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Commentary on "In the Beginning"
Day 3: Monday, January 9, 2012 - The Heart of the Creator
Overview
Today’s lesson camps on God’s tender emotions, similar to a mother bird preparing the nest for and protecting her babies. The lesson ends with these words: “There’s nothing impersonal about the creation, nothing emotionless, nothing purposeless. Love was there at the start of the Creation week. What a contrast to evolutions, which teaches that love somehow emerged only after billions of year of selfish violence. Love motivated the Creation, and love will be there when this damaged version of Creation is created anew.”
Observations
This lesson creates a fallacious contrast between God’s love and the supposed “selfish violence” of evolution. The somewhat maudlin description of God’s love that directed creation bears no similarity to the sovereign power and authority of God as revealed in Scripture.
To be sure, Scripture does depict God’s tenderness for His people, but this tenderness is merely one facet of God’s love. God’s love is fierce, treacherous, omnipotent, and sacrificial. It does not increase one’s likelihood to believe God created the earth to characterize evolution by selfish violence and to characterize God like a sheltering mother bird.
Instead of attempting to persuade the reader that God must have created the world because of the word “hovering” used in Genesis and the reference to the morning stars singing together in Job 38:4-7, it would be far more convincing to take Scripture seriously, to assume that it tells the truth, and to refuse to stoop to drama or emotional manipulation to elicit the reader’s sympathy for a God who creates.
If a person believes that Scripture is God’s word and is utterly reliable, it is not necessary to camp on “God’s emotions” to make His case. In fact, if a person believes that Scripture is God’s unerring word, the reduction of His “creation emotions” to tenderness and joy undercuts what He has revealed.
We do not serve a God who can be understood in human terms. He is not in our image; we are in His. But we cannot perceive Him fully:
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:12-13 ESV)
Now we live by faith, believing what we cannot see because God’s promises are true. Now we hope, if we are born again, because we know He is coming back to redeem our physical bodies as He has already redeemed our spirits. Then, after He returns and glorifies us, faith and hope will have been fulfilled, but Love will remain eternally.
Love caused the Father to crush the Son for our sin (Is. 53:10). Love caused God to crush Israel in Babylonian captivity (Lam. 1:15). Love caused God to promise that although He would give us 100 times as much as we lose in order to follow Him, we would also suffer persecutions (Mk. 10:30). Love is the reason God promises that when we suffer and are weak, then He makes His strength perfect in us (2 Cor. 12:10).
God did, indeed, create the world. But the tender emotions elicited by the author of this lesson are not the proof that He did so. Moreover, the admonition at the end of the lesson to “dwell on the marvels of nature” in order to see the “amazing love of God manifested there” does not help us to believe in Him if we are resistant to truth.
The creation speaks of God’s “invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature” (Rom. 1:20). It is not the emotional tenderness of a mother bird that nature reveals: it is the eternal, divine power and strength of God. And even this revelation can be suppressed by men’s wickedness.
Rather than reducing God to a tender, human-friendly Person who created the world because He was filled with emotion and love, it would be far more convincing to use what Scripture actually says about creation and about God’s involvement.
Creation is subject to God, and it is where His invisible qualities are demonstrated. His power and divine nature shine through creation.
Our God is not an approachable, maudlin god. He is terrifying, holy, and His glory would kill sinful man. But because He loved us with a powerful, authoritative, protective love, He sent His Son to become sin for us and to shed His blood to reconcile us to Himself (2 Cor. 5:19). Because God loved us with the terrifying and unrelenting love that only our Creator could have had for us, He paid within Himself the price He demanded for our sin. He sent the Son to reduce His eternally living spirit into mortal flesh so He could die a human death for human sin.
Our God is bigger than our sin. He is bigger than Satan. He is sovereign even over evil. No emotional God created the earth. Our Sovereign created the earth, and His emotions are not small enough for us to grasp.
Paul’s prayer for God’s people reveals the hugeness of His intention for humanity:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:14-19 ESV)
The love of God surpasses knowledge. We cannot describe it nor comprehend it by looking at nature. Rather, we must be born again and indwelt by God Himself in order to know this love that surpasses knowledge. When we are born again, we can know God’s love, and we may be filled “with all the fulness of God.”
Summary
- God is not an “emotional” God whose feelings can be perceived by contemplating nature.
- God’s love is sovereign, surpassing knowledge, powerful, mighty, and even wrathful against evil.
- God wills suffering in His people in order to teach them to trust Him and to know that no evil is his opponent.
- God is sovereign even over evil.
- The only place we can rightly look to perceive the “amazing love of God” is Jesus as He is revealed in Scripture.
- Jesus, not nature, not the law, is the transcript of God’s character and of His love.
Copyright 2012 BibleStudiesForAdventists.com. All rights reserved. Revised January 4, 2012. This website is published by Life Assurance Ministries, Glendale, Arizona, USA, the publisher of Proclamation! Magazine. Contact email: BibleStudiesForAdventists@gmail.com.
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