The Grand Staircase: Theological Musings and Observations from the Edge of the Colorado Plateau

Recently, my wife Robin and I spent over a week camping in Zion National Park in southwest Utah. It’s a trip we’ve planned for years but unforeseen events prevented it from happening. But it did happen this year and we enjoyed hiking, bicycling, and sightseeing in this spectacular desert landscape.

The term Grand Staircase was coined by 19th century geologist Clarence Dutton. It poetically captures the grandeur of the exposed geologic formations that comprise this portion of the geographic region called the Colorado Plateau. Laid bare like the layers of a cake, the Grand Staircase draws scientists and sightseers from around the world to study its features and stand in awe of its wonders.

But it also stirred in me musings about God’s creation and the people who come to view it.

First, a little theology concerning God’s creation. Genesis 1:31 says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good…”. The Hebrew word for good is tov. Tov means good in the sense of wholeness, pleasant, beautiful to see. Even with sin’s arrival into the world, God’s creation still exhibits those qualities.

And Romans 1:20 tells us that this good creation reveals God’s “invisible attributes, His eternal power, and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse” (NASB 1995).

British pastor and scholar John Stott wrote this on p.73 in his commentary on Romans in the Bible Speaks Today series: “The creation is a visible disclosure of the invisible God, an intelligible disclosure of the otherwise unknown God. Just as artists reveal themselves in what they draw, paint, and sculpt so the Divine Artist has revealed himself in his creation.”

Both secular scientific explanations and Native American spirituality (common in National Park Service literature) fall short of fully explaining the Grand Staircase in general and Zion National Park in particular. A robust biblical theology of creation is needed to appreciate what we see.

Song writer Isaac Watts captures this theology well in his 1715 hymn, I Sing the Mighty Power of God:

I sing the mighty pow’r of God, that made the mountains rise,
That spread the flowing seas abroad, and built the lofty skies.
I sing the wisdom that ordained the sun to rule the day;
The moon shines full at His command, and all the stars obey.

I sing the goodness of the Lord, who filled the earth with food,
Who formed the creatures through the Word, and then pronounced them good.
Lord, how Thy wonders are displayed, where’er I turn my eye,
If I survey the ground I tread, or gaze upon the sky.

There’s not a plant or flow’r below, but makes Thy glories known,
And clouds arise, and tempests blow, by order from Thy throne;
While all that borrows life from Thee is ever in Thy care;
And everywhere that we can be, Thou, God, art present there.

Second, I thought about people on our trip. Lots of people. Where we camped at Watchman Campground just inside Zion National Park, we watched the Visitors Center parking lot fill up by 7:30 am nearly every morning. We later learned that visitation to Zion has exceeded 5 million people, most of it crammed into the narrow, but beautiful eight-mile-long Zion Canyon. Zion itself comprises only 147,000 acres and change. Compare that to Yellowstone National Park whose visitation tops 4 million but is spread out over 2.2 million acres.

And the people seem to come from around the globe. Of course, Zion’s proximity to large population centers like Los Angeles and Las Vegas contributes much of the visitation. But I heard French, Spanish, German, maybe some Eastern European languages as well as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

It seems Zion National Park is on everyone’s bucket list.

I later read that Europeans and Asians find the Colorado Plateau and Zion different from any landscapes in their home countries. They are fascinated by a geography that is laid bare by the geologic forces of uplift and erosion.

But I believe, biblically, that they are looking for something or Someone transcendent. Something beyond themselves that inspires awe and gives meaning to their lives.

But they’re not fully finding it.

They’re looking for the eternal in the temporal. The Bible says in Romans 1:18 that “they suppress the truth in unrighteousness” and they are justly objects of God’s wrath. The truth that they suppress is the aforementioned knowledge of God in the creation.

Further, people swap the Creator for the creation:

“For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.” Romans 1:21-23 NASB 1995

These are not innocent tourists but guilty sinners in need of a Savior.

But amidst the crowds, individuals stood out. A new helpful volunteer campground host to whom we gave a much-appreciated meal. An aging hippie who enjoyed our company enough to go with us on several hikes. A guy my age I met in nearby Bryce Canyon National Park who did a down canyon overnight backpack in water at times over his head. We fed and prayed for him prior to his trip. He texted me afterwards that the prayers worked. Finally, two younger backpackers I chatted up on a shuttle bus ride made me reminisce about my past trips in the American Southwest.

Fortunately, God has not left us without further witness of himself. Besides the creation, God has provided his written and incarnate Word—the Scriptures and Jesus—to lead us to himself. We can have a saving knowledge of God that no rock formation, however beautiful, can provide.