I accepted Christ at the age of nine and, like many believers, when I became older I questioned my relationship to the Lord. When I reached adulthood and accepted a call to the ministry my view of God and the world was informed by my understanding of the Bible.

The Bible, comprised of 66 books, was written by at least 40 different authors over a period of 1,500 years. The writers lived in different eras and wrote in three different languages about many controversial subjects yet the story is consistent, clear, and cohesive. The Bible has an appropriate beginning, a central character and a logical ending. My preaching centered around the plan of redemption, the theme of the Bible. I preached that the Bible reveals a God who, by nature, redeems mankind from his lost condition through Jesus Christ. The promises to Abraham and David allow us to see the historical development of God’s plan. From the Bible we understand the nature of man, that he is a sinner who needs to be forgiven and prepared for eternal life.

I accepted the belief of our forebears that the Scriptures were divinely inspired. Such a belief is based on the fact that the Bible predicted events that were fulfilled much later, that the theme of the Bible is unwavering and consistent with the findings of archeology and science. However, neither the Bible nor science begins with the opening event of the universe- the creation. They pick up the story of creation immediately after the big event.

Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize winner, writes in his book “The God Particle”

 “In the very beginning, there was a void – a curious form of vacuum – a nothingness  containing no space, no time, no matter, no light, no sound. Yet the laws of nature were in place  and this curious vacuum held potential. A story logically begins at the beginning. But this story is about the universe and unfortunately there are no data for the very beginning. None, zero! We don’t know anything about the universe until it reaches the mature age of a billionth of a trillionth of a second – that is, some very short time after the creation in the Big Bang.

When you read or hear anything about the birth of the universe, someone is making it up. We are in the realm of philosophy. Only God knows what happened at the very beginning.”

On the subject of creation a friend of mine sent me his view of the matter in an e-mail last year:

“We can no more grasp how God actually created the universe than we can grasp the concept of God Himself. Our minds will forever be limited as to our understanding of God and his Creation. The Creation story in Genesis says, essentially, this — that God and His Creation are greater than our finite minds can grasp.

God made His greatest effort to explain Himself by sending Jesus. My concept of Jesus always seems to come back to the account in Mark, of Jesus going out into the countryside to pray. I could imagine Him doing this early in the morning when the stars were still out. He must have looked up and contemplated the greatness of His heavenly Father as He looked at the stars. His thought is infinite in scope. But then, that is what the Love of God as expressed on the Cross is, infinite in scope. It is the ultimate act of turning the other cheek, the ultimate renouncement of force in the arena of relationships — between human beings, and between God and human beings.

We cannot understand the Scope of God as to Time and Space, but if we accept Jesus as Savior, we catch a glimpse of the Nature of God.

WOW! I was impressed with the way my friend expressed in a few sentences what believing scientists have been saying as they seek to find out “how God did it.”. On one occasion Jesus pointed out that we must become as little children in order to enter into the kingdom. With that in mind I imagined a child’s concept of what science and the Bible do not tell us about what God did in the initial act of creation:

There was only vast unending space. Don’t ask me where it came from; only God knows.

At the moment of creation God was standing just inside space holding in his hand a ball of hard material. At that point he leaned back and flung the object with unerring aim at a spot in the center of space where it exploded into an unbelievable cloud of fragments which went flying in every direction. They did not settle down for there was nowhere for them to settle. They are still whirling through space, receding from the center, an inconceivable cloud of heavenly bodies.

Consider now that our earth is only a tiny speck at the edge of the massive cloud of fragments. Never mind its size; size means nothing to the Creator who chose to enclose that tiny fragment in an envelope of air, to populate it with people, to fill its tiny drops of oceans with fish and to fill its minute forests with animals of all kinds.

Next he sent his Son to live among the people on earth, to love them beyond measure, to die for them and teach them that life on tiny earth is but for a brief moment until they are relocated. Those who love their Creator will be moved because they are immortal having been given a measure of the nature of the Creator himself.

Their eternal home is not on earth but in the home where God himself lives outside the whirling mass of flying debris – a place of such magnificence that the mind of man is not able to comprehend it.

“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for them that love him.” 1 Corinthians 2:9