God: Creator

Welcome! Today is our second message on our series on worship entitled “Sing and Tremble.” Our focus today is on worshiping God as creator – the creator of the universe, creator of life, creator of you and me. Last week we talked about our title by focusing on God’s holiness, and how one proper response to God’s perfect holiness is in fact, to tremble: to remember that apart from Christ and what He has done for us on the cross, we would have no hope for reconciliation with God, that apart from Him we would stand condemned with no hope for forgiveness.

I am reminded of the account of the first sin, Adam’s fall, in Genesis 3. After Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, we have this passage:

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” – Gen. 3:7-10

In the one sin of Adam, they went from walking and talking with God to hiding from His presence. Emotionally, in that one act, they went from feeling love and acceptance to fear and shame. The awareness of their nakedness was really only a symptom of a much deeper problem – they now felt like they needed something to separate them from God, to cover them, to protect them from Him, from His holy presence.

Now for the Christian, for one who has put his faith and trust in Christ to save him, it is no longer necessary or appropriate to cower in fear because of what God might do to us, but it is appropriate to think about the perfect holiness of God and, still, to tremble. One analogy I have thought of (and it is far from perfect) is that of being on a roller coaster that chugs up hundreds of feet, and, just before beginning its descent down a nearly vertical cliff, pauses and dangles for a moment. Even though we know it is safe for us because we are safely strapped into this machine that has gone without incident countless times before, we still scream (well, you scream – I never scream). As believers we face God “covered” by Christ, but it is still God we face, and in the glory of His holiness, having that feeling that your stomach has risen up into your throat is an appropriate response. Sing and tremble.

Well, today our focus is on God’s creative works, on God as Creator, and I think reflecting on the following verse is most appropriate:

Then I saw another angel flying in midair, and he had the eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth—to every nation, tribe, language and people. He said in a loud voice, “Fear God and give Him glory, because the hour of His judgment has come. Worship Him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water.” – Rev. 14:6-7

This is definitely a “sing and tremble” moment. Lots of people have gone around proclaiming “the end is near,” through the ages, all of them wrong, so far – but when this angel will do it, it will be the real deal. He who made us will hold us accountable for our actions. We will be judged, and apart from Christ, it will be our (nonexistent) righteousness that He looks at. But if we are in Christ, as the book of John says, He in us and us in Him, we will be judged not by our own righteousness, but by the perfect righteousness of Christ. Our sins will not enter into the equation at all. Knowing this, will we still tremble? I think we almost certainly will, just like the people on that roller coaster.

The passage ends with “Worship Him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and the springs of water.” God created everything, and His creation is indescribably awesome. His creation is unfathomably complex. His creation is unspeakably beautiful. What this means is that He is even more awesome, even more complex, even more beautiful.

Faculty Commons a few weeks ago had as a guest speaker Henry (Fritz) Schaeffer, a Christian chemist who was 5 times nominated for the Nobel Prize. I purchased a copy of one of his books while he was here, entitled “Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence?” The book is filled with interesting quotes by scientists, Christian and otherwise. Schaeffer points out that Christian faith has been a primary motivation for many scientists over the ages to study science. Quoting another Chemistry professor, Schaeffer explains the following consequences of having faith in Christ that motivate people to think and work scientifically: (1) Trust that the universe is real, not an illusion, in contrast with various eastern religious ideas. (2) Trust that the universe is of value (since God made it) and worthy of study, in contrast to Gnosticism and some other eastern religions and philosophies. (3) Trust that nature itself is not divine, and we may therefore probe it free of fear, again in contrast to other religions and superstitions. (4) Trust that man, made in God’s image, can discover order in the universe and understand at least aspects of it. (5) Trust that observation rather than merely logical thinking can lead to further understanding of the universe because God had a choice in how He made creation, as opposed to the idea that the creation was limited to being only one way because of “reason.” The latter idea was another of the ideas of Gnosticism. I would personally add a sixth consequence of having faith in Christ: (6) Trust that God wants us to work to understand the universe, because He made us stewards over the earth and all that is in it. And there is another reason, one pertinent to our topic today: The more we learn, the more we are amazed and in awe of God, and the more we want to worship Him as Creator. Schaeffer does talk about, after exploring some minute scientific (in his case, quantum chemical) topic, after finally understanding something new, saying, “Ah, so that’s how God did it.”

