The Immutable God: God is the creator, simply, profoundly
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I learned very fast not to tell new acquaintances what I do. When I was ordained, people stopped cussing around me and I haven’t heard a dirty joke since. All the sudden, it was like I was a completely different person. All the sudden, it seemed everybody expected that I would have something to say about God or the Bible in every conversation.
With the benefit of retrospect, though, I now realize it wasn’t sudden. After a period of self-observation, I have realized that even on my “time off,” I think and talk about the Lord a lot. And it was that way before I entered full-time ministry. When people in my life accuse me of always talking about Jesus and being obsessed, I have to concede.
But is being obsessed with the Lord unreasonable?
Two books of the Bible — Genesis in the Old Testament and John in the New Testament — begin with the same three words, “In the beginning.” The surrounding contexts make the same point, but in slightly different ways.
“In the beginning” is the first phrase in the Bible. Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The whole point of the opening chapters of the Bible is to present God as the creator and source of everything that is. Whether you believe he did it in six literal days, or if you understand the first chapters of Genesis figuratively, the main theological point is that God created everything that is. This is a simple and basic proposition, but the rest of everything we know about God rests on the simple fact that before anything was, God was, and that he created everything else that is.
The Book of John begins with the same words, but says something a little different. The first century Jew would have finished the words in their head as they read the text. When they read in John, “In the beginning,” the first century reader would have though, “God created…” But John surprises the memory by saying, “In the beginning was the Word.”
What an interesting thought.
The rest of John 1 paints a picture of the Word as a person. The Word is with God, but he also is God, and it is specifically the Word that does all the creating. “All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:3). So just like in the Old Testament, God is the source of all that is, but the person of the Trinity most closely linked with performing the actual work of creating the universe is the Word, that is, Jesus.
Consider this carefully. While the Spirit of God and the Holy Spirit “hovered over the waters,” God the Father spoke, and Jesus, his Word, created. God created as a trinity. Before anything was, God, as a trinity, already existed from eternity. In fact, God created time and space because he existed apart from it. God as creator has so many implications for theological truth, but this is not a doctrine that belongs in the scholastic ivory tower of the seminary. It has some practical, albeit inconvenient, applications.
I’m a woodworker. It’s much cheaper than therapy. One of my favorite projects was the nightstands in my bedroom. I started with a log from a tree and ended with two attractive nightstands. I milled the log to dimensional lumber. I carefully cut all the joinery. I fitted and glued each part together, and I applied a protective finish. When I was done, there was no question about who owned the new pieces of furniture. I did. I made them, so I own them. They are good because they are what I wanted them to be. If they weren’t what I wanted them to be, I would accurately call them bad.
Because I own them, I can do whatever I what with them. I could paint them (though I have strong feelings against painting wooden, hand-made furniture). I could put them wherever I like. I could give them to whomever I like. I could burn them and dump the ashes in a lake. Anything I want to do with them would be totally fair. Burning them would be especially understandable if they were not what I want them to be, or “bad.”
But the analogy breaks down because someone else — namely God — created the log. This is where belief in a creator God becomes very inconvenient. God played a greater role in making my nightstands than I did. Anyone can cut up some wood and fit it together. Have you ever tried to make a tree? Turns out, God actually owns my nightstands and everything else I have ever thought was mine.
Because God owns everything, he can also do whatever he wants with anything. He gets to set and enforce any moral standard he pleases. “Good,” then, is how God describes things that conform to the moral standard he sets based on his character.
Because he made you and me, God owns us. Because he owns us, he has the right to tell us what to do and to do whatever he wants with us. No wonder so many people refuse to even believe in such a God. Such a belief is sometimes inconvenient.
Conversely, if God set things the way he did because he loves us, and if he blesses us even when we are objectively bad (see Matthew 5:45), why wouldn’t you be obsessed with him? After all, he is the eternal, triune creator whose character is perfectly holy, righteous, just, merciful, gracious and above all loving. In both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, he acts to judge, bless and redeem all of creation.