God's Creation is Filled to Become More

Adults will happily pay startling amounts of money for tiny plastic bricks if you package them as "botanicals" or "architecture.” This is the surprising power of LEGO. There is something immensely satisfying about opening a box containing hundreds of tiny ouchie rectangles and, several hours later, having a whole thing standing on your table.

My roommate was given a LEGO "Tallneck," an enormous giraffe-like machine from a video game world. The finished model is intricate and strange and honestly hard to imagine disassembled anymore, since it has turned into more than the numbered bags it started as. But imagine how much more impressive it would be if I snapped the final piece into place, stood back admiring my work, and the Tallneck suddenly turned its head, walked across my apartment, decided it didn't like my blue sofa, and left.

At that point, we would have moved beyond bricksmanship into something categorically different. I would have somehow made something with life inside of it — something capable of moving apart from me and possessing a will beyond my control.

Which is roughly where the creation story gets outrageous.

Genesis 2 describes God forming a human being from the dust of the ground. Even if the story stopped there, the achievement would be incomprehensible: muscles constantly adjusting to keep us upright, eyes translating light into images, brains complicated enough to spend decades trying to understand themselves. God makes all of that out of dirt.

But Scripture doesn't describe the complexity of the body as the climax. Instead, "the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life," and only then does the man become "a living being" (Genesis 2:7).

God doesn't merely assemble something remarkable. He makes material creation with room, waiting to be filled, capable of receiving life.

And this turns out not to be an exception reserved for humanity. Genesis 1 is practically bursting with verbs of filling: waters teem with living creatures; birds fill the sky; the earth brings forth vegetation and animals; humans are blessed and told to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth. God doesn't make a world like a gallery of inert masterpieces; He makes a world like a home full of children.

Psalm 104 makes the connection between all this creaturely life and God's breath even more explicit. The psalmist describes this dependence on God’s breath beyond just humans, applying to the entire bustling animal kingdom (Psalm 104:29–30). The biblical picture is that all living things are dust, shaped and filled with life; Creation itself lives by reception. It is animated by God's exhale into us over and over and over again.

But it's even more than that; we living things contain room in us, too. We live, and we can also be filled with yet more life. A womb can literally become living space for another person: not a factory assembling a product, but a life making another life. The person who emerges will surprise you, disagree with you, outgrow you — and that is not a malfunction. That is the point. God creates us personally and fills us with His own breath, but allows us our own will and personality; we, too, create personally, but somehow end up with wholly free individuals.

God made creation to receive lives.

Our trouble is that we have inherited a tendency to imagine "body" and "soul" as fundamentally separate. It is easy to think of the soul as the real person — a luminous little ghost piloting a meat robot until death finally sets it free. But the Hebrew Bible is considerably less tidy about this. The word nephesh, frequently translated "soul," can refer to a living being or person and has associations with the throat — the very physical place through which we breathe, eat, thirst, and cry out. Genesis doesn't say that God formed a body and then placed a nephesh inside it; it says that when dust receives God's breath, the human becomes a nephesh chayyah, a living being.

That doesn't mean Christian theology should suddenly become materialist. But the Bible is remarkably resistant to the idea that our spiritual selves are the important part while our bodies are unfortunate packaging. Christianity's clearest rejection of that instinct is the incarnation itself — God doesn't escape matter, He enters it. The more radically dualistic Gnostic and Platonic ideas were rejected early and explicitly, most obviously through the doctrines of incarnate Christ and bodily resurrection — but the instinct to treat "spiritual" as the opposite of "physical" is sticky at best.

Interestingly, science keeps finding the division more complicated, too. Experiences we think of as immaterial, like chronic stress and trauma, can affect epigenetic regulation in our physical bodies; meanwhile even emotion and facial expression appear to be linked in both directions; a smile can improve, not merely express, your invisible mood. So humanity looks much more like what Genesis describes: a profoundly integrated living creature, in whom the physical and invisible are woven together.

Even so, creaturely life is not self-contained. God doesn't simply breathe into a machine once and watch the Tallneck walk off; being alive is a constant process of being filled, and Scripture increasingly describes God filling people with His own Spirit in ongoing relationship.

In fact, the first time God "fills" a person with His Spirit… it's a creator.

In Exodus 31, God tells Moses that He has filled the artist Bezalel "with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills" in order to make the Tabernacle. Bezalel is not possessed like a puppet while God takes over his hands. His craftsmanship matters. But his ability is also described as something God inhabits and enlarges.

God's creation is filled to become something more. And this time, that something more is actually… yet another creation for God to fill.

