The Who and Why of Creation
7:31 AM
When it comes to disagreements between science and religion,
creation often seems to be the battlefield. Whether it be the discrepancy
between what some believe to be the Biblical timeline and what others believe
to be the scientific one, or the argument over the genesis of man himself,
fairly few today have gone without some exposure to sometimes ugly exchanges.
Recently I listened to this physicist explain the harmony he has found between his religious beliefs and his scientific studies.
Why
In the very first verse God outlined why he created the
earth and all on it: “in the beginning I created the heaven, and the earth upon
which thou standest.” In this one verse, God showed Moses and, through him, all
of us where we are—the earth upon which we stand—and where we are to go—heaven.
This very first verse of the Bible foreshadows what the rest of the Bible will
illustrate: how to get people from earth to heaven, and how to get people from
worldliness to heavenliness.
Who
God did not shy away from emphasizing to Moses His own
divine authorship of creation. The phase “I God” introduces nearly every verse
in the Moses 2 (Genesis 1). Is this bragging? Or a testimony to the fact that
our confidence in God’s ability to make and control worlds is one of His most
consistent aims. To His children often tossed around by the winds in the world
He created but which has fallen from innocence God wants us to be assured that
He is at the helm with the ability to calm the waves and guide the ship.
A companion question to who created the world is the
question of for whom the world was created. At the end of each creative stage
(by the way, the Hebrew word translated as “day” in Genesis more accurately
translates to “distinct period” and is not a measurement of time but rather a
delineation of events; hence the creation did not take seven twenty-four hour
time periods but rather occurred in seven distinct states) God called his work
“good” (vv. 4, 10, 12, 18, 21). However, after he had completed the work of
creating man and woman, God called his work “very good” (v. 31). Hence, as
amazing as the physical world around is, the masterpiece of God’s whole
repertoire of creation was and is His role and actions as Father to the
children he caused to be.
President Russel M. Nelson—a career surgeon and, now, an apostle of that Creator—explained this well:
So many are fond of pointing at the story and truth of
creation and claiming it near-impossible to believe, whether because God is at
the center or because they feel it all scientifically unsupported. However, those
claiming accidental, authorless, and random creation must then provide for me a
reason for all the intricacies and interconnectedness of the universe including
the complexity of humans themselves, and this seems to me the far
less-believable proposition. To believe that mankind came into existence
accidentally is to believe that people are nothing more than sprayed rocks from
a randomly spinning wheel. We then have no purpose, except maybe to exist and
live out our biological story line. However, if there is a God and Father who
created us, our world, and our destination means that we have both purpose and
direction. There is a reason why you are here. As my favorite refrigerator magnet
saying says, “I know I’m worth something because God made me, and God don’t
make no junk!”
Questions:
- Why, do you think, it is so important for us to know the Who and Why of creation?
- What difference does it make to you to know that you live on a world that was purposefully created for you and that you, yourself, are the “very good” end to God’s grand actions?
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