The Greatness of God (Genesis 1)

One of the greatest tragedies in our life is that we don’t know God much.  We know about so many things such as iphone, or facebook, or Charlie Sheen, or Lady Gaga.  But we neither know about God nor know him personally when he is the most important being in the whole universe.  Honestly speaking, even though I delivered the message about Genesis Chapter 1 two Sundays ago, I don’t feel much about the majestic nature of creation.  God created the universe.  That’s it.  And no more.  Then I come back to my daily busy routine and he remains as an only small part of my life.  But if you and I sit down and meditate on what God did during the Creation even in a minute, we will surely agree that the Creation was not a small event.  Let’s pretend that we were so lucky that God showed us what had happened in the Creation even in a small scale. Even so that will be an awe-inspiring experience in scale, sound, vividness, and size.  The reason I am saying “even in a small scale” is because if we had witnessed the Creation, we could not have borne the gigantic nature of the Creation and survived.  Think about it.  The whole universe was in a chaos state.  Suddenly a blazing light was created by God’s command.  Then with a gigantic sound, louder than the Niagara Falls, the waters were separated and a great expanse was created.  Then the great universe was created one by one.  According to modern scientific knowledge, there are millions stars in number and the size of universe is billions light years in distance.  Think that, in front of your own eyes, planets, stars, super nova, and galaxies were created one by one.  And all kinds of animal plants, fish, birds, and animals were created in front of your own eyes.  In other words, the Creation displays God’s majesty, glory, and greatness.

A journalist, lecturer, and writer named Hendrick Van Loon, on his first visit to the Grand Canyon, exclaimed, “I came an atheist; I leave a believer.”  God created the nature to display his invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature.  Through the nature, God wants us to see him and recognize and acknowledge him as our God.  At this point, I am following J. I. Packer’s “Knowing God.”  According to the book, the Bible talks about the following natures of God:

Omnipresence (God is everywhere)

Omniscience (God knows everything)

Omnipotence (God is almighty.  Nothing is impossible with God)

Omnipresence: Psalm 139:7-8:

⁷ Where can I go from your Spirit?
   Where can I flee from your presence?
⁸ If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
   if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

Man is always in God’s presence.  You may hide yourself from people’s sight but not from God’s gaze.

Omniscience: Psalm 139:1-6:

¹ You have searched me, LORD,
   and you know me.
² You know when I sit and when I rise;
   you perceive my thoughts from afar.
³ You discern my going out and my lying down;
   you are familiar with all my ways.
⁴ Before a word is on my tongue
   you, LORD, know it completely.
⁵ You hem me in behind and before,
   and you lay your hand upon me.
⁶ Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
   too lofty for me to attain.

I can hide my inner heart, my past, my plans from men, but I cannot hide anything from God.  I can deceive people about myself but cannot deceive God who knows my thoughts and hidden desires.

Omnipotence: Ps 139:13-14

¹³ For you created my inmost being;
   you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
   your works are wonderful,
   I know that full well.

God is so almighty that he created you and me in wonderful and mysterious ways.  Why am I talking about all these things about God, quoting from Packer?  My reason is because even though God is such God, we don’t know him much.  In other words, as the book title “Your God Is Too Small,” indicates that we have a very poor notion of God.  As a result, we suffer from insecurity, fear, inferior complex, or identity crisis.  In the past, those who intimately knew this mighty and great God were willing to give their lives in glorifying and serving him because they knew that they were serving this great God.  But since we don’t know this great God much, we are sometimes ashamed to be identified as God-believing people.  We don’t know how great privilege it is to know and serve and praise him even once a week.  Sometimes I am ashamed to be your pastor.  In God’s point of view, how special privilege it is to serve his children with his words and guide them into his truth!  But sometimes I lose that perspective and sometimes it becomes a burden to me.  When I will go to heaven, God will surely rebuke me, “What a fool you were!  Your job was a small one, but it was a very significant one.”

Packer’s book, then, talks about Isaiah 42.  Like us, despairing Christians, who assume the cause of Christ will never prosper again in this nation, the Israelite despaired and became despondent and tired because of the tides of events running after them for a long time.  They lost their own country and exiled to a foreign land.  It was like God had  forgotten them and he was powerless to do anything against the great powers of Babylon or Persia.  Then God asks the Israelite the three questions (See the bold-faced sentences):

²⁵ “To whom will you compare me?
   Or who is my equal?” says the Holy One.
²⁶ Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
   Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
   and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
   not one of them is missing.
²⁷ Why do you complain, Jacob?
   Why do you say, Israel,
“My way is hidden from the LORD;
   my cause is disregarded by my God”?
²⁸ Do you not know?
   Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
   the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
   and his understanding no one can fathom.
²⁹ He gives strength to the weary
   and increases the power of the weak.
³⁰ Even youths grow tired and weary,
   and young men stumble and fall;
³¹ but those who hope in the LORD
   will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
   they will run and not grow weary,
   they will walk and not be faint.

Because of the hard situations surrounding them, the Israelite forgot that their God is God the Creator who created the heavens and the earth, and that no task is impossible with him.  They did not consider the fact that even great nations like Babylon are like a drop in a bucket, and that even great rulers and princes are reduced to nothing before him.  God tells them that if they want to know how great he is, they should lift up their eyes and looked to the heavens and understand that he brings out the starry host one by one and call their names one by one.  Then God asks them,

Do you not know?
   Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
   the Creator of the ends of the earth.

