I was chatting with our friends’ 8 year old son Seth when out of his mouth popped this question. “Miss Rose, who made God?” I scrambled to answer this precocious blue eyed boy as best I could, on his terms.
“Well, Seth, you can’t go back any further than God. He was in Eternity before Time/Space. That’s why we say, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’. And you know how He did it? He used his words!”
As I endeavored to stay out of the weeds on this one, not wanting to overload Seth with too much information, I began to marvel at this thought. Psalm 33:6 popped into my head. “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made…He spoke and it came to be, He commanded and it stood fast.”
Words, words, words. Mathematician and apologist John Lennox opens our understanding from a scientist’s viewpoint. Why is there something instead of nothing? God put the universe there; all things were made through Him. The atheist insists that mathematics created the universe. But as Lennox notes, mathematics creates nothing. The laws of physics don’t create; they can only describe.
The universe is the product of an intelligent creator. He thought; he spoke. Hebrews 11:3 tells us,
“By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” Information is invisible and immaterial. But it is very real. Our brains are filled with it. Out of this information, out of our thoughts, we speak, we create. This is one way in which we mirror God’s image, however flawed our efforts. This concept of information, which floods our culture today, goes back to language, words that communicate, flowing from rational thought. Push back as far as you will, and you will bump into a loving, all powerful God, who thinks, who plans, who creates with His Word, speaking the universe into being.
I ponder the power of the Apostle John’s insights in John 1. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” Here is Jesus, the Word, the essence of communication, creating out of nothing. No cold and inhuman mechanistic process here, but a living, breathing Savior. And the process goes on, down through the ages, as our Lord communicates the Father’s love to us every day. He is walking and talking His children through these strange times. “This is, (after all, still) my Father’s world.”
