Monday, September 24, 2012

How Great IS Our God?

A few weeks ago, I saw this video linked on Facebook. I found the title intriguing, as I've often thought the same of a great many gods. For instance, a god who is not sovereign is not an all-powerful god, and certainly not the God of the Bible. A god who is only managing things is what I would consider a weak god. There's also the idea of the god who has created everything and then has, in great indifference, decided that, although he COULD do anything, he simply has no interest - that god also strikes me as too small because he has no larger vision.

However, the argument that this video makes has nothing on the triune God of the Bible. I find it rather humorous that the very foundational things that we must believe have so baffled the minds of everyone who tries to comprehend them, and yet this video makes the claim that OUR imaginations have outgrown God. Have we come up with something more complex than Three separate, divine Persons existing as ONE essence? And we've imagined something more mysterious and wonderful than the omnipresent One taking on humanity - somehow fully and completely containing both a human nature and a divine nature? No. We haven't and we never will.

The video takes the universe as evidence that God is small, but how does that make any sense if you take Genesis 1-2 into account? You know how much time the Bible gives to the creation of the universe? "He made the stars also." All the trillions upon trillions of stars out there and how much does the Bible say about their creation? They got a single sentence. Why? Why is this immense thing given such little time and thought? Because God didn't know about it? Or because the universe is not the epitome of God's creation? The narrator is missing one of the key points of Genesis - the universe was not made in the image of God; humanity was. We are not the center of the universe, it's true; but we are the most important things that God created.

Now I'm all for realizing just how small we are and I'm all for realizing just how vast and amazing the universe is. But not in light of the universe - in light of the God Who MADE the universe!

The narrator brings up a few points of interest about the Bible - things like "we now know that the blanket of stars above us is not placed upon a firmament as the writers of Genesis would have had us believe." I wonder if the narrator would think it dishonest to say, "There are so many stars in the sky tonight!" It isn't by the way. "The sky" doesn't just refer to the atmosphere. It refers to "above" us, to anything from the tops of trees to the galaxies and vast empty spaces in between it all. "The sky" is a not a scientific term and neither is "firmament."

He then compares the power of the greatest volcano to a super-nova, once again forgetting that the God of the Bible made BOTH. So how exactly does this make God small???? No, the whole argument is actually proving just how vast God really is. It's a matter of common sense that you cannot make something greater than yourself. Therefore, everything that shows the immensity of the universe is simply showing that God is even greater.

It's telling just how large of an impact that believing or not believing that God is THE Creator has on everything else throughout the Bible. You can see this easily when the narrator says that (paraphrasing here) "at God's most wrathful, the worst He could do is flood a world that was already covered in 2/3s water." Even if we KNEW that that was true (which we don't, by the way; there's this great big theory about the water canopy before the Great Flood), who put the water there to be used as a flood?? God did! Is that a picture of His lack of strength, or is that a picture of His sovereignty in Creation?

And then the narrator goes on to talk about the destruction of our galaxy. It puzzles me to think that this person who talks with such wonder about the universe can then sit there and practically say that our doom is secured because one day we're going to collide with another galaxy. I don't understand how that is not a depressing thought to him.

In case you couldn't tell it was coming, the narrator comes right out then and suggests that we should pay homage to the universe. How does that make any sense whatsoever? Even if you don't believe in a deity, how does it make sense to pay homage to a THING? Do you pay homage to a painting? Sure, you can admire it, but don't you usually praise the painter? You say something like, "I love Van Gough. His paintings are so beautiful." Do you pay homage to a home run, or to the player who hit the home run? Do you praise the football for landing in the receiver's arms or praise the receiver for catching it?

Last point: After he's just talked about how our galaxy is going to collide with the neighboring one which will result in total annihilation, he says something about how we will "never run out of opportunities to explore our own potential." I pretty much wanted to facepalm at that point. He's either assuming that we'll all be well out of our galaxy by that point (since we're colliding with the next nearest one), or that somehow we'll have developed a way to survive colliding galaxies.

Anyway. The video does have two things going for - the music and the narrator's voice. But overall, that's got to be one of the worst arguments ever for the God of the Bible being too small.

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