Language allows us to attach simple words to very large or very complex things and ideas. We do this all the time with numbers. We throw around words like million, billion, trillion as if we really grasped the immensity of those ideas. If you took average diameter human hairs and laid them side by side, one million would stretch for almost a quarter of a mile. . .side by side. If you did this with a billion hairs, they would reach 21 miles! And if you did it with a trillion hairs, they would reach 84% of the way around the earth at the equator! Clearly we cannot grasp how vast a billion of anything is. Astronomers estimate that there are 10,000 trillion stars in the universe. If we laid that many hairs side by side it would equal 440 trips to the moon and back!
Let’s apply that to the bible. We can correctly apply the term “Creator” to God, but we simply
have no idea what that really means. In the over fifty passages that explicitly describe God as the creator we read things like:“You are the Lord, you alone. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host [stars], the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all of them; and the host of heaven worships you. Nehemiah 9:6
We get much fuller descriptions in Genesis 1-2, or in the creation Psalms (8, 19, 29, 65, 104, 139), and then in the book of Job, especially chapters 37-41. Let’s look at that last one.
When Job becomes arrogant and self-justifying, even to the point of putting God in the wrong, the Lord brings him back to his senses; not with an abstract doctrine but with a revelation of Himself as the Creator.
He describes the earth itself:
7He stretches out the north over the void
and hangs the earth on nothing. Job 26:7
It was God who determined its measurements. You may remember that when the lunar astronauts took the first full frame picture of the earth from space (called “the Blue Pearl”) that they wept at the sight of its beauty. God takes Job even earlier and asks:
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? . . .
When the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:4–8)
The bible ascribes the hydrologic cycle to God. So here is the earth with 71% of surface covered with water. Why hasn’t it turned into one giant mass of muck and mire? We all know that the best way to purify water is not with chemicals or filtration; it’s distillation. The bible tells us that that is exactly how God set things up. The water evaporates, condenses into clouds and falls to the earth as distilled water. It’s a perpetual water purification system designed into God’s creation and explicitly described in Job 36:27-30.
Or how about air quality? Animals use up the oxygen, but the green vegetation which covers about 30% of earth’s land surface absorbs CO2 and releases fresh oxygen back into the atmosphere. A perpetual air purification system!
He not only created the morning but things like, sunrise, sunsets, seasons and weather. He tells Job that He “commands the morning”! It is God who created the amazing liquid we call water. That expands as it freezes so that ice floats instead of sinking to the bottom and crushing the fresh-water animal life. He conceived clouds, thunder, lightning, frozen lakes, dew, hail, torrential cloud bursts.
He created the hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor (Job 38:16). He causes all sorts of animal and plant life even in the vast remote spaces where there are no humans to ever observe it. He created the cosmic forces that rule the earth. The effect of the moon comes to mind. The oceanic tides it creates are critical to eliminating pollutants, circulating nutrients, and causing cyclical water currents that are essential to the survival of sea-life. And all of the craters on the moon’s surface are testimony to its ability to attract and capture meteor impacts that would otherwise wreak havoc on the earth.
God didn’t just fashion these things from some cosmic set of plans. Before He began creating there was no such thing as light, or energy, or gravity, or space, or stars or planets. He both conceived of them all, and then brought them into being!
In the book of Job after God describes the physical universe He turns Job’s attention
to all of the living things that he made. He provides the prey for the carnivores. He protects some species from domestication. And makes some of the highest speed creatures imaginable: In the ocean, a sailfish can reach 68 mph. On land Cheetah 60+ mph, Ostrich 45 mph. In the air a peregrine falcon can read over 200 mph in a dive, and the lowly Homing Racing Pidgeon can fly over 110 mph straight and level, and cover up to 700 miles in one day!
God fills the oceans with animal life from microscopic plankton to great blue whales over 100 ft. long and weighing 300,000 lbs. Watch some natural life documentaries like Planet Earth and you will learn that even the great deserts are hosts to a shocking variety of plants and animal life that we rarely see or think of.
Who invented gravity which we still don’t understand? What is time? Who invented light, energy, matter, and life? It is not uncommon for a scientist to spend an entire life-time studying a single arcane topic like how honeybees communicate. But that leaves us with all of the unexplored intricacies of the other millions of life-forms on the earth! Millions of man hours and untold billions of dollars have been invested in trying to determine the nature of the subatomic world, and there’s still no solution in sight. It took mankind thousands of years to finally crack the mystery of flight, but the solution was right there in plain sight all the time in the structure of a bird’s wing. We marvel at little toy helicopters the size of a match box that are sold by the carload at Christmas time. But God created tiny, living flying machines that we call “gnats”. They are a mere .006 inch long, they chose their own flight path and they reproducing and distribute themselves without a single tool, factory, or shopping network.
Who made all this stuff? Who conceived of it before there even was a material universe? What kind of mind, ingenuity, power, and creativity lies behind all this? The scriptures tell us that it was God, who “ made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host [stars], the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them;” and that He “upholds the universe by the His word of power.”
We use the word “Creator” to describe Him, but it’s such a tiny word for such a vast, magnificent being!
And on a practical note God says:
8For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
9For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8–9
Yet we have the sheer audacity to pit our reasoning, based on the little three pound biochemical computer that we call the human brain, against the “Creator”. With it we dare to try to define Him, to constrain Him, to dictate what He can or cannot do or say, or to blame him for things that we do not understand! And sometimes we actually demand that God give us the things that we want and then we have the audacity to call it “prayer.” Imagine! The creature daring to demand things from the “Creator” of all the universe! Such arrogance is beyond description!
But more astonishing than all of this, is that this “Creator” would be willing to have His Son bleed out in a bloody humiliation we call crucifixion accompanied by jeers, scoffing, and ridicule in order to make it possible for Him to forgive our rebellion and adopt us as His children! Try wrapping your brain around that kind of Creator!