I had a question today in my Genesis Bible Study:
What makes it hard to believe there is a creator God?
My initial reaction was that it is not hard to believe. I was raised in a family that introduced me to God as a child. I’ve walked with the Lord (more or less) all my life. He is as familiar to me as myself.
But then I stopped and stepped back. I saw the pride in my first response and thought again, why is it hard to believe? Do I believe in this God, the one who in Genesis spoke the world into being? Or do I believe in a much smaller, less dominant and more “convenient” notion of God? And much of our world does not believe, so can I really be blind to how hard it is to believe?
Believing in God means considering, acknowledging that there is a being so great, so vast, so beyond our comprehension who pre-existed the universe, who conceived and brought it all to being through his creative power to conceptualize and speak things that never existed into existence.
Except where God is concerned there is nothing new under the sun. No artist has ever created something that does not interpret or reflect what God has made. God conceived all the elements of creation originally, with no reference point: light, land, fish, birds, animals and, of course, human beings. Even the duckbill platypus. The creativity of God is mind-blowing.
We create through our labor. We paint. We build. We type. Our words may bring ideas to life and inspire action. But can they bring forth life itself? God’s can and they did. And Genesis 1 tells the story. God said, “let there be…” “And it was so.”
In everything we create bad comes with the good. We plant flowers and weeds grow up with them. We write software and then pay someone to de-bug it. In this world you simply can’t have one without the other. That’s because we are sinful creators living in a fallen world with all the brokenness that brings.
But God is holy. He is good. And so with every act of creation, “God saw that it was good.”
Ultimately, I think the reason it is hard to believe in a creator God–and hard for someone like me to be aware of and awed by the realization–is the response it requires: humble worship. As the powerful hymn “How Great Thou Art” says:
O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout the universe displayedThen sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee
By Carl Boberg (who, for the record, based the song on a a traditional Swedish melody)
How great Thou art, how great Thou art
Faith Runner 