GOD SHOUTED: AND THE UNIVERSE LEAPT INTO
EXISTENCE
By: Dr. Norman Geisler
The Bible is the Word of God, Christ the
Son of God, salvation an act of God. But who is this God? Why did He create us?
And how should we respond to Him?
Who is God?
The word God (Elohim,
“mighty one”) in Genesis 1 stands out against other views of God in the ancient
world. First of all, it is in stark contrast against atheism, which claims
there is no God. It affirms, with Judaism, the monotheistic view that there is
one God: “Hear, O Israel! the Lord our God, the Lord
is one!” (Deuteronomy 6:4). There are not many gods (Exodus 20:3), as
polytheism proclaims. The Creator is also contrasted with pantheism, which
identifies God with the universe that God made. Further, He is unlike deism
because He is personally and miraculously involved with His universe (see
Genesis 1-3).
Also, He stands apart from finite godism since He created the finite world. Even panentheism (God-in-All) fails to describe Him because the
universe is not the body in which God dwells. He is before the universe. He
made it. He sustains it.
As Creator, God is as different from the
universe as an architect is from his architecture. As C.S.
Lewis put it: “the Christian idea is quite different. Believers think
God invented and made the universe—like a man making a picture or composing a
tune. A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is
destroyed. You may say, ‘He put a lot of himself into it,’ but you only mean
that all of its beauty and interest has come out of his head.”
Who Made God?
So who made God? Where did He come from?
This question has unnecessarily perplexed many minds because it is a gigantic category
mistake. It is asking who made the Unmade God. It is like asking, “Who is the
bachelor’s wife?”
No one made God.
He is the unmade Maker of everything else
that exists. He was always there. Theism affirms that God was neither created,
nor can He be destroyed. And since the Second Law of Thermodynamics asserts
that usable energy in the universe is running down, the universe cannot be
eternal (it would eventually run out of usable energy). Thus if the universe is
not eternal, then it necessarily had a beginning. And whatever had a beginning
had a Beginner (God). So God is the unmade Maker, the beginningless
Beginner, the uncaused Cause.
How Did God Create the World?
If the universe had a beginning, then how
did it get here? Clearly, it was not made out of God (ex Deo).
God is spirit (John 4:24); the universe is matter. God has no beginning, but
the universe does. The universe, consisting of physical matter, was not
fashioned out of matter (ex materia) but by
God’s commanding words (Hebrews 11:3). The physical universe is matter, and it
had a beginning. God made physical matter when He “created the heavens and the
earth.” So the universe was made out of nothing (ex nihilo). Put another
way, it was not made out of something. Before the universe came to be, there
was God—and nothing else.
Thus, God created from nothing.
Someone may object: “Nothing came from
nothing; nothing ever could.” This memorable line from The Sound of Music
means simply that nothing cannot make something. It
does not mean that Someone (God) cannot make something
where before there was nothing else but God. In fact, everything that comes to
be has a cause. So when the universe came to be, it too had a Cause (God).
Why Did God Make Us?
The Apostle John declared that “All things
were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made” (John
1:3, NKJV). But why did God create the universe at all? Why did He make us? The
biblical answer is: God made us to glorify Him. John declared: “Worthy are You, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and
power; for You created all things” (Revelation 4:11). Thus the Apostle Paul
exhorted: “Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the
glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).
Some suggest that it is egoistic for God to
want to be worshiped. It would be for us, but we are not God. However, it is
not wrong for God to want recognition for who He
is—the Creator. And we, His creatures, are made in His image (Genesis 1:27). It
is not egoistic; it is realistic.
When we ask why God created, we can mean
two things: what prompted God to do it, or what purpose did He have in doing
it? The biblical answer to the first question is: God was prompted by nothing
beyond His own will. As John affirmed of God, “because of Your
will they existed and were created” (Revelation 4:11). Also, He was free to not
make us. As amazing and humbling as it may be, God did not make us because He
had to; He made us because He wanted (willed) to do so. Of course, in making us
God had a certain purpose in mind—to redeem us so that we could know Him
through repentance and faith, and we could live obedient lives to the praise of
His glory.
David said to God: “In Your presence is
fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures
forevermore” (Psalm 16:11, NKJV). If God needs nothing, then what can we give
Him? The answer is praise, adoration and worship! We certainly cannot add to
His already perfect nature (Matthew 5:48). The best we can do is to magnify the
nature that He has.
So worship—attributing worth to God—is the
ultimate a creature can do for his Creator. This is why the basic sin of sinful
mankind was that they “exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and
served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25).
God wants us to do here what we will do
there—in Heaven, namely, to sing “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the
Almighty, who was and who is and who is to come” (Revelation 4:8). He desires
us to proclaim: “Worthy are You, our Lord and our God,
to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things, and because
of Your will they existed, and were created” (Revelation 4:11).
It is indeed humbling to acknowledge that
all we can give to God is what He has already given to us—even if we literally
give our lives for Him. As missionary martyr Jim Elliot once said: “He is no
fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” Worship
is like the fine spray of Niagara Falls that rises from below and moves up
toward the endless source that feeds it. Thus when we worship God, we are
merely giving back what the Source provided.