6th August, 2010

LLOYD HARKNESS

God is the creator. The creator is God. Only God could be the creator and only the creator could be God. God is the self-existent one who is was and always will be. He is life and He gives life. He is the life of the cosmos and He is its source.

PICTURE: © ooyoo (www.istockphoto.com) "Recognising God as creator underscores the distinction between Him and the universe. There is no place for some pantheistic view that God is the world and all therein. The creator exercising omnipotence has created and His creation is distinct and separate from Him."

God is life. He is the fire that burns without consuming the bush, as Moses witnessed. He is light and life independent of all He has created.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1: 1) This isn’t a fable nor a once-upon-a-time story. The Bible’s ‘beginning’ reveals God Almighty at work creating. God did not create with pre-existing eternal materials. The heavens and earth are not eternal. God created.

He is the author and sculptor who brings light out of darkness and order out of chaos. He speaks and it is.

God created and He created not from necessity but simply because He chose to.

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” (John 1: 1) Here is Christ at work with the Father in the beginning. Here is the conscious, creative, reflective, expressive, self-aware being who is God at work. Here is the word still in the mind of God about to speak all life into being. Everything animate and inanimate stems from God.

God is the source of everything outside Himself; everything has been brought into being by God. Physical objects, spiritual realities, and time and space are acts of His creation. Recognising God as creator underscores the distinction between Him and the universe. There is no place for some pantheistic view that God is the world and all therein. The creator exercising omnipotence has created and His creation is distinct and separate from Him.

The universe is not divine or eternally existent. God is the one who is ‘I Am’, who is eternally sovereign. Some people would substitute the cosmos for God, declaring it to be the totality of existence, eternal and without causation. In short, they are saying the cosmos just is or, to give it a theological expression, the cosmos is ‘I Am’. This clearly contradicts God’s revelation of Himself, to say nothing of the fact that it is a bold statement without foundation.

God created out of nothing. This is a revelation of extraordinary significance. He was. The cosmos was not. There was a starting point, a beginning.

God in His omnipotence chose to create. (He would still be omnipotent if He had not created.) God in His eternity chose to create and there was a beginning. (The universe and time are co-existent.) God in His love chose to create. (He did not need someone to love as the Trinity has always been the Trinity.)

In the beginning...

There is the initial act of creation but there is also the sustaining power of God. To remove God is to remove His sustaining power and a removal of His sustaining power is a return to nothing outside or beyond God. Universes would vanish in a blink, to say nothing of us, without God’s sustaining power. Right now God is holding and sustaining the universe. Right now He is as much the creator as He was 50 billion years ago. His divine purpose and mind are behind the whole of cosmic history.

To believe in God is to believe the universe was created by Him. Everything exists because of Him. The Bible focuses on the who and a bit of the why of creation. It isn’t a textbook on the how other than to say all that was required was for God to speak things into being.

God holds the cosmos together but He also relates to and interacts with His creation. This latter understanding starts to point us in the direction of the why of creation. God is not the watchmaker who sits back after manufacture and only re-engages if there is a problem. He acts and interacts in the unfolding of His creation. History has His name written on it. Providence is God’s interaction.

In a vast universe, with what so far appears to be the rarity of life here on earth, we see the centrality of God conscious beings in what God has created and is creating and we see something of God’s motives, His ‘why’ He has created.

The universe is also part of shaping mankind as self conscious beings who have the capacity to relate freely with God.

We can know the universe in its vastness but the stars and the nebula and the black holes and the bigness of it all has no capacity to know us. We can know ourselves and we can know God. Size isn’t the same as significance.

God has created to display His glory and because He has created He receives glory. The glory of creation is His alone.

His glory is not tainted by vanity or arrogance. God simply is glorious. By extension, it can be added He can be known by mankind and to know Him is to glorify Him.

To know Him, to know we are one of His works, can only take us in one direction; to a place of humble submission and worship.

Our life is a fragile miracle constantly sustained by the creator.

Without God nothing exists. He inherited nothing yet He creates and sustains everything.

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