When God Does His Laundry
In the beginning, O LORD, you laid the foundation of the earth, * and the heavens are the work of your hands.
They shall perish, but you will endure; they all shall wear out like a garment; * as clothing you will change them, and they shall be changed.
These verses are from Psalm 102. Praising God for his work “in the beginning,” the psalm invokes the first verse of the Bible: “In the beginning God created.” Here the Psalmist describes God’s beginning work as laying “the foundation of the earth.” We think of foundation, first, as something that’s underneath a structure—the foundation of a house, for instance. If the foundation is well-laid, the house may well stand. With regard to the earth, of course, there is nothing “under” it—we know that it is round (and many ancients did too), not a flat thing that we could picture standing on something else.
Perhaps it is better to think of the earth’s “foundation” as natural laws, such as the law of gravity. The late Anglican scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne spoke of the laws that govern matter as being remarkably well-constructed: over billions of years, these laws undergirded an evolving universe that ultimately produced creatures capable of thinking about the universe. Gravity, for instance, is just strong enough to keep things together but not so powerful as to cause things to collapse into each other.
We can praise God for laying the foundation of the universe in the natural laws that underlie the workings of the cosmos.
God, Psalm 102 says, from the beginning laid these foundations and also fashioned with his (metaphorical) hands the heavens. When we think of “heaven and earth” we are thinking as expansively as it is possible for humans to think about the whole cosmos, extending to the most distant galaxies. Human beings, by contrast, are tiny, vulnerable creatures; we are buffeted about and ultimately die; the universe, “heaven and earth” as a whole, seems by comparison the very picture of permanence.
But the psalmist says, as science also knows, it ain’t so. The earth and the heavens “shall perish.” In the poetry of Psalm 102, they shall “wear out like a garment.” The earth, our familiar zillion-pound complex sphere with a lava core and a 25,000-mile circumference, is going to wear out. It is going to be no better than that threadbare coat in your closet that does no good. What a powerful put-down: the universe itself will be nothing more than a worn-out garment!
And God will take care of it. As if earth and heavens were mere clothing, God “will change them.” This doesn’t mean that the physical universe is connected to God like clothing is connected to the person who wears it; it doesn’t mean that when this created world wears out God will replace it with new clothes. It means something rather surprising. God will “change” the worn-out heaven and earth “and they shall be changed.” God is not, as it were, changing out the contents of his closet, tossing the old clothes and buying new ones. No, at the end, God will transform (and not replace!) the old heavens and earth. They won’t be thrown away. He “will change them, and they shall be changed.”
There are Latin prepositional phrases to mark this distinction. The first creation was ex nihilo, “out of nothing.” God creates everything without tools and without raw material. But the new heavens and new earth, which are to come at the end and are seen by St. John the Divine at the end of Revelation: they are created ex vetere, “out of the old.”
Which means, I think we can say, that at the end of all things God will do his laundry. The worn-out creation will be, who knows? Washed? Mended? Resurrected? Transformed? We can’t know, we can’t even picture this, but we can wait for it with grateful anticipation.
For God’s character is not to lose anything that can be saved. He will not break even a bruised reed, as Jesus says. He watches over our world with a tender care that nothing be lost.
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A Note on Good Books & Good Talk. This fall we will have a series of four seminars on Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. This is perhaps the greatest novel to have arisen from a Christian heart and mind—some say the greatest novel ever, period. Yet, in part because of its length, many people have never read it. This is your chance to do so, and to enjoy doing so with other Christians. Any translation will do, but I recommend a reputable publisher (Penguin, FSG, Modern Library, etc.) rather than a cheap word-dump printing. For the first session read Part One, which includes three “books” (each book is further divided into chapters). This is about 150 or 200 pages in most printings.
I’ll be writing more about this through the summer, including hints for people reading a Russian novel for the first time.