In my recent contemplation of the bigness of God, I was thinking about the creation story. This has been in the news some recently, associated with the whole Intelligent Design debate in the scientific community. When you think about it, our attitude a Christians is often too pass\u00e9 about God and creation. We read through the first few chapters of Genesis pretty quickly, not stopping to think about the significance of what the writer is saying. Genesis 1:1 says \u201cIn the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.\u201d We Christians sort of go past this pretty quickly most of the time, along with the verses that follow, all beginning with God saying, \u201cLet there be\u2026and there was.\u201d Let\u2019s just slow down for a minute and hang out in these verses.<\/p>\n
The more we learn about the origins of the universe, the more awesome, breathtaking, and incomprehensible it becomes. Isn\u2019t it often true that the more we learn about a subject, the more we understand how little we really know? How our universe came to be is one of those, and in that light, Genesis 1:1 could probably be safely described as the most colossal understatement in the history of the universe. \u201cIn the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.\u201d Wow! Given what we now know, or think we know, about how the universe got started, there a lot of stuff that happened inside those ten words.<\/p>\n
First, God was there already. God is the only being that always lives in the present tense. No matter when God is, he always \u201cis.\u201d He never was or will be existentially. I have read just enough of William Lane Craig\u2019s book Time and Eternity<\/u>, which I think is the light version of a more academic work, to understand that part of what he is trying to grasp is that God is outside our experience of linear time and reaches into the timeline to do things like create the universe. You know, the little stuff. This is the kind of stuff that makes my head hurt to try and get hold of, but God is like that. His bigness is beyond our ability to reason it out. God\u2019s very existence, not that He does, but how He does, is unexplainable in human terms.<\/p>\n
God created it all. It was His conscious choice. It was an intentional act. It was no accident. Creation was not a random event, driven by a wildly improbable convergence of circumstances. God had something in mind when he created our universe. Our existence and that of the Earth we live on, and the solar system of which it is a part, and the galaxy of which it is part, and so on, has a purpose. That purpose is to please Him. More about this in a minute.<\/p>\n
As God executed all the steps of creation as outlined in Genesis 1, He spoke everything into existence. Think of that. To be able to say, \u201cLight, be\u201d and have it happen is a level of power that we can\u2019t even measure. Our most brilliant scientific minds can\u2019t even describe how light really works except in a rough way. The knowledge that it takes to even conceive of light where it had never existed before, and then to create it with a word\u2026 Words fail.<\/p>\n
On and on through this abbreviated story, God speaks a few words and amazing things spring into existence that had never been before. Fully thought out. Well ordered. Just what he wanted. And at the end of the six steps, including the creation of man in his image, which is another thing to think through on another day, he pronounced it not just good, but very good.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not going to debate whether the process took a literal six days, or some other six-step process over a longer period. Neither position dilutes the fact of God\u2019s awesomeness, or his power, or his creativity. It is no wonder that so many of the characters in the Bible spent a bunch of their time face down before God.<\/p>\n
It occurs to me that we Christians need to redefine and rediscover a term that gets used today in the business world when it comes to our interactions with God. It refers to time with a colleague or client in a close encounter. I\u2019m talking about the term \u201cface time.\u201d<\/p>\n
We, no I, need more face time with God. And this kind of meeting is not one of colleagues across a conference table, or over coffee, or at dinner. I\u2019m talking about time in the presence of the Creator. Given the nature of who he is, of how powerful he is, there is only one way to really have face time with God, only one posture that\u2019s appropriate. Face down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In my recent contemplation of the bigness of God, I was thinking about the creation story. This has been in the news some recently, associated with the whole Intelligent Design debate in the scientific community. When you think about it, our attitude a Christians is often too pass\u00e9 about God and creation. We read through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-life","category-meditations","category-worship"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thestockdells.com\/thinkingchristianly\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thestockdells.com\/thinkingchristianly\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thestockdells.com\/thinkingchristianly\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thestockdells.com\/thinkingchristianly\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thestockdells.com\/thinkingchristianly\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thestockdells.com\/thinkingchristianly\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thestockdells.com\/thinkingchristianly\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thestockdells.com\/thinkingchristianly\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thestockdells.com\/thinkingchristianly\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}