Many of us grew up singing that line. For Andrew Peterson, my guest on Created in the Image of God, the practical effect was simple and devastating: the world was beautiful, but you weren’t really allowed to love it.
He was told, in so many words, “It’s all going to burn anyway.” Trees, oceans, birdsong, the Florida woods he wandered as a kid—temporary scenery. At best, a distraction; at worst, a trap. Meanwhile, the church sang, “This is my Father’s world,” and read the Psalms that rave about hills leaping and rivers clapping their hands.
The dissonance was real.
Andrew grew up as a pastor’s kid, first in a “Norman Rockwell painting” of small-town Illinois—John Deere tractors, Midwestern calm—then, at seven, uprooted into what he describes as “a Flannery O’Connor short story” in North Florida. He believed in God, but assumed God was perpetually disappointed. The world around him glowed with a beauty he felt deeply, especially in the woods, yet his religious subculture treated that love as suspect, or at least irrelevant.
Then he discovered Rich Mullins.
A Singer-Songwriter Who Loved Dirt and Sky
Rich Mullins is best known for “Awesome God,” which Andrew will tell you isn’t even close to his best work. The album that undid him was A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band—a collection of songs that took Jesus, and the world Jesus made, with equal seriousness.
Here was a Christian writer who talked about Wheaton and Wichita, highways and Appalachia, thunderstorms and sunsets, not just “spiritual principles.” Rich wrote about Jesus, but always with concrete dirt under his feet. He sounded less like a man escaping this world and more like one astonished to be living in it.
Through those songs, Andrew realized two things at once:
- Jesus was real, and kind, and pursuing him. Not just tolerating him, not waiting to smite him, but wanting him.
- The created world was not enemy territory. It was a place shot through with the presence and speech of God.
“I didn’t know I was allowed to have that wonder,” he told me. “I’d always loved being outside…but I was being told in church that it was all going to burn anyway, so why bother caring for it?”
Rich’s work gave him permission to see what Scripture had been saying all along: this is my Father’s world. Not a disposable backdrop, but a beloved handiwork God intends to redeem, not discard.
Behold, I Am Making All Things New
One of the most important sentences for Andrew—and for many Christians shaped by his work—comes from Revelation: “Behold, I am making all things new.”
He pointed out something that often gets missed in his own evangelical circles: Jesus does not say, “Behold, I am making all new things.”
For Andrew, those two little words mark a chasm between two ways of imagining God’s work:
- In one imagination, God looks at creation like a failed project. The storyline becomes: evacuate the faithful to heaven, torch the stage, and start over somewhere else.
- In the other, God insists on working with what He made—wounded, corrupted, and vandalized as it is—until it is healed, restored, and glorified.
“God’s flex,” as Andrew put it, “is ‘I don’t throw stuff away. I fix it and redeem it.’ The enemy of our souls tries to break us and wants us thrown away. God says, ‘I’m going to take all these pieces and bring order out of chaos again.’”
From Andrew’s Christian theological standpoint, that includes persons and the world itself. He reads the New Testament’s language about resurrection in a very concrete way:
- Jesus rises, in the Gospel accounts, eating fish and inviting His followers to touch His wounds.
- Andrew understands that as a sign that God does not abandon His creation, but renews it, starting with what Christians call the resurrection of Christ.
Put simply, in Andrew’s view, the hope is not escape from creation but the renewal of creation. He’s careful to say this doesn’t mean he fully understands how that renewal will unfold; it does mean he refuses the idea that God treats the physical world as trash to be tossed.
My own background and convictions as a Bahá’í lead me to read some of those same texts more symbolically—seeing “resurrection” above all as the raising up of new life, new understanding, and new obedience in human beings and human communities. But on this point, Andrew and I deeply agree: the Creator is not in the business of discarding what He has made.
We arrive at that shared conviction by different theological routes, but it converges in practice on the same ethic: this world is not disposable. It is something God knows, loves, and, in ways beyond our full comprehension, intends to renew.
Curriculum and Laboratory
This way of seeing lines up with a metaphor I’ve used often: revelation as curriculum, creation as laboratory.
- Curriculum: Scripture, tradition, conscience—the “syllabus” God gives us.
- Laboratory: The physical world, history, relationships—the messy place where we work the assignment out.
In Genesis 1, God speaks order into chaos: light, sky, land, stars, living creatures. He calls it good. In Genesis 2, He “gets His hands dirty,” so to speak—forming Adam from dust and breathing into him the breath of life.
Then comes the commissioning: “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15).
The first explicit human vocation is not preaching or singing hymns; it’s gardening. Dressing and keeping a particular patch of earth.
