Theme of the Week: The God Who Is
Bible Verse: “He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?” Matthew 19:4
Scripture Reading: Genesis 1:1-31
The Bible does not begin with a long set of arguments to prove the existence of God. It does not begin with a bottom-up approach, nor does it begin with some kind of adjacent analogy or the like. It just begins, “In the beginning God” (Gen. 1:1).
Now, if human beings are the test of everything, this makes no sense at all because then we have the right to sit back and judge whether it is likely that God exists, to evaluate the evidence and come out with a certain probability that perhaps a god of some sort or another exists. Thus we become the judges of God. But the God of the Bible is not like that. The Bible begins simply but dramatically: “In the beginning God.” He is. He is not the object whom we evaluate. He is the Creator who has made us, which changes all the dynamics.
Human beings exist, and because God knows everything, what we know must necessarily be some small subset of what he knows. In other words, all of our knowledge—because he knows everything—must be a subset of what he knows exhaustively and perfectly.
If we exist, it is because of God’s power. Our knowledge, even our existence, is finally dependent on him. But this side of Cartesian thought, we begin with “I.” I begin with me. And that puts me in a place where I start evaluating not only the world around me but also morals and history and God in such a way that God now becomes, at most, the inference of my study. That changes everything. But the Bible does not run along those lines. God simply is.
Taken from The God Who is There by D.A. Carson. Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group. Copyright © 2010 by D.A. Carson. Used by permission.
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