God is the Creator. He made everything and He set the stage for the grand theater we call “life.” He wrote the script and made each and every one of us characters in this big play. I am an author of both fiction and nonfiction books, and in my fiction writing, I create characters through which I tell my story. Some characters are good, some are bad; some are redeemable, some are not. When I develop my characters properly, they begin to get their own voices and are able to tell me, the author, what they would do in certain situations. That directs how I move the story. Many authors have this saying, “If your characters don’t talk back to you, you haven’t developed them well enough.” God has fully developed each of us, knowing the number of every hair on our bodies and knowing our every thought. And that is what He uses to carry out this grand epic called “history.”
In order for God to showcase His glory, His might, His love, His grace, and His justice, He needed a stage on which to carry it all out. This is “Creation,” the physical universe that we all live in. God is the creator. There is no other option. All the proposed deities never created anything; they only manipulated what was there. Only the God of the Bible created “ex nihilo,” out of nothing. There was no physical anything – no time, no space, no matter, nothing. Then God who is outside this physical universe, just like I, an author, am outside the world I create for a story, spoke and it came into being.
I know it is not a popular notion among Christians, but I have a friend who plays Dungeons and Dragons. While I do not play myself, I have enough “gaming” background to actually understand the principles behind the game and how it works. I can say much of the backlash comes from a lack of understanding of what it is. I can see some legitimate concerns, but few have demonstrated an understanding of the game/system to correctly express them. The game is simple: players in a group choose a character to be, and they can pick and choose a variety of skills and traits that the character would have. They use that character to role-play through many different situations and scenarios set up by a Dungeon Master who is the master storyteller. The point in bringing this up is that the Dungeon Master can “speak” things into existence such as (to use my friend’s example), “It rained pink flamingoes,” and then it rains pink flamingoes in the game’s world. This is about as good of an analogy as I can give to explain how God creates by speaking things into existence.
God did not use natural means to create. He spoke it into existence. He also did it in six days, six normal days as understood by mankind. This is vital because it reveals the character of God as being holy, as being “other than” us. He created in a way that man would never consider if he were making up a story. He did not create over many long years of natural processes. Not only does science not support those models, but God is not going to share His glory with another. He is not going to allow man to figure out how He created lest we try to steal His blueprints and proclaim ourselves to be God in His stead. God also did not create instantaneously. While He absolutely could have done it any of these ways, He purposefully did not want to be deemed a super “magician” who just waved a magic wand. He was not going to let Himself be relegated to mythology easily. So He created in six days; everything in the natural universe was done and made in those six days. Nothing was done before and nothing was done after.
God also did something that none of the other models did with creation: He completed it as “very good.” The curse of sin was not present. Weeds and thorns did not grow. There was no hint or record of death of any kind upon the completion of creation. Everything served its purpose, demonstrating God’s creative power and mind, while also keeping track of so many intricate details that it completely surpasses man’s capability. Only a true God with all possible knowledge could create what we see in this universe.
Then to top it all off, God created mankind. Man is unique among all other creatures. Not only is man’s physical design so spectacular that he can do more things holistically than any other animal. True, man cannot fly, swim as deep as fish, or run as fast as cats or dogs, but we can climb, swim, run, use tools, fight, and do things that many animals who have their specialties cannot do. Above all that, man is made in the image of God. Unlike any other animal, man alone has the capacity to be a reflection and a picture of God on this physical earth. Man is the only being that has an understanding of “ought,” of morality, of “should or should not.”
The Creation gives us the backdrop for the greatest story ever told – the Gospel. Man is at the center of the story. The Gospel is about God’s dealings with man. But it goes deeper than that. God is a Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It has been said that the Father so loved the Son that He created mankind who would rebel against Him, and yet out of that rebellious population, a remnant would be chosen to be a bride for the Son whom He would get to enjoy for eternity. The Gospel is about how God comes to rescue man from his sin and displays the most creative and counter-intuitive manner to bring in salvation that only God could come up with. It makes no sense to those who think in the flesh, but to those who have been saved and look at eternity, it is the most glorious thing.
This week and last week have all been about the setup for the Gospel. Next week, we’ll introduce the villains of this great epic story: the devil and mankind.
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