Andrew takes that seriously. He lives on seven acres outside Nashville with, as he happily admits, a tractor. On his days off, one of his greatest joys is “tramping around the place,” mowing paths, tending trees, planting, watching what comes up. He’s also involved in a fantasy series (The Wingfeather Saga), a ministry to artists (The Rabbit Room), and of course writing songs. But the land itself is not a metaphor for him. It’s part of the calling.
“There can be a tendency to think of it only as metaphor,” he said. “And I kind of want to be like, no—God cares about the hyacinths coming up out of the ground right over there. He cares about the way we’re taking care of the soil here and growing things.”
That resonated deeply with work I’ve done through the Royal Falcon Foundation and other projects—helping people literally turn dead dust into living soil. In the desert, we’ve seen sand become garden through bat guano, biochar, drip irrigation, and time. Spiritually, we’ve seen something similar in people’s lives.
The point holds at every level:
- The garden of your soul
- The garden of your family
- The garden of your community
- The literal garden under your feet
All of it is part of the same assignment: dress and keep it. Tend. Cultivate. Repair.
The World as Extended Eden
Earthrise—the famous 1968 photograph of our blue-green planet floating in the blackness of space—showed us the whole “garden” for the first time. The thin atmosphere. The swirling weather patterns. The fragility.
When I look at that image, I hear Genesis differently. Eden was not just a lost patch of land; it was a prototype. The whole earth was meant to be “Eden-ized,” extended bit by bit as humanity multiplied and took up its task.
That hasn’t gone particularly well. We have deforested, poisoned, exploited. We have treated not only the land but each other as disposable. We have, in many places, turned garden into desert.
But the marching orders haven’t changed. And the promise hasn’t changed: “The desert shall rejoice and blossom like the rose” (Isaiah 35:1).
When my wife and I worked with young people at the Desert Rose Bahá’í Center, we took this literally. With soil amendments, patient watering, and a lot of sweat, we watched living green emerge where there had been only dust. It became a parable in real time of what God desires to do in hearts, in neighborhoods, in nations.
Andrew’s life witnesses to the same truth. He’s not merely writing “worship songs”; he’s writing world-attentive songs. Stories that take seriously both the pain and the beauty of human life in a specific place, under a specific sky. He’s gardening his own acreage as an act of worship, not as a side hobby. He’s helping other artists see their craft as a way of loving the world God loves, not escaping from it.
That’s what happens when you actually believe that this is your Father’s world—and that He intends to keep it.
Loving the World God Loves
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Andrew for any final thoughts. He pointed to Thomas Merton’s “epiphany” on a busy street corner in Louisville. Merton wrote of suddenly seeing the passersby “shining like the sun,” radiant with a glory they themselves did not see.
Merton’s experience has a historical marker now at that intersection: “Merton’s Epiphany.” The city decided it mattered enough to remember.
Andrew’s counsel was simple: “Pay attention. The world is amazing.”
That’s not escapism. It’s exactly what Romans 1 assumes when it says God’s “eternal power and divine nature” are clearly seen “in the things that have been made.” It’s why the Psalms invite us again and again to listen to mountains, rivers, stars, and trees as choirs.
Pay attention to the crocus pushing through late snow, to the child learning to ride a bike, to the elderly woman in the nursing home breaking into song on the third verse of a hymn she hasn’t sung in years. Pay attention to the soil under your feet. Pay attention to the news of flooded towns and burnt forests, not as abstract issues but as groaning in the very body of creation (Romans 8).
And then, as best you can, tend what is in front of you.
Because the God who spoke light into chaos now says, in Christ, “Behold, I am making all things new.” He has no intention of abandoning the work of His hands—not the work He did when He knit you together in your mother’s womb, and not the work He did when He called stars into being and continents out of oceans.
You are created in the image of God. So is your neighbor. And in some mysterious way, this world—this battered, beautiful world—is the stage on which that image is meant to shine.
We are not just passing through. We are gardeners in a world our Father will not throw away.
Sneak Peek: Next Week on Created in the Image of God
If this conversation with Andrew Peterson stirred something in you—a renewed love for the world God made, and questions about what it means to be human within it—then you’ll want to join us for next week’s shows.
On Sunday, June 14th at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I’ll be talking with Kelly M. Kapic—theologian, author, and teacher. He reflects on suffering, grace, and the limits of being human, and how embracing our weakness can actually lead to a deeper, healthier faith. From pain and exhaustion to embodied hope and humility, we’ll explore what it means to live as creatures who were never meant to “do it all.”
Then on Tuesday, June 16th at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I’ll sit down with Miroslav Volf—theologian, author, and founder of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He’ll help us think through identity, forgiveness, and human flourishing: what it means to build a life, and a society, shaped by reconciliation rather than resentment. From justice and public faith to the deeper pursuit of joy and a life truly worth living, we’ll continue our exploration of what it means to bear the image of God.
Different guests, different angles—suffering, reconciliation, limits, flourishing—but the same foundation: you are created in the image of God, and God loves His creation.
