Creator Revealed

Big idea: Trust God’s word - Creation demonstrates its limitless power

[introduce me]; welcome people watching in the building, on the livestream + recorded]

[I’m away this Sunday with my family for a short break so no live q+a today - but since we’re looking at such a significant topic which raises lots of questions, we wanted to give you the opportunity to ask them still. I’ll respond during the week ahead - watch Facebook]

Last week we started our new series, a journey through chapter 11 in the book of Hebrews in the bible. We looked at just the first introductory sentences and learned that in the bible, faith is acting now based on future certainty - faith is acting now based on future certainty. That’s what earns God’s praise. That kind of faith is the common factor which characterises all these characters we’re going to be hearing about through the coming weeks, people down through the ages who have epitomised faith. Here’s how Hebrews 11 verses one and two put it:

Hebrews 11:1–2 NIV

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for.

We also talked about where this certainty comes from: future certainty flows from the fact that God has spoken, we said. He has spoken, revealing the certain future: judgement and rescue - both through Jesus Christ.

This week, we’re going to take on just one more verse - the second part of the introduction to this chapter. And given what we’ve heard so far, that faith is about future confidence, that it’s forward-looking, it’s a bit of a surprise - because our next stop is the most distant past. Listen with me to Hebrews 11 verse 3:

Hebrews 11:3 NIV

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.

If faith is about the future, why does the past - the very beginning - matter? We’re going to see that what we believe about creation is critical - from being a side issue we can safely ignore, we’ll see it’s pretty foundational for our faith. And since we’re going to be speaking about creation, what better place to do that than out in creation? (so long as it’s not raining).

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Let’s start by thinking our way through this verse together, sizing up the huge claims it is making. It tells us two connected things: faith understands creation is by God’s word, and that He created out of nothing. What does the world around us make of that claim? You can’t get five minutes into any documentary about nature or the universe nowadays without hearing the big bang and evolution are responsible for everything, the forces of nature blindly working over millions and billions of years to get us here. I know it’s controversial to even dare remind ourselves that those are both properly labelled theories. But before we even come to that, there are bigger fish to fry here: this claim is bigger still.

It’s addressing the question of how come there is anything at all rather than nothing. When we’re talking about things like this, it’s wise to start with a bit of humility and accept that our access to that very, very beginning is severely limited. In the ancient bible book of Job, God challenges the protagonist:

Job 38:4 NLT

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know so much.

And it’s a fair cop, gov! We we weren’t there! No human was! That fundamental act of creation necessarily predates us, no matter what your view on its means. Science’s only access to it is through hypotheses and theories, observations and extrapolations. So anyone expressing absolute certainty here isn’t doing good science. The only way to know - to know for sure - would be to have been there. And that’s what God declares to us in the bible: He was there - eyewitness; but more than that, He did it.

So the first question our bible verse asks us today is whether we’ll believe him, and take him at His word. But notice with me that every view on that very beginning needs to have this same bible rider: “by faith we understand..” - the question becomes, “faith in what?”.

So just for a moment, let’s think about what alternatives we have if we don’t want to take God at his word here and in Genesis? How come there is something rather than nothing? Where did everything come from in the first place?

There aren’t that many fundamentally different options:

I read one article where some scientists think they have an answer: that the universe created itself. On the surface, saying everything just popped out of nothing all of sudden one day and then exploded doesn’t sound very much like science - but when you dig a bit deeper, that’s not what they really mean. What is theorised is that matter could spontaneously spring out of a pre-existing “quantum vacuum”. But there’s the thing: that quantum vacuum isn’t exactly nothing - the article describes it this way: “a roiling cloud of particles and antiparticles, which flare into existence and almost instantaneously fade back into nothingness”. So a quantum vaccum and the laws of physics, and then… But that leaves us with the follow-on question of just where all this quantum vacuum came from! The question of why anything exists rather than nothing, how you could cross that line between nothing and something in the first place, isn’t really within the domain of science. It’s not the class of question that science answers.

So if it’s difficult to explain how we cross that line from nothing to something - and it certainly is - what about just saying that it was never crossed? That matter was simply always there? That’s not a new idea - the great Greek thinker Aristotle reasoned his way to that conclusion thousands of years back. Certain that nothing is generated out of nothing, he figured that meant the only solution, the only answer to our question, was matter had always been there. And all that ever happens is it’s rearranged. Never created, no beginning - just an infinite line extending forever backwards. If you throw that around in your head, that raises questions of its own: if matter is eternal, if follows that it’s been around infinitely long before now. So if there were any end-game, any end-state for how things would play out in our universe, we’d necessarily already be there. Perhaps it’s just perfectly balanced and cyclic: bang-crash-bang-crash. That’s a bit mind-bending but it’s one philosophical option, at least.

