The first thing God told Adam and Eve to do was ‘fill the earth and govern it’. Because Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden doesn’t mean they were limited to the Garden of Eden. God told them to ‘fill the earth and govern it’. Let’s stop and think about that for a moment. God was inviting Adam and Eve to explore. Everything outside Eden was uncharted territory. They could travel 24,759 miles in any direction and never see the same landscape twice. There were 196,949,970 square miles of unknown territory to explore. One way we glorify God is by exploring and educating ourselves about everything He’s created. One author explains: ‘The astronomer who charts the stars, the geneticist who maps the human genome, the researcher who seeks a cure for Parkinson’s disease, the oceanographer who explores the barrier reef, the ornithologist who studies and preserves rare bird species, the physicist who tries to catch quarks, the chemist who charts molecular structures, and the theologian who studies God have one thing in common. All of them are explorers. They are fulfilling the Genesis commission. And their exploration honours God if it’s done for the right reasons and results in the right response: to know Him and to worship Him.’ There’ll always be some scientists who take an atheist’s view, and come to conclusions that don’t include God. But rather than abandon science, we’ve been called to reclaim it. If God created everything, then everything carries His holy fingerprint. All truth is God’s truth. Theologian Abraham Kuyper said, ‘There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, “This is mine! This belongs to me!”’