And he tells them that he will never grow tired and weary.   God’s message to the Israelite is the same with us.  When you grow tired and weary in your life of faith, when you are depressed, despairing when the cause of Christ may not prosper again, lift up your eyes and know that your God is an awesome God who created the heavens and the earth.

The truth God is the Creator is the basic tenet of our faith.  We believe that this world is God’s.  Sometimes evil seems to be strong but we know that everything is in God’s hands.  Nothing happens without God’s eternal edict.  Therefore, God is calling us, “Look up me.  Never forget that this world is mine.  I am greater than any human power and evil schemes.”

The second and last point I want to emphasize is Genesis 1:31.  At the end of each stage of creation, God saw that what he had done was “good.”  Then at the end of the six days of creation, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”  God was extremely pleased in the creation that he had made just as he had purposed to do.  This truth reveals that 1) God created the universe with his purpose and meaning, and that 2) the purpose of the creation was for his glory, in other words, God created the universe for his glory.  When God created the universe out of nothing, he created it, in his wisdom, for something.

¹ The heavens declare the glory of God;
   the skies proclaim the work of his hands. (Psalm 19:1)

¹¹ “You are worthy, our Lord and God,
   to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
   and by your will they were created
   and have their being.” (Revelation 4:11)

God was so pleased when all the creation he created revealed his glory, wisdom, and power.  Even in this world under sin after the fall, everything reveals God’s glory, either a positive or negative way.  We may wonder whether it is really true that everything in this world reveals God’s glory.  Once the song of a blind Korean pop singer was No. 1 in Korean billboard.  His song’s title, “Why did my mom give birth to me?” Look at genocide, sickness, crime, abnormally-born children, or divorce.  In the movie, “Ben Hur”, Judah Ben Hur sarcastically retorts to his lover Esther: “Children of God?  In that dead valley where we left my mother and sister!”  Sometimes we may wonder: 'God, I know, when you created Adam and Eve, they were in your good purposes.  But how about me?  I was not created by you as you did Adam and Eve.  I was just born by the union of my father and mother.  They did not even design my birth and they had me by the result of one night of passion.  Maybe I was born by accident.'  But we must know what the Bible says.  When God created the universe, every event after the creation was in his plan and purposes.  In other words, subsequently generated plants, animals, and all human beings are in God’s plan, even though they were generated by purely biological means.  Each of us born in a certain parent, in a certain way – character, intelligence, beauty, background, or times.  But God created each of us in a unique way for his specific purpose and plan, and ultimately for his glory.  When Jesus’ disciples met a blind beggar, they asked Jesus, ““Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2)  In other words, they seemed to ask him, “Why was this pathetic man born?”  But Jesus’ answer to them was “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” (John 9:3)  As a parent, we want all our children to be smart and successful. But remember that God created each child in a unique way to reveal his glory and to carry out his good purpose in his or her life.  Each person is important to God for eternity.  When one deeply accepts that God is the Creator, he or she can ultimately accept himself and herself as a meaningful creature in this world.

The fact that God created us for his own glory determines the correct answer to the question, “What is our purpose in life?”  In this world, only a few people find their purposes, usually because they have talents to pursue their dreams or ambition to achieve their great goals, such as becoming a great musician or a wealthy businessperson or a world famous scientist.  Even so, later they used to regret that they have spent their whole life for the things that turned out to be vain like chasing after the winds and shadows (Eccl 1:14).  Since God gives anyone the purpose and meaning of life, whether he or she is talented or not, each person has a unique purpose in glorifying God through his or her life.  A person will willingly do this and thus enjoy God through his or her life.  On the other hand, even if a person does not want to serve God willingly, he or she will be subject to glorify God in a way with which God will not be pleased such as the Pharaoh or Judas Iscariot  Therefore, if anyone wants to have a blessed and fulfilled life, it is very important to accept that he or she was born with the specific and unique purpose of revealing God’s glory through his or her life.

In conclusion, it is a very important to believe Genesis 1:1.  (See J.I. Packer's argument against natural theology). The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God is dead.  When you do not believe God is the Creator, life is a string of random chances without meaning.  If there is no God, there is no absolute truth, morality, meaning, or purpose in life.  If that is so, life would be just a joke or a play of game; life would be nothing but a survival of fittest, and only those who are strong and smart would take everything.  Morally twisted people take advantage of this moral nihilism (nothing matters) and try to suck the most juices out of life, cheating and defeating anyone who stands against them on their ways, sometime breaking the hearts of their spouse and children.  But thank God that he created the heavens and the earth.  Because of him, life is not a survival of the fittest any more.  Everyone has a unique value, importance, meaning, and purpose in him.  In his almighty and great nature, God will never grow tired and weary in executing his purpose and plan.  Let us remember that our God is not a small God, but an awesome and great God.  Therefore, God will be so pleased with the person who honors him, believing that he or she was created for a unique purpose, to be God’s blessing to someone in this world in God’s redemptive plan (Eph. 3:9-10, 2:10; Mt 5:3-14), in a good or bad circumstance.