Here's one for you: Why did the scientist say to his readers, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”?1 Well, the answer goes back almost a century, when a Belgian physicist named Georges Lemaitre put forward his brand-new theory. He'd already published a report showing that the universe was not some static system like they used to think; it was getting stretched further apart. Now, in 1931, he drew out the implications in just four paragraphs: if you rewind the clock enough, the whole universe begins at one initial point, “a single quantum” which marks “the beginning of the world.” Lemaitre imagined it as “a unique atom, the atomic weight of which is the total mass of the universe.” And so “the whole matter of the world” was “present at the beginning..., a little before the beginning of space and time.”2 The whole universe – all matter, energy, space, time – can be drawn no further back than that original beginning from which it grows.
When Lemaitre said it, it was such a crazy idea, an unsavory suggestion, one that skeptics thought “smacks of divine intervention,” smuggling religion into the halls of science.3 It sounded way too much like Genesis – and it didn't help that Lemaitre was not just a devout believer, but an ordained priest! Years later, a persistent skeptic scoffed at Lemaitre's theory for being “based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past.”4 He kept repeating the remark, and his mockery of Fr. Lemaitre's theory as “the big bang” stuck. But, to the scoffers' dismay, it's become part of the standard scientific account, so that even Stephen Hawking confessed that “almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang.”5
And so, back to that remark from earlier. To make an apple pie, you need things like wheat and apples. But to make wheat and apples from scratch, you'll need molecules you've got to build up from atoms like carbon and oxygen. To cook those atoms from scratch, you'll need some stars. To make the stars from scratch, you'll need hydrogen and helium. And how do you get those from scratch? The scientist, Carl Sagan, explained that they were “made in the Big Bang, the explosion that began the Cosmos.” So that's why, “if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”6 Now, Sagan himself – out of his philosophical poverty – tried his floundering best to backtrack from the notion that the universe really had an Inventor; he hoped, somehow, maybe, “the universe has always existed,” so there wasn't really that pesky absolute beginning after all.7 Plenty of people, even among scientists, remain desperate to escape these facts, because, no matter how you slice it, if all things trace back no further than that infinitely dense beginning state, then that cries out for an explanation which can't be found within universal space and time, or at nature's furthest boundaries, at all.
And when we're dumbfounded by what can't even in principle have a natural explanation, Genesis steps up to the plate, shouting in our dumb ear: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1)! Last Sunday, we traced all manner of things upward and backward to this unique God who is pure Existence, Goodness, Life, Knowledge, Happiness, Power, and Love. And from the revealed truth that “God is Love” (1 John 2:16), we realized God must be a Trinity – he exists eternally as a Lover called Father, a Beloved called Son, and a Love-Between-Them called Holy Spirit. This eternal life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as one God in three distinct persons is the eternal prelude playing 'before' Genesis opens. There's no one else but God.
And then, suddenly, there are “the heavens and the earth.” The ancient Israelites didn't have a single word in their language that meant the whole universe. They had to get around that with a way of speaking where you can sum something up by referring to its opposite extremes.8 So, to the Hebrews, one extreme of the world they lived in was the earth, and the other extreme was the sky above. So to talk about 'the heavens and the earth' means “the whole of creation,”9 “the totality of cosmic phenomena,”10 “everything that exists,”11 “all things apart from God.”12 That covers “all things visible and invisible.”13 The spiritual realm is included, and so is the physical world. When Genesis says “the heavens and the earth,” nothing isn't included in that except for God.
And in the beginning, God “created” all these things. The word Genesis uses is a verb that never takes anyone but God as its subject. And the Bible uses this word for 'create' sparingly, only for steps that are truly “novel, extraordinary, and effortless.”14 And that's not something you and I can do. In the biblical sense, we aren't creative. We can make things, build things, devise things, dream things, but “only God can create.”15 And it applies especially here at the beginning because God is inventing the universe. And he's doing it truly from scratch. There are no ready-made ingredients lying around to cook up the universe from. “He himself invented the matter of his work,”16 this “basic material... out of which all the things would be made,”17 since previously it did not exist.”18 He made all of it from nothing, not out of anything – no material cause at all.
That was an explosive idea. Some of Israel's neighbors had stories where their gods built the universe on the back of a terrible war: violence, conquest, dismemberment – that's where heaven and earth came from. Others told stories where the universe flowed forth in sensual and graphic ways: fluids, fertilization, pangs of labor. But in Genesis, heaven and earth are brought into being not with war but in peace, not in sensuality but in purity.19 How'd he do it, then? “By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible” (Hebrews 11:3). God simply “calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17). “For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm” (Psalm 33:9). With the will of God does absence yield to presence, eternity embrace time, space and substance surrender their unreality. God calls, “Let there be!” – and say no more, bang! there it be!
