Sunday, September 18, 2011

Implications of God Being the Creator

I know, boring title. And if this sentence was here to read it means that I couldn't think of a better title while writing what follows. Anyway …

One of the things my mind keeps coming back to is the implications of God being the Creator. This isn't a Young Earth vs. Old Earth vs. Theistic Evolution thing, but has to do with the nature of God and His relationship with His Creation. When we think of what God created, we think of the things around us – the ground, people, plants, animals, planets, galaxies. Time was also created by God. Your brain could get seriously pretzellated by this fact, but consider some of what this means …

God is not inside, bounded, or limited by time as we human beings are. The day of Creation, the time of Abraham, the time of Jesus, my lifetime, the day Jesus returns are all equally real to God. Guess how God can give us prophecies of future events! Such events may be “future” to us, but not to God.

Questions such as, “What was before God?” or, “What did God do before Creation?” don't really have meaning. Concepts such as “before” or “after” are intrinsically linked to time, and God created time (this is something Augustine pointed out in his Confessions).

That God is Creator bears on the predestination vs. free will argument in at least a couple of ways. First, because God knows all that would happen in His Creation, in that sense He predestined everything by the very act of Creation. But that does not mean that God is actively micro-managing everything that happens, everything individuals do. He just knows what choices each individual will make. Second, being Creator means God designed everything and is the One Who fully understands the nature of each thing He designed and created. Thus, when He speaks to mankind in the Law given to Moses, telling mankind that “______” is wrong or “______” is right, He is speaking not only from the power He has as the Creator but also from His being our designer. In other word He speaks not only from a position of power but from a position of understanding what we are. Not only does He have the right, but He is right. And in telling mankind that “______” is wrong or “______” is right, He shows that human individuals have a meaningful choice each time when one is faced with doing right or doing wrong. Human individuals are not pre-programmed by some micro-manager to do what is right or to do what is wrong.

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