Last summer I published a blog post entitled “Planet Earth: A Theological Documentary.”
Yesterday morning during a painfully freezing (!) early morning run, I was listening to an MP3 from John Piper’s 2007 regional conference on “The Pleasures of God.” In part 2 (MP3 | video), Piper describes the pleasure of God in His creation, and he enthusiastically endorses the above “Planet Earth” DVDs.
In the MP3, start at 38:08 to get the context (“God loves the world that He made”) and listen until 42:43. Here are a few highlights:
- 39:30: “There are many aspects of nature that no human ever sees.” And then some BBC cameraman comes by and captures it!
- 40:54: This is where the “Blue Planet” and “Planet Earth” endorsement begins.
- “My wife and I and little girl have worshipped for eight hours watching these unbelievable works of God! There are all these pagans producing this worship DVD!”
- While they were watching the DVDs, Piper kept saying to his daughter, “That can’t be happening! That can’t be happening!”
- “I hate evolution. It is so worship destroying! I mean that. Secular, atheistic evolution is worship destroying.”
- “I get so much pleasure talking about what God has done in creation. It’s way better than talking about movies, but that’s another story.”
Thanks, Andy. I agree that watching videos like planet earth is a pure worship experience! I had that same experience myself last summer when I saw them. I recently had the same experience, but even to a greater extent when I watched a Moody Science video on space with my 4- & 6-year old sons. I sat there in stunned (tearful) awe as the Christian narrator(s) used Scripture, statistics, and Hubble photographs to expound the wonders of the universe. Both with that video and with Planet Earth, I found myself taking every opportunity I could to tell whoever would listen to me about the amazing things I had seen. “What is man that you are mindful of him…?”
Thanks again.
P.S. Another great exercise is to spend some time exploring the universe on Google Sky—a worship experience, indeed!