Creation
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” - Genesis 1:1
About a year ago our daughter Brooklyn was sitting at the dinner table and she seemed to be struggling to find the words to articulate what she wanted to ask Candice and I. She asked who our grandparents were and who their grandparents were and “all the way back”. In her own words she was attempting to articulate the eternity of God. I remember thinking the same thing when I was young and it always seemed to make my brain hurt.
Several years ago S.M. Lockridge was asked a similar question after one of his sermons in which Lockridge replied:
“Where did God come from? He came from nowhere! The reason God came from nowhere is that there was nowhere for Him to come from. Coming from nowhere, He stood on nothing. The reason He had to stand on nothing is there was nowhere for Him to stand. And standing on nothing, He reached out where there was nowhere to reach and caught something where there was nothing to catch and hung something on nothing, and He told it to stay there. Now standing on nothing, He took the hammer of His own will; He struck the anvil of His omnipotence and sparks flew. He caught them on the tips of His fingers, flung them out into space and bedecked the heaven with stars, but no one said a word. The reason no one said anything is that there was nobody there to say anything, So God Himself said, "That is very good."
When we look all over the world we see the amazing handiwork of God. We can infer from what has been created what the Creator is like. As mentioned above, we see his infiniteness.
Creative - We can also tell that God is creative in the diversity of his creation. We see varieties of plants, animals, rocks, elements, etc.
Wise – Our Creator has fine-tuned this world to work. Without water, there would be no life. Without oxygen, humans could not breathe. Without blood clotting, anytime we were cut we would bleed to death. Our skin repairs when we are cut. We need gravity or we would float away, but not too much or we would be crushed to death. We take for granted so many of the things in this world that are necessary for our ability to even be.
Merciful –It’s not just that God has created a world that works, but He has created it in a way that we can have our desires satisfied. When we are hungry, we have food to eat. We have food to eat because it rains. We desire to know things and he has created us with memory to recall things and use logic to infer meaning out of the things that we learn.
Not all that we know about God can be known from nature itself. We must read scripture to know some very important characteristics about who God is. For example, how, from Creation, can we know that God is Triune (3 in 1)? We can only see glimmers of this from creation in how the number 3 is often used in different laws of nature include the states of water (steam, liquid, ice), the 3 dimensions of space (length, width, height), the 3 dimensions of time (past, present, future), the 3 kinds of light (red, green, blue {coming together all three make white light]), et al. But from scripture we see more clearly the 3 persons of the Trinity:
The Father
The Spirit - His Spirit was hovering over the waters (Gen 1:2) and played a role in the creation of man (Job 33:4).
The Son – He created all things visible and invisible (Col 1:16), is the sustainer of all things (Col 1:17), and was with God and was God at the beginning of it all (John 1:1-3)
The penultimate question of time is “What is the meaning of life?” From a Christian perspective this question is rephrased as “Why did God create us?” We were created for the glory of God. But what exactly does that mean? Does God need us in order to fulfill his desire to be glorified? Or did he create us so that He could reveal His glory to us and we could enjoy it? Maybe it is a bit of both.
When I was very young I had a great grandmother who placed money in a savings bond for me. I never knew about this money until I was in high school and needed the money for college and my parents revealed it to me. So, when I turned 18 I walked into a bank and cashed in the savings bond and walked out with several thousand dollars in cash. I saw the generosity of my great grandmother at that time. It wasn’t that my great grandmother all of a sudden was generous toward me. She was generous long before I was born. Her generosity was only recognized and enjoyed by me on the day when it was revealed to me. What a waste and injustice it would be if I never knew about the savings bond or the generosity of my great grandmother! Or what if I had never cashed that bond and put the money to use!
Though this is not a perfect example of how God’s glory is revealed, I think that it is God’s ultimate desire to reveal it to us. That is the theme of the Bible from start to finish. We don’t naturally see this because of sin in our lives but when that glory is revealed to us, we see that this is what life is all about: worshipping God for all He has done, is doing, and will continue to do for us, even as we often fail to see it. The greatest joy that we can have in life is to see this glory revealed. It must become like an addiction to us. When I study the Bible or reflect on the goodness of God, there are moments where I feel I am in the presence of God and my heart beats fast in excitement and joyfulness. It’s like finding lost treasure. I hope you are experiencing that too.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PWqSGdPyBw]