We are the ‘apple of his eye. We are the ones made in his image (Gen 1:26-27). This reminds me, challenges me, and corrects me, to care for His creation. I can’t control it, master it, or overpower it, in the same way I can’t do that to Him. But I must respect it, honour it, and, if it can be put like this, lead it well. May I engage with creation as God would. After all it’s His anyway, even when it ‘blinds me’.
“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet”
Psalm 8:3-6 NIV
The sun is a wonderful part of creation. Even has its own particular moment of creation in the record of creation in Genesis. It brings us great sunsets and sunrises, heat and light, and necessary vitamin D. And yet there are these moments when the sun does not ‘bless us’ but ‘curse us’. Many things in creation can be like this - think of water, so necessary and joyful, yet in a flood, dangerous and lethal.
It’s not so much that creation can be harmful. Rather these experiences remind me that God is so much bigger than me. His creation is on a greater scale than me. His work and engagement with creation far exceeds my understanding. There is a point at which we humans will not be able to ‘harness the power of the sun’. It’s power is far greater than us - just like the God who made it.
Yet I, as a human being, are the pinnacle of His creation. We are the ‘apple of his eye. We are the ones made in his image (Gen 1:26-27). This reminds me, challenges me, and corrects me, to care for His creation. I can’t control it, master it, or overpower it, in the same way I can’t do that to Him. But I must respect it, honour it, and, if it can be put like this, lead it well. May I engage with creation as God would. After all it’s His anyway, even when it ‘blinds me’.
“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet”
Psalm 8:3-6 NIV
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