One of the biggest questions that a person can ask is the question of origin. Where did everything come from? How did the universe get started, and why is it so orderly? What about life — trees, grass, ants, dogs, cats, birds, reptiles — where did those kinds of things come from? And most importantly, where did we come from? What is the explanation and meaning of human life? What exactly happened in the beginning?
Well, the Bible is a book of answers, and its very first words tell us what happened in the beginning:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (Gen. 1:1)
We really can't begin a discussion of origins without encountering this character called God. We arrive at the beginning of time, and God is already there. History begins, not with His coming into being, but with His bringing all other things into being. We see Him active within space and time, but not bound by space and time. He is entirely self-existent, and He transcends all limitations and constraints. He is the origin of all things, but He Himself has no origin. A.W. Tozer put it this way:
Origin is a creature word. The trees had an origin, space had an origin, the mountains, the seas — all things have an origin. But when you come back to God, you come back to the One who has no origin. He is the Cause of all things, the uncaused Cause. (Meditations on the Trinity, 16)
You may think that's a lot to pull out of one verse, but the Scriptures consistently support and elaborate on these claims. Take, for instance, the words of Moses in Psalm 90:
Before the mountains were brought forth, Or ever You had formed the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God. (Ps. 90:2)
You can't get much longer than "from everlasting to everlasting." And if God has existed "from everlasting," then a beginning is something that He did not have. The world had a starting point in time, but God did not. There was a moment in history when none of the things existed that we take for granted today, but God was still there. He was always there, and He always will be. He depends on nothing, and all other things depend on Him.
But merely saying that God is there tells us very little about who God is. What kind of being is He? It's hard even to begin to understand the infinite God who has created all things, but there are some very straightforward and fundamental truths that we can know about who He is. One of the most important of these truths is that God is a personal being. He's not just a higher power, a force, or some kind of cosmic energy. He is alive and conscious. He didn't emit or radiate the heavens and earth — He created them with deliberate and purposeful action. He spoke (Gen. 1:3). He saw the light and recognized that it was good (v4). He divided the light from the darkness and gave them both names (v4-5). He formed the first human beings with a particular purpose in mind, and He communicated verbally with them (v26-30). Only a personal being would be able to perform actions such as these. And it is this infinite, personal God — presented to us in the very first chapter of the Bible — that sets Christianity in stark contrast to the various religions and philosophies of the world.
In attempting to answer the origin question, the vast majority of belief systems do not accept the existence of an infinite, personal Creator. It is true that the mythologies often recognize personal deities, but virtually none of them are said to be infinite. They don't stand outside of the world and sustain its existence like the God of the Bible does. On the contrary, the personal deities that we see in paganism are more like exalted human beings than anything else — contained within the world, and bound by space and time. And finite gods certainly aren't "big enough" to explain the origin of the world.
A little over a week ago, I had a very interesting conversation with some LDS missionaries outside of a local coffee shop. We talked about God, divine revelation, personal salvation, and other topics. At one point, I said, "You seem to be making God out to be a lot like us," to which one of the LDS elders replied, "Well, you know what the Bible says: 'As man now is, God once was.' " I asked for a specific Bible reference, which he diligently searched for but failed to locate, because that phrase was never written in the Bible — it's actually a quote from LDS President Lorenzo Snow:
As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be. (LDS Church)
This is just one example of how LDS theology is really very similar to the mythologies of old, because it embraces a god that was once like us, a god who was not God "from everlasting to everlasting," a god that is really nothing more than a glorified man. Besides being entirely contrary to what we find in the Bible, this kind of teaching about God leaves us with a being that is much too small to be the origin of everything that exists. He is not all-powerful. He is by nature a dependent being, one that had to "climb up" to godhood. He is, literally, of the same species as man, finite, limited by space and time, and less than perfect. He is god made in man's image, and man's image is much too small.
