Makers of Good – Sunday, June 23, 1985
God is the maker of all things. But of all His creations, He has set man apart by extending to us the opportunity and responsibility of creative enterprise. He made us to be like Him, to be not merely created, but to be creators.
The marvelous works of God are an emblem of the opportunities that exist for man. He made us to be the stewards of His handiwork, to add our lives and our making to the world He gave us. And we have only to look around us to see the fruits of this positive creative force: our sciences and medicines, our universities and societies. They are at once the gift of God’s light and truth and the expression of our own creative energies.
But not all of man’s creations have been directed by God’s light, and much of what man has made has been counter to the positive creative mandate of God. Our universities have fostered literature, theology, and the healing arts, but have created weapons of war and sciences whereby life itself is threatened. Our technologies have enabled us no, only to communicate with one another and to better understand our world, but they have been conscripted by those who would do evil for the purpose of destroying man’s freedom.
None of this is unique to our own time. In Ecclesiastes, the Preacher wrote: “Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.” 1
What does make our time unique is that the “inventions” we have sought out expand our creative and destructive abilities in ways the world has never seen before. We can save life, and we can destroy it—vastly, swiftly, more certainly than at any other time in the history of mankind. But what we may not yet have learned is that the power given us by God ultimately has meaning only if we return it to His service.
In each of us is the power to make, to create…or destroy. And our sciences and technologies have expanded the consequence of that power, both for good and for evil. It remains for us to decide whether we will fulfill the stewardship given us by God, whether we will be makers of good, whether we will answer God’s call as spoken through his apostle Peter: “…Let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator.”2
It remains for us to decide, to choose, to become the makers of good God intended us to be.
1 Old Testament, Ecclesiastes 7:19.
2 New Testament, I Peter 4:19.
June 23, 1985
Broadcast Number 2,914