I want to give you a few of my favorite quotes of other scientists from the book. In a way, this is fun for me, as a former atheist, because all of the quotes I am going to give you are from atheists. Here is one of my favorites, from the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow: “Many scientists are deeply religious in one way or another, but all of them have a certain rather peculiar faith – they have a faith in the underlying simplicity of nature; a belief that nature is, after all, comprehensible and that one should strive to understand it as much as we can. Now this faith in simplicity, that there are simple rules – a few elementary particles, a few quantum rules to explain the structure of the world – [ready for it?] – is completely irrational and completely unjustifiable.” He’s right, of course, unless that faith is a consequence of faith in a Creator much like the God of the Bible.

Here is another, from another Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner: After speaking of the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,” he writes, “the miracle of the appropriateness of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift that we neither understand nor deserve.”

Yet another, this from physicist Dennis Sciama, who was Stephen Hawking’s thesis adviser. This one I need to set up for a bit by explaining that many atheists really hate the Big Bang Theory because it holds that the universe had a beginning, and by that fact argues that a reasonable conclusion is that Someone made it. Formally, this is the Cosmological Argument, which has three simple parts: (1) Everything that begins to exist must have a cause. (2) The universe began to exist. (3) Therefore, the universe must have a cause.  Anyway, physicists keep looking for other explanations, one of which is called the steady-state theory of the universe. Sciama eventually gave up on his steady-state theories because they didn’t agree with data, shortly after which he said, “The steady-state theory has a sweep and beauty that for some unaccountable reason the architect of the universe appears to have overlooked.”

One final set of quotes from Schaeffer’s book, this from Steven Weinberg, yet another Nobel Prize-winning physicist, yet another atheist:

“I have to admit that sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.” He goes on to say, after discussing birds, “Although I understand pretty well how brightly colored feathers evolved out of competition for mates, it is almost irresistible to imagine that all this beauty was somehow laid out for our benefit.”

Weinberg is also quoted, after discussing a passage from the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (written around 700 AD) in which a sparrow flies swiftly through a banqueting hall, and in which Bede compares the short flight – compared with the nearly infinite flight available out of doors – to our life on earth compared with eternity, “It is an almost irresistible temptation to believe with Bede […] that there must be something for us outside the banqueting hall. The honor of resisting this temptation is only a thin substitute for the consolations of religion, but it is not entirely without satisfactions of its own.”

If only he – and all these other atheists – would stop resisting this temptation! I am reminded of Romans 1:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 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. For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.  – Romans 1:18-21

As a former atheist myself, I know what it means to suppress the truth by my wickedness, to have my thinking become futile, and to allow my foolish heart to be darkened. I praise God for rescuing me from myself!

Steven Weinberg, and so many like him, have to work hard to deny what their own spirit, their own heart knows intuitively, what every child knows, that creation was made by a Creator, a Creator who loves beauty and loves to make things beautiful for our own benefit. This must be so, as we are the only beings (other than the angels) who can appreciate the beauty of His creation. The blue jay doesn’t go around thinking, “Wow, that cardinal is just so beautiful to look at!” The ugly duckling, despite the story by Hans Christian Andersen, doesn’t go around admiring the beauty of the swans. God enjoys His creation – again and again in Genesis He calls it “good,” but the other intended recipient and appreciator of His work is us. How sad that admiring His amazing handiwork would be seen by anyone as a temptation to resist!

This attitude towards God’s incredible creation also reminds me of the opening to Psalm 19:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. – Psalm 19:1-4

This message without words goes out to believers and unbelievers both. For us, our response should be worship. As glorious as a sunset is, it is nothing compared to the glory of the One who made the sunset and who makes countless sunsets.

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of His mouth. He gathers the waters of the sea into jars; He puts the deep into storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the people of the world revere Him. For He spoke, and it came to be; He commanded, and it stood firm. – Psalm 33:6-9

Sing and tremble! The “tremble” is here – let all the earth fear Him; let all the people of the world revere Him. The word translated “revere” is an interesting word. It has a meaning more literally of turning aside. The idea is that of getting out of the way of another person coming down a path towards you. Although a different word, the literal meaning is quite close to that of “repent,” which literally also means to turn. Repentance is certainly an essential part of worship.

