THE CREATOR OF HEAVEN AND EARTH

The God Who Has Revealed Himself in Scripture

By Gary Ray Branscome

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. // The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead;

(Genesis 1:1 // Romans 1:20)

The God whom we worship, the God who has revealed Himself to us through the pages of Holy Writ, is the Creator of heaven and earth! Moreover, far from being just another organism in the universe, the entire universe, the entire time-space continuum is His handy work. He is the God who in just six days, “made heaven and earth, the sea, and everything that is in them,” (Exodus 20:11). And, the Bible tells us in no uncertain terms that he did it in just six days: each of which consisted of a period of darkness and a period of light which the Bible refers to as the “evening and the morning” (Genesis 1:5).

Furthermore, in the first chapters of Genesis God has given us an exact record of His creation because He does not want us to be deceived by man made lies. His Word tells us exactly what happened, and that is what He wants us to believe and teach. Moreover, that is how He wants to be identified. Therefore, those who reject what He has revealed, those who replace His Word with man’s word, those who have devised for themselves another god, a god who grew up on another planet, or a god who used evolution (with all the death and suffering that entails) to create life; have invented their own religion and are worshipping a false god.

Of course they will not admit it. They want us to believe that they are worshipping the same God that we worship. However, that is not true! When the children of Israel turned away from God, and began to worship a golden calf, they made the same claim. They claimed to be worshipping the God who brought them “up out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:8). However, our God was not fooled! He knew that they had rejected Him in favor of a god of their own devising. And, the deceivers who have invented a non-existent god, a god whom they claim used evolution to create the world are not fooling God either. They are worshipping a god of their own devising!

The invisible things of God

Because the God whom we worship is the creator of both time and space, time and space (both of which are invisible) were designed by Him to reveal facts about Him that are likewise invisible (Romans 1:20). For example, because our God fills the entire universe [i.e. “heaven and earth,” Jeremiah 23:24] we know that just as the universe is infinite, our God is infinite. And, just as time is eternal, our God is eternal. In addition, time and space both illustrate His triune nature. Like God, both consist of three inseparable parts. Space consists of length, width and height. Time consists of past, present and future. And, in both cases the three inseparable parts are one. For example, it is impossible for space to exist without all three dimensions. Those who want to dispute this may try to imagine a two-dimensional existence where everything is as thin as a piece of paper. However, they forget that paper has thickness. If you take all of the thickness away nothing will remain. Space must exist as both three and one or it will not exist at all. Furthermore, because time cannot exist without space, the beginning spoken of in Genesis 1:1 is the beginning of both time and space.

If you find what I have just said hard to follow, let me explain it this way. For time to exist there must be a place where time is passing. If time is not passing anywhere, how can we say that it is passing at all? Likewise, if space existed without time there could be no movement in it, for movement takes time. And, if no movement was possible, how could we call it “space”? Just as the idea of space without movement is absurd, the idea of time that is not passing anywhere is equally absurd. Therefore, for time and space to exist at all, they must exist together.

Our God does not exist somewhere in space. On the contrary, time and space are His creations. He exists in another dimension, a spiritual dimension which transcends both space and time. And, because His existence transcends both space and time He is not limited by space and time. For that reason, whenever men try to bring God down to their own level they wind up trying to fit Him into the limitations of space and time. As a result, they wind up denying anything about Him that does not fit in with their own limited perspective of reality. And, that often includes the fact that He exists as both three and one. However, once we realize that He is not limited by time and space, it is not only perfectly reasonable to believe that He is totally different from those who are limited by space and time it would be unreasonable to expect it to be otherwise.

The Puny Mind of Man

The foolish men who try to explain away God, those who deny the obvious evidence of His wisdom in the design of their own bodies, and deny that time had a beginning (Genesis 1:1) assume that if they could travel back into the past time would always be there. What they fail to see is that time must have had a beginning point. If it did not have a beginning point we could never have arrived at this point in time.

If that idea is new to you, if you think that time has always existed, you might just assume that no matter how many “billions” or “trillions of billions” of years have passed before this point in time, the present is just where we are now in time. However, that idea assumes that time had a beginning point “billions” or “trillions of billions” of years ago. In reality, if time has truly existed from infinity, and you could somehow go back “billions” and even “trillions of billions” of years into the past, then the amount of time that would be still further in the past would still be infinite. And, if it was infinitely distant in the past, then it would take an infinite amount of time for the present to reach this point in time. And, an infinite amount of time means FOREVER. It would take forever to reach this point in time! And, that is why time must have had a beginning point. It had to start somewhere! Otherwise the present could not exist.

Conclusion

The doctrine that God wants us to believe and teach consists of what He says in His Word, not what men think about it. Every contrived explanation that men have devised to get around what is said in the first chapters of Genesis, or anywhere else in the Bible, is just as much man-made religion as the Koran or the book of Mormon. While those who deny the truth of Genesis (including what it says about the age of the earth) may accept much of what the Bible says, the fact that they reject part of it tells us that the Bible is not their authority. And, for that reason, they are not true disciples of Jesus Christ (John 10:27, Luke 24:25).