The Tabernacle is a work of art: architecture, textile work, metalwork, carving, color, symbolism, scent, ritual and light. Human beings make it out of material things, according to the skills God has given them — and when it is finished, the glory of the LORD fills it so powerfully that even Moses cannot enter (Exodus 40:34–35). You could account for every material component and still fail to understand it. It's not a LEGO set, a collection of somethings; it's a means to relationship, Someone who fills the material space.

Later, Israel builds the Temple, and this filling of God progresses somehow. Instead of a portable tent, Israel builds God a costly, settled house, and once again the glory of the LORD fills what human hands have made (1 Kings 8). There is a movement here from presence toward dwelling: God making His home among His people.

Then Jesus arrives and radically intensifies this process. John describes the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us using language deliberately reminiscent of God's Tabernacle. Jesus calls His own body the Temple (John 2:19–21). But it’s so much more: after His resurrection, He breathes on His disciples and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit" (John 20:22), which leads us to an astonishing claim about ordinary Christians: your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you (1 Corinthians 6:19).

The biblical story has traveled from God breathing life into dust to God dwelling within embodied human beings: living, breathing, opinionated temples.

That is a remarkable amount of intimacy. His Spirit is moving and active in your very skin, even when you're unaware of it. It is in you as your very breath is. This cooperation with God is far more intimate than carrying out instructions from heaven. God gives us wills and works in them, gives us abilities and fills them, invites us to shape the material world with Him, offers us vision, sustains us.

At first, this seems to be the point where God's creativity and ours diverge completely. How can I create like that kind of Creator? My novels aren't alive. They don't breathe. They certainly aren't going to look at me one afternoon and say, "I disagree with you, Danielle." Yet it is true that my work has a life of its own after I finish it, which I cannot control.

When we make art, we are constructing a kind of room. A novelist makes a world and invites a reader to live inside it for a few hundred pages. A filmmaker creates a place that strangers enter together in the dark. A songwriter lets us live a few minutes in their sound.

And the moment another person enters, your artwork is filled with life that you did not put there.

People bring themselves — their histories, bodies, and experiences — into your piece. They laugh at the line you didn't know was funny. A character reminds them of their father when you based him on your college roommate. A song becomes associated with a funeral or a first kiss and can never again mean only what its writer intended.

Sometimes this produces rather spectacular misunderstandings. Consider, appropriately enough, "Every Breath You Take." Sting has described the Police song as being about jealousy, surveillance and ownership; generations of listeners have nevertheless concluded, "Ah yes. Romance," and played it at weddings. Once people enter the room, the creator can't completely dictate what they experience there.

This can be terrifying for artists. We would like to believe that if we make something carefully enough, nobody will misunderstand it. If someone extracts a message we never intended, perhaps we've failed, and we can feel the urge to chase after our work shouting, "No, no, no, that's not what I meant!"

But if creation is meant to be relational, if it was always meant to be filled with life, then perhaps some loss of control is not a failure. Perhaps, in fact, it's fulfillment.

After all, God's creation rejected His intentions almost immediately. We misunderstood, harmed, destroyed, exploited. If I'd been that creator, I wonder if I would have insisted on my intent — or washed my hands of the whole thing, saying, "That wasn't what I meant."

But God kept making room.

His response to the danger of relationship was not to stop creating relationally. And I think this might be the most important takeaway for us to consider.

Suddenly, faithful creative work looks less like controlling an outcome and more like practicing hospitality. Who am I making room for? What mystery and ambiguity can I maintain? What questions can I draw others into? Have I made room for disagreement? Have I made room for God? And can I trust Him with all that I cannot control?

Maybe this month, before you begin whatever you're making, try something painfully simple.

Breathe.

Not because conscious breathing is magic, or because you need another wellness routine to feel guilty about forgetting. Do it because breathing is perhaps the most ordinary reminder your body possesses that you are a creature. You are alive because you continually receive what you cannot produce for yourself.

Take a breath before the first sentence, while the paint dries, before rehearsal, or before showing someone what you've made. And perhaps make it a prayer:

Breathe in: “Fill me with You.”

Breathe out: “Make room through me.”

God has been doing something like this since the beginning: forming material things with astonishing care, making room inside them for presence, and drawing near enough to fill them.

Dust becomes a living person. A womb becomes a first home. A craftsman becomes a Spirit-filled maker. A tent becomes the dwelling place of glory. A body becomes a temple.

And somehow, mysteriously, every time God fills what He has made, creation becomes more.