The “sing” is here too – this psalm begins with “Sing joyfully to the Lord, you righteous; it is fitting for the upright to praise Him. Praise the Lord with the harp; make music to Him on the ten-stringed lyre. Sing to Him a new song; play skillfully, and shout for joy.” The “tremble” comes in again near the end: “No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength. A horse is a vain hope for deliverance; despite all its great strength it cannot save. But the eyes of the Lord are on those who fear Him, on those whose hope is in His unfailing love.”

Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing to the Lord, praise His name; proclaim His salvation day after day. Declare his glory among the nations, His marvelous deeds among all peoples. For great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; He is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the Lord made the heavens. – Psalm 96:1-5

Once again, sing (verse 1) and tremble (verse 4). Proclaim His salvation day after day. Sharing the gospel with someone, whether a believer or an unbeliever, or even with yourself, is worship! I love the message of the last two verses. We don’t worship physical idols, generally speaking, but we find other things to worship, things that can make us fear. If we worship money, we may overly fear the possibility of a coming economic downturn. If we worship our reputation, or we worship praise and acceptance from others, we may overly fear the possibility that someone thinks something bad about us. If we worship our children, we may become overprotective because we fear something might happen to them. The message of this passage is that none of these fears are justified; they reflect worship of the wrong thing. The only thing we worship is God, because unlike these false gods, God is the creator! Not that we need to fear God doing some terribly bad thing to us, but well, God is God! With Him as the one we really care about, all of these other fears fade away. As it says in I John 4:18, perfect love drives out fear.

David, of course, wrote many of the Psalms. He also wrote this:

“Praise be to you, Lord, the God of our father Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. Yours, Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is Yours. Yours, Lord, is the kingdom; You are exalted as head over all. Wealth and honor come from You; You are the ruler of all things. In Your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all. Now, our God, we give You thanks, and praise Your glorious name.” – I Chron. 29:10-13

The fact that God is Creator has many implications. The overwhelming scope and nature of creation tells us that God is mighty, even almighty. This is a word we may not think about very much – but “almighty” really does mean “all-mighty.” God’s creation also tells us that He is owner of all that He has created – that is, He is owner of all, of everything. Everything belongs to Him. Even we belong to Him. And because of this, He is also the rightful ruler of all things, including us. His is the kingdom. He is King of kings and of everyone else. Do you think of Him in this way? At this point in time David had been king a long time, and he was about to acknowledge his son Solomon as the next king. Despite being king most of his life, look again at his prayer – He is acknowledging that his kingship is nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to God’s.  At this point, under the leadership of Solomon, they were about to build the Temple of the Lord, something David had always desired to do but God told him it was not for him to do, but for his son. Under David, Israel had prospered, and his people had prospered. They gave very generously for the Temple about to be built. David continues by saying, “But who am I, and who are my people that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from You, and we have given You only what comes from Your hand.” In David here is a perfect picture of humility. David has no pride in his possessions, in his accomplishments, or in his kingship. Can you pray like this? Would you mean it? This is the proper heart of a true worshiper. Worship is not just something we do at a prescribed time. It is an attitude of genuine humility, like David has here.

Do you believe, deep down, that your wealth, whether a lot or a little, doesn’t come from your shrewd maneuverings or your hard work, but from God? Do you believe, deep down, that honor, reputation, your name, also doesn’t come from your actions or even your character, but from God? Now it is true that maybe without hard work, without good money management skills, you will not “make it” financially, and it is also true that if you act unethically or dishonorably you may destroy your reputation – that is, we do have the power, through our sin, to destroy pretty much any area of our life we choose. But the converse is not really true. Our success, financially or otherwise, is not really in our control. The Bible is filled with people who acted honorably who went through periods of poverty, persecution, imprisonment, and much worse. Think of Joseph. Think of Daniel. Think of Stephen, the first martyr. Think of Paul. And of course, think of Christ Himself. Worship starting from an understanding of God’s power and sovereignty over all that we have and even, in many ways, who we are is the kind of worship God loves.

In God’s vast creation, one might think that man is quite unimportant. Steven Hawking has stated, “We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred billion galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence.” Carl Sagan and other atheists have made similar kinds of statements. I love what John Piper says in response to this idea. “Sometimes people stumble over this vastness in relation to the apparent insignificance of man. It does seem to make us infinitesimally small. But the meaning of this magnitude is not mainly about us. It’s about God…The reason for ‘wasting’ so much space on a universe to house a speck of humanity is to make a point about our maker, not us.” And what is that point? That God is omnipotent. That God is omniscient. That God is eternal. And yes, that even our greatest accomplishments, our resumes, are nothing, are in fact utterly insignificant compared to God’s.

