I will extol You, my God and King, and bless Your name forever and ever. Every day I will bless You and praise Your name forever and ever. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised, and His greatness is unsearchable. (Verses 1-3)
Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; His understanding is unsearchable.
Isaiah 40
Search all you want, but you'll never come to the end of knowing God's greatness or His understanding. That's why I think the atheist's claim that there is no God is such foolishness. Go ahead and say you don't know whether there is a god or not, but don't claim that you know everything there is to know about everything, because inherent in the assertion that there is no God is the assertion that one grasps and understands everything.
God's greatness. We can only scratch the surface of what that means. He is the hub of everything that is anywhere. The power that propels the planets from the tiny particle of matter that existed before the big bang blew it apart and created the universe. The universe began with a particle the size of a period. (.) That big. And it blew up into all the stars and galaxies and everything that exists...all matter was inside of that tiny particle. Who can even conceive such a thing? God set the moon in just the right place and ringed his finger around Earth to give us gravity. This isn't just fantasy. Scientists who'd rather not give a god credit for the order of the universe, are still stuck on trying to give some reasonable explanation for DNA, the code encrypted very specifically into almost all the cells of our body. Each strand of DNA is a mini-computer replicating itself every time a new cell is created. From the time of conception, it is the code my body used to build me into who I am. It dictates not only what we look like, but it tells every cell what its purpose is. For instance, it tells a liver cell how to do its job. My DNA is one of the things that makes me special. Not like someone else. A snowflake in the human population, set apart as me. Each of us has DNA that designs our bodies. From conception. The blueprint for the human that is growing in the womb is the same as when the human is born. I was set to be me the moment I was conceived. This coding is so very specific and obviously well thought out that it smacks of design...a Designer. Saying it just happened that way is like saying computers build themselves. The tides of the oceans are set to balance nature, too. Like they are on a clock. If they were to falter even the tiniest bit, the world would be under water. Our God is able to design and create all of this. In fact, it's much easier to believe in His greatness than to believe with many scientists that such appallingly intricate design is possible without a mind behind it. God created us in His image, too. To love beauty...to even know there is such a thing as beauty or truth--to write poems about love or paint landscapes or sing songs with lyrics to express our hearts. What science is discovering isn't how smart the scientists are, but how unfathomable the Creator is. There is always a new frontier to explore. A new galaxy to wonder at. Those who believe in science as the last word look only at the smallest piece of evidence, forgetting the obvious greater scope. There is too much to know. They will never understand more than the smallest part of our universe--the unsearchable depth and width of all there is to know about everything. Our God actually does understand His creation. Even the tiniest atom. Because He dreamed it all up and holds it all together.
God's understanding. Here is what God knows. Everything. The pre-existent, all powerful God of All sees time stretched out before Him as a whole. God isn't wondering what will happen next. He is working a plan that He's hinted at in the Bible, but the scope of which we will never comprehend. We all fit into it in a specific place and time, and God is intricately involved in each one of us as He is also guiding the events of history and time. He knows what He is doing. "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways," declares the Lord. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55)." Instead of being frustrating to us, the fact that God knows everything about everything should be a comfort. We don't have to "lean on our own understanding (Proverb 3:5-6)". The One Who conceived the plan loves His children and knows our way. Our place in the trajectory of history. And is committed to guiding us in this life and into the next. Through Jesus, God also understands our predicaments and has solved them. Sent the Word Who spoke it all into being to us to change the course of history forever. Jesus bought our hearts for Himself in excruciating compliance with the plan that was from the beginning--the seed of the woman would crush the head of our enemy. Jesus wasn't surprised one day when God said it is time. There was a work to finish and the Godhead understood it. In His great wisdom and prescience, God knew how to make salvation accessible to everyone. Since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe...for the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men (I Corinthians 1). The wise of this world are confounded by the gospel because God knows it's not through our brilliance we know Him, but with our hearts. There is an unfathomable depth to understanding Him, knowing Him. We will never, ever plumb the depths of knowledge about our God. But He has given us an amazingly sharp image of Who He is. For what can be known about God has been made plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse (Romans 1). Just as we don't go to the Louvre and think, "Wow, isn't it great that this Picasso just evolved the way it did?" So we shouldn't be able to look at the sunset, the mountains, the stars and the variety of animal life and say, "Hmm. Don't think I want to believe in a God, so I'm just gonna say those things appeared over millions of years out of nothing." It is a foolish conclusion in the face of wondrous design.
There is a God Who is involved in His world and with all of His creation. God wants us to participate with Him in all He made with us in mind. To trust Him and to marvel at His greatness--a greatness that He uses on our behalf every day now, and forever.
Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; His understanding is unsearchable.
Isaiah 40
Search all you want, but you'll never come to the end of knowing God's greatness or His understanding. That's why I think the atheist's claim that there is no God is such foolishness. Go ahead and say you don't know whether there is a god or not, but don't claim that you know everything there is to know about everything, because inherent in the assertion that there is no God is the assertion that one grasps and understands everything.
God's greatness. We can only scratch the surface of what that means. He is the hub of everything that is anywhere. The power that propels the planets from the tiny particle of matter that existed before the big bang blew it apart and created the universe. The universe began with a particle the size of a period. (.) That big. And it blew up into all the stars and galaxies and everything that exists...all matter was inside of that tiny particle. Who can even conceive such a thing? God set the moon in just the right place and ringed his finger around Earth to give us gravity. This isn't just fantasy. Scientists who'd rather not give a god credit for the order of the universe, are still stuck on trying to give some reasonable explanation for DNA, the code encrypted very specifically into almost all the cells of our body. Each strand of DNA is a mini-computer replicating itself every time a new cell is created. From the time of conception, it is the code my body used to build me into who I am. It dictates not only what we look like, but it tells every cell what its purpose is. For instance, it tells a liver cell how to do its job. My DNA is one of the things that makes me special. Not like someone else. A snowflake in the human population, set apart as me. Each of us has DNA that designs our bodies. From conception. The blueprint for the human that is growing in the womb is the same as when the human is born. I was set to be me the moment I was conceived. This coding is so very specific and obviously well thought out that it smacks of design...a Designer. Saying it just happened that way is like saying computers build themselves. The tides of the oceans are set to balance nature, too. Like they are on a clock. If they were to falter even the tiniest bit, the world would be under water. Our God is able to design and create all of this. In fact, it's much easier to believe in His greatness than to believe with many scientists that such appallingly intricate design is possible without a mind behind it. God created us in His image, too. To love beauty...to even know there is such a thing as beauty or truth--to write poems about love or paint landscapes or sing songs with lyrics to express our hearts. What science is discovering isn't how smart the scientists are, but how unfathomable the Creator is. There is always a new frontier to explore. A new galaxy to wonder at. Those who believe in science as the last word look only at the smallest piece of evidence, forgetting the obvious greater scope. There is too much to know. They will never understand more than the smallest part of our universe--the unsearchable depth and width of all there is to know about everything. Our God actually does understand His creation. Even the tiniest atom. Because He dreamed it all up and holds it all together.
God's understanding. Here is what God knows. Everything. The pre-existent, all powerful God of All sees time stretched out before Him as a whole. God isn't wondering what will happen next. He is working a plan that He's hinted at in the Bible, but the scope of which we will never comprehend. We all fit into it in a specific place and time, and God is intricately involved in each one of us as He is also guiding the events of history and time. He knows what He is doing. "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways," declares the Lord. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55)." Instead of being frustrating to us, the fact that God knows everything about everything should be a comfort. We don't have to "lean on our own understanding (Proverb 3:5-6)". The One Who conceived the plan loves His children and knows our way. Our place in the trajectory of history. And is committed to guiding us in this life and into the next. Through Jesus, God also understands our predicaments and has solved them. Sent the Word Who spoke it all into being to us to change the course of history forever. Jesus bought our hearts for Himself in excruciating compliance with the plan that was from the beginning--the seed of the woman would crush the head of our enemy. Jesus wasn't surprised one day when God said it is time. There was a work to finish and the Godhead understood it. In His great wisdom and prescience, God knew how to make salvation accessible to everyone. Since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe...for the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men (I Corinthians 1). The wise of this world are confounded by the gospel because God knows it's not through our brilliance we know Him, but with our hearts. There is an unfathomable depth to understanding Him, knowing Him. We will never, ever plumb the depths of knowledge about our God. But He has given us an amazingly sharp image of Who He is. For what can be known about God has been made plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse (Romans 1). Just as we don't go to the Louvre and think, "Wow, isn't it great that this Picasso just evolved the way it did?" So we shouldn't be able to look at the sunset, the mountains, the stars and the variety of animal life and say, "Hmm. Don't think I want to believe in a God, so I'm just gonna say those things appeared over millions of years out of nothing." It is a foolish conclusion in the face of wondrous design.
There is a God Who is involved in His world and with all of His creation. God wants us to participate with Him in all He made with us in mind. To trust Him and to marvel at His greatness--a greatness that He uses on our behalf every day now, and forever.
No comments:
Post a Comment