How Nature Exhibits the Lord’s Amazing Generosity

The natural world around us is jam-packed with abundance. Just look around you, and then think about how that abundance exhibits the generosity of the Lord towards us.

Have you ever thought about it like that?

Abundance of Species

In our devotional book, Heaven and Nature Sing, I listed the numbers of some of the species God created in our natural world. These are approximate:

• 6,400 species of mammals
• 18,000 bird species
• 32,500 different fish species in our oceans and freshwater
• 60,000+ species of trees
• 400,000 plants species
• 900,000 species of insects

THAT’S abundance! While that January 20th devotional focuses on God’s creativity, we can also see from these numbers that God was very generous in His creativity.

Each ecosystem doesn’t have just a handful of species, but loads of them! Beyond counting, really.

And the Bible teaches us that the Lord cares for each, just like He cares for us:

Matthew 6:26—“See the birds of the sky, that they don’t sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you of much more value than they?”

Luke 12:27—“Consider the lilies, how they grow. They don’t toil, neither do they spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

Psalm 50:10—“For every animal of the forest is Mine, and the livestock on a thousand hills.”

Water, Everywhere

Earth looks blue from space because of all the water. In fact, 71% of Earth’s surface is covered in water, most of it (96.5%) by the oceans.

Life must have water—and plenty of it—to exist. So the Lord was extremely generous with it to benefit all the living species He made, including us.

When we stand at the shore of an ocean or even a huge lake (like our Lake Superior here in Minnesota), there’s water as far as the eye can see.

And some of my favorite examples of overflowing abundance are rivers and waterfalls. It seems they never stop flowing.

I still remember being at Niagara Falls a few years ago, watching the unbelievable amounts of water pour over the edge. Trillions of gallons. What abundance.

Rivers and waterfalls can be small and tucked away, too, and still present that picture of continual flow. Generosity.

In Psalm 1, the author uses water as a picture of spiritual flourishing for those who follow the Lord:

Psalm 1:1-3—“Blessed is the man who doesn’t walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand on the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in Yahweh’s* law. On His law he meditates day and night. He will be like a tree planted by the streams of water, that produces its fruit in its season, whose leaf also does not wither. Whatever he does shall prosper.”

*Yahweh is the Hebrew name for God.

We find the same picture in Jeremiah 17:7-8—“Blessed is the man who trusts in Yahweh, and whose confidence is in Yahweh. For he will be as a tree planted by the waters, who spreads out its roots by the river, and will not fear when heat comes, but its leaf will be green, and will not be concerned in the year of drought. It won’t cease from yielding fruit.”

Gigantic Trees

I have yet to see the world’s largest trees—the sequoias and giant redwoods of California. One day, I hope to.

General Sherman, the largest sequoia of them all and the world’s biggest tree, is almost 275 feet tall with a ground circumference of over 102 feet. It stands in Sequoia National Park.

Our big trees here in Minnesota aren’t anywhere close to that. But we have some pretty huge cottonwoods and white pines.

You probably have some old, very large trees where you live too. Either large in height or circumference, or both. Many are protected in the world’s parks, and others grow on public and private land.

The Lord didn’t have to create such enormity—but He did. They’re another picture of His generous heart.

Trees are mentioned often in the Bible. My favorite verses are the ones at the very beginning and the very end:

Genesis 2:9—“Out of the ground Yahweh God made every tree to grow that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food, including the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

Again, the generosity of the Lord—for joy, for nourishment, for life and knowledge.

Revelation 22:1-2—“He showed me a river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On this side of the river and on that was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruits, yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”

The Tree of Life sounds big, too, if it stands on both sides of the river! I wonder what that will be like?

Flourishing Plant Life in Rainy Climates

A rain forest or jungle is a great example of how plant life flourishes when rain is abundant.

Rain forests grow all over the world. They especially cover ecosystems near the equator, in tropical climates.

There are also some rain forests in more temperate climates like the northwest coast of North America, from northern California all the way to Alaska. Parts of South America, Australia and New Zealand also have these temperate rain forests.

We can see it in our own gardens and yards. In those years when we get plenty of rain, our gardens flourish.

A Bible verse that identifies rain as one of God’s blessings is Deuteronomy 28:12—“Yahweh will open to you His good treasure in the sky, to give the rain of your land in its season, and to bless all the work of your hand. You will lend to many nations, and you will not borrow.”

The Lord’s generosity again, shown through the abundance He gives.

Rain is also used an illustration of how God uses His word to accomplish His purposes with His people in the earth:

Isaiah 55:10-11—“For as the rain comes down and the snow from the sky, and doesn’t return there, but waters the earth, and makes it grow and bud, and gives seed to the sower and bread to the eater; so is My word that goes out of My mouth: it will not return to Me void, but it will accomplish that which I please, and it will prosper in the thing I sent it to do.”

The Miracle of the Seed

A quick online search will tell you that an average apple contains five seeds. If you plant one of them, by the time the new apple tree matures, it’ll produce 1,500 apples each season.

If you planted all five seeds from the original apple, in a few years you could have 7,500 apples from those five trees—in one season.

Take the seeds from those 7,500 apples and plant them—that’s 37,500 seeds—and, according to my math, that’s over 56 million apples in a few more years. In one growing season.

Take the seeds from those 56 million apples and…you get the picture.

The Lord designed into one apple the genetic material in its seeds to produce millions upon millions of apples over generations.

That’s abundant generosity!

Here are a couple of psalms that praise God and ask Him for His generosity through agriculture:

Psalm 65:11—“You crown the year with your bounty. Your carts overflow with abundance.”

Psalm 72:16—“Abundance of grain shall be throughout the land. Its fruit sways like Lebanon. Let it flourish, thriving like the grass of the field.”

Two Hundred Billion Trillion Stars

One of the best pictures of the generosity of God is in the number of stars in the universe.

Modern astronomers now believe there are about two trillion galaxies. An average galaxy, like our Milky Way, contains 100 billion stars. Multiply that by two trillion and the number is two hundred billion trillion (2 followed by 23 zeros).

That’s a few stars!

We can see about 6,000 of them from earth with the naked eye. (And even that seems like a boatload of stars!)

Why would the Lord make so many more stars than we can see? Could it be out of plain generosity? His own pleasure?

Because He knew that one day, people would devise instruments capable of discovering many more of them than most people throughout history could’ve thought possible?

I don’t know, but what a picture of generosity!

Of course, there are many Bible verses about the stars. Here are just three of them:

Psalm 8:3-4—“When I consider your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained, what is man, that You think of him? What is the son of man, that You care for him?”

Psalm 147:4—“He counts the number of the stars. He calls them all by their names.”

Jeremiah 31:35—“Yahweh, who gives the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night who stirs up the sea, so that its waves roar—Yahweh of Armies is his name…”

Northern Lights Shows

Here’s just one more example of the Lord’s generosity on a grand scale. As I write this, just last night, many of us across the northern half of the US got to witness a spectacular northern lights show.

It was probably the brightest and most colorful one I’ve personally ever seen—and certainly the longest. And I got to watch it right from our backyard for 45 minutes. And it wasn’t in the middle of night!

(At least, it was, but it started around 8:00 pm, so those of us who don’t get up in the middle of the night could see it, too, lol!)

These weren’t just in the northern sky either, but stretched over to the west and covered the sky above us as well.

This natural phenomenon only happens occasionally, and we need to have clear skies to see them—and it helps if there’s not a lot of light pollution from cities.

But, what a treat! What a gift.

While our phone cameras pull the colors out a little more than we can see with our eyes, photos can’t contain the vastness of what we saw last night.

That’s another picture of the abundant generosity of our good God. And just for beauty and pleasure.

Psalm 19:1—“The heavens declare the glory of God. The expanse shows his handiwork.”

Truly.

The Lord’s Generosity Through Jesus

The pinnacle of the Lord’s generous heart, though, isn’t in the natural world. It’s in the gift of His Son, who died and rose again on our behalf.

Let these truths soak into your mind and spirit:

John 10:10—“The thief only comes to steal, kill, and destroy. I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.”

Romans 8:32—“He who didn’t spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how would He not also with Him freely give us all things?”

Romans 15:13—“Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope in the power of the Holy Spirit.”

2 Corinthians 9:8—“And God is able to make all grace abound to you, that you, always having all sufficiency in everything, may abound to every good work.”

Ephesians 3:20-21—“Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be the glory in the assembly and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.”

Philippians 4:19—“My God will supply every need of yours according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.”

2 Peter 1:2-4—“Grace to you and peace be multiplied in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, seeing that His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and virtue, by which He has granted to us His precious and exceedingly great promises; that through these you may become partakers of the divine nature…”

It’s hard to stop!

Here’s one more psalm for you…

Psalm 23:5—“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil. My cup runs over.“

All scriptures from the World English Bible. Public domain.

Photos by Sharon Brodin unless stated otherwise.

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