In contrast to what Steven Hawking believes about the insignificance of man to God (which Hawking does not believe in), the Bible, of course, takes a very different view of man. We are made in the image of God. We are given dominion over the creatures of the earth and are to serve as stewards over God’s creation. Other animals are not said by God to be made in His image. We are said to be a little lower than the angels, but God sees man as so important that Christ died to redeem us! This cannot be said even of the angels. When God made all the rest of creation it says in Genesis that it was “good,” but when God made man it was “very good.” The Bible repeatedly says that God loves us; in fact, as John 3:16 says, it was because of God’s love for us that He sent Jesus, God’s Son, to die for us. Despite our sin, we are unspeakably precious to God.

Psalm 139 says,

Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? If I go up to the heavens, You are there; if I make my bed in the depths, You are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there Your hand will guide me, Your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to You; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to You. For You created my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. – Psalm 139:7-16

I have spoken before on how impossibly huge the universe is. But in God’s eyes, we are a much bigger deal. The human body is just amazing. Study any system of the body, or any process, and the complexity of what goes on is staggering. We take it all for granted. We like to say we live in the scientific age and don’t believe in magic, but unless you are a scientist who spends his life studying the human body, and frankly even if you do so, there is so much that you won’t understand about the human body and how it works that it is indistinguishable from magic. The same is actually true of all life – watch a bird in flight, or a cheetah running fast enough to merge with traffic on I85, or the incredible variety and otherworldly weirdness of creatures in the sea, and how can you not marvel? How can you not worship the God who thought of and created these amazing things?

But it is not in our body that we are made in the image of God. Yes, Jesus came to earth as a baby, in human form, to save us. He became one of us. But this was an unimaginable lowering of Himself. Imagine somehow squishing ourselves down and becoming an ant or a mosquito – even this is no comparison to what God did to come to Earth. He tells us, “Before Abraham was born, I AM.” He is God, second Person in the Trinity, becoming like one of us for our sake. He lived as one of us, with all of our limitations, even with a limited access to the Father. I have read how hard it is for an identical twin to lose their twin. This is nothing compared to what Jesus must have felt coming to Earth and living here. And as God, He was tempted by Satan to use His power despite the instructions of His Father to not do so. It is much harder to be somewhere you don’t want to be when you know you could leave at any moment. This was Jesus’ life.

But back to talking about God’s creation, man: As I said, it’s not in our bodies that we are made in the image of God. Our bodies are flesh, and blood, and bone, and organs like the animals. But we are intelligent. We have used our intelligence to transform the world around us. We have built cities and societies. We have made discoveries. Again and again, as a species, we have been able to say, whether or not we wanted to acknowledge it, as Fritz Schaeffer writes, “Ah, so that’s how God did it!”

In our intellect we are more like God than any other animal. But I don’t think this is really the core meaning of being made in the image of God either. Being made in the image of God I think has more to do with our spirit or our soul. At our 9:45 Sunday study time, the materials we are using has made a clean distinction between soul and spirit, and I think the distinction is Biblically valid, but I don’t want to belabor that here. My point here is that we are spiritual beings. We are eternal beings. We will not end when our hearts start beating. We will be with God, or we will be separated from God, forever. God’s desire, His heart, is that we would be with Him forever. This is why He made us. But He also made us able to choose to reject Him. There are really only two choices: reject Him or worship Him. I pray that you would choose the latter. He is worthy of our worship! His vast, beautiful and overwhelming creation shouts to us of His worthiness and His glory.

Most of you know the story of the book of Nehemiah, how he returned after the Israelite exile to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Well, one of the thing Nehemiah and those with him did was worship God, rededicating their lives to Him. They spent a quarter of a certain day reading from the Law, and another quarter in confession of their sins and in worship. And it says that the Levites said the following:

“Stand up and praise the Lord your God, who is from everlasting to everlasting. Blessed be your glorious name, and may it be exalted above all blessing and praise. You alone are the Lord. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship you. – Nehemiah 9:5-6

Let us follow their example and stand and praise Him by reading Psalm 8 out loud together.

Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth! You have set Your glory in the heavens. Through the praise of children and infants You have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger. When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have set in place, what is mankind that You are mindful of them, human beings that You care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of Your hands; You put everything under their feet: all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth! – Psalm 8