Advertising God’s creation
Editorial
Pepsi-cola’s advertising agency tells a horror story about one of its promotions.
The American drink-maker was taking to the world its slogan ‘Come alive with
the Pepsi generation’. The slogan seemed popular everywhere. Except in Taiwan.
In Taiwan, billboards were supposed to proclaim the Chinese translation of ‘Come
alive with the Pepsi generation’. But the slogan had confused the translators,
and billboards in Taiwan were found to be mistakenly making this strange offer:
‘Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead.’
People often get the wrong message from advertisements. But advertisers keep trying
anyway. French advertiser Jacques Se’gue’la told of a certain advertisement
for batteries. Scene One showed a battery being placed in a fishtank. Scene Two
was taken a week later: the battery was removed from the water and placed in a radio
which worked first time. Sales of the battery were a disaster. When researchers
investigated, they found that people had wrongly interpreted the ad to mean that
the batteries worked only after being submerged in water.
God’s advertising gets misinterpreted too. Psalm 19 tells us: ‘The heavens
declare the glory of God: and the firmament sheweth his handywork.’ Day after
day and night after night, God’s intricately created universe conducts a silent
yet magnificent symphony to the glory of the Creator. The whole design, complexity
and beauty of the universe is one grand and majestic advertisement for the Creator.
But like Pepsi’s Taiwanese translators and the battery-buying public, many
people get the message wrong. They think the heavens and the firmament are an advertisement
for a self-creating process called evolution.
Wrong interpretations of God’s advertising are not new. Only a few years after
Christ’s death and resurrection the Apostles Barnabas and Paul were proclaiming
the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Lystra, a city in the rugged inland districts of Asia
Minor. God used the two Apostles to heal a man who had been lame from birth (Acts
14:8-10). But the multitudes who saw this miracle did not instantly acknowledge
that God had produced this healing through His Apostles. To the Apostles’
horror, the local people began to suggest that Barnabas must really be ‘Zeus’
(the chief god of the ancient Greeks) and that Paul was ‘Hermes’ (son
of Zeus, and himself highly regarded in Greek mythology). The crowds then tried
to offer sacrifices to the two Apostles.
When Barnabas and Paul saw this, they quickly made their message clearer. They told
the Lystrans that they were there to ‘preach unto you that ye should turn
from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea,
and all things that are therein’ (Acts 14:15). They made it clear that it
was God the Creator they were advertising, not the false gods to which some attributed
the healing miracle.
Paul did a similar thing at Athens. He saw an altar inscribed ‘To the unknown
god’ (Acts 17:23). Immediately he told the Athenians that their ‘unknown
god’ was God the Creator… the God who made all things and who gives
the breath of life to all living things.
Today, advertising is a gigantic part of many economies. In September 1990, the
magazine Advertising Age reported that in the previous year the top 100
advertisers in the United States alone had spent $33.9 billion on advertising. And
remember, that’s only a small part of the total world-wide expenditure in
just one year.
We are all advertisers. Every time you tell someone you enjoyed a certain book or
film, or that you are happy with a product or service, you are advertising. People
have been advertising, not always with ideal results, since Eve convinced Adam to
join her in tasting the prohibited fruit in the Garden of Eden.
But God is the world’s biggest advertiser. His creation and His Word about
it are the biggest, most spectacular, no-budget, clearest advertisements for Him
the world can see. Yet people still misinterpret His message, either deliberately
or through ignorance. As the most important part of God’s creation, we must
remember that we too are living advertisements, good or bad, for God. In the Psalmist’s
words: ‘We spend our years as a tale that is told’ (Psalm 90:9).
The life story we tell must correctly advertise God as Creator. When we come across
people who are misinterpreting the Creator’s message (particularly as an aimless
product of evolution) we must do what Barnabas, Paul, and countless others have
done down through the years: tell them the correct message. Romans 1:20 says that
the creation reveals to all mankind the power and divine nature of God. And those
who reject this truth are ‘without excuse’. We need to constantly and
confidently advertise these facts.
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