Most of the eastern religions, on the other hand, are much more interested in the infinite, but it is not viewed as something personal. Take, for instance, the Hindu view of Brahman:
In Hinduism, Brahman refers to the supreme cosmic power, ontological ground of being, and the source, goal and purpose of all spiritual knowledge. Non-Hindus often translate Brahman as "God," but this is inaccurate. According to Hinduism, Brahman is said to be ineffable and higher than any description of God in personal form. (New World Encyclopedia)
So Brahman, as supreme of a cosmic power as it may be, is ultimately impersonal. Brahman is powerful, but Brahman is not alive. It is not self-aware. It does not have a plan. It is not creative. Brahman is literally dead because Brahman was never alive. And one has to wonder if it's really reasonable at all to say that a dead force brought all things — including intelligent life — into existence.
However, the most far-fetched philosophies of all, rather than embracing finite, personal gods or impersonal, cosmic powers, literally embrace nothing as the source of all things. This seems to be a fairly popular approach today, particularly among atheists. I recently came across the Amazon page for Lawrence M. Krauss' book, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, with the following description:
Krauss reveals that modern science is indeed addressing the question of why there is something rather than nothing-with surprising and fascinating results. The beautiful experimental observations and mind-bending theories are all described accessibly, and they suggest that not only can something arise from nothing, something will always arise from nothing. (Amazon description)
I have, admittedly, not read Krauss' book, and only a limited amount of insight into its contents can be gleaned from its Amazon description. However, claiming that everything came from nothing seems to be just another way of saying that you don't have to answer the origin question. You can dress it up as nice as you want, but postulating that the universe arose from nothing is a non-explanation because nothing is literally no thing. Nothing is merely the absence of something. It has no attributes or existence of its own, and certainly cannot be the source of all existence. And claiming that "something will always arise from nothing" sounds like you're attributing some kind of law-like behavior to nothing, which would imply that it is really something after all, though perhaps a very mysterious something.
Against all these mythologies and philosophies of the world stands the Bible like a city on a hill. We are confronted with the only clear and consistent explanation of the world in the infinite, personal God of Holy Scripture. There simply is no other answer to the origin question. Everything that exists — the mountains, the oceans, the stars, the trees, the dogs, the cats, the rabbits, the family members that we love, and even the thoughts in our own minds — all of them proclaim this one undeniable truth: God is there. It is staked on every mountain and written on every blade of grass. It shines in the face of every newborn baby, and is stamped into the consciousness of every human person. His presence can be ignored, but it cannot be escaped. We can "suppress the truth in unrighteousness," but we are ultimately "without excuse" (Rom. 1:18-21).
Of course, everything I have written above is useless if we do not walk away with the conviction that God's existence is the most important, the most paradigm-shattering reality of our lives. He's not just a philosophical deduction or a theoretical fact. He is the living God. John Piper has something of a grasp of what it means to truly believe that God exists:
God absolutely is! Let us believe and cherish this. God is. It is a wildly untamable, explosively uncontainable, electrically future-creating reality — that God is. And it is a cosmic outrage billions of times over that he is ignored, treated as negligible, questioned, criticized, and given less consideration than the carpet in people's homes.
With God being the most significant reality, nothing is rightly known apart from its relationship to him. He is the source and goal and definer of all beings and all things. Let us, therefore, be a God-besotted people. To know him, to admire him, to make him known as glorious should be our driving passion. Let him be simply and overwhelmingly dominant in our consciousness. If we exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God, then everything must start and end with him, everything must be related to him. (Astonished by God, 14-15)
God's existence is a life-giving truth that is meant to transform your own existence. It is designed to turn your world upside-down. It is certainly a mysterious truth, but that only makes it all the more wonderful and awe-inspiring. And the mystery only continues when we learn that this God — the one who exists beyond space and time, who depends on nothing and no one to be who He is — this God pierced the cosmic curtain and came as a man to die for other men. The glorious mystery of the creation story is magnified ten times over when we learn that the Creator of all things willingly became a creature. But of course, that's another story for another time.
Very Educational!!!