But to say that “the world was created by the word of God” is to say more than we thought. Because the Word was in the beginning with God, and was God, and then the Word took on flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth (John 1:1, 14). And his name is Jesus Christ. The New Testament very plainly unveils that Jesus is the One “through whom [God] created the world” (Hebrews 1:2). “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). “For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible... – all things were created through him and for him, and he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17). That's a wild thought! When Jesus was being born in Bethlehem, and growing up in Nazareth, and walking the fields of Galilee, and being nailed to the cross outside Jerusalem – that was the uncreated Creator of everything, the One whose idea it was to have angels and atoms and apple pies.
And so we know that, whenever we hear that “God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10), it's because God only makes good things. Paul writes that “everything created by God is good” (1 Timothy 4:4). And how could it be any other way, if the Word that calls each thing into being is the same Jesus we know and love? There is no thing in all God's creation that isn't good so far as it exists. A far-off galaxy? It's good that that exists! The land under your feet? It's good that that exists! Your body? It's good that that exists, too! All these things are good, even if something about them no longer works right or has some unpleasant features. God makes all things good, and nothing that's not good.
And God “made things by his own counsel and free will.”20 God created each and every thing he created – time and space, matter and energy, cherubim and cockroaches, galaxies and gingko trees and gophers – freely, not under any inner or outer compulsion.21 He decided freely in favor of all these things, when he could easily have not, easily have remained blissfully content in eternity with his Son and his Spirit. But freely God “created out of a superabundance of goodness,” willing there to be creatures who could “benefit from his goodness and share in it.”22 He did it to extend his love to a creation. A Jewish writer around the time of Jesus' earthly ministry prayed to God: “You love all things that are, and loathe nothing you have made, for you would not fashion what you hate” (Wisdom 11:24). Everything that exists? God loves it! God wouldn't have made it if he didn't. God didn't just speak you into being; he loved you into being. Love is what made you, love is what keeps you, the love of God is your very heartbeat. If you ever need proof God loves you, check if you exist – question answered. And so it is for all that exists: it's a manifestation of God's love. Space is the love of God stretching, time is the love of God counting. Every creature is simply, purely loved into being by God who is Love.
And because love is relational, God isn't merely a Creator 'from the outside.' He's a Creator who doesn't stand far off from what he's made. He can't: nothing could stand without his continued touch of love. God is, we said, Existence himself. And so for anything to exist is for God to be lending it existence at the core of its being – God loves each thing from the inside. He surrounds and suffuses each thing he has made. That's why Joshua can say that “he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath” (Joshua 2:11), why Paul can proclaim that “in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17), “and no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed” (Hebrews 4:13). Loaning existence to every span of space, every moment of time, every particle of matter, every wave of energy, “God must exist... intimately in everything.”23 In this most fundamental sense, God may just be closer to you than you are to you. Like Paul says, God “is actually not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27-28).
Now, if God made all things out of love, and God is Love, then God made them for himself. Paul says that God the Father is not only the one “from whom are all things,” but also the one “for whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6). And of Jesus Christ, he adds: “All things were created... for him” (Colossians 1:16). God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – is the point of why you and I and anything else exists. What's a person for? For God. What's a peacock for? For God. What's a proton for? For God. There is no thing that was not created for God, that does not exist for God, that does not have God as its ultimate goal and good.
And if that's true, then God – as creator and goal of each and every thing – has absolute rights over all things, because they're his both in origin and in destiny. That's why Moses taught that “to the LORD your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it” (Deuteronomy 10:14), why King David prayed: “All that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours” (1 Chronicles 29:11), why Paul reasoned that “the God who made the world and everything in it” must therefore be “Lord of heaven and earth” (Acts 17:24). “If God made everything, then he owns it and is in charge of it.”24 “Shall the potter be regarded as the clay, that the thing made should say of its maker, 'He did not make me,' or the thing formed say of him who formed it, 'He has no understanding'?” (Isaiah 29:16). “Has the potter no right over the clay?” (Romans 9:21). God made all things for his own purposes. No inch of space or moment of time isn't made by him and for him, and any other treatment of it would be illegitimate. Every use of your powers of body or mind – your actions, your will, your thought – is equally made by him and for him, in holy love. And so any use that deviates from holy love is both a violation of God's rights as its Creator and a betrayal of our very own selves, falling short of our own true purpose, resisting our best destiny. Off-label use of our faculties is no good for us, or for anything else.
For when any created thing behaves as though God weren't its maker and owner, when any created things veers away from the purpose for which he made it (which is for himself, for love), then it behaves against its creation. It acts as though some other thing – some fictitious thing or some created thing – is a god to rival God. But the prophets remind us, in their usual stark way, that “the gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens” (Jeremiah 10:11). God made all things for himself, which is to say, for Love. But false loves, distorted loves, misappropriate and arrogate God's purposes to themselves. So every love that isn't at the root of creation, or reflective of the love that is, is destined for a downfall.