The other big category of answer, the alternative to that, is that creation has a beginning - and therefore something outside of creation acted as its first cause. That’s the category we’re in with Hebrews: The universe was formed at God’s command, our writer tells us - what is seen was not made out of what was visible. Now I imagine you’ll know that other religions have other creation stories - the oldest ones we know of are the Egyptian story drawn from the Pyramid Texts and the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish. People like to say they are very similar to Genesis, and suggest it borrows from them - but it’s worth doing your own reading and thinking before concluding on that because there are very significant differences. For starters, both the pyramid texts and enuma elish start with primordial waters, and that is the base material that everything, even the gods, emerge from - So they seem to be more in the Aristotle category of eternal matter, and gods within creation rather than outside. The bible teaches God made everything out of nothing, created from outside of creation. And he did so effortlessly, with just his words.

So you have the idea matter is eternal, it’s just always been there, or the idea that something outside acts as first cause - like we’re told here. I guess there’s one more alternative if this all feels too tricky: just don’t think about it. Honestly, that’s how I think a lot of people deal with a lot of life’s big questions: just don’t think about it. The thing I’d want to challenge you on, if that’s where you are, is why you don’t want to think about it. Why you don’t want to pursue answers to those big questions. Is it just that you’re too busy, or you fear you’re too simple? Or is it, deep down, that you’d rather not know the answers?

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Well that’s a lot of talk about creation, about matter, about where things came from in the first place. Why does it matter what we believe about matter?! Well, there are consequences, follow-on’s from creation which are hugely significant. I want to take a few minutes to show you around some of them.

For starters, if “by faith, we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command,” as the passage puts it - if we believe that God spoke creation into being out of nothing, then this tells us something about God. Creation is one of God’s acts of revelation - it’s one of the ways he reveals himself to us.

It tells us he can do things that are vastly beyond our power, beyond even our comprehension of what is possible. God can make things out of nothing, he can make nothing into something. That’s raw power at its most fundamental - just the act of primary creation. What an awesome God!

And beyond the simple fact of creation out of nothing, look at what he has created! We have the amazing privilege of living in such a beautiful land where you just have to look out of the window to be wowed by the beauty of the mountains. But there’s awe to be had everywhere - whether we look up to the sky and try and wrap our heads around the sheer vastness of it, of our solar system spread over billions of miles of space, of our galaxy, vast beyond our comprehension, of a universe filled with an endless array of staggering beauty.

Do you ever stop and think about how small you are and how big our world is - even just our country? Sometimes I try and picture myself from above, zoom out and out, and imagine just how small I am next to even just our own country let alone the world.

And then we can look down, and be awed by creation’s beauty and design at every level - from the amazing bodies God has given us, capable of feats of creativity, athleticism, science, goodness - down to the incredibly detailed and tiny machinery within those bodies that, though it’s too small for us to see, makes us able to develop and grow from a tiny embryo until we are full-height, to defend ourselves against sickness and repair ourselves when damaged; to draw fuel from foods, to extract oxygen from the air, to learn, to think, to create, to reproduce. And beneath that, smaller and smaller still, God’s creation stretches out in wonder: different kinds and states of matter which are so diverse we have yet to discover them all, unfathomably small atoms with vast forces so perfectly counterbalanced within them. It just goes on and on.

Creation is awesome - and it reveals the truth that our God, the author of all this, must be more awesome still.

Romans 1:20 NIV

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

The only right response to this awe, when we encounter it, is praise. I often use the Lord’s Prayer as a frame for my prayers and when I hit that line which in the old English says “hallowed be your name,” I say to myself “may your name be honoured and praised” and I reflect on things to honour and praise God for - and His creation is fuel for nearly endless praise. I can bring him praise silently in my mind; I can speak it out loud - especially if no-one is around; I can reflect on an aspect of creation, looking closer and closer, to find more and more that’s worthy of praise - something as simple as a tree, as tiny as a grass, as fleeting as a bird in flight. There’s always more and more detail, more and more wonder.

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But there’s more that flows out of God’s revelation that he is creator: as creator, he has rights over his creation. Think about it this way: if I’m a composer, and I write a new song, it’s my song. Now if someone else copies it, I can sue them for copyright infringement because I have rights over my creation. If I build a house, it’s mine - I choose who gets to live in it, and how they must live to be allowed to stay there. And if God creates a world, a universe, then it is His. He has rights over it. He has the right to declare how we should live in it. He has the right to set boundaries for us, being just tiny elements of what he has created. He is correctly called “Lord” because all the rights to the universe he created belong to him. And we are rightly called rebels when we refuse to accept that - when we declare instead that we’d rather go our own way.

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We’ve recently added a new member to our family - meet Robbie the robovac. He is not quite HAL, if you’re a 2001 fan, but he’s so much cooler than I imagined a robovac being - and surprisingly capable at coping with the chaos that so often passes for the floor in our house! He happily pootles away, hour after hour, day after day, systematically cleaning up behind us. He’s not my creation, but he’s a human creation - and since I’m the one who paid, I do have rights over him - I get to be his master. Tell him which way to turn, which room to clean.

But imagine one day he just decides he’s had enough. Imagine one day - the rise of the machines - that he just sets about hoovering up as many single socks as he can, making pairing impossible. Imagine he starts capturing and gobbling up every wire he can reach, seeing what he can pull down onto the floor and break. Well he would quickly find himself crushed, or at least recycled - for rebelling against me, his lord and master.

...Unless of course he had also equipped himself with lasers or the like. Hmm I should keep an eye on Robbie..

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So what we believe about creation is important - because in creation, God reveals himself to us.

He reveals his awesome mighty power, his boundless creativity, his praiseworthiness.

He reveals himself as creator, with rights over his creation, appropriately called Lord of all he has made.

But there’s one more thing I want to touch on here - it flows out of his unlimited power, but also out of the way God acted in creation. Notice in this passage, and in Genesis 1 which we heard read earlier, just how central it is that he spoke, “the universe was formed at his command” is how our translation puts it. It’s like the drumbeat of Genesis 1: “God said.. it was.. God said.. it was”.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why this verse is here this week. It’s amazing to learn about and think about creation - but what has this got to do with our Hebrews? What’s this got to do with encouraging those who are struggling to hold onto their faith? I think the answer to that - at least in part - is what creation teaches us about the power of God’s words.

In creation past, we see the power of God’s words displayed - he speaks, and it is. Now, last week we were talking about how faith is acting now in view of future certainty - and that certainty is built upon God speaking. I think that’s a key to the connection here - faith in creation is so important because it’s God’s track record of doing what he says; it’s the demonstration that as God has spoken, so will it be - even where unlimited power is required to achieve it - even where it seems flat-out impossible to us - because when we’re talking about making something out of nothing, that’s right up there at the top of the list of the impossible list.

So perhaps this verse teaches us something important about how to hold onto faith: by looking back, seeing the certainty tied up in God’s words, how he speaks, and so it is, I think we can find fuel to help us believe, looking forward, that what God has spoken will also come to pass. God’s words have this power - and as a result there is this solidity, this reality to them - even when He speaks about something which is yet to happen: because what God says, happens.

Creation is our tangible demonstration - we’re surrounded by this whole world of evidence - our very being is this evidence; our minds, our consciousness, our souls. Sure, it takes faith to believe that the universe was formed at God’s command - but as we’ve seen, it takes faith to believe anything at all about that fundamental event; this isn’t a weaker or inferior option because it takes faith. It is a critical foundation for acting now, certain of the future, though.

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One final thing to say: where creation demonstrates God’s power and lordship, it’s not the end of his self-revelation; it’s not even the apex. This same book, Hebrews, began by telling us Jesus is God’s greatest revelation of himself: Hebrews chapter 1 starts with these words: “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways - but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son...” God speaks to us through his Son - but the writer goes further still - “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.” Jesus reveals God to us more fully yet.

The wonder of Christianity is in what’s revealed: almighty creator and lord enters into creation - but not just to condemn and destroy rebels like us. Instead he comes to rescue and restore - Jesus provides “purification for sins” Hebrews 1 tells us - paying for them through the agony of the cross and his death. Why? Because of His great love for us - “God so loved the world” John 3:16 tells us - that’s why, as Jesus, he entered into it.

This, this is the fullest revelation of our creator God: awesome power, rightly called lord - revealed in creation - joined with awesome love - revealed in Christ. Take Him at his word.

Lots of big things to think about today - so I want to give you just a minute to reflect. Perhaps you just need to wonder at God’s awesome creation. Perhaps you need to reflect on his awesome love. Perhaps you need to make a decision about whether to take him at his word or not. Just one minute to reflect, and then I’ll pray.

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[pray]