BIBLE READING: Isaiah 40:21-31
TEXT: Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom (Isaiah 40:28).
This is one of the most frequent and one of the most misunderstood questions I am ever asked. It is also very difficult to answer because it doesn’t make sense – even when it is asked by very intelligent people like the famous atheist, Richard Dawkins! Let me explain. It’s like asking, ‘Why can God not make a square circle?’ A square circle does not and cannot exist. Likewise an Almighty God, who created everything but is himself created, cannot exist. He could not be Almighty because the one who created him would be the Almighty one! Christians (and Jews and Muslims) do not believe in a ‘created God’.
The answer to the question who made God, is simply – ‘nobody’. God is not made. God is the Creator, not the creation. God is outside of time and space. (This is not to say that he is not also in time and space and that there is not plenty evidence for him there.) God creates ex nihilo (out of nothing). That’s what makes him God. He does not craft from what is already there. He creates time, space and matter from nothing.
Who says that everything, including God himself, has to come from something? Christians and other theists do not argue that God was created. That is precisely the point. He did not come from anywhere. He has always been. He did not evolve, nor was he made. If there is a personal Creator of the Universe then it makes perfect sense to regard him as complex, beyond our understanding and eternal. We do not believe in a created God. We believe in an uncreated supernatural power.
These are the only possibilities for when we come to consider why anything exists at all.
SOMETHING CAME FROM NOTHING. At one point there was no universe, there was no material, there was no matter, no time, no space. And out of that big nothing there came the Big Bang and our vast universe, tiny planet, evolution and the human species. Such a notion is beyond the realms of reason and is a total nonsensical fantasy.
SOMETHING WAS ETERNAL. In other words, matter has always existed. There is a lump of rock, or a mass of gas or some kind of matter that had no beginning and will probably have no end. And at some point that matter exploded and we ended up with the finely tuned and wonderful universe we now inhabit.
SOMETHING WAS CREATED – EX NIHILO – OUT OF NOTHING. And that Creator has to be incredibly powerful, intelligent and awesome beyond our imagination. This is what our passage in Isaiah teaches. God is the Everlasting God. The Creator of the ends of the earth. He is not created. He creates. Little wonder that we bow down in worship. We are the created. He is the Creator. It is so, so important that you do not think of God as some kind of super human. He is beyond our understanding.
But what about Jesus? Was he not created? In one of the most sublime, deep and profound things ever written (John 1), the apostle John tells us: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made (John 1:1-3).’ This is so marvellous. If God were ‘just’ the Creator, he could be distant and far from us – unknowable. But he sent his Son, Jesus (God is Father, Son and Spirit – something we will look at later) to reveal himself to us. Jesus is the Word. Jesus is God. Jesus is the Creator as well – without him nothing was made that has been made.
So not only do we not believe in a created God, we don’t believe in a created Jesus. He is the eternal Word. He is from everlasting to everlasting. ‘Yesterday, today forever, Jesus is the same. All may change but Jesus, never. Glory to his name!’
CONSIDER: Why do people find it so difficult to accept that God is uncreated? What should be the reaction of the created to the Creator?
RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING: The Dawkins Letters – David Robertson
PRAYER: Almighty God, Creator of heaven and earth. You are the everlasting one. You alone are uncreated. We bow before you as your creatures. We worship you that you have made us in your image – that we can love, think and do good. O Lord, we grow tired and weary, we are so limited in our understanding and we are so sinful. Grant us your strength, your mind and your holiness. For your glory. Amen.
Dear Dr John – A Response to a Canadian Atheist
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Can you provide evidence that the writer of the gJohn was an apostle?
Ca you also provide an explanation why the Christian religion did not spring up independently anywhere else on earth and why the majority of human beings on the planet
do not recognise the christian claims regarding Jesus of Nazareth?
Yes..
As I tell my Sunday school students: It is difficult for our finite beings and minds to understand that God is infinite, but He is.
Well – I sometimes wonder about that. Logically yes it makes sense to talk of God not being created. But why can that be such a difficult thing to accept?
Is it because we as humans look for patterns in things and we can struggle with something that seems to be outwith a pattern? If that is the same case then what about miracles? Perhaps there is the same suspicion about miracles too? and maybe it is a good thing to have suspicion about grand claims such as these. For if a claim of such enormity outside of “normal” experience is made, should there not be suspicion about it lest we be led away by deception?
So I would suggest then that science itself shows that the greater the enormity of something, the greater the limitation of understanding we can have about it. Why, for example can an identical twin have the same thought as the other twin on the other side of the world? Coincidence? What about putting atoms from a molecule into a particle accelerator, making one atom change direction and predictably see the other atom change direction too for some reason? What about the theory of relativity? Why is at 0.9 times the speed of light that there is the speed of light difference in speed between that and the speed of light?
Maybe just maybe there is an explanation. That there are things that exist that the human mind can’t understand.
And maybe it’s useful to consider this, “trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.” Proverbs Chapter 3 Verses 5 and 6
This is a thought experiment derived mostly from Glen Scrivener, based on Genesis 1:1-3 and John 1: 1-5. What is nothing? Think about it? Imagine it. Then imagine everything there is emerging from this nothing, nothingness. Ourselves emerging out of nothing. Nothing comes from nothing. What then is our value, our meaning? Nothing. Nothing to hope for, to live for.
He continues that the God of the Bible is a preexisting, before the beginning, Father eternally loving the Son in the joy of the Holy Spirit -far who draws us into fellowship of his Son.
Everything there is, is in effect, “Fathered.”
“Reading Between The Lines,” Volume 1 Old Testament Daily Readings”: Glen Scrivener.
Glen Scrivener may be an Aussie from Down Under, but this turns the world of the unbeliever upside down, which is in fact the right way up. (Which is where he now lives in the UK!!)
And what about an eternal,material. inanimate something?
Drawing on a quotation attributed to that well known contemporary, postmodern, atheist scientist: true “Nothing is something rocks dream about”- Aristotle, Scrivener, above, covers it.
Of course, rocks, dust, minerals don’t create life of and in itself, without life, animal or vegetable, being imparted from without.