Because God created freely as an act of love. And that makes creation a gift – a gift from God and to God, in the final scheme of things, but also a gift to itself and us. Creation is a gift to creation, “the gift of existence.”25 Everything that exists is a gift! Not even the apple pie in your oven is anything other than a gift from God. After all, he first had to invent the universe so you could have it. And such gifts call for a fundamental attitude of gratitude.26 Through our hearts, through our lives, the universe can be grateful to its “faithful Creator” for itself (cf. 1 Peter 4:19). I think Chesterton said it best, a century ago this year, when he wrote:
This sense of the great gratitude... was not a fancy but a fact. … That we all depend in every detail, at every instant..., is not an illusion of the imagination; on the contrary, it is the fundamental fact which we cover up, as with curtains, with the illusion of ordinary life. … He who has seen the whole world hanging on a hair of the mercy of God has seen the truth. … The great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All goods look better when they look like gifts. … It is the discovery of an infinite debt. It may seem a paradox to say that a man may be transported with joy to discover that he is in debt. … Debt and dependence do become pleasures in the presence of unspoilt love. … It is the highest and holiest of paradoxes that the man who really knows he cannot pay his debt... will be always throwing things away into a bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks.27
Faced with the infinite debt of being a creature, a creature loved into existence by God, a creature loved into the good by a God who has only the good purpose of love for all things – what else should we do, what else is good to do, what else is beneficial to do, but to leap with our lives into that bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks? “Let us glorify the Master Craftsman for all that has been done wisely and skillfully,” wrote St. Basil, “and from the beauty of visible things, let us form an idea of him who is more than beautiful.”28 Or, as the angels sing in Revelation: “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created!” (Revelation 4:11). God first invented the universe, and so he is worthy of praise, worthy of thanks, worthy of admiration and adoration. For “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Let us adore with thankful lives the Creator Love that loves us into being! Glory to God! Amen.
Prayer
Almighty and Eternal God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, as one God you willed all things to exist, and they were created. None but you could have done this. Out of your goodness, out of your love, you created all things out of nothing. Time and space themselves, matter and form and energy, things in heaven and things on earth, things visible and things invisible - you spoke your word, and they came to be; you commanded, and there they were, established by the power of your love to be loved by you and to glorify you with their being. You encompass all things, you exist intimately in all things, you share the goodness of existence with all things that are. You are Lord of all creation, of heaven and earth, and your every work is the giving of a gift. What can we do but thank you? What should we do but praise you? What is there for us but to worship you in adoration? We believe in you, God, for the Creator can do all things. We hope in you, God, for the Creator is faithful to all things. We love you, God, for the Creator is the good of all things. And you are more than wise, more than beautiful, more than true, more than good. So we give you boundless glory and honor and power, to the extent we as feeble creatures can, for you are worthier than worthy! Thank you, Most Holy Trinity, for the gift of existence. Thank you, Creator, for all your creation! We pray and praise you through Jesus Christ, your Creating Word, our Redeeming Lord. Amen.
1 Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Random House, 1980), 218.
2 Georges Lemaitre, “The Beginning of the World from the Point of View of Quantum Theory,” Nature 127 (9 May 1931): 706.
3 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (Bantam Books, 1988), 46.
4 Fred Hoyle, BBC radio broadcast “Continuous Creation,” 28 March 1949, script, page 4.
5 Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time (Princeton University Press, 1996), 20.
6 Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Random House, 1980), 218.
7 Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Random House, 1980), 257.
8 Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration (Baker Academic/Apollos, 2004), 43; Seth D. Postell, Adam as Israel: Genesis 1-3 as the Introduction to the Torah and Tanakh (Pickwick Publications, 2011), 86; and plenty more. The figure of speech in question is called a merism.
9 Augustine of Hippo, Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis 3 §9 (fourth century), in Works of St. Augustine I/13:118.
10 Nahum P. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 5.
11 Paul O'Callaghan, God's Gift of the Universe: An Introduction to Creation Theology (Catholic University of America Press, 2021), 52.
12 Jacobus Erasmus, The Kalam Cosmological Argument: A Reassessment (Springer, 2018), 23.
13 Nicene Creed (fourth century): “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of all things visible and invisible.”
14 John Goldingay, Genesis, Baker Commentary on the Old Testament (Baker Academic, 2020), 26.
15 Anwarul Azad and Ida Glaser, Genesis 1-11, Windows on the Text (Langham Global Library, 2022), 49.
16 Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 2.10.4 (second century), in Ancient Christian Writers 65:37.
17 Augustine of Hippo, On Genesis Against the Manichees 1.5 §9 (fourth century), in Works of St. Augustine I/13:45.
18 Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 2.10.4 (second century), in Ancient Christian Writers 65:37.
19 Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan Academic, 2022), 55.
20 Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 2.1.1 (second century), in Ancient Christian Writers 65:17.
21 Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration (Baker Academic/Apollos, 2004), 25.
22 John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith 16 (eighth century), in Popular Patristics Series 39:98.
23 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q.8, a.1 (thirteenth century).
24 Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan Academic, 2022), 53.
25 Paul O'Callaghan, God's Gift of the Universe: An Introduction to Creation Theology (Catholic University of America Press, 2022), 151.
26 Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan Academic, 2022), 60.
27 Gilbert Keith Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi (1923), in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton 2:75-77.
28 Basil of Caesarea, Hexaemeron 1.11 (fourth century), in